Truth Versus Truthiness

Only those born before 1980 are considered digital natives.
I’m classified as a digital immigrant, because I was born around the same year as the Ferrante Mark I—the world’s first general-purpose computer.
I grew up in the days of rotary phones and three TV networks, and I didn’t own a personal computer until the early 1990’s, when I purchased my first OS6 Macintosh. 

I went through a phase when I played games on my Mac, but I only liked clue-finding games.
I never devised an avatar, or played computer games with people around the world.
I met my husband at an office for freelancers—where people could get their resumes typed and use drop off boxes—not via Hinge or Tinder.
My only avatars are the sticker emojis I made on my iphone, and the self-portrait I cobbled together from ready-made choices for Facebook.
My favorite Apps are IMDb, the FoodNetwork, YouTube, and Goodreads—sites where I can look up information or be entertained, not communicate with others.
I’m definitely a digital immigrant.

Most of the science-fiction I read is old—very old.
I enjoy rereading authors that I first read in the 1970’s—among them, Isaac Asimov, Primo Levi and Olaf Stapledon.
Authors have been discussing the ideas of whether artificial beings should be legal “persons,” or whether artificial intelligence will supersede humans, for a very long time.

In order to broaden my horizons, I decided to read more recent science-fiction, and I happened upon The Lifecycle of Software Objects by Ted Chiang.
According to Wikipedia, Chiang isn’t a digital native either.
(He was born in 1967.)
However, he’s won four Nebula Awards and four Hugo Awards; and he writes philosophical science-fiction—my favorite category.

Just as Karel Capek invented the word “robot” for his 1921 play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), Chiang invented the term “digient” for “digital entities.”
In The Lifecycle of Software Objects, digients are virtual pets created as past-times for wealthy customers, who are then expected to parent them.
The novella is the story of two central characters (Ana and Derek), and their digients (Jax, and siblings Marco and Polo).
At the beginning of the story, Ana and Derek both work for a company that creates and sells digients.
After the software company goes bankrupt, Ana and Derek opt to take over the care of their favorite digital entities, so that their cherished entities may “live.” 

Chiang deals with both psychological and philosophical issues in The Lifecycle of Software Objects.
The principal subject is raising and educating the “infant” digients.
He further mentions that digients are equipped with “pain circuit breakers,” so they’ll be “immune to torture,” and thus “unappealing to sadists,” bringing up the fact that sociopaths will still be a societal problem in the near future.
I especially enjoyed the message board sequences in which obviously “bad” parents grouse about their “bad” digient children.

At one point in the story, the digient siblings, Marco and Polo, ask to be “rolled back” to an earlier point in their “lives,” because they’re unable to resolve an argument.
Is it right for “daddy” Derek to allow this; or should he force his “children” to work out their own disagreements, so that they may grow emotionally?
Later, Marco and Polo ask to become corporations, or legal persons.
Should Derek permit this?
Is it child abuse to separate a digient from its’ friends, and fan clubs, or to alter its’ programming so that it can become a sex slave?

Scene of Robbie the Robot disabling the weapons of  “Doc” Ostrow (Warren Stevens) and Commander Adams (Leslie Nielsen) in 1956’s Forbidden Planet.

In Chiang’s novella, Ana disagrees with a company that wants her to help train a digient that “responds like a person, but isn’t owed the same obligations as a person.” [Italics mine.]
This scene reminded me of two TV series in which androids/robots are traumatized—The Orville (2017-?) and Westworld (2016-2022).
In season two of The Orville, we learn about the history of the Kaylons—a society of sentient artificial lifeforms (created as slaves) who exterminated the biologicals who created them.
In Westworld, the first season begins with human-like androids being the prey of depraved humans, but by season four it’s all-out war between androids and humans—that seems to end on earth in the same result as on planet Kaylon.

The central question is whether it’s ethical to enslave a sentient being—be it a virtual entity, robot, android, or human.
Is enslaving non-biologicals just as wrong as enslaving a fellow biological?
In a world in which human life is less important than money, is it senseless to worry about the treatment of virtual or robotic creatures?
After all, while many of us say we believe in fair play, unselfishness, and truthfulness; almost no one thinks we should carry through with these beliefs in our daily lives.

Scene of Charly Burke (Anne Winters) talking to the Kaylon Isaac (Mark Jackson) in The Orville episode “Electric Sheep.”

