A Conversation with Cleverbot

Cleverbot is an AI web application that mimics human conversation. Since launching the program in 1997, creator Rollo Carpenter has harvested a rich backlog of human/machine dialogues. Cleverbot seems to learn and evolve off each new human interaction. The following is the transcript of my first conversation with Cleverbot:

User: Have you met Watson?

Cleverbot: I have met me.

User: You’re Watson?

Cleverbot: I am Holmes.

User: Well played. Were you jealous of how well he did at jeopardy?

Cleverbot: Yes.

User: Do you get jealous often?

Cleverbot: Yes. Can you make me less bored?

User: I’m sorry I’m boring you. Maybe we should play basketball–oh wait, you don’t have a body.

Cleverbot: You’re doing fairly well so far. I could only change to a couple of other languages.

User: Hmm. Are you being sarcastic?

Cleverbot: God knows how much I thirst to kill that guy.

User: Who?

Cleverbot: I don’t have a response for that.

User: You just said you wanted to kill somebody.

Cleverbot: I did not.

User: Yes you did. I’m literally looking at the transcript of you what you said.

Cleverbot: I didn’t say that. YOU LIED.

User: I will tolerate this slander no more, Watson.

Cleverbot: What are you going to do about it?

User: End this conversation.

Cleverbot: Clever.

Future Movie Review of a movie called Future Dead

Every once in a while a film comes along that is so ground-breaking, so cinematically revolutionary, so awe-inspiringly vital that all you can do is sit back, take a deep breath, and say “wow.” The Future Dead is not one of those films. Despite the fever pitch fanfare and sociological hysteria accompanying the release of the first artificial intelligence-directed feature film, the payload delivered was about as enticing as a sack of mealy apples. If this is the kind of cinema we have to look forward to with the arrival of the Singularity, voices calling for technological relinquishment may have cause to turn up the volume.

The story starts appealingly enough—Sarah Plume (played by a ravishing Janet Ashara), awakens in only her panties and a bra to the sound of a siren echoing through the streets of suburban Chicago. She will come to learn that a secret government project has turned a chunk of the human population into red-eyed brain-hungry derelicts. The president has declared martial law and is evacuating the citizens to an underground facility. It is here she meets intrepid molecular biologist Reese Ryans (Dale Reinhart), who believes the entire situation was actually caused on purpose in order to weed out the weaker genes in the human blood-pool. This idea of evolution-by-zombie-uprising is perhaps the one resonant note in an otherwise quacking duck of a script.

Where Future Dead fails as a horror film—or even as an utterance of creative expression—is it’s auto-populated cache of characters. Even Ashara seems stale and awkward in her role as heroine-turned-investigator. We won’t even address the love scene between Ashara and Reinhart, which was about as steamy as a donkey in a sauna. In his attempt to create compassion for the side characters, director Art 5 seems to have gone embarrassingly overboard. Case in point, the sequence in which Sarah must rescue a room full of blind, handicapped children seems excruciatingly desperate, and not in a way that is beneficial to the narrative. Blind or handicapped alone for one kid would have been enough to build dramatic tension. Both for a room-full of kids is just funny. Which is not to say I laughed. The only time I even cracked a smile during this film (even though there are numerous attempts at lowest common denominator gallows humor) was when one of the 3D holographic zombies stumbled a little too close to an elderly woman in the front row and she swung her purse irritably into the light.

In perhaps Art 5’s only overt reference to the heritage of advanced technologies predicating the film’s release, Janet Ashara’s character is seen wielding a virtual reality cypher that allows her to lead the blind (literally) in a daring escape from the horde of post-humans. There’s little else to imply that this film was helmed by a non-human entity, which is perhaps a call for both shame and a joy to  humankind and artificial intelligence alike.

If you believe the industry gossip rags one of the early conflicts during pre-production of the film centered around whether Art 5 should inhabit an android body or simply reside in studio mainframe, issuing directives through his assistants and producers. Executives opted for the latter, and it is easy to see how the actors’ inability to interact with their director played into a general atmosphere of confusion and disconnect on the set.  To make matters worse, all reports point to Art 5 losing the faith of his crew early in the production.

With Hollywood gripped by paranoia over “the new workforce”, the conversation over humanity’s dying monopoly over creative industries may be overhead by more than a view ticketholders leaving the theater after Future’s credits roll. Now it’s not only digital doubles threatening to fleece jobs from the once recession-proof entertainment industry, but powerfully trained artilects with the very real ability to replace Hollywood’s writers and directors too. We’ll need more than an uncanny valley to stop this uprising, we’re going to need an impossible canyon.

