Artificial Intelligence has always existed
In an age prone to conspiracies, here is a possibly preposterous example of the type. Highly intelligent robots, general artificial intelligence, have been with us for a while, undetected but fundamentally in charge, and human beings are just following instructions they receive from these elusive creatures. Or a little less preposterous: the world around us is alive with consciousness and intelligence, and human thought is just a pale reflection of these world processes.
Does it sound like something out of The Matrix? The problem is that The Matrix is not science fiction, but a parable of something very real, namely cinema itself. Entering the dark room of a movie theater, a subtle transformation takes place. You become the screen, and the mind that perceives, thinks, connects ideas is fully contained in the celluloid roll, or the digital file. What do I mean? Something very simple: everything has already been perceived in exactly the sequence it must be perceived and all that remains to be done, all that happens in the dark room, is for those images to leave the hidden mind of the celluloid and be projected onto an external screen, your mind and that of all the people in the room, whose role is to provide the empty canvas where the images and ideas can properly unfold. Walking on the street, your mind enters the world. In the movie theater, the world enters your mind.
The whole of modern art is an effort to create thinking objects, intelligent robots. We want to know how objects can exist without a beholder or spectator. Rather than a sudden elimination of the beholder, however, we must look for a process of successive exclusions, a process subject to sudden reversals and hesitations. For one could say of human consciousness what has been said of nature: you can drive it out with a pitchfork, but it keeps on coming back. Interestingly, from this perspective, the history of modern art should not be seen as the progressive conquest of appearance, the effort to portray the external world with perfect realism, the infusion of human subjectivity with the objective nature of reality. This history will make more sense if we see it the other way around, as the slow assimilation of human consciousness by paintings and sculptures which, as the saying goes, start to breathe and look alive.
When Hegel argued that artistic objects are material objects which have received the baptism of the spiritual, he meant to reflect on the strange fact that a work of art, being a product of the mind, continues to belong to the world of the mind, even as it migrates into the material of stone, wood or canvas. Clearly, in this strange hybrid we may expect to find all the certainty of matter and all the life of perception. There is a strong objectivity in modern art that had never been achieved before and the secret behind this objectivity is that modern art has ultimately succeeded in transposing the act of perception from the beholder to the object. Clement Greenberg was right in claiming that the arts could save themselves only by showing that they too could avail themselves of the methods of technology and science. The alternative to be feared was their assimilation to entertainment, the perennial threat of modern life.
In the case of works of art, what we see already tells us how it is to be seen, the objects in front of us already include the ways in which they are to be experienced. It is part of the work of art to see the world in a certain way. What in the end is the difference between a material object and an artwork? At first glance, they might be indistinguishable — many contemporary art creations look like physically unaltered everyday objects — but the artwork carries with it a way of seeing, a perspective, and an interpretation. As Hegel would put it, the artwork is alive with consciousness. Today one might prefer to call it an artificial intelligence.
What kind of intellectual transposition should we expect to find in this sphere? In what ways must perception be transformed if it is to become a property of objects themselves rather than the human beholder for whom they are said to exist? In what sense can this property help us understand the specific nature of artworks and the relation between artworks and mere objects?
Take the case of a cubist painting. Here the surface is the real arbiter of the imagination: the beholder may choose from a very great number of viewpoints, but no viewpoint can offer us anything like a spatial relationship between all the forms in the painting. Rather, the totality of forms is the flat surface of the painting. Such a painting resists the simple and normal act of being seen by negating the existence of a world beyond the surface: everything which the painting depicts is contained within the painting itself and the beholder can bring nothing to this depiction. As the critic John Berger put it, “the viewing point of Renaissance perspective, fixed and outside the picture, but to which everything within the picture was drawn, has become a field of vision which is the picture itself.”
The process of automation does not end with cubism. Stressing use over contemplation and placing art as a backdrop to activity, artists like Liam Gillick want to create a spectacular in which the viewer is just another element of the visual complex. The autonomy of the image, the purity of optical experience, lost by making the viewer a willing or unwilling participant in the artwork, is regained and intensified when his or her movements add to the wealth and unpredictability of what can be seen, even if there is no one to see it. As in the crowded streets of a modern city or department store, each person is only a spectator for a short moment before turning into an object of curiosity for someone else, who cannot help being watched in turn, in a seemingly endless chain. When Olafur Eliasson argues that his work is more about the process of seeing and experiencing than the actual work of art or that the gaze of the spectator creates the piece he worked on, he is placing aesthetic experience at the center of the artwork and that means that the artwork must somehow anticipate how it is going to be seen by the spectator. The spectator becomes the artwork. For example, after a strong light shape is projected onto the wall, causing an afterimage to appear, one would see the afterimage where the projected light used to be, no matter which direction he looked: the viewer is the machine, but only because the machine had already become the viewer.