People can justify any bad action, as long as it makes them feel better.
We can justify not paying back a loan because the lender has more money in the bank than the lendee.
We can justify breaking laws, because other people are more corrupt—the classic pot calling the kettle black.
Few believe that the way to build a life is to be honest and truthful all the time.
Some of my favorite novels on this subject are not science-fiction.
(I recommend two Fyodor Dostoevsky novels—The Idiot, and Demons, also titled The Possessed.)

Because people can justify any bad action, the erosion of generally-believed truths is quite dangerous for society.
A 2016 Sanford study* came to the conclusion that digital natives are unable to judge the credibility of online information, or distinguish between an advertisement and a news story.
The inability to tell truth from truthiness (on the web) is also evident in digital immigrants—perhaps, more so.
In a world where we have no generally believed truths, and we only believe what we want to believe, how is an organized society possible?

We first heard the word “truthiness” on The Colbert Report—Stephen Colbert’s mock news show (which aired from 2005 through 2014), in which he portrayed a far right news personality.
In Colbert’s book America Again (2012), the same character satirically discusses voter fraud (page 165) and goes on to recommend ending voter fraud by ending voter registration (page 166).
Little did anyone think in 2012, that 10 years later, in 2022—40% of us would believe that the 2020 election was illegitimate, or that later several states would actually pass laws making it harder to vote.

Ultimately, the most important conflict is not one between digital natives and digital immigrants, right versus left, the intelligentsia versus average people, or even “woke” versus “anti-woke.”
Instead, I think that the most crucial divide is between people who want to try and seek out truth and reality in this confusing world, and those who prefer living in their cocoons.

*”Evaluating Information: The Cornerstone of Civic Online Reasoning,” by Sam Wineburg, Sarah McGrew, Joel Breakstone and Teresa Ortega (2016) the Stanford History Education Group.

Robots and the “Truth” of Reality

A scene from one of the first productions of R.U.R. (London, 1921)

I recently read Karel Capek’s play R.U.R. (first performed in 1921), and can’t help but draw analogies from R.U.R.—the first story about robots— to The Matrix film series.
R.U.R. is short for Rossum’s Universal Robots, and Rossum was the last name of the two scientists, who created synthetic creatures* built from organic matter who look identical to human beings.
The purpose of the robots is to act as servants to humanity.
Capek (1890-1938) called his play a “comedy of science.”
Basically, the artificial creations revolt, and this results in the extinction of the human race.

R.U.R. has three acts plus an epilogue, and the play is set in the years 2000, 2010, and 2011.
The location is a robot factory, on a remote island.
At the beginning of the play, robots have become cheap to produce, and are available for work all over the world.
Gradually, robots are taking over all human jobs. The main characters are:

• Miss Helena Glory, lovely daughter of the robot factory’s President, and secret representative of a group (the Humanity League) that wants to rescue robots from slavery,
• Harry Domin, the factory General Manager, who keeps Dr. Rossum’s secret of robot creation in his office,
• Dr. Hallemeir, Head of the Institute for Psychological Training of Robots,
• Dr. Gall, the top experimental scientist, who wants to create more and different types of robots,
• Radius, an experimental robot that works in the factory library, and
• Alquist, the Head of Robot Construction.

The robot Radius (Patrick Troughton, with arms raised), in the BBC's 1948 live production of R.U.R.

The play is obviously a comedy, or a parable, because motivations are unclear, and some plot lines simply don’t make sense.
Why does Helena accept Harry Domin’s marriage proposal, and remain on the island?
Why does Helena put her goal of ending robot slavery on hold for ten years?
How is Rossum’s secret formula for creating robots so easy to destroy?
How is Radius able to lead a robot revolution from the island?
Could there be a communal robot brain?

In Act One, Helena visits the island (ostensibly, to tour the factory), but her purpose is to save the robots because they may have souls.
Poor Helena is naïve, and she can’t distinguish robots from humans (to the general amusement of her hosts).
By the end of the first act, she accepts Harry Domin’s marriage proposal, and at the beginning of Act II, she is living comfortably in their apartments.
It appears that she has given up her goal of saving robots.

It's fascinating that in Capek’s vision of 2000, we’ve already entered the era of “truthiness”—the quality of something being felt to be true, even if not necessarily true.
Domin explains to Helena that the world’s text books are simply propaganda—“the schoolbooks are full of paid advertisements and rubbish,” and the outside world has been deceived as to the true story of the origins of the robot underclass.

