Tag Archives: robots

There will never be an Iris

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Watching Companion, directed by Drew Hancock, for New Scientist, 19 February 2025

Iris (Sophie Thatcher) is not at all confident of her reception at Sergey’s house in the country. Sergey is leery (Rupert Friend, eating the screen as usual); his wife Kat is unwelcoming. (Later she admits, it’s not Iris she dislikes, it’s “the idea” of her; Iris makes her feel redundant.)

Iris’s boyfriend Josh (Jack Quaid) is patient and encouraging but in the end even he finds Iris’s shyness and clinginess heard to bear. “Go to sleep, Iris,” he says, and Iris’s eyes roll up inside her head as she shuts down.

Maybe Josh shouldn’t have set her intelligence at 40 per cent. At that level, Iris makes a faithful bedmate but not much else. But Josh hasn’t purchased Iris for company. He’s bought her so as to jailbreak her firmware, and use her for dark ends of his own.

Companion, a romantic horror-comedy and Drew Hancock’s debut feature neatly (if predictably) alternates between two classic approaches to robots. Some scenes, with a nod to the Terminator franchise, scare us with what robots might do to us. Other scenes horrify us with what we might do to our robots. Josh’s fellow guest Eli (Harvey Guillén) actually manages to fall in love with his male robot companion, but he’s a bit of an outlier in a movie that’s out to deconstruct (sharply at first, but then with dismaying ham-fistedness) men’s objectification of women.

Are Iris’s struggles to be free of her owner-boyfriend Josh a stirring feminist fable, or a tiresome bit of man-bashing? Well, your personal experience will probably dictate which side of this fence you’ll fall. There’s not a lot of mileage to be had in me saying the abuse Iris suffers at Josh’s hands in the second half of the movie is tasteless — not in a world that has men like Dominique Pelicot in it. I’d feel more comfortable, though, if the script hadn’t had its own intelligence halved, just as it makes this turn towards the issue of domestic violence. Quaid’s a decent comic actor who’s more than capable of letting the smile drop and going dead behind the eyes when required. Companion, though, requires him to turn on a penny, from doting boyfriend to sniveling incel, and without much justification from an increasingly generic plot. He does what he can, while Sophie Thatcher, as Iris, brings a vulnerability to her role that, in what’s ostensibly a comedy, is occasionally shocking.

Peeling away from the sexual politics of the piece, I found myself thinking far too much about plot logic. In the first half, one little illegal tweak to Iris’s firmware sets off a cascade of farcical and bloody accidents that by-the-by ask us worthwhile questions about what we actually want robots for. Surrounded by dull, bland, easy-going robot companions, will we come to expect less of other people? Assisted, cared for, and seduced by machines, will we lower our expectations around concepts like “conversation”, “care”, “companionship” and “love”?

Alas, the robot lore built up in the first half of the movie is more or less jettisoned in the second: anyone who wants to play “plot-hole bingo” had better bring a spare card.

It’s a pity. There was much to play for here, and over eighty years of entertaining fiction to draw from (Isaac Asimov’s “Liar!” was published in 1942). But perhaps I’m taking things too literally.

After all, there will never be an Iris.

The robot as we commonly conceive of it — the do-everything “omnibot” — is impossible. And I don’t mean technically difficult. I mean inconceivable. Anything with the cognitive ability to tackle multiple variable tasks will be able to find something better to do — at which point, incidentally, they will cease to be drudges and will have become people. Iris was very clearly a person from the first scene, which makes the film’s robot technology a non-starter from the beginning. This isn’t some dystopia that’s embraced slavery.

Whichever way you look at it — as a film about robots, or as a film about people — Companion seems determined to chase after straw men.

A burgeoning technology you wouldn’t be seen dead with

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For the Telegraph on 26 January 2025, and Inspired by Hyper Functional, Ultra Healthy at Somerset House, London

Long-distance relationships are hard to do, but my goodness they’re fun: all that flitting about between mutually inconvenient cities, Muscat to Odessa, Dubai to Istanbul…
A good 90 per cent of the time, though, we were together alone — witness the huge message chain preserved on my smartphone.

The thing about the WhatsApp messaging service is that it’s happy by design, beautifully geared to meme-sharing and goofing-off. Even if you’re not in the mood, you’re only ever a couple of clicks away from sharing an exploding unicorn head or a river of balloons or a video of someone’s pet cat nailing middle-C.

As I cast a bleak eye over our last messages, I see that my girlfriend and I weren’t really spending time together at all; we were just toying with the app.

New technological applications are even now shaping the future of sex, intimacy, friendship and desire. This, anyway, is the hypothesis underpinning a series of talks and screenings starting soon at Somerset House Studios in London. “Hyper Functional, Ultra Healthy” is the programme’s umbrella title, the strong implication being that technology will, at best, save us from our less-healthy impulses; while at worst it will persuade us to sacrifice our humanity on the altar of productivity.

I think the future could be altogether more wild and enjoyable. I think intimacy technologies of various sorts are going to be good for us sometimes, and a lot of fun in any case — just so long as we get over our angst-ridden, future-shocked selves and embrace — literally and figuratively — what we have made.

In Spike Jonze’s 2013 romantic comedy Her, Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) falls in love with Samantha (Scarlett Johansson), an artificially intelligent operating system. Because Samantha is at least as conscious as Theodore, the film is a rather charming red herring. The film we needed, in the year sales of smartphones surpassed feature-phone sales for the first time, was one in which Theodore falls in love with an entry-level smartphone assistant like Alexa, or Siri — a being that is patently not conscious, though it puts on a good show.

That really would have got under our skin.

We want our lovers to really love us. But what if they could keep us just as happy by behaving as if they loved us? Then we wouldn’t even have to build better and better technology to satisfy our needs and desires; we could just lower our expectations of what it is to be human.
If we’re so easily debased, there’s not a lot left to say: only that we deserved our fate. But why should things turn out so badly? I reckon we could learn to live quite happily in a world full of non-human agents while being, like Red Riding Hood, on constant guard against those who try to pass themselves off as “one of us”.

