Even though I’ve already written about a robot-based film for this series (which, to be fair, was explicitly a horror movie), I still often ask the question: do people other than me consider robots to be monsters (I mean, there’s a movie called Robot Monster) and/or fantasy creatures, or does their approximate existence in real life preclude them from that distinction? Mechanical beings existed in stories long before we had any capacity to create actual artificial intelligence, and for the most part their characteristics were purely in the realm of fantasy, allegory, or thought experiment—the fact that we have them buzzing around now, constantly being developed into more refined and capable forms, is more of a case of life imitating art (although, who says something in real life couldn’t also be an allegory or thought experiment?) Besides, to some people, AI will always be a little bit monstrous—an unnatural imitation of life, thinking and acting in ways outside the biological norm, completely aberrational and threatening. Much like in The Golem, these things are our creations, but we don’t really know how they will react to the world around them, or if we can maintain our power over them.
Recently, I’ve read two pieces of literature from the past—one of them predating the term “robot” and many of our notions about them, and one fully in the thick of science fiction’s historical development— that exemplify many of the ideas that make robots so fascinating and also frightening, but also present interesting ideas about their relationship with life as we know it. Essentially, we have a proto-robot story that brings its own notions into them, and an innovation on the established view on robots, both providing a conception of them as, in a way, more part of the natural world than most people seem to consider, and in many ways, making them more like traditional monsters.
The older of the two pieces, the short story “Moxon’s Master” from 1899, comes from Ambrose Bierce, the influential American writer who gave us “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”, the story with the twist ending that people online seem to think is secretly the twist ending of everything ever. “Moxon” fits into the same sort of twisty, shocking style that Bierce was known for, placed into a more conceptual, early science fiction framework. There isn’t really much plot to it: the narrator is conversing with Moxon, a man well-known for his love of machines, and the latter is trying to convince the former of his theory that all matter has a form of intelligence, using examples from nature such as vines that can navigate convoluted pathways to find moisture. “There is no such thing as dead, inert matter: it is all alive; all instinct with force, actual or potential” Moxon explains, but the narrator remains skeptical, wondering if the guy has been overtaken by his machine mania. At one point, Moxon momentarily leaves the conversation, entering his machine shop, and comes back with a scratch on his face, saying alternately “I have a machine in there that lost its temper” and that he “[left] a machine in action with nothing to act upon.” When the narrator later enters the machine shop, he finds that Moxon is engaged in a chess match with an opponent the narrator can only see the back of—but immediately recognizes as an automaton. Moxon manages to checkmate his opponent, but apparently didn’t consider the possibility that his creation would be a poor sport.
The idea of a mechanical chess player is rooted in history—The Turk was a purported automaton that toured the western world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, proving to be a formidable opponent capable of seemingly masterful maneuvers (that Bierce gave his chess player a fez is enough evidence of the inspiration.) Of course, The Turk was later revealed to be a clever hoax, but it’s a genuine historical curio, and a prime example of a mechanical being made before most of our preconceptions about robots were established. This is the context that “Moxon’s Master” derives from, and its basis in real life is probably meant to augment the shocking nature of its story.
The contrast is a simple one: Moxon’s high-minded ideas about a machine’s intelligence belies the nature of the “living” machine he has created. He even manages to convince the narrator of it to some degree with his proposal that “Consciousness is the creature of Rhythm”, an idea that the narrator ultimately finds so enlightening in its implication—creating a singular connection between all things in existence—that he immediately decides to return to Moxon’s after leaving, which is why he is there to witness the final events. It all sounds so very idealistic, until you actually see the thing itself—although showing some superficial resemblance to humanity, the narrator describes the machine as having “…proportions suggesting a gorilla…” and a right hand “…which seemed disproportionately long”, making its moves in “…slow, uniform, mechanical and, I thought, somewhat theatrical…” ways. After all his philosophical talk about the potential of machines, even Moxon seems fearful of what he’s produced. It seems to be an early example of the uncanny valley, long before that term was ever conceived: the narrator makes note of when certain behaviours exhibited by the machine are distressingly human (such as its signs of irritation), which only makes it more inhuman qualities (the buzzing and whirring sounds emanating from it, and the convulsive movements it makes just before attacking Moxon) all the more disturbing. When the narrator finally sees the face of the chess-playing machine—in the middle of it murdering its creator—it has a painted-on expression of “…tranquil and profound thought…”, the ultimate irony. Moxon’s whole purpose in building this thing was to demonstrate the intelligence suggested by his theories in the most evocative ways possible, but a capacity for consciousness seems also to lead to a capacity for violence—and considering that earlier in the story Moxon quoted Herbert Spencer, a philosopher known as a proponent of the primacy of “survival of the fittest” and an early form of Social Darwinism, it seems to be another irony Bierce threw in just to be extra cruel.
