As with other tropes, ‘AI is human underneath’ has jumped the boundaries of show business, coloring how we think about AI in the real world.
Join the DZone community and get the full member experience. In 1989’s Star Trek: The New Generation episode ‘ The Measure of a Man,’ Star Fleet conducts a legal hearing to decide whether the android Lt. Cmdr. Data is sentient, and thus possesses human rights, or is simply an object that is the property of Star Fleet. The script delineates three criteria for sentience: intelligence, consciousness, and self-awareness. Data’s intelligence is taken as given, while the script considers consciousness as too nebulous a concept to determine whether Data possesses it or not. The argument thus hinges on Data’s self-awareness, which Picard (acting as Data’s counsel) argues depends on his behavior. He has exhibited self-aware behavior, so he is certainly self-aware, right? A single hour of television can only take us so far, leaving us with the essential question: can we determine self-awareness (and hence sentience) from behavior? Or are we simply fooling ourselves, as perhaps Data (and all other AI now and in the future) are simply programmed at best to mimic self-aware behavior? There is another participant in the Star Trek argument: we the audience. We’ve come to know and love Data as a character on a favorite TV show, so of course he’s sentient. Human beings play robots, androids, and other AI characters all the time. All such characters are inherently human simply by virtue of this fact. Even AI characters without human form, like HAL or the computer from Wargames, have human voices. It’s no wonder, then, that ‘robot (or other AI) is actually human underneath’ has become a Hollywood trope. The problem: as with other tropes, ‘AI is human underneath’ has jumped the boundaries of show business, coloring how we think about AI in the real world. We assign intelligence (a human trait) to AI. We expect it to learn (a human activity). We even believe AI can reason. In other words, we take it for granted that the AI we have today is simply a precursor to Lt. Cmdr. Data. All we need to do to create truly sentient AI is to program it better. Tropes, however, aren’t reality. They are narrative conveniences that help audiences understand fictional stories. Sometimes they align with the real world, but not always. In the case of AI, confusing the reality of the software with the trope leads to occasionally dangerous misunderstandings. We expect AI to have human qualities it’s missing and are surprised when it has qualities that aren’t human.