Between here and there lie three obstacles.

First, we’ll have to accept that we can and should seek solace from non-human agents. If books and plays have a thing or two to tell us about the world and how to live in it, then why not GPT-5 or Gemini?

In 2019 an international survey of psychiatrists (which sounds like the start of a joke, but never mind) half believed AI would significantly change their profession.

That half was right. The NHS is evaluating the use of conversational agents in talking to users about their mental health. Systems like Leora, spun out of the Australian disability care sector to provide support for mild symptoms of anxiety and depression, have gone a long way to prove the concept. Other systems are still more advanced: why tie up a human therapist when Stanford University’s Woebot shows all the signs of delivering cognitive-behavioural therapy with equal efficacy over your smartphone?

Next, we’ll have to get comfortable around robots and digital assistants who behave as if they love us. This should not be too difficult: cats have been faking affection for us for about six million years, so we’ve had plenty of exposure.

Ah, but how will our machines love us? This is where, like it or not, the conversation turns to (yawn now) sex robots.

In the current climate, we’re allowed two responses to sex robots.

Following the lead of TV series like Westworld and films like Ex Machina (and don’t tell me that wasn’t a sex robot), we fear what they might do to us. Also, we fear what sort of people we might become when we’re with a sex robot. This is very much an argument about means and ends. If I mistreat a robot today, will I find it easier to mistreat a fellow human tomorrow? This is an excellent point; also an old one and not really limited to robots. (People who mistreat animals score highly on the Hare Psychopathy Checklist.)

What we’re absolutely not supposed to do is use a sex robot, although many people do. The global market for this gear was valued at approximately $30 billion in 2023 and is projected to reach over $100 billion by 2032. Machines designed specifically for women are worth $23 billion and while this market’s expanding more slowly, by 2032 it’s still expected to top $54 billion. That’s a lot of cash being thrown at consumer durables people wouldn’t be seen dead with.

And this, neatly enough, brings us to the third and most difficult hurdle: we’re going to finally have to decouple sex and intimacy.

*

It’s not as though these two were ever comfortable bedfellows, whatever the sentimentalists might claim. In the 11,000 years that separate the birth of sedentary agriculture and the bumper harvests brought in by the agricultural revolution in the 18th century, the regular production of children was an activity essential for people’s economic survival. Farms needed hands to work them. A woman’s value lay in her sexuality. It was an economic good and came with a price — a very high one, most of the time.

For all that time we craved adult intimacy, but we needed children. Reconciling ourselves to this miserable state of affairs was a job of work, but we managed it, not once, but many times, by inventing marriage. This charitable fiction convinced us that the world was backwards – that while we needed adult intimacy, what we really craved was children.

In the West the Enlightenment eventually put paid to the lie, ushering in a doctrine of reasoned sexual self-interest under whose influence, wrote Claire Clairmont, stepsister of Mary Shelley, “Lord B[yron] became a human tyger slaking his thirst for inflicting pain upon defenceless women who under the influence of free love… loved him.”

From Byron to Weinstein, the permissive society has undermined religious strictures around sex and replaced them with a free-for-all that has often left women in a worse state. Of her would-be male seducers, the 18th-century writer Lady Mary Wortley Montagu had this to say: “‘Tis play to you, ’tis but death to us.”

Better birth control offered a partial fix, but what we really need to do is decouple sex and intimacy, then we might be able to jettison coercion and childbearing in one go. What’s not to like about that?

I know, I know, this is a terrible thing to say. But look at the numbers. Wherever and whenever living standards rise, the birth rate falls. A 2020 study in the Lancet projected that 23 countries, including Spain and Japan, could see their populations halve by 2100 due to low fertility rates. The total fertility rate in England and Wales has fallen to 1.44 children per woman, its lowest level on record. The United Nations projects that over half of the world’s population growth by 2100 will be concentrated in just eight countries.

There are all kinds of reasons: more processed food, better education for women, a more atomised working environment. Actual infertility aside (a growing and mysterious problem we can’t get into here) all these are aspects on the same unmentionable truth: the more time we make for ourselves, the less time we invest in child-rearing.

It’s not that we don’t want sex. We just don’t want it with each other. Now that market forces are finally prising sex out of the bedroom and into the public gaze, it turns out that there are many more enjoyable ways to have sex. Not all involve technology directly. Most sex clubs are run on a shoestring by enthusiasts; they’re certainly not splashing out on robots. Still, they use social media to bring cohorts together in numbers sufficient to get by, And if the club’s too far away, you could always show off on OnlyFans: heck, that site pays you. Now that sex toys are part of the internet of things – networked, remotely controlled, and even self-controlled to some degree — sex ceases to be a purely private affair and becomes a civic act.

All right, all right, let me offer an olive branch here. Love is real; pair-bonding is real; in many of us, the desire for children is real; and, yes, humans fall in love all the time.

But If we maintain the food supply and continue to chisel away at poverty then, as a wole, fewer women will have fewer children and they will have them later in life. And this leaves us casting around, trying to work out what sex is for, now that procreation has been knocked off its 11,000-year-old pedestal.

Technology holds out two incompatible answers to this question. One set of technologies comforts us, but doesn’t really work. The other set works a treat, but it will have even the most hardened roué weeping for humanity.

Digital comfort-blankets even now provide solace to an increasingly atomised society. For platonic cuddling services, visit Cuddle Sanctuary or Cuddlist (now offering on-line cuddles). If you want to text back and forth with an AI companion, sign up with Replika or its more blokey kin, Soulfun AI and DreamGF. VR Chat and Somnium Space are your gateways to the metaverse where you’ll most likely run into people just like you (good luck with that).

Many of these apps and websites are in dire need of updating. My guess is, they’re not doing wildly well, And no wonder: they’re not playing to the strengths of their own medium. They’re trying to sell human intimacy through a piece of tempered glass, which is daft.

