Lovely day with Lena and her cousins. On Kirsten’s recommendation we saw Solaris, which was wonderfully meditative and crystalline, if lacking in viscerality. I perversely enjoyed the over-the-top ranting by one of the scientists about how the Visitors, those alien reanimations of missing loved ones, Weren’t Human and that she wanted the Humans to Win, by any means necessary, even if it meant disintegrating the Visitors, who have no apparent agenda. Rather than overindulge in Star Trek-style moral conundrums, which only occurred to me later, the film brought oblique thoughts of the Turing Test, of the ever-shifting project of artificial intelligence, of the many Evil Demons of philosophy.
The movie has substantively little to do with AI per se, but a lot of its practical, everyday questions – how do we recognise each other as human? how do we make the gestures that signify ourselves as human? – turn nicely with that discipline’s changing brief and fortunes. Despite its loaded objective – to determine what is adequately sentient – the Turing Test is never transparently definitive, and is echoed by the wonderful dictum of one of the Visitors: “there are no answers, only choices”. The Test hinges on an interviewer deciding whether a remote interviewee is sentient, based on a comprehensive conversation. However dodgy, it is all about the practical ethics of decision, rather than a checklist of internal, known, structural requirements for intelligence. And while the Visitors in Solaris are assumed to be sentient, the debatable anthropocentric value of “humanity” in the film nevertheless resonates with the discourse of AI.
I’m reminded by Phoebe Sengers’ idea that the work of creating “agents” via “artificial intelligence” can never be some transcendent, Tower-of-Babel-type enterprise, and is always a reflexive, interpretive kind of cultural work in itself, whether we like it or not. Every attempt to create an effective, socially interactive agent is a grounded, knowing story about our own milieu. Every agent is a question: what does this construct say about us? And what does this approach say about our attempts to live our lives? Upon his apparent return home in Solaris, George Clooney’s character reflects on how he “rebecomes human” by successfully participating in the contextual gestures that constitute society. I guess the real ending ups the ante on how much those gestures float in suspension, so “inessential” and yet so necessary.
Perhaps the unexplained heavenly body that is Solaris is really like a dense point in a crystal solution of our ideas about sociality. When humans are introduced to that space, our loving memory of the gesture cannot help but solidify and grow like crystals at that point. In a sensory deprivation tank, we float in salty water to re-experience the womb, to put the ego to rest, to temporarily re-establish the polymorphous. Perhaps Solaris is an unabashedly “mutant womb”, a critical, concretising tank of solution that perversely builds (inter-)personality-simulations as a dramatic theatre of the social, a testing ground for social models, a prototyping space. “Hard fax” tanks, in which actual 3D objects can be reproduced by congealing a solution via the intersection of lasers, are now a reality, and are employed in real prototyping processes. And it’s hardly a coincidence that the space station orbiting Solaris is the Prometheus, named for the Titan who shaped humans from clay (that tried and true prototyping substance) in Greek mythology. And it was Prometheus who, as punishment for bringing fire to humanity, was chained to a mountain for an eagle to feast on his liver, which would then magically regenerate the next day, just like the Visitors, who reappear when sent away and who are mysteriously resurrected after (self-inflicted) mortal injury. And for the Greeks, the liver was the seat of consciousness, not the brain. Perhaps this is where the movie’s missing viscerality can be found...