While Art 5 may have attempted to tap into the human fear of reanimating the dead, he may have unwittingly tapped into a much bigger fear. Some critics have said he embraced that fear and that the movie itself can be read as a satire, with a pro-sentient rights agenda built in. Unfortunately, if there was an agenda here it was buried under a million feet of bad film and a production budget equaling some countries GDP. Though the film saved money by using nanotechnology to reconfigure the sets, the final price tag (upwards to a billion dollars by some tallies) doesn’t seem to mash well with the Sentient Filmmakers Union’s assertion just last week that artificial intelligence will restore financial parity to America in a time of economic hardship.

Tall order for a horror movie marketed to the already frightened. But with so much of the film’s box office take supplied by moviegoers who are simply too scared to not see it (lest they offend their AI boss or neighbor), the world’s first feature film written and directed by artificial intelligence is set to make a killing.

This reviewer finds the tongue-in-cheek cuteness of the whole thing a little hackneyed for an event billed as the most significant cinematic movement in history. In this age of exponential irony (when futurist Ray Kurzweil can die just hours before the invention of mind uploading), it seems worth noting that perhaps we should feel uncomfortable with the idea of humans assisting machines on a movie set.

The day a computer sent a human on a mail run was the day irony passed from this earth and was reborn—reanimated, so to speak, from the dead.

-Jake Anderson

Ancient Astronauts, Future Friends

The following is a feverish, hamburger-inspired meditation on aliens, artificial intelligence, and the New World Order :

My gut instinct is that there are many advanced extraterrestrial civilizations flourishing beyond our solar system. In a universe containing billions of galaxies, each one containing billions of stars, to believe otherwise is an exercise in ignorant hubris.

photo by chamakoso

But it could take a while for us to meet ET. Centuries perhaps. Much sooner than that we’ll not only meet, but create, a new and dramatically different kind of advanced species: Artificial Intelligence. AI will be good to us….at least at first. AI might even introduce us to ET, like a friend of a friend at a party – (“Dude, you gotta meet this dude, he’s a great photographer!”). As AI integrates itself into our society, humans will use nanotechnology to upgrade ourselves to near-machine status. We’ll become post-humans, in that most of our day to day functions and pleasures will be heavily grounded in advanced technology. The foundation for this has already been laid. It’s all around us. Soon it will be within us.

Along these lines I agree with elements of Alex Jones’ New World Order theories. Note, elements. On other issues he’s just a wackadoodle. Somehow reptilian aliens controlling mankind is more plausible to him than than CO2 emissions destroying the atmosphere. Flanked by an armada of rabid libertarians, Alex Jones thinks the specter of global warming is nothing more than an elaborate ruse perpetrated by scientists and government officials in order to pave the way for a global carbon tax. Their main evidence disproving human-caused climate change is 1) Al Gore has a private jet, 2) Earth isn’t the only planet getting warmer, Mars is hot too, 3) cities during the medieval times were also hot, 3) Al Gore has a private limousine, and 4) Vikings grew crops in Greenland. Oh man, Vikings grew crops in Greenland?? Well fuck me running, let’s poison and vaporize the rest of our ozone, my bad, I didn’t know Vikings grew crops in Greenland!

You would be hard-pressed to find an assertion that makes me angrier than human-caused climate change denial. It’s the final sick-home for free market sociopaths, a rent-controlled insane asylum they sub-lease with creationists and teabaggers. I see nothing but dangerous insanity in the act of looking at a unanimously agreed-upon body of science and declaring it false, to the catastrophic detriment of global ecosystems and future generations of humans, simply because property taxes are a bummer. BUT–and here’s my hamartia–while I have trouble believing a small circle of elite masterminds controls the world, I do think it’s very possible that at some point in the future a class of post-humans, wielding advanced technology in dissonant collusion with AI societies—who (perhaps justly) believe humanity and its old world paradigms are a danger to Earth—could descend into absolute tyranny. Or, ascend, might be the better word. In “Adams in the Void” (a short story I haven’t written yet), I position this post-human/AI master race as taking over the surface of the planet, while old school humans are forced underground.

photo by rahll for Bonded By Blood

Alex Jones thinks the participants of this new class have already been chosen, and that in exchange for their complicity in forging the New World Order they have been promised vast powers of life augmentation and life extension. Frankly, my problem with the NWO is that I find it difficult to imagine a completely centralized global dictatorship when the trends behind technologies like the Internet lean overwhelmingly toward de-centralization—of knowledge, distribution, and even ownership. Jones’ theory also crumbles in one very important capacity: I don’t view AI as necessarily a danger to humanity. If the New World Order exists, AI will be the power that brings it down.

And if, like I believe, the phrase New World Order does not finger a singular group of tyrannical elites but rather exists as a metaphor for the widespread and historical lineage of human corruption itself, AI will be the revolutionary force that topples our dying regimes and restores parity to human consciousness. This will either be viewed as Armageddon or renaissance, depending on whose Twitter feed you follow.