These services want you to buy a packet of commoditised human experience, rather than take action for yourself. In the same way, people in the early 1900s used to sell pianola rolls door to door to families who could no longer be bothered to play their own pianos.

Well, the piano is one thing; your life is surely something else. It’s not that hard to make friends. Go to church! Volunteer at a food bank!

The other set of technologies does work and boy, does it earn its market share. Porn is a much more effective form of digital address because it plays to digital strengths: glamour, glossiness, hardness, mechanical repetition. And it’s an aesthetic you can translate wholesale into the real world very easily. Profitably, too: is that branch of Coco de Mer an unfailingly friendly place to shop for well-made leather goods, or an actor in the hidden war to pornocratise the culture? Can’t it be both?

The prigs and prudes among us fight their frantic rearguard actions. In the motley of sexual radicalism they preach the virtues of ethical and consensual non-monogamy, polyamory and compersion. But thumb through Feeld (a non-traditional dating app) and #Open (a marginally raunchier competitor) at your peril: anyone who’s earned their scars will tell you of the coercion and abuse these lifestyles spawn.

Don’t live in the past. Say hello to the circus and the sideshow and FinalCut Pro, to the smartphone and the ring-light and the tripod, to doll-makers, to latex-cutters, to sculptors in silicone and thermoplastic elastomer. Even now, designers besotted with perfect curves are laying before you their smooth, glossy path to a burlesque world where sex is a hybrid thing, half-real, half-digital. Goodbye, marriage and its rubbishy “alternatives”, Goodbye love, and every enlightened impulse.

Or do what you need to do, you hopeless sentimentalists: no-one’s out to stop you being happy together. Intimacy will tick by and that’s all one can really say about it.

Sex, though – now there’s a gift that will only keep on giving.

The strange, the off-kilter and the not-quite-right

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The release of Mufasa, Disney’s photorealistic prequel to The Lion King, occasioned this essay for the Telegraph on the biota of Uncanny Valley

In 1994 Disney brought Shakespeare’s Hamlet, or something like it, to the big screen, In turning the gloomy Dane into an adorable line cub, and his usurping uncle into Scar (arguably their most terrifying villain ever) the company created the highest-grossing movie of the year. Animators sat up and marveled at the way the film combined hand-drawn characters with a digitally rendered environment and thousands of CGI animals. This new technology could aid free expression, after all!

Well, be careful what you wish for.

When in 2019, Disney remade its beloved The Lion King (1994), it swapped the original’s lush hand-drawn animation for naturalistic computer-generated imagery. The 2019 reboot had a budget of $260 million (£200 million) and took more than $1.5 billion (£1.1 billion) at the box office, making it one of the most expensive, and highest-grossing, films of all time – and the focus of a small but significant artistic backlash. Some critics voiced discomfort with the fact that it looked more like an episode of Planet Earth than a high-key musical fantasy. Its prequel Mufasa: The Lion King (directed by Moonlight’s Barry Jenkins), released this month, deepens the trend. For Disney, it’s a show of power, I suppose: “Look at our animation, so powerful, you’ll mistake it for the world itself!” In time, though, the paying public may well regret Disney’s loss of faith in traditional animation.

What animator would want to merely reflect the world through an imaginary camera? The point of the artform, surely, is to give emotion a visual form. But while a character drawn in two dimensions can express pretty much anything (Felix the Cat, Wile E Coyote and Popeye the Sailor are not so much bodies as containers for gestures) drawing expressively in 3D is genuinely hard to do. Any artist with Pixar on their resume will tell you that. All that volumetric precision gets in the way. Adding photorealism to the mix makes the job plain impossible.

Disney’s live-action remake of The Jungle Book (2016) at least used elements of motion capture to match the animals’ faces to the spoken dialogue. In 2024, even that’s not considered “realistic” enough. Mufasa, Simba, Rafiki the mandrill and the rest simply chew on air while dialogue arrives from out of space, in the manner of Italian neorealist cinema (which suggests, incidentally, that, along with the circle of life, there’s also a circle of cinema).
Once you get to this point, animation is a distant memory; you’ve become a puppeteer. And you confront a problem that plagues not only Hollywood films, but the latest advances in robotic engineering and AI: “the uncanny valley”.

The uncanny valley describes how the closer things come to resembling real life, the more on guard we are against being fooled or taken in by them. The more difficult they are to spot as artificial, the stronger our self-preserving hostility towards them. It is the point in the development of humanoid robots when their almost-credible faces might send us screaming and running out of the workshop. Or, on a more relatable level, it describes the uneasiness some of us feel when interacting with virtual assistants such as Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa.

The term was invented by the Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori in 1970 – when real anthropomorphic robots didn’t even exist – who warned designers that the more their inventions came to resemble real life-forms, the creepier they would look.

Neurologists seized on Mori’s idea because it suggested an easy and engaging way of studying how our brains see faces and recognise people. Positron emission tomography arrived in clinics in the 1970s, and magnetic resonance imaging about twenty years later. Researchers now had a way of studying the living human brain as it saw, heard, smelled and thought. The uncanny valley concept got caught up in a flurry of very earnest, very technical work about human perception, to the point where it was held up as a profound, scientifically-arrived-at insight into the human condition.

Mori was more guarded about all the fuss. Asked to comment on some studies using slightly “off” faces and PET scans, he remarked: “I think that the brain waves act that way because we feel eerie. It still doesn’t explain why we feel eerie to begin with.” And these days the scientific community is divided on how far to push the uncanny valley concept – or even whether such a “valley” (which implies a happy land beyond it, one in which we would feel perfectly at ease with lifelike technology) exists at all.

Nevertheless, the uncanny valley does suggest a problem with the idea that in order to make something lifelike, you just need to ensure that it looks like a particular kind of living thing – a flaw that is often cited in critical reviews of Disney’s latest photorealist animations. Don’t they realise that the mind and the eye are much more attuned to behaviour than they are to physical form? Appearances are the least realistic parts of us. It’s by our behaviour that you will recognise us. So long as you animate their behaviour, whatever you draw will come alive. In 1944 psychologists Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel made a charming 90-second animation, full of romance, and adventure, using two triangles, a circle and a rectangle with a door in it.