The audience learns in Act Two that much has happened in ten years.
Human workers, in an attempt to keep their jobs, began killing robots, and governments (motivated by greed) reacted by giving the robots weapons, and allowing robots to kill off humans by the thousands.
Humans have become sterile, and no children are being born.
Essentially, humans are becoming more like robots, and robots are becoming more like humans.
Robots now outnumber humans 1,000 to one.
Helena commits two pivotal actions in act two:

1. she prevents Radius from being killed (sent to the stamping mill) for insubordination, and
2. she destroys the only two copies of the secret formula for creating robots.

It becomes apparent in Act Two that the robots are planning a revolt, and Harry Domin proposes a counterattack—the creation of nationalistic robots.
In Domin’s vision, factories in different countries “will produce Robots of a different color, a different language.” 

They’ll never be able to understand each other. Then we’ll egg them on a little in the matter of misunderstanding, and the result will be for ages to come every Robot will hate every other Robot of a different factory mark.

However, humans are unable to activate this plan, because they simply don’t have enough time.
In the third act, Radius leads the other robots in killing all the humans on the island, with the single exception of Alquist.
(One executive actually tries to tempt the robots into not killing them with stacks of money, but his attempt is futile.)
Alquist is kept alive in hope that he can reconstruct Rossum’s formula, and create more organic robots.

The Epilogue takes place one year later, and Alquist has been unable to make any progress in his assigned task.
No other humans have been located on the planet, and eight million robots have died.
It’s predicted that within 20 years, all robots will die.
However, it’s revealed that before he was slaughtered, Dr. Gall (the lead science for the factory) had secretly created two special robots—a male robot named Primus, and a robotic recreation of Helena.
These robots have been sleeping for a couple of years, and they visit Alquist in his lab.
Unlike other robot models, they dream, and feel love for each other.
They protect each other from being dissected by Alquist—who considers them to be his last chance to figure out the secret of robot creation.
The last lines of the play are:

Primus (holding her): I will not let you! (To Alquist.) Man, you shall kill neither of us! 

Alquist: Why?

Primus: We—we—belong to each other.

Alquist (almost in tears): Go, Adam, go, Eve. The World is yours.

Helena and Primus embrace and go out arm in arm as the curtain falls.

Similar to the story of R.U.R., in The Matrix saga, there are two separate societies—biologicals and synthetics—and they battle for survival.
However, while in both stories, the synthetic beings win, they do not kill them in The Matrix stories.
Instead, mechanicals use humans as power sources to keep the world running.
In a way, The Matrix is R.U.R. turned inside out.
In The Matrix, humans are the slaves and the mechanical beings hold the cards (the reverse of what is initially true in R.U.R.)

Neo (Keanu Reeves) awakening in a pod in The Matrix.

In R.U.R., it’s the robots who are sent to the dissecting labs, and constructed in the factory (where their flesh is made in kneading troughs, brains and livers prepared in vats, and nerves spun in spinning mills).
In The Matrix trilogy, it’s millions of humans in pods who exist in the harvesting fields, where their bodies provide energy so life may continue.

Neo (Keanu Reeves) looking at a row of human battery pods in The Matrix.

Just as Dr. Gall proposes that they “introduce suffering” to the robots as an “automatic protection against damage,” in 2003’s The Matrix: Reloaded, the Architect reveals to Neo that the Oracle discovered that “Humans needed to be given a choice” in order to survive psychologically. (Actually, humans are only given the illusion of choice.)

Another similarity is that the synthetics feel far superior to the humans in both stories.
In a conversation with human Helena (in Act Two), Radius tells her: “You are not as strong as the robots. You are not as skillful as the robots. The robots can do everything. You only give orders. You do nothing but talk.”

Poster from a WPA production of R.U.R. (1930's)

Both stories contain an “Adam” and an “Eve.”
In The Matrix, it’s Neo and Trinity.
In R.U.R., the couple is Primus and Helena.
In The Matrix: Reloaded, the Architect tells Neo that his five predecessors were designed to develop an attachment to fellow human beings.
However, Neo is an anomaly; he has developed an attachment to Trinity.
In R.U.R., Primus and Helena can hear each other’s thoughts telepathically, and are entranced by the sun rising, and the sounds of birds singing.
The question remains: Does it really matter whether either couple is “real” or “synthetic?”

* Capek derived the word “robot” from a Slavic word for “forced labor”—“robota.”
Today, a creature made from organic material would be described as an “android,” and only a truly mechanical creature would be termed a “robot.”