Simulation, Simulacra, Mimesis, the Copy, the Artificial, the Virtual, the Synthetic, the Unreal
Simulating ourselves – What does AI say about us?
Human simulations – testing the real/virtual dichotomy.
some human simulations are embodied. incased in something in human form (Honda robot) – has physical form
many that are not – immaterial (online, computer spaces)
real and virtual are opposites (there is a dichotomy)
dichotomy – a division or contrast between two things that are or are represented as being opposed or entirely different.
like nature and culture – considered to be opposites
how do we consider if something is real?
We need sensation feedback data. need to be able to touch, question whether something is real.
If you remove one of the senses then the test becomes harder.
The real and virtual relate to different things
Real – touch feel (is tangible)
Virtual – exists in other reality
Virtual is part of our reality
If we create something that is virtual we still experience it within our real reality.
Line is blurry between the two (a sen-sable real)
However on closer inspection the gap between these two things appears less clear when we begin to test what is real and what is simulated.
Increasingly technologists refer to an area of mixed reality or dual reality.
If you see a film and it makes you scared – it is a virtual scared. Cinemas allow you to experience emotions concepts ideas through cinema that aren’t in the real world. You imagine these emotions through the characters on screen, but they are still your own real emotions – it is a dual reality.
When watching cinema we turn lights off so we blur the real and can be immersed into the simulation.
We project ourselves into the fake reality on screen and are drawn into that. (Vicarious experience).
Human simulations provide a particularly challenging model through which we might test the REAL/VIRTUAL dichotomy.
How do we test for a ‘real’ human.
Only recently came up with tests
What senses do we employ in such a test? We utilize them to work out whether something is a simulation or not.
If we start removing some of the senses, it becomes much more complicated.
Example of when child meets someone new – scares them as they haven’t had enough experience to tell them its just another human. we are older and more clever so we can tell whether someones a human through our senses.
We wouldn’t think someone on street wasn’t a real human but as technology gets better we may not be able to rely on these senses.
If we can’t rely on these senses – then what are we testing for?
– Intelligence (AI)
– Emotional intelligence
– On deeper level – what makes us innately human
when we simulate human what are we simulating? – how something looks or trying to simulate essential characteristics of humans?
Blade Runner (Ridley Scott 1982)
Voight-Kampff test attempts to distinguish androids from human beings by autonomic responses to questions that should elicit an emphatic response.
Because it seeks to gather and measure biological information for security purposes, the empathy testing procedure is a kind of bio metric identification system.
All tests are potentially flawed as not every human has the same response (which just because we don’t get the right answer doesn’t mean we are an android).
Author of Do androids dream of electric sheep? Phillip K Dick rejects the idea of trying to defend human intelligence against machine intelligence instead he relies on emotional response. Biometric data are also used to authenticate the person being tested.
The history of tests to distinguish human beings from machines is still short. The most significant example was by Alan turning what is commonly known as the turing test.
Alan turing understood well the need for empirical evidence when carrying out foolproof tests, what he proposed was what has become known as the turning test, to determine if a machine was capable of thinking. The test was an adaptation of a Victorian-style competition called the imitation game.
The game involved secluding a man and woman from an interrogator who has to guess which is which by asking questions and studying written replies. The man aims to find who is the woman and who is the man.
In the Turing test, a computer program replaces the man. Turing asked “will the interrogator decide wrongly as often when the game is played like this, as he does when the game is played between a man and a woman?”
Recently at Reading University the first machine passed a turing test and made the interrogator believe it was a human.
Effectively the test studies whether the interrogator can determine which is computer and which is human (although Turing did not explicitly say that the interrogator should be told that one of the respondents was a computer, it seems clear from his example questions that this was what he intended.
When we simulate ourselves to lie we teach the machines how to lie
What happens when we know something is virtual but still believe they are real (Ex_Machina film)
Robots struggle to make art and music on their own. Aida Lovelace said they must make something cultural to be human.
We should test their creativity