There are other ways to give objects the gift of life. A few years ago, I met the Tokyo designer Yamanaka Shunji, who creates one-piece walking machines from 3D vinyl-powder printers. One, called Apostroph (a collaboration with Manfred Hild in Paris), is a hinged body made up of several curving frames. Leave it alone, and it will respond to gravity, and try to stand. Sometimes it expands into a broad, bridge-like arch; at other times it slides one part of itself through another, curls up and rolls away.

Engineers, by associating life with surface appearances, are forever developing robots that are horrible. “They’re making zombies!” Shunji complained. Artists on the other hand know how to sketch. They know how to reduce, and abstract. “From ancient times, art has been about the right line, the right gesture. Abstraction gets at reality, not by mimicking it, but by purifying it. By spotting and exploring what’s essential.”

This, I think, gets to the heart of the uncanny valley phenomenon: we tend to associate life with particular outward forms, and when we reproduce those things, we’re invariably disappointed and unnerved, wondering what sucked the life out of them. We’re looking for life in all the wrong places. Yamanaka Shunji’s Apostroph is alive in a way Mufasa will never be.

***

We’re constantly trying to differentiate between living and the non-living. And as AI and other technologies blur the lines between living things and artefacts, we will grapple with the challenge of working out what our moral obligations are towards entities — chatbots, robots, and the like — that lack a clear social status. In that context, the “uncanny valley” can be a genuinely useful metaphor.

The thing to keep in mind is that the uncanny is not a new problem. It’s an evolutionary problem.

Decades ago I came across a letter to New Scientist magazine in which a reader recalled taking a party of blind schoolchildren to London Zoo. He wanted the children to feel and cuddle the baby chimps, learning about their hair, hands, toes and so on, by touch. The experiment, however, proved to be a disaster. “As soon as the tiny chimps saw the blind children they stared at their eyes… and immediately went into typical chimpanzee attack postures, their hair standing upright all over their bodies, their huge mobile lips pouting and grimacing, while they jumped up and down on all fours uttering screams and barks.”
Even a small shift in behaviour — having your eyes closed, say, or not responding to another’s gaze, was enough to trigger the chimpanzee’s fight-or-flight response. Primates, it seems, have their own idea of the uncanny.

Working out what things are is not a straightforward business. When I was a boy I found a hedgehog trying to mate with a scrubbing brush. Dolphins regularly copulate with dead sharks (though that might just be dolphins being dolphins). Mimicry compounds the problem: beware the orchid mantis that pretends to be a flower, or the mimic octopus that’ll shape-shift into just about anything you put in front of it.

In social species like our own, it’s especially important to recognise the people you know.
In a damaged brain, this ability can be lost, and then our nearest and our dearest, our fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, spouses, best friends and pets become no more in our sight than malevolent simulacra. For instance, Capgras syndrome is a psychiatric disorder that occurs when the internal portion of our representation of someone we know becomes damaged or inaccessible. This produces the impression of someone who looks right on the outside, but seems different on the inside – you believe that your loved one has been taken over by an imposter.

Will Mufasa trigger Capgras-like responses from movie-goers? Will they scream and bark at the screen, unnerved and ready to attack?

Hopefully not. With each manifestation of the digital uncanny comes the learning necessary for us not to be freaked out by it. That man is not really on fire. That alien hasn’t really vanished down the actor’s throat. After all, the rise of deepfakes and chatbots shows no sign of slowing. But is this a good thing?

I’m not sure.

When push comes to shove, the problem with photorealist animation is really just a special case of the problem with blockbuster films in general: the closer it comes to the real, the more it advertises its own imposture.

Cinema is, and always has been, a game of sunk costs. The effort grows exponentially, to satisfy the appetites of viewers who have become exponentially more jaded.

And this raises a more troubling thought – that beyond the uncanny valley’s lairs of the strange, the off-kilter and the not-quite-right is a barren land marked, simply, “Indifference”.

The uncanny valley seemed deep enough, in the 1970s, to inspire scientific study, but we’ve had half a century to acclimitise to not-quite-human agents. And not just acclimitise to them: Hanson Robotics’ wobbly-faced Sophia generated more scorn than terror when the Saudi government unveiled her in 2017. The wonderfully named Abyss Creations of Las Vegas turned out their first sexbot in 1996. RealDoll now has global competition, especially from east Asia.

Perhaps we’ve simply grown in sophistication. I hope so. The alternative is not pretty: that we’re steadily lowering the bar on what we think is a person.

 

The most indirect critique of technology ever made?

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Watching Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast for New Scientist

“Something or other lay in wait for him,” wrote Henry James in a story from 1903, ”amid the twists and turns of the months and the years, like a crouching beast in the jungle.”

The beast in this tale was (just to spoil it for you) fear itself, for it was fear that stopped our hero from living any kind of worthwhile life.

Swap around the genders of the couple at the heart of James’s bitter tale, allow them to reincarnate and meet as if for the first time on three separate occasions — in Paris in 1910, in LA in 2014 and in Chengdu in 2044 — and you’ve got a rough idea of the mechanics of Bertrand Bonello’s magnificent and maddening new science fiction film. Through a series of close-ups, longueurs and red-herrings, The Beast, while getting nowhere very fast, manages to be an utterly riveting, often terrifying film about love, the obstacles to love, and our deep-seated fear of love even when it’s there for the taking. It’s also (did I mention this?) an epic account of how everyone’s ordinary human timidity, once aggregated by technology, destroys the human race.

Léa Seydoux and George MacKay play star-crossed lovers Gabrielle Monnier and Louis Lewanski. In 1910 Gabrielle fudges the business of leaving her husband; tragedy strikes soon after. In 2014 an incel version of Louis would sooner stalk Gabrielle with a gun than try and talk to her. The consequences of their non-affair are not pretty. In 2044 Gabrielle and Louis stumble into each other on the way to “purification” — a psychosurgical procedure that heals past-life trauma and leaves people, if not without emotion, then certainly without the need for grand passion. By now the viewer is seriously beginning to wonder what will ever go right for this pair.

Somewhere in these twisty threaded timelines are the off-screen “events” of 2025, that brought matters to a head and convinced people to hand their governance over to machines. Why would humanity betray itself in such a manner? The blunt answer is: because we’re more in love with machines than with each other, and always have been.

In 1910 Gabrielle’s husband’s fortune is made from the manufacture of celluloid dolls. In 2014 — a point-perfect satire of runaway narcissism that owes much, stylistically, to the films of David Lynch — Gabrielle and Louis collide disastrously with warped images of themselves and each other, in an uncanny valley of cross-purposed conversations, predatory social media and manipulated video. In 2044 mere dolls and puppets have become fully conscious robots. One of these, played by Guslagie Malanda, even begins to fall in love with its “client” Gabrielle. Meanwhile Gabrielle, Louis and everyone else is undergoing psychosurgery in order to fit in with the AI’s brave new world. (Human unemployment is running at 67 per cent, and without purification’s calming effect it’s virtually impossible to get a worthwhile job.)

None of the Gabrielles and Louises are comfortable in their own skin. They take it in turns wanting to be something else, even if it means being something less. They see the best that they can be, and it pretty much literally scares the life out of them.

Given this is the point The Beast wants to put across, you have to admire the physical casting here. Each lead actor exhibits superb, machine-like self-control. Seydoux dies behind her eyes not once but many times in the course of this film; MacKay can go from trembling Adonis to store-front mannekin in about 2.1 seconds. And when full humanity is called for, both actors demonstrate extraordinary sensitivity: handy when you’re trying to distinguish between 1910’s unspoken passion, 2014’s unspeakable passion, and 2044’s passionless speech.

True, The Beast may be the most indirect critique of technology ever made. Heaven knows how it will fare at the box office. But any fool can make us afraid of robots. This intelligent, shocking and memorable film dares to focus on us.

Apocalypse Now Lite

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Watching Gareth Edwards’s The Creator for New Scientist, 4 October 2023

A man loses his wife in the war with the robots. The machines didn’t kill her; human military ineptitude did. She was pregnant with his child. The man (played by John David Washington, whose heart-on-sleeve performance can’t quite pull this film out of the fire) has nothing to live for, until it turns out that his wife is alive and working with the robots to build a weapon. The weapon turns out to be a robot child (an irresistible performance by 7-year-old Madeleine Yuna Voyles) who possesses the ability to control machines at a distance. Man and weapon go in search of the man’s wife; they’re a family in wartime, trying to reconnect, and their reconnection will end the war and change everything.

The Creator’s great strength is its futuristic south-east Asian setting. (You know a film has problems when the reviewer launches straight in with the set design.) Police drones like mosquitos rumble overhead. Mantis-headed robots in red robes ring temple bells to warn of American air attack.

The Creator is Apocalypse Now Lite: the Americans aggressors have been traumatised by the nuking of Los Angeles — an atrocity they blame on their own AI. They’ve hurled their own robots into the garbage compactor (literally — a chilling up-scaled retread of that Star Wars scene). But South East Asia has had the temerity to fall in love with AI technology. They’re happy to be out-evolved! The way a unified, Blade-Runner-esque “New Asia” sees it, LA was an accident a long way away; people replace people all the time; and a robot is a person.

Hence: war. Hence: rural villages annihilated under blue laser light. Hence: missiles launched from space against temple complexes in mountain fastnesses. Hence: river towns reduced to matchwood under withering small-arms fire.

If nothing else, it’s spectacular.

The Creator is not so much a stand-alone sf blockbuster as a game of science fiction cinema bingo. Enormous battle tanks, as large as the villages they crush? think Avatar. A very-low-orbit space station, large enough to be visible in the daytime? think Oblivion. Child with special powers? think Stranger Things. The Creator is a science fiction movie assembled from the tropes of other science fiction movies. If it is not as bankrupt as Ridley Scott’s Alien prequels Prometheus and Covenant (now those were bad movies), it’s because we’ve not seen south-east Asia cyborgised before (though readers of sf have been inhabiting such futures for over thirty years) and also because director Gareth Edwards once again proves that he can pull warm human performances from actors lumbered with any amount of gear, sweating away on on the busiest, most cluttered and complex set.

This is not nothing. Nor, alas, is it enough.

As a film school graduate Gareth Edwards won a short sci-fi film contest in London, and got a once in a lifetime chance to make a low budget feature. Monsters (2010) managed to be both a character piece and a love story and a monster movie all in one. On the back of it he got a shot at a Star Wars spin-off in 2014, which hijacked the entire franchise (everyone loved Rogue One and its TV spin-off Andor is much admired; Disney’s own efforts at canon have mostly flopped).

The Creator should have been Edwards’s Star Wars. Instead, something horrible has happened in the editing. Vital lines are being delivered in scenes so truncated, it’s as though the actors are explaining the film directly to the audience. Every few minutes, tears run down Washington’s face, Voyles’s chin trembles, and we have no idea, none, what brought them to their latest crescendo — and ooh look, that goofy running bomb! That reminds me of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow…

The Creator is a fine spectacle. What we needed was a film that had something to say.

We’ve learned a valuable lesson today

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Watching M3gan, directed by Gerard Johnstone, for New Scientist, 25 January 2023

Having done something unspeakable to a school bully’s ear, chased him through the forest like a wolf, and driven him under the wheels of a passing car, M3gan, the world’s first “Model 3 Generative Android”, returns to comfort Cady, its inventor’s niece. “We’ve learned a valuable lesson today,” she whispers.

So has the audience, between all their squealing and cheering. Before you ask a learning machine to do something for you, it helps if you know what that thing actually is.

M3gan has been tasked by its inventor Gemma (Allison Williams, in her second Blumfield-produced movie since the company’s 2017 smash Get Out) with looking after her niece Cady (Violet McGraw), recently orphaned when her parents — arguing over who should police her screen time — drove them all under a snow truck.

M3gan is told to protect Cady from physical and emotional harm. What could possibly go wrong with that?

Quite a lot, it turns out. Gemma works for toy company Funki, whose CEO David (comedian Ronny Chieng) is looking for a way — any way — to “kick Hasbro right in the d—.” In a rush to succeed, Gemma ends up creating a care robot that (to paraphrase Terminator) absolutely will not stop caring. M3gan takes very personally indeed the ordinary knocks that life dishes out to a kid.

The robot — a low-budget concoction of masks and CGI, performed by Amie Donald and voiced by Jenna Davis — is an uncanny glory. But the signature quality of Blumfield’s films is not so much their skill with low budgets, as the company’s willingness to invest time and money on scripts. In developing M3gan, James Wan (who directed the 2004 horror film Saw) and Akela Cooper (whose first-draft screenplay was, by her own admission, “way gorier”) discovered in the end that there was more currency in mischief than in mayhem. This is the most sheerly gleeful horror movie since The Lost Boys.

Caring for a child involves more than distracting them. Alas M3gan, evolving from Funki’s “Purrfect Petz” (fuzzballs that quote Wikipedia while evacuating plastic pellets from their bowels) cannot possibly understand this distinction.

The point of parenting is to manage your own failure, leaving behind a child capable of handling the world on their own. M3gan, on the contrary, has absolutely no intention of letting Cady grow up. As far as M3gan is concerned, experience is the enemy.

In this war against the world M3gan transforms, naturally enough, into a hyperarticulated killing machine (and the audience cheers: this is a film built on anticipation, not surprise).

M3gan’s charge, poor orphaned Cady, is a far more frightening creation: a bundle of hurt and horror afforded no real guidance, adrift without explanations in a world where (let’s face it) everything will eventually die and everything will eventually go wrong. The sight of a screaming nine-year-old Cady slapping her well-intentioned but workaholic aunt across the face is infinitely more disturbing than any scene involving M3gan.

“Robotic companionship may seem a sweet deal,” wrote the social scientist Sherry Turkle back in 2011, “but it consigns us to a closed world — the loveable as safe and made to measure.”

Cady, born into a world of fatuous care robots, eventually learns that the only way to get through life is to grow up.

But the real lesson here is for parents. The robot exists to do what we can imagine doing, but would rather not do. And that’s fine, except that it assumes that we always know what’s in our own best interests.

I remember in 2014, at a conference on human-machine interaction, I watched a a video starring Nao, a charming “educational robot”. It took a while before someone in the audience (not me, to my shame) spotted the film’s obvious flaw: how come it shows a mother sweating away in the kitchen while a robot is enjoying quality time with her child?

“Does it all stop at the tree?”

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Watching Brian and Charles, directed by Jim Archer, for New Scientist, 6 July 2022

Amateur inventor Brian Gittins has been having a bad time. He’s painfully shy, living alone, and has become a favourite target of the town bully Eddie Tomington (Jamie Michie).

He finds some consolation in his “inventions pantry” (“a cowshed, really”), from which emerges one ludicrously misconceived invention after another. His heart is in the right place; his tricycle-powered “flying cuckoo clock”, for instance, is meant as a service to the whole village. People would simply have to look up to tell the time.

Unfortunately, Brian’s invention is already on fire.

Picking through the leavings of fly-tippers one day, the ever-manic loner finds the head of a shop mannequin — and grows still. The next day he sets about building something just for himself: a robot to keep him company as he grows ever more graceless, ever more brittle, ever more alone.

Brian Gittins sprang to life on the stand-up and vlogging circuit trodden by his creator, comedian and actor David Earl. Earl’s best known for playing Kevin Twine in Ricky Gervais’s sit-com Derek, and for smaller roles in other Gervais projects including Extras and After Life. And never mind the eight-foot tall robot: Earl’s Brian Gittins dominates this gentle, fantastical film. His every grin to camera, whenever an invention fails or misbehaves or underwhelms, is a suppressed cry of pain. His every command to his miraculous robot (“Charles Petrescu” — the robot has named himself) drips with underconfidence and a conviction of future failure. Brian is a painfully, almost unwatchably weak man. But his fortunes are about to turn.

The robot Charles (mannequin head; washing machine torso; tweeds from a Kenneth Clark documentary) also saw first light on the comedy circuit. Around 2016 Rupert Majendie, a producer who likes to play around with voice-generating software, phoned up Earl’s internet radio show (best forgotten, according to Earl; “just awful”) and the pair started riffing in character: Brian, meet Charles.

Then there were three: Earl’s fellow stand-up Chris Hayward inhabited Charles’s cardboard body; Earl played Brian, Charles’s foil and straight-man; meanwhile Majendie sat at the back of the venue (pubs and msuic venues; also London’s Soho Theatre) with his laptop, providing Charles’s voice. This is Brian and Charles’s first full-length film outing, and it was a hit with the audience at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

In this low-budget mockumentary, directed by Jim Archer, a thunderstorm brings Brian’s robot to life. Brian wants to keep his creation all to himself. In the end, though, his irrepressible robot attracts the attention of Tomington family, his brutish and malign neighbours, who seem to have the entire valley under their thumb. Charles passes at lightning speed through all the stages of childhood (“Does it all stop at the tree?” he wonders, staring over Brian’s wall at the rainswept valleys of north Wales) and is now determined to make his own way to Honolulu — a place he’s glimpsed on a travel programme, but can never pronounce. It’s a decision that draws him Charles out from under Brian’s protection and, ineluctably, into servitude on the Tomingtons’ farm.

But the experience of bringing up Charles has changed Brian, too. He no longer feels alone. He has a stake in something now. He has, quite unwittingly, become a father. The confrontation and crisis that follow are as satisfying and tear-jerking as they are predictable.

Any robot adaptable enough to offer a human worthwhile companionship must, by definition, be considered a person, and be treated us such, or we would be no better than slave-owners. Brian is a graceless and bullying creator at first, but the more his robot proves a worthy companion, the more Brian’s behaviour matures in response. This is Margery Williams’s 1922 children’s story The Velveteen Rabbit in reverse: here, it’s not the toy that needs to become real; it’s Brian, the toy’s human owner.

And this, I think, is the exciting thing about personal robots: not that they could make our lives easier, or more convenient, but that their existence would challenge us to become better people.

Don’t stick your butter-knife in the toaster

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Reading The End of Astronauts by Donald Goldsmith and Martin Rees for the Times, 26 March 2002

NASA’s Space Launch System, the most powerful rocket ever built, is now sitting on the launch pad. It’s the super heavy lifting body for Artemis, NASA’s international programme to establish a settlement on the Moon. The Artemis consortium includes everyone with an interest in space, from the UK to the UAE to Ukraine, but there are a few significant exceptions: India, Russia, and China. Russia and China already run a joint project to place their own base on the Moon.

Any fool can see where this is going. The conflict, when it comes, will arise over control of the moon’s south pole, where permanently sunlit pinnacles provide ideal locations for solar collectors. These will power the extraction of ice from permanently night-filled craters nearby. And the ice? That will be used for rocket fuel.

The closer we get to putting humans in space, the more familiar the picture of our future becomes. You can get depressed about that hard-scrabble, piratical future, or exhilarated by it, but you surely can’t be surprised by it.

What makes this part of the human story different is not the exotic locations. It’s the fact that wherever we want to go, our machines will have to go there first. (In this sense, it’s the *lack* of strangeness and glamour that will distinguish our space-borne future — our lives spent inside a chain of radiation-hardened Amazon fulfilment centres.)

So why go at all? The argument for “boots on the ground” is more strategic than scientific. Consider the achievements of NASA’s still-young Perseverance lander, lowered to the surface of Mars at the end of 2018, and with it a lightweight proof-of-concept helicopter called Ingenuity. Through these machines, researchers around the world are already combing our neighbour planet for signs of past and present life.

What more can we do? Specifically, what (beyond dying, and most likely in horrible, drawn-out ways) can astronauts do that space robots cannot? And if robots do need time to develop valuable “human” skills — the ability to spot geographical anomalies, for instance (though this is a bad example, because machines are getting good at this already) — doesn’t it make sense to hold off on that human mission, and give the robots a chance to catch up?

The argument to put humans into space is as old as NASA’s missions to the moon, and to this day it is driven by many of that era’s assumptions.

One was the belief (or at any rate the hope) that we might make the whole business cheap and easy by using nuclear-powered launch vehicles within the Earth’s atmosphere. Alas, radiological studies nipped that brave scheme in the bud.

Other Apollo-era assumptions have a longer shelf-life but are, at heart, more stupid. Dumbest of all is the notion — first dreamt up by Nikolai Fyodorov, a late-nineteenth century Russian librarian — that exploring outer space is the next stage in our species’ evolution. This stirring blandishment isn’t challenged nearly as often as it ought to be, and it collapses under the most cursory anthropological or historical interrogation.

That the authors of this minatory little volume — the UK’s Astronomer Royal and an award-winning space sciences communicator —
beat Fedorov’s ideas to death with sticks is welcome, to a degree. “The desire to explore is not our destiny,” they point out, “nor in our DNA, nor innate in human cultures.”

The trouble begins when the poor disenchanted reader asks, somewhat querulously, Then why bother with outer space at all?

Their blood lust yet unslaked, our heroes take a firmer grip their cudgels. No, the moon is not “rich” in helium 3, harvesting it would be a nightmare, and the technology we’d need so we can use it for nuclear fusion remains hypothetical. No, we are never going to be able to flit from planet to planet at will. Journey times to the outer planets are always going to be measured in years. Very few asteroids are going to be worth mining, and the risks of doing so probably outweigh the benefits. And no, we are not going to terraform Mars, the strongest argument against it being “the fact that we are doing a poor job of terraforming Earth.” In all these cases it’s not the technology that’s against us, so much as the mathematics — the sheer scale.

For anyone seriously interested in space exploration, this slaughter of the impractical innocents is actually quite welcome. Actual space sciences have for years been struggling to breathe in an atmosphere saturated with hype and science fiction. The superannuated blarney spouted by Messrs Musk and Bezos (who basically just want to get into the mining business) isn’t helping.

But for the rest of us, who just want to see some cool shit — will no crumb of romantic comfort be left to us?

In the long run, our destiny may very well lie in outer space — but not until and unless our machines overtake us. Given the harshness and scale of the world beyond Earth, there is very little that humans can do there for themselves. More likely, we will one day be carried to the stars as pets by vast, sentimental machine intelligences. This was the vision behind the Culture novels of the late great Iain Banks. And there — so long as they got over the idea they were the most important things in the universe — humans did rather well for themselves.

Rees and Goldsmith, not being science fiction writers, can only tip their hat to such notions. But spacefaring futures that do not involve other powers and intelligences are beginning to look decidedly gimcrack. Take, for example, the vast rotating space colonies dreamt up by physicist Gerard O’Neill in the 1970s. They’re designed so 20th-century vintage humans can survive among the stars. And this, as the authors show, makes such environments impossibly expensive, not to mention absurdly elaborate and unstable.

The conditions of outer space are not, after all, something to be got around with technology. To survive in any numbers, for any length of time, humans will have to adapt, biologically and psychologically, beyond their current form.

The authors concede that for now, this is a truth best explored in science fiction. Here, they write about immediate realities, and the likely the role of humans in space up to about 2040.

The big problem with outer space is time. Space exploration is a species of pot-watching. Find a launch window. Plot your course. Wait. The journey to Mars is a seven-month curve covering more than ten times the distance between Mars and Earth at their closest conjunction — and the journey can only be made once every twenty-six months.