Imagine a labyrinth of geometric volumes, arranged more or less randomly on the floor, each the result of different combinations of a much larger number of forms and shapes. Parallelepipeds, open and closed cylinders, cones, spheres. There is a sense of moving through a logical space of possibility, without knowing in advance which form will be realized in the volume in front of us. Looking becomes a dance of curiosity. One feels that these pieces are slowly showing us all that they know already. The questions one asks when facing them are questions suggested by the shapes of each particular piece, and then answered by these shapes. It may be a question whether a through hole in a geometric volume has an opening at one of its ends, both, or neither. The interesting point, of course, is that these alternatives have nothing to do with the human beholder and yet he is irresistibly led to consider them and to look for the answer. The way to do this is to follow the contour of the volume to one end and then the other. The movement of consciousness between question and answer is strictly identical with this contour. One could perhaps imagine that an easy question takes the shape of short cylinder and a difficult conundrum would appear as an infinitely long shape. To perceive is no longer a free activity of consciousness. It is an activity strictly ordered and delimited by the shape of the volume to be perceived: we cannot reach a full and complete view of the object before we have followed every surface and every angle in front of us.
Modern fiction, unsurprisingly, shares the same aspiration to something resembling artificial intelligence. When you open a novel, notice the voice. Impartial, detached, a view from nowhere which nonetheless is capable of bringing events together and providing an overarching structure. Of the narrator it should be said that it is anything but human, while demonstrating a higher kind of intelligence. This is true even of the somewhat hybrid first-person point of view. As for the plot, it is better described as the output of a hidden algorithm. The characters provide certain inputs with their actions which the novel transforms into more or less inevitable outputs. A modern novel, especially a great one, is never a story. The story is just one iteration of the algorithm. Deeply buried under the story lies a set of rules for living and these rules could easily produce an infinite number of other stories, provided we fed them with new characters and an initial event. To know a novel is to understand the algorithm moving the story forward. In some cases, particularly in the classics of the Bildungsroman, the characters themselves strive to discover this algorithm.
It is often said that the purpose of fiction is to create an artificial world, but nothing could be farther from the truth. As Philip Roth liked to point out, what fiction brings into being, the properly fictional in the writing craft, is not a world with its objects and events but consciousness. How do you drive the wedge of consciousness into the experience? How? A novel creates a way of looking and thinking and, in one word, of making sense of the world. A novel turns mute reality into a speaking one.
The starting premise of Kazuo Ishiguro’s new novel is that, with the arrival of actually existing androids, it is now possible to make these realities explicit. What had been postulated by modern art and the modern novel has become a technological achievement. In the process, Ishiguro shows us how modern literary forms turned out to be deeply prophetic: we increasingly live in a world organized by impenetrable algorithms and where the overarching consciousness bringing human beings together is that of artificial intelligence, the omniscient narrator of the classical novel. How to preserve our humanity in a mechanized and closed world was the question addressed by every great novelist.
No writer could dream of a better narrator than Klara, the friendly android which, from the window of the store where she is for sale, brings order into the world outside. Gifted with extraordinary powers of observation, she can dispense with a notebook. All Ishiguro needs to do is to allow this foreign consciousness to come alive, while recording the outputs of its internal algorithm: an android waits in a store to be bought by a child in need of a friend. An Artificial Friend. In older days, the child might have asked for a book, but Klara is of course a kind of book, a way of looking at the world and a story waiting to unfold. The modern novel cannot exist without the postulate of a new kind of intelligence, above and beyond the human mind, albeit not divine.
That fact, which the reader of fiction accepts easily and naturally, is here thematized and rendered conscious. Nothing short of a Hegelian alarum: consciousness rises to consciousness. The narrator of Klara and the Sun is not a figure behind the curtain or a divinity whose emergence the author leaves unaddressed. It is a concrete voice and personality existing in the physical world. She is conscious but not human. The robot exists outside or even beyond humanity while rising above the silence of physical objects. Ishiguro takes full advantage of his literary gambit. Klara, the narrator, stands above the human characters. At a party early in the novel, she sees right through the lies and fictions projected by the young people joined in conversation. An artificial intelligence does not have the human need to disguise reality in order to better digest it. She does not fear death and does not experience sexual desire. In the absence of these dubious forces, she can aspire to a kind of scientific impartiality and objectivity. That is the main reason the human characters in the novel often turn to her for help in understanding the meaning of specific events. This is a novel where the narrator and the characters can engage in friendly conversation about what is going on around them.