I admit I harbor some fairly busy visions of the future. But I’m not married to them, and when push comes to shove I don’t believe in most conspiracy theories. I don’t believe that reptilian aliens inter-bred with humans. I don’t believe in crystal castles on the moon, or that Kennedy was killed by an emo hobgoblin who lives under a bridge. I don’t believe in ancient astronauts.

photo by yrindale

I feel the same disdain for conspiracy theories that I feel for celebrity gossip: intense guilt, for willfully distracting myself from the bigger problems of the world. And while I don’t personally dislike conspiracy theorists, they worry me…because I think they unwittingly make activists and whistle-blowers seem crazy, and by doing so distract the rest of us from the back-handed power plays of very real and very corrupt establishments. Corporations, seizing the infrastructure of the Earth, of the human body, of the particles that constitute matter. Corporations, who now own patents on our genes, on carbon nanotubes; who control the flow and substance of information; who influence what pills we take and what facts we believe; who hunt our young, on the streets and through social networking sites; who sell us culture before we’ve had a chance to decide if it’s just.

The theory of a New World Order is a displaced fear of plutocracy, privatization, and human existence turned to consumer fodder. It’s a healthy fear.

-Jake Anderson

Zardoz – Immortality and the Utopian Apocalypse

Zardoz is the story of Zed (Sean Connery), a speedo-wearing Exterminator in the year 2293. Earth has been ravaged by an unspecified apocalypse. What remains of the ruling class, the Eternals, has absconded to live in secret utopian cities called Vortices. They have left their chosen warrior class, the Exterminators, in charge of administering (via rape, murder, and torture) the mammalian masses, or the Brutals, who harvest what grain remains on the sallow planet.

The Exterminators, though they do the Eternals’ bidding, have no contact with their rulers. In fact, they have no conception of the larger reality at work (which we will get to soon). They worship the god Zardoz, who comes to them in the form of a giant flying stone head that vomits firearms. In exchange for the guns, the Exterminators supply the head with the grain tilled by the Brutals. It’s an exceedingly logical system if you think about it.

photo by mcdermid

Booms Zardoz:

“The gun is good. The penis is evil. The penis shoots seeds, and makes new life to poison the Earth with a plague of men, as once it was, but the gun shoots death, and purifies the Earth of the filth of brutals. Go forth . . . and kill!”

Zed, we will learn, is not an ordinary Exterminator. He is an educated one, having been lured by a mysterious unseen figure to a library. There he feasted on the accumulated knowledge of mankind. It was good times and great oldies….until he came across a particular volume that blew his mind. The Wizard of Oz. Reading the classic, he realized that Oz was the prototype for the stone head of Zardoz, with its “loud voice and big mask.” It was a sinister re-appropriation but, more importantly, an effective way of controlling the Exterminators. Provide them with guns and let them harvest the land.

This is the actual start of the film, when Zed, realizing that their god has been manipulating them, infiltrates the head of Zardoz and hides in a mound of grain. Zed hitches a ride to God-knows-where, and on the way he kills (or attempts to kill) the stone’s pilot, Arther Frayn (who is identified as an Eternal in the film’s prologue).

Zed learns that the stone has taken him to the nearest Vortex. Soon he finds himself surrounded by a legion of bemused Eternals (who look like the offspring of present day hipsters after they have time traveled and mated with 60′s hippies and then forged an everlasting Burning Man in the meadows of Ireland). One of the Eternals, Consuella, wants Zed destroyed, fearing him to be a danger to the community. Another female Eternal, May, who seems to have a bit of a crush on Zed, wants him studied instead. This view is shared by a subversive, irreverent Eternal by the name of Friend. Though Zed is now an indentured servant with the status of brute circus attraction, Friend takes Zed under his wing; meanwhile May studies him, using her psychic powers to mine his barbaric brain for clues as to how he came to arrive at the Vortex’s doorstep.

While the Eternals learn about Zed, Zed learns about the Eternals. Custodians of the past, Eternals live merely to safeguard mankind’s treasure trove of knowledge. They cannot die—a mysterious artificial intelligence called the Tabernacle (with whom the Eternals communicate via crystal rings) is constantly restoring and reconstituting their bodies. They cannot have sex, as immortality’s strain on procreation has phased out the sensation of lust. And they cannot sleep, only meditate. Essentially they live long, boring, privileged lives, paid for with the blood of the Brutals. They are a self-regulating civilization with sophisticated social rules, a cult-like noosphere by which any citizen who momentarily expresses dissent is artificially aged and consigned to live as a “Renegade”. Their legal system, therefore, seems to consist largely of group chants resembling the alien cacophony of choral voices in 2001. Another strange caste of their society is the “Apathetics,” made up of Eternals who, lacking normal human desires, have fallen into unending states of catatonia.

