Our moral failures… our failures as human beings… shine very brightly through the lenses of our collective imaginations.

Speaking of robots and cyborgs…

It says something very… negative… that through our imaginative efforts we have mostly only been able to conceive of robots or cyborgs or AI within the context of servitude to humans. It may or may not be justified that these creations are not really human but when you examine that too closely the arguments sound very much like our justifications for pressing other races into servile or slave roles.

Not quite human.

Other.

Science pushes on to create beings that are as close as possible to human and even indistinguishable from humans but still not quite. They remain “the other” in our broader consciousness and therefor not allowed… or it’s not necessary to treat them equally in any sense. There are fiction writers and now even philosophers and social theorists who are bringing this into question but they are few and far between. The morality was questioned early on by Isaac Asimov in I, Robot. The question was hammered home in the film Bladerunner and more recently Ex Machina, which brought the idea of the “Turing test” into more regular usage. How human do they have to be before they are human? Have we ever settled collectively into a definition of what it means to be human. Judging by the criteria by how we consider even other humans, and by our behavior towards them and the justifications, the answers are pretty bleak. It’s a wonder really that people have even asked if it’s “okay” to treat our humanoid creations differently.

Still, with rare exceptions, our cultural output, film, literature etc. relegates them to second rate positions. It’s not just Rosie the Maid from The Jetsons (How much of an accident is it that Rosie is built and dresses so similarly to Butterfly McQueen in Gone With The Wind?). They are sidekicks, servants, laborers, expendable soldiers (because of course one of the driving forces of much of our technology is finding more efficient, effective ways to kill), prostitutes (because if we can create it we should see if we can fuck it) and otherwise second class citizens. We have portrayed human/humanoid friendships but they very closely resemble old films where there might be a beloved slave who was a part of the household. The slave scenario remains very, very real. Consider Data, from Star Trek Next Generation, as a house slave, and Roy Batty from Bladerunner as the field slave. None of it says a lot for us as a race.

A human race…

Pressing beings into servile positions in our society seems to be part of our fantasies. The very idea secretly delights us, doesn’t it? It seems we should take a good, hard look at ourselves and where we stand morally and even in evolution that we haven’t shed the dream of lordship over others. In many cases the closest we have come to considering the humanoid as an equal is in perpetuating the idea of machines and artificial intelligence as an existential threat. We nurture the fear that we might actually make something that is superior to us in some way, and that they won’t be in any way a benevolent superior. We can’t conceive of them as having any empathy or compassion for our plight as mortal flesh sacs, so they are morally inferior to us, so of course we must march forth in righteous defiance and secure not just our own survival but our moral superiority.

We create a perfect slave in our imaginations. It gets uppity. It must be brought back to its place in the hierarchy of gods and men. It’s not a pretty picture, and not because it portrays a real futuristic threat but because it mirrors our actual history, and in fact, our present. Am I saying machines should have rights? Not really. What I’m saying is that we might want to view the world through what we’ve expressed as goals and re-examine where we stand presently and make some huge changes. We have positioned ourselves continually through history as petty, fearful gods over all other beings on the planet. We can’t wrap our heads around what it really means to be human while we lord our superiority over everything. If there is indeed a god and he created us in his image, what does that say about him?

Not a condemnation. Just saying we have a long way to go before we take on the responsibility of creation. We are in no position against the framework of evolution to take on any of those responsibilities. We are primitive still.

Yet, it is within our imaginations also, that this is the case. Most of the portrayals of a human and humanoid future, and in particular the cyberpunk genre, do accurately show that for all our advancement in technology we have rapidly advancing inequality. There are high-tech paradises floating just above unthinkable poverty and slums. They show the detritus of putting technology, consumerism and consumption first and foremost and not asking the important questions about ourselves as a species.

Who are we? What should we be? What could we be? What might we be? What will it take to get to the loftier goals? It seems ridiculous that simple, common decency is a “lofty” goal and not a common sense goal, but it’s not been really addressed.

We both delight in and manifest dread fear that we are advanced enough to create something better than us so we create moral prejudices and try to back it with vague ideas of ethics and morality.

So for now…

That’s where I leave this for today while I head out into the streets that are gripped in the fear of the microbial threat. COVID-19 is first and foremost on everyone’s minds. I do believe that a lot of the fear is that we have gotten the virus we deserve because we are not superior at all. How can we be who we proclaim to be while something so small that it’s nearly invisible is upsetting our apple cart? But that’s the way it’s always been. We aren’t a lot more advanced than we were when the bubonic plague leveled Europe and the then modern world. There are notions/hopes that science and medicine will swoop in like The Avengers and save the day. The reality is probably that a lot of people will die and that those who survive ( I don’t presume to know the ratio between victims and survivors) will have just developed new anti-bodies, and COVID-19 will be rendered ineffective. It won’t be Science or Medicine (man as God) or God himself that saves us. It will go just the way things have always gone.