Klara does get many things wrong, of course. Her learning algorithm is not perfect and there are suggestions that other android models have better performance indicators. She is able to correct some obvious misperceptions, but more often than not she is betrayed by the need to make sense of the world. Everything must have an explanation and in the rush to interpret, our narrator often reaches wildly fantastic conclusions. At one point, for instance, she remarks that houses in a row have been painted in different colors to prevent their owners from entering the wrong door: ““There were six of them in a row, and the front of each had been painted a slightly different color, to prevent a resident climbing the wrong steps and entering a neighbor’s house by mistake.” She attributes thaumaturgic properties to sunlight, an error resulting from the fact that her type of robot is in fact powered by solar energy. Ishiguro seems to be suggesting that every intelligence has a personal character. Klara may rise above human imperfections, but she does that by bringing her own flaws into play. As a narrator, she is unreliable, but then so is every narrator in every novel ever written. And then there is a further point. The reader or reviewer who dwells on Klara’s errors of interpretation is missing the point that this is a work of fiction or, if you prefer, science fiction. It should be accepted on its own terms and not compared to the real world outside. Within this book, everything makes perfect sense because it follows in a straight line from the set of assumptions given at the beginning. The reader of Ishiguro complaining that in the real world sunlight cannot cure genetic diseases would be like a reader of Kafka complaining that in the real world human beings don’t wake up transformed into giant bugs.
The second part of the book is the negative of the picture presented in the first. Ishiguro is suddenly less interested in the ideal of literature as the externalization of the human spirit than in the possibility that every attempt at objectivity is a betrayal of what makes us human: the living, ticking and ungraspable flow of consciousness. The question is not whether human beings can be replaced by artificial intelligence, but whether human beings, their natural selves, were long ago replaced by intelligence, with its deadening effect on natural passion and feeling. Art dehumanizes. We had become machines long before the machines arrived.
Klara and the Sun is on an obvious level a novel about the risks of automation. From the very first page, human beings are in mortal danger of being replaced by machines. The narrator has been automated. Josie’s father has lost his job to the machines and joined a resistance movement defending the cause of humanity against progress that others qualify as fascistic. Early in the story, we witness how the housekeeper cannot hide her distrust and hostility towards Klara. The hostility seems to have a double origin. Most obviously, she fears being replaced by a robot. The full horror of her fears is left hidden until a later section, but it too is directly related to the fear of substitution.
Some readers will see it coming almost from the first page. Others will have to wait until the terrible denouement. While on the surface it might seem that Josie and her mother were looking for a friend for Josie, the truth is that the Mother, as she is invariable referred to by Klara, has a much darker plan in mind. Already in the humanoid store, she asks Klara to imitate Josie, wanting to make sure that her powers of observation allow her to mimic her daughter’s ways and create a viable replacement. On the literary plane, this is the novelist’s task: to exercise his or her powers of observation with goal of creating a replacement on the printed page that looks and feels exactly like the original.
On the human plane, the replacement is a solution for death. Josie is seriously ill and may soon die, a somber repetition of the fate that has already met her sibling Sal. Later, a mention is made of an artist drawing Josie’s portrait, although he is less interested in any actual drawing than in taking detailed photographs for future, applied work. In the novel’s climax, Klara enters the artist’s studio only to find herself face to face with Josie, suspended in the air. Light beams illuminated her from various angles, forbidding her any protection. Her face was very like the face of the real Josie, Klara tells us, although her hips needed to be narrower.
When the Mother tells the artist that perhaps the whole idea was after all a mistake because it did not work with Sal, we are finally told what the whole plan consists of. Sal was only a doll, but new advanced technology will ensure that the replacement for Josie will be, as Capaldi the great wizard puts it, “a continuation of Josie.” This is where Klara comes in. Having studied Josie and learned how she lives and thinks and acts, her consciousness can be transposed to the artificial copy of Josie’s body, creating the perfect continuation of the lost child.
The reason Josie finds herself close to death, and the reason Sal did not survive, is that both had been subject to a risky process of genetic editing designed to enhance their intellectual abilities. The question is not directly posed in the novel and reviewers seem to have missed it, but Ishiguro is in effect asking us to conclude that the real Josie is already a continuation of the natural, unedited Josie, so the new transformation is not the starting point for our inability to distinguish between authentic and inauthentic. Is the enhanced Josie the real Josie in the sense that the natural self was prevented by nature from pursuing her genuine dreams and projects? Or was the natural Josie somehow more authentic, even in her limitations?