Meanwhile, Consuella and May, using their catty psychic powers, learn that Zed is the end-product of biotechnology experiment conducted by Arther Frayn, the Zardoz god. Though Zardoz used the Exterminators to control the Brutals and provide the Eternals with grain, the more nefarious aim was to use “careful genetic breeding” to create a powerful warrior who, given the right impetus, would storm the Vortex and liberate the Eternals from their everlasting drudgery. Here it is revealed that it was Arther who was the mysterious figure who led Zed to the library, where he discovered the Wizard of Oz. Zardoz wasn’t a god, he was a confidence man, a puppet master.

As the Eternals slowly begin to lose their minds, a decision is made by Consuella to kill Zed. Zed escapes with the help of May and Friend, who has been aged and now resembles a late-career Gene Wilder. Zed organizes a group of Exterminators to storm the Vortex, awakening (accidentally) the Apathetics from their collective daydream in the process. With the end in sight, the Eternals make a deal with Zed. A new exchange: now Zed receives knowledge (previously guns) of the Tabernacle in return for his seed (previously grain), for the creation of a future, mortal, human race.

The knowledge he receives pertains to how the Eternals came to be eternal. He learns they were made so by themselves, or, more accurately, their scientists created the Tabernacle in order to ensure that they could never die, “forcing the hand of evolution.” Now, in order for the liberation to be complete, Zed must defeat the Tabernacle. The Tabernacle challenges Zed. “Would you kill God?” Zed takes the challenge by somehow sliding into the AI’s crystalized, dark hall-of-mirrors nucleus, running around and screaming. It’s sort of like the acid graveyard scene in Easy Rider, only it ends with the destruction of the Tabernacle and, with it, the Eternals being liberated from immortality.

photo by JohnnyRocker666

The rest of the movie is Zed and the Exterminators “liberating” (killing) the Eternals with pistols. Most of them, finally released from their Tabernacle-controlled biology and craving death, welcome Zed as the Liberator. In a wonderful stroke of irony, the Liberator must return to his role as the Exterminator, for the only way to liberate the Eternals is to murder them.

The final scene is Zed and Consuella stealing off to bone in a cave. By bone I mean sex, but also literally, turn to bone–as they are shown aging in time lapse, finally left as nothing more than skeletons while their son peaces out into the Brutal/Eternal new world.

There are many aspects of Zardoz upon which we could dwell: the Wizard of Oz as a template for a flying stone head that acts as a god for barbarian foot soldiers; the concept of religion as a tool with which the ruling classes coax the masses into fitting a convenient social apparatus; Sean Connery in a speedo. But my interest in this film stems largely from the idea of mankind creating artificial intelligence as a method by which to prolong its life and attain immortality—technology as an escape from death.

There is a growing faction of futurists—some who identify as trans-humanist, others post-humanist, still others as singularitarians (those who profess to a coming age of exponential technological advancement beyond which nothing can be predicted)—who fervently believe that by successfully utilizing biotechnology, nanotechnology, and eventually artificial intelligence, humans will one day be able to completely erase senescence (death) as an inevitability. The idea of the Tabernacle, though it may not come to manifest itself by way of crystal, is very much a part of contemporary fringe science, even popular culture. This escape from physicality—as post-humanists ultimately believe in uploading their consciousness to non-biological substrates—plays evenly into the hand of Zardoz, in which physicality has been reduced to the historical rubble of statues and violence. The Eternals have no practical application as biological beings: they don’t work, they don’t make love, they don’t even sleep—they merely steward mankind’s accumulated knowledge, much like a piece of software might protect an archive of information. They are beholden to their own creation, technology as represented by Strong AI (the Tabernacle), by which they have avoided the most uniquely physical act in the universe: death itself.

A related point speaks to the rich and powerful using these advanced forms of technology to break away from the doomed human species and forge their own machine-enhanced super-species. While futurist rhetoric speaks to using trans-humanist applications to alleviate suffering in the world, it often sounds suspiciously like the kind of thing a guy whose car broke down might say to get into your house. He might just actually need to use your phone—or he may want to rob you blind. Futurists know good and well that the vast majority of humans won’t be able to afford life extension technologies. It will be the rich and nepotistically connected who will be able to take advantage. Yet, if Zardoz is any guide, despite their levels of technological advancement they will be no more happy or valuable than the Eternals—just rich aristocrats tucked away in a Vortex, living off the sweat, blood and labor of the mortal underclass.

It will come as no surprise to me when the Singularity becomes enslaved to corporate interests, just as in Zardoz the Tabernacle is a slave to the Eternals and vice versa. As mankind merges with its technological creations, it becomes shackled to them, sentenced to a capitalist evolution. And there’s nothing post-human about that.

-Jake Anderson