TV Tuesdays 12: Can a robot be a friend?
Asking for myself
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Welcome to the 12th TV Tuesday!
Someone recommended the Amazon movie Robot and Frank when I asked for good content on AI and loneliness. I watched it this weekend and I really enjoyed it.
First, James Marsden. Yum. I found his character super unlikable. But I still enjoyed looking at him. And Liv Tyler is similarly off-putting personality-wise in her role. And, I’m sorry, but her acting was amusingly bad. But, again, I enjoyed looking at her both for her face and the 90s nostalgia factor.
The movie did a good job asking, but not necessarily trying to fully answer, some interesting questions around AI.
As a point of contrast, everyone and their mother told me I’d love Ex Machina. And it was a beautiful film with beautiful ladies who kicked ass that definitely more than deserved to be kicked, which was fun. But ultimately I disliked the movie for a few reasons. Basically, the movie’s premise offered copious opportunities for extremely interesting dialog and questions to explore. But the movie seemed to assiduously avoid actually addressing most of these.
The movie involves many conversations between a startup founder who’s built the world’s most human-like AI to ever yet exist and an engineer talented enough to help test the project. You’d think these would be really interesting conversations, right? Two brilliant people working on something fascinating and world-changing. In real life, you’d expect they would each ask, and answer, really fascinating questions about AI, human-ness, etc. If anything, their conversations should be even more fast-paced, clever, and fascinating in a movie. But their conversations were so boring and stupid that it took me out of the fantasy. I’ve met people who work on AI and they’re all way more intelligent and interesting than either of these characters.
Watching the Ex Machina script avoid the interesting parts of its premise was like watching a cooking show where the host lays out all the ingredients for a delicious cake. But instead of mixing them together and baking it, they just throws them all in a bowl and then throw the whole thing away while you watch, aghast.
Then again, Ex Machina was a drama and I don’t like those as much while Robot and Frank was a comedy, which I prefer. Plus, Ex Machina was heavy-handed technophobic cautionary tale. This is one of my least-favorite genres of fiction. It’s easy, and frankly boring, to conceive of ways technology could fuck people over. It’s not particularly imaginative, helpful, or fun to watch. We know it’s much harder, and more fun and interesting, to think up how technology could radically transform the world for the better because the people who manage to do it often end up making lots and lots of money.
Robot and Frank was not, for the most part, heavy-handed in any particular direction. It was neither utopian nor cautionary. And that is so much more true to life. It was cute and funny. The characters were relatable.
The most interesting question Robot and Frank asked, in my opinion, is this: Can a robot be a friend? And the best part of the movie, in my opinion, is that it pretty thoroughly explored the question within the limitations of its running time and plot requirements. And then left it mostly open. Because it’s not a question we are anywhere near being able to answer. It’s not a question we may ever be able to answer. If I had to make a prediction, I’d say the answer is probably: To some extent, for some people, some of the time.
As I’ve written, I think for a lot of people that’s going to be a life-changing difference.
What else should I consume on the topic? Did you watch Robot and Frank? What did you think? (I watched Her when it came out, but it probably deserves a re-watch and a review. It might be fun to watch everything on the topic and write a guide ranking them.)
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Great take-down on Ex Machina. M3GAN sort of suffers from similar and other issues. I feel like the classic of this genre was Robin Williams’ Bicentennial Man, but been too long since I’ve seen it and it has a surprisingly low 36% on rotten tomatoes.
I get the feeling, like me, you read mostly non-fiction, but the most amazing AI as friend/lover relationship I’ve seen anywhere is thoroughly explored in Becky Chamber’s novel A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet. Her novella A Psalm for the Wild Built is also a meditation on human/robot as equals in a relationship.
Books probably have more freedom to properly dive into this speculative issue than tv/film productions.