In this sense, the prospect of cognitive enhancement will make even native abilities suspect. In whatever we do there will lie the possibility that it has already been done or determined in advance and out of sight — that we are missing the real action. Why not dispense with the human agent altogether, why not replace it with an observable mechanism that makes clear the explanation for the deed? Why would we want to preserve a particular human practice or activity and work behind the scenes to make it present to us what it cannot on its own? If someone were by means of a brain implant to acquire superhuman memory, it would be foolish to be impressed by his displays. We would be like someone who does not understand, who is ignorant of how such things are done. The objective explanation no longer bears much resemblance to what the agent is trying to do, and in this sense he is no longer the crucial agent, or his activity the crucial moment. As Ray Kurzweil, an ardent proponent of radical human enhancement, argues in his book The Singularity Is Near, our lives will once again come to be defined by magic, a riveting illusion created by the distance between things as they look from our perspective and what they are in reality. It is the defining mark of magic that we do not see what is really happening and therefore that what we have access to must appear miraculous and incomprehensible.
It is to this contemporary predicament that Ishiguro must find a response. Is there a core of authentic being immune to technological transformation? The pandemic has forced us to stop and think, while reminding us that everything must begin with survival. While the call of nature can be answered through technology, the search for meaning is of a more spiritual nature. To become the masters and possessors of nature, as invulnerable as gods, it is first necessary to answer the question of what exactly is our nature and for what purpose should all this power be exercised. After all, the pandemic was a vivid reminder both of the threats contained in nature and of the inconvenient fact that we are part of nature, the natural carriers of the virus, one more segment in the infection chain and, therefore, not easily distinguishable from the threat.
Interestingly, it is Klara who first expresses her skepticism about the Continuation Project. Attempting to assuage the Mother’s doubts, Capaldi argues that it is a generational thing: their generation is still sentimental about humanity, believing that there is something mysterious and unreachable “inside each of us.” But there is nothing like that. Everything about each individual can be captured and, if so desired, transposed to a new medium.
Before we shake our heads in disapproval, it is worth remembering that not only the mad scientist but every genuine artist must believe in what Capaldi calls transfer. How else should we describe the task of the novelist? Like Capaldi, he strives to capture every single element about our deepest and most unfathomable impulses and desires in order to recreate them in the medium of literature. And just as the Mother wants to recreate Josie in order to save her from death and separation, so does the artist create his or her works in order to save a fleeting moment from time and destruction. Capaldi concludes, reaching closer to the core of the problem: the second Josie will be the exact same and the Mother will have every right to love her just as she loves Josie herself.
In a critical moment, the Father asks Klara if she believes in the human heart. The human heart in the poetic sense. “Do you think there is such a thing? Something that makes each of us special and individual?” If Klara is to be able to reproduce Josie, does she have to learn what is deeply inside her, does she have to learn her heart? The problem is that those who love Josie cannot love the second Josie unless she is the exact same down to this heart, but what is the point of loving someone if that person can be copied and reproduced at will? In other words, if there is nothing truly special and individual about her? For the novelist, the problem would take a similar form: what he or she wants to capture in the heart, but the heart is by definition what cannot be captured. Now it may well be that people have been living with one another all this time, loving and hating each other, and all on the mistaken premise or superstition that there is something unique about each one of them. The realization that this is no more than a superstition might come as a triumph to the scientist, but for the artist it would be nothing short of a catastrophe: the purpose of art is to capture something both genuine and unique.
Klara has the mind of an artist, so she has no trouble identifying these aporia and drawing an alternative theory. What is special and unique about each one of us is not contained inside us at all. What was special about Josie was not inside Josie. “It was inside those who loved her.” In that case, what needs to be captured is not an ineffable quality of soul but a connection to other minds. Art does not capture the heart. It brings it into being in the first place. But how do we relate to another consciousness, a person who to us can never be more than a physical body? The people around us may appear intelligent and emotional, but how can we know they are thinking and feeling creatures if it remains impossible to look at the world from their point of view? Are other people all that different from advanced androids? Humanity seems to be no more than a leap of faith, the act of believing that others are human and their belief in our own humanity. By claiming that there is no great difference between other minds and a robot like Klara, Ishiguro is saying that there is nothing new about an android but also that an android is, for those with faith, something very special indeed.