“Cyborgs Don’t Feel Pain. I Do.”
The machines’ behavior can’t provide us with proof that the machines have conscious experiences. Just as mere behavior cannot demonstrate that one understands English, or anything else, mere behavior cannot demonstrate that one feels pain, or anything else. The T-101 may say, “Now I know why you cry,” but then I could program my PC to speak those words, and it wouldn’t mean that my computer really knows why humans cry. Let’s again consider the hypothetical little Austrian who lives inside the T-101 and speaks its dialogue. Imagine him being roused from his comic book by a new note floating down from Arnie’s neck. The note is an English sentence that is meaningless to him, but he consults his computer file to find the appropriate response, and into the microphone he sounds out the words “Ah nah know whah you crah.” Surely, we don’t have to insist that the Austrian must be feeling any particular emotion as he says this. If the little Austrian can recite the words without feeling the emotion, then so can a machine. What goes for statements of emotion goes for other expressions of experience, too. After all, a screaming face or an expression of blood-licking ecstasy can be produced without genuine feeling, just like the T-101’s words to John. Nothing demonstrates this more clearly than the way the T-101 smiles when John orders it to in
T2
. The machine definitely isn’t smiling there because he feels happy. The machine is just moving its lips around because that is what its instructions tell it to do.
However, despite the fact that the machines’ behavior doesn’t prove that they have experiences, we have one last piece of evidence to consider that does provide proof. The evidence is this: sometimes in the films, we are shown the world from the Terminator’s perspective. For example, in
The Terminator
, when the T-101 cyborg assaults a police station, we briefly see the station through a red filter, across which scroll lines of white numbers. The sound of gunfire is muffled and distorted, almost as if we are listening from underwater. An arm holding an Uzi rises before us in just the position that it would be if we were holding it, and it sprays bullets through the room. These, I take it, are the Terminator’s experiences. In other words, we are being shown
what it is like to be a Terminator
. Later, when the T-101 sits in a hotel room reading Sarah’s address book and there is a knock at the door, we are shown his perspective in red again, this time with dialogue options offered in white letters (he chooses “Fuck you, asshole”). When he tracks Sarah and Kyle down to a hotel room, we get the longest subjective sequence of all, complete with red tint, distorted sound, information flashing across the screen, and the sort of “first-person shooter” perspective on the cyborg’s Uzi that would one day be made famous by the game
Doom
.
These shots from the Terminator’s-eye view occur in the other films as well, particularly, though not only, in the bar scene in
T2
(“I need your clothes, your boots, and your motorcycle”) and in the first few minutes of
T3
(where we get both the traditional red-tinted perspective of the T-101 and the blue-tinted perspective of the TX). If these are indeed the Terminators’ experiences, then they are conscious beings. We don’t know
how much
they are conscious of, so we might still doubt that they are conscious enough to count as thinking creatures, let alone people. However, achieving consciousness is surely a major step toward personhood, and knowing that the machines are conscious should renew our hope that people might survive the extinction of humanity.
So is the extinction of humanity the end of people or not? Are the machines that remain
people
? I don’t think that we know for sure; however, the prognosis looks good. We know that the Terminators behave as though they are thinking, feeling beings, something like humans. In fact, they are so good at acting like thinking beings that they can fool a human into thinking that they, too, are human. If I am interpreting the “Terminator’s-eye-view” sequences correctly, then we also know that they are conscious beings, genuinely experiencing the world around them. I believe, in light of this, that we have sufficient grounds to accept that the machines are people, and that there is an “I” in the “I’ll be back.” You, of course, will have to make up your own mind.
With a clack, the skeletal silver foot brushed against the white bone of a human skull. The robot looked down. Its thin body bent and picked up the skull with metal fingers. It could remember humans. It had seen them back before they became extinct. They were like machines in so many ways, and the meat computer that had once resided in the skull’s brain pan had been impressive indeed, for a product of nature. An odd thought struck the robot. Was it possible that the creature had been able to think, had even, perhaps, been a person like itself? The machine tossed the skull aