Code, Performance, and Meaning

2. Code, Performance, and Meaning • The free/open-source community teaches us that code can be a vehicle for discourse. • But can code have a meaning beyond what it does? • One source of meaning: the body. • How do computation and the body relate?

3. Overview • Androids and Computation • A Post-war Convergence: Asimov and Turing • “Android Poetics” • The Body of the Computational Android • Bodies in Code

4. Transcendent Man, a broadcast discussion “to explore Raymond Kurzweil’stheories on immortality and the Singularity, a point in the near future when technology will be advancing so quickly we won’t be able to keep up, unless we merge with the intelligent machines we are creating.”

5. An advertisement for Sprite featuring the rapper Drake, who turns out to be an electromusical android.

6. A trailer for Hugo, in which the primary object appears to be a writing automaton which doesn’t work and must be ‘brought to life’.

7. What is an android, anyway? Our definitions Their definitions Cyborgs are alternately labeled as “androids,” “replicants,” or “bionic humans.” Technologies of the Gendered Body : Reading Cyborg Women Anne Balsamo, 1996 An android is a living being that has been created partly or wholly through processes other than human birth. Science-fiction Thinking Machines: Robots, Androids, Com Groff Conklin, 1955 The android will duplicate the human form as nearly as possible; synthetic flesh will cover a body and brain made up of superbly designed electronic components. The Pseudo-People: Androids in Science Fiction William Nolan, 1965 ANDROIDES, an Automaton, in figure of a Man; which by virtue of certain Springs, &c. duly contrived, Walks, Speaks, &c. See AUTOMATON. Cyclopaedia, or, An Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences Ephraim Chambers, 1758 [U]n-humans take many shapes: cyborgs, constructed from both organic and inorganic materials; artificial intelligence; independently thinking computers, which often appear in the form of androids . . . Alien Constructions: Science Fiction and Feminist Thought. Patricia Melzer, 2006

8. Androids and Computation • These days, when we say “android” we probably mean a humanoid computerized robot • But the concept is much older than the digital computer • Why do we think computation could “animate” a human body? What happened?

9. Fiction and Non-fiction:A Postwar Convergence 1950: Alan Turing publishes “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” 1936: Alan Turing publishes “On Computable Numbers…” 1939: Isaac Asimov writes his first robot story, “Robbie” 1953: Isaac Asimov writes the novel The Caves of Steel 1946: ENIAC

10. Turing • 1936: developed an abstract model of computation based on the actions of a human clerk: The behaviour of the [human] computer at any moment is determined by the symbols which he is observing. . . . Let us imagine the operations performed by the computer to be split up into "simple operations" which are so elementary that it is not easy to imagine them further divided. . . . We may now construct a machine to do the work of this computer.

11. Turing • 1950: Speculated that “computing machinery” might eventually behave as an intelligent human does. No engineer or chemist claims to be able to produce a material which is indistinguishable from the human skin. It is possible that at some time this might be done, but even supposing this invention available we should feel there was little point in trying to make a ‘thinking machine’ more human by dressing it up in such artificial flesh.

12. Asimov • Unaware of computers until much later Computers were not in the air until the first electronic computer was built during World War II. Since my robot stories began just before World War II, computers were not part of my consciousness • But conceived the “positronic brain” in 1940. . . . delicate traceries that corresponded to whatever it was in human brains that marked out the electropotential of thought. It never occurred to me that we would do precisely that in a very few years, with ordinary electrons.

13. Asimov • First wrote of a humanoid robot in “Evidence,” 1946 he imagined a process of using human ova and hormone controlto grow human flesh and skin over a skeleton of porous silicone plastics that would defy external examination. The eyes, the hair, the skin would be really human, not humanoid • This was before the word cyborg was coined!

14. Asimov The Caves of Steel (1953) was his first lengthy treatment of a humanoid robot – R. DaneelOlivaw became his most famous and beloved character

15. “Android Poetics” • How are androids made/written/depicted? (How should we interpret them?) • Even Asimov, after writing “Evidence,” was unsure about the humanoid robot idea. • His letters with his agent, Fred Pohl, provided a fascinating view of the development of these ideas as he was writing The Caves of Steel

16. From the Archives The novel originated in a suggestion from a magazine editor, H. L. Gold, that Asimov write about “a robot society where the robots were intended to be primarily consumers of excess production.” (15 May 1952) Asimov took this to mean as being about “robot/human symbiotic civilization” (20 November 1952)

17. From the Archives But he was uncomfortable with the economic focus: “Believe me, I won't make an economic treatise out of it… Essentially, the story will be a detective story.” (29 Nov 1952) Simultaneously, Pohl, had shown an outline to a publisher, “Brad” Bradbury, at Doubleday, who thought, “the robots are entirely too human.” Pohl: “they are supposed to be human because that is the traditional Asimov robot,” Brad: “but it is not the traditional Doubleday robot.”

18. From the Archives The problems at Doubleday: • earlier, Asimov had agreed to make the robots “more robot-like and less humanoid” • skepticism about a robot’s ability to be a detective that could “think like another robot” Pohl suggested the robots be given extra senses, like “the ability to compute as fast as an electronic computing machine, which would speed up his logical processes enormously”

19. From the Archives Finally, Asimov, hit upon the final formula: the robots would be “very non-human. . . . The one exception is the robot detective who is very humanoid.” But . . . “The robots will actually be ‘waldoes’ or long-distance manipulators. In short, the robot detective will have a robot body but he will be connected up with a human mind.” (16 Dec 1952)

20. From the Archives After working on the draft for a couple months, Asimov wrote, “Actually, here's the story. There will be only onehuman robot and the fact that he appears human will play an important role in the plot.” (19 Feb 1953) And everyone was pleased. Some time after it was finished, Asimov wrote, “I am awfully glad you like THE CAVES OF STEEL. Since finishing it, I haven't done a word of writing. . . .I'm nervous about it. I love it so much.” (3 June 1953)

21. The Body of the Computational Android • Android-like characters are pretty old business (Golem of Prague, Frankenstein, R.U.R, etc.) • Computational androids pose a new problem: how can we tell they’re not human? • This is the problem of “Evidence;” Asimov revisits it several times in The Caves of Steel

23. The Body of the Computational Android • Why does this discernment problem appear only with computation? • (E.T.A. Hoffman’s story The Sandman does feature android confusion, but…) • Probablyboth emerge from modern optimism about total mastery of knowledge and the body • symbolic logic • dissection • psychology

24. . . . into Code C by Dissection, a 1987 textbook by Ira Pohl “Dissection is a unique pedagogical tool first developed in 1984 to illuminate key features of working code. A dissection is similar to a structured walk-through of the code. Its intention is to explain to the reader newly encountered programming elements and idioms as found in working code.”

25. A fragment of a dissection

26. Reflection Modern programming languages include mechanisms which allow programs to “introspect” themselves. This idea was first introduced in a 1982 PhD dissertation It is a striking fact about human cognition that we can think not only about the world around us, but also our ideas, our actions, our feelings, our past experiences. This ability to reflect lies behind much of the subtlety and flexibility with which we deal with the world

27. Reflection While modern applications of reflection are varied, it was originally developed in the context of artificial intelligence, specifically “the hope of building a system able to decide how to structure the pattern of its own reasoning”

28. Bodies in Code • These metaphors are just examples of the ways in which we think about code in embodied ways • computer memory and human memory are often understood interchangeably, despite being very different