STICKS AND STONES

Dick Pountain /Idealog 346/ 04 May 2023 10:29

It’s no great surprise to me that the movie business is terribly poor at dealing with IT-related material in an adult fashion. First of all, the industry’s whole purpose is to entertain, and neither solid-state physics nor computational complexity theory are intrinsically entertaining (to put it mildly). Secondly, entertaining nowadays mostly means blowing things up, and the technology for doing that is no different in principle from the spear or bow-and-arrow, just with more oomph behind it, more fins and shiny bits: the Marvel Universe shares aesthetic principles with the funfair rather than the library. Thirdly movie people tend to be from the artistic rather than scientific world, have neither the wish nor need to understand the physical principles behind tech artefacts: they want to know what things do rather than how they do it, and employ that knowledge as plot elements.

There have been a very few exceptions, and I’m not talking about biopics like ‘The Imitation Game’ or ‘A Beautiful Mind’. l liked Alex Garland’s ‘Ex Machina’ a lot, and Spike Jonze’s ‘Her’ quite a lot less because these films at least tried to tackle the psychology of humans interfacing with intelligent machines (a subject particularly on my mind right now as moral panic about ChatGPT builds up a head of steam in the media). Last night I watched a 2021 German film called “I’m Your Man” which is in my opinion better than either of those: a somewhat depressed middle-aged archeology professor gets invited by a tech firm to road-test one of their super-intelligent humanoid robots: designed to become life partners, trained on all their user’s available biographical data, and learning as they go from conversation and behaviour to become a perfect spouse. It’s a bit comic, a bit tragic, subtly done and moving.

Thinking about it afterwards though I realised that, good as it is, it shares a major failing with ‘Ex Machina’ and similar films, namely total implausibility from an energetic standpoint. AI and Robotics, though highly co-operative, remain separate disciplines for a simple reason: AI is mostly about uttering Words and Pictures, while robotics is about moving Things. Sticks and stones can break bones, but words can’t. We converse with ChatGPT like a convincingly intelligent agent, using very little energy because digitised words can be transmitted almost for free, but the server at the other end is running a language model that consumed 1.287 gigawatt hours of electricity to train. Similarly Boston Dynamics makes superbly creepy dog-like robots that can jump through hoops, do back-flips and dance to dubstep, but they’re powered either by an umbilical mains power cord or a battery-pack the size of a hotel minibar.

To create the sort of humanoid robots these cyber-romantic movies depict, we’d need to cram both of these systems into a single, human-sized container and power it solely with tea and sandwiches. I’m prepared to stick my neck out and say it won’t ever happen. The only way to achieve the necessary energy densities for both building and running such beings already exists, in the shape of animal metabolism and genetics based on carbon and salty water.

The other movie I saw this week was Jim Jarmusch’s 2016 film ‘Paterson’ which could hardly be less techy, but nevertheless contains a potent insight. It’s about a week in the life of a bus driver in Paterson, New Jersey, who’s also called Paterson and is played by Adam Driver. Well, it is Jarmusch. Paterson writes poetry during his slack moments at work, in pen in a little notebook, ‘Paterson’ is also the name of a famous modernist poem about Paterson by William Carlos Williams (which I read and enjoyed back in 1963). Well, it is Jarmusch.

The poetry is good (which is because Jarmusch got Ron Padgett rather than Adam Driver to write it) and his delightfully cookie young wife constantly nags him to go to the copy-shop and get that notebook xeroxed. He repeatedly says he’ll do it next Saturday, because he’s a bit of a romantic who doesn’t care for technology apart from pens and paper. They go out for the day, and come back to find that Nellie, their equally delightful English Bulldog whom they had left at home, has reduced the notebook to confetti in a fit of pique. Driver delivers an Oscar-worthy performance as the man who has just lost years of mental (and physical pen-scratching) effort, which he may or may not be able to remember or repeat, for want of making a backup copy that would have consumed very little electrical energy. Sticks and stones and English Bulldogs may break your bones, but words can hurt you just as badly if you neglect to back them up…