Jack Trembath Intermission 6-Story 6


Yamamoto’s The Stories of Ibis, “Story 6” is a continuity of the positive looks at technoculture and the development of artificial intelligence.  Beyond that, I see a thread throughout these stories that points out aspects of humanity and the self through the person’s interaction with AI.  The idea that technology has this reflective nature shines through when Kanbara says, “Where did this baseless fear that robots would attack humans come from?  Why were there so many stories about robots and humans fighting? Did they only exist because that was how mankind had always lived?  Did we simply see ourselves in these humanoid machines?  Were we not simply afraid of our own reflections?” (267).  The suspicion towards Artificial Intelligence isn’t about the threat of AI, but rather points out that humans may have this violent, dominating nature that they project on their humanoid robots.
This story also brings up ethical questions regarding the creation of Artificial Intelligence and even defining right from wrong in an AI context.  With the creation of Shion, there arises a lot of questions.  One of these questions being how to define right from wrong or how to define danger when Shion is taking care of the people in the home.  Takami, the man in charge of tracking Shion’s success, points out this problem by stating that they got rid of the frame conflict within the robot in which Shion would freeze up at the request of keeping people from danger as the definition of danger is unclear.  They programed Shion to make this decision of right from wrong by herself through learned situations.  Essentially, the ethical development of Shion is through experience, and Takami can’t one hundred percent guarantee that Shion won’t harm the residents of the nursing home.  The Alan Turing quote exemplifies this, “If a machine is expected to be infalliable, it cannot also be intelligent.  Intelligence allows it to do things an ordinary machine could not do, and it is therefore also capable of making mistakes” (208).  Being a machine, Shion’s development of morals advances on a different more logical level than humans.  She understands how illogical humans act when they respond purely upon emotion.  Shion lives by the statement, “What is hateful to you: do not do to your fellow” with the definition of fellow being everyone.  She points out that “fellow” for humans is only people that are similar to them, and that humans seem to only act on their feelings lacking all logical process.  Again, technology reflects something about humans that humans could not point out themselves.  Overall, this story was another positive, hopeful look at the potential of technology.
https://thenextweb.com/contributors/2018/03/12/ai-black-mirror/
This link leads to an article that makes the point that the internet is telling more about humanity than itself.  We put ourselves in to the internet and sometimes the darker side of humanity beams out.
I think that this idea of the reflective technology touches on my interest in the relationship between AI and creator in which the creator may see a part of him or herself in their own creation.     

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