The crossing of biological and artificial systems is even more pronounced in Polish science fiction master Stanislaw Lem’s 1964 novel The Invincible, and leads to things that even stretches human comprehension. An attempt at a more “hard sci-fi” story—which means lots more description and conversation about the technology and science involved, although that’s not exactly a big departure for Lem—it follows the crew of the titular spaceship, which is sent to a planet that was being surveyed by a similar ship called the Condor, which had ceased all communications. What the crew find is a planet seemingly devoid of all life on land (although there are still organisms in the seas, and fossil evidence of terrestrial life) but containing what appears to be ruins of massive, artificial structures—and then they begin to encounter cloud-like swarms of tiny creatures that can disrupt their communications and, most disturbingly at all, erase a person’s entire memory, leaving them conscious but unable to do much of anything. The mystery of what happened to the Condor seems pretty well solved, so it then becomes about figuring out what the swarms are, and what to do about them.
Not unlike Lem’s novels Solaris and His Master’s Voice, there is a lot of theorizing based on evidence, but an intentional lack of confirmation, leaving the situation ultimately ambiguous—science is only rarely about knowing anything for sure. One of the scientists in the crew proposes that the swarm, made of many tiny, insect-like crystalline units, was the result of millions of years of selective pressure and evolution on AI-powered machines that had been left behind by an alien civilization. The various machines were forced to contend not only with the animal and plant life in their battle for continued existence, but also with each other as they sought out resources—some of the machines were better suited for independent life than others, such as the ones equipped with solar batteries. Ultimately, it was the machines that had the lowest resource demands and were otherwise the most adaptable that stuck around (the “ruins” the crew discovered are thought to have been another strain of mechanical life that developed to become more plant-like, but eventually ceased functioning due to some change in the environment), which turned out to be the “insects.” While they are harmless on their own, they become highly dangerous when they form into a sort of hive-like gestalt using the mechanical processes they developed. It is a vivid and thought-provoking idea of robots both shaping and being shaped by the natural environment, and also an early antecedent of nanomachines, a concept that would become a science fiction staple.
It’s also, rather explicitly, meant to demonstrate how complexity doesn’t always make for a dominant form of life. The theory as presented in The Invincible proposes that the less complex and more efficient machines readily overcame the more intelligent and powerful ones, and that everything they do arose from that need for efficiency—their electromagnetic ability to cut off radio was likely developed as a way to interfere with the other AI, and even their memory erasing was likely a more efficient way of dealing with organic obstacles. The crew even get to see this in action when they unleash an AI powered battle tank called the Cyclops, armed with an “anti-matter cannon” that can decimate its surroundings, in order to distract the swarm, only to watch it go completely berserk as a result of the encounter, rolling off to become yet another mechanical menace on that world. That these swarms are borderline mindless but still rule their ecosystem is a reminder that the universe doesn’t always play to the expectations our more anthropocentric mindset, an idea so profoundly disturbing to some members of the crew that they have a hard time believing it, thinking that the things must possess some sort of intelligence (and, for example, wondering about the possibility of them deciding to exit the planet, giving them a level of motivation that is not at all apparent) despite what their own scientist is telling them. This is very much in line with what Lem was getting at in Solaris, which also featured a cosmic entity whose existence goes against our ideas of how life should be, suggesting that much of the universe does not abide by traditional concepts of purpose or progress—and much like that book and also His Master’s Voice, The Invincible has scenes where scientists from different fields all come up with their own hypotheses, coloured and mislaid by their own limited and biased understandings. It’s a recurring theme in Lem’s work that most things are not truly understandable, no matter how much we try to impose meaning on them.
Although coming from very different points in the history of robot fiction, both of these stories paint artificial intelligence in a way that takes them out of the hands of their human creators and puts them into the unknown and uncontrollable world of nature. For Bierce, the conception is much broader, vaguer, and more philosophical, but still ends up imbuing life into machines…which unfortunately doesn’t make them particularly benevolent, no matter how much someone like Moxon tries to dress them up in the image of civilization. Lem’s novel, on the other hand, shows intelligently crafted machines taking on elements of biological evolution, simplifying themselves in order to fit into a new environment, and becoming akin to a quasi-sentient natural disaster in the process. In both cases, though, the tool has thrown off any control we have of it and developing into its own entity, which I think is always the background implication that turns the non-monstrous robot into the monstrous one.
A Scrapbook of Infinite Noise 