Gadding about the solar system isn’t an option, because it would require fuel your spacecraft hasn’t got. Fuel is great for hauling things and people out of Earth’s gravity well. In space, though, it becomes bulky, heavy and expensive.

This is why mission planners organise their flights so meticulously, years in advance, and rely on geometry, gravity, time and patience to see their plans fulfilled. “The energy required to send a laboratory toward Mars,” the authors explain, “is almost enough to carry it to an asteroid more than twice as far away. While the trip to the asteroid may well take more than twice as long, this hardly matters for… inanimate matter.”

This last point is the clincher. Machines are much less sensitive to time than we are. They do not age as we do. They do not need feeding and watering in the same way. And they are much more difficult to fry. Though capable of limited self-repair, humans are ill-suited to the rigours of space exploration, and perform poorly when asked to sit on their hands for years on end.

No wonder, then, that automated missions to explore the solar system have been NASA’s staple since the 1970s, while astronauts have been restricted to maintenance roles in low earth orbit. Even here they’re arguably more trouble than they’re worth. The Hubble Space Telescope was repaired and refitted by astronauts five times during its 40-year lifetime — but at a total cost that would have paid for seven replacement telescopes.

Reading The End of Astronauts is like being told by an elderly parent, again and again, not to stick your butter-knife in the toaster. You had no intention of sticking your knife in the toaster. You know perfectly well not to stick your knife in the toaster. They only have to open their mouths, though, and you’re stabbing the toaster to death.

An inanimate object worshipped for its supposed magical powers

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Watching iHuman dircted by Tonje Hessen Schei for New Scientist, 6 January 2021

In 2010 she made Play Again, exploring digital media addiction among children. In 2014 she won awards for Drone, about the CIA’s secret role in drone warfare.

Now, with iHuman, Tonje Schei, a Norwegian documentary maker who has won numerous awards for her explorations of humans, machines and the environment, tackles — well, what, exactly? iHuman is a weird, portmanteau diatribe against computation — specifically, that branch of it that allows machines to learn about learning. Artificial general intelligence, in other words.

Incisive in parts, often overzealous, and wholly lacking in scepticism, iHuman is an apocalyptic vision of humanity already in thrall to the thinking machine, put together from intellectual celebrity soundbites, and illustrated with a lot of upside-down drone footage and digital mirror effects, so that the whole film resembles nothing so much as a particularly lengthy and drug-fuelled opening credits sequence to the crime drama Bosch.

That’s not to say that Schei is necessarily wrong, or that our Faustian tinkering hasn’t doomed us to a regimented future as a kind of especially sentient cattle. The film opens with that quotation from Stephen Hawking, about how “Success in creating AI might be the biggest success in human history. Unfortunately, it might also be the last.” If that statement seems rather heated to you, go visit Xinjiang, China, where a population of 13 million Turkic Muslims (Uyghurs and others) are living under AI surveillance and predictive policing.

Not are the film’s speculations particularly wrong-headed. It’s hard, for example, to fault the line of reasoning that leads Robert Work, former US under-secretary of defense, to fear autonomous killing machines, since “an authoritarian regime will have less problem delegating authority to a machine to make lethal decisions.”

iHuman’s great strength is its commitment to the bleak idea that it only takes one bad actor to weaponise artificial general intelligence before everyone else has to follow suit in their own defence, killing, spying and brainwashing whole populations as they go.

The great weakness of iHuman lies in its attempt to throw everything into the argument: :social media addiction, prejudice bubbles, election manipulation, deep fakes, automation of cognitive tasks, facial recognition, social credit scores, autonomous killing machines….

Of all the threats Schei identifies, the one conspicuously missing is hype. For instance, we still await convincing evidence that Cambrdige Analytica’s social media snake oil can influence the outcome of elections. And researchers still cannot replicate psychologist Michal Kosinski’s claim that his algorithms can determine a person’s sexuality and even their political leanings from their physiology.

Much of the current furore around AI looks jolly small and silly one you remember that the major funding model for AI development is advertising. Most every millennial claim about how our feelings and opinions can be shaped by social media is a retread of claims made in the 1910s for the billboard and the radio. All new media are terrifyingly powerful. And all new media age very quickly indeed.

So there I was hiding behind the sofa and watching iHuman between slitted fingers (the score is terrifying, and artist Theodor Groeneboom’s animations of what the internet sees when it looks in the mirror is the stuff of nightmares) when it occurred to me to look up the word “fetish”. To refresh your memory, a fetish is an inanimate object worshipped for its supposed magical powers or because it is considered to be inhabited by a spirit.

iHuman’s is a profoundly fetishistic film, worshipping at the altar of a God it has itself manufactured, and never more unctiously as when it lingers on the athletic form of AI guru Jürgen Schmidhuber (never trust a man in white Levis) as he complacently imagines a post-human future. Nowhere is there mention of the work being done to normalise, domesticate, and defang our latest creations.

How can we possibly stand up to our new robot overlords?

Try politics, would be my humble suggestion.

We, Robots

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‘A glorious delve into the many guises of robots and artificial intelligences. This book is a joy and a triumph.’

SFF World

Published on 19 December 2020 by Head of Zeus, We, Robots presents 100 of the best SF short stories on artificial intelligence from around the world. From 1837 through to present day, from Charles Dickens to Cory Doctorow, these stories demonstrate humanity’s enduring fascination with artificial creation. Crafted in our image, androids mirror our greatest hopes and darkest fears: we want our children to do better and be better than us, but we also place ourselves in jeopardy by creating beings that may eventually out-think us.

A man plans to kill a simulacrum of his wife, except his shrink is sleeping with her in Robert Bloch’s ‘Comfort Me, My Robot’. In Ken Liu’s ‘The Caretaker’, an elderly man’s android careworker is much more than it first appears. We, Robots collects the finest android short stories the genre has to offer, from the biggest names in the field to exciting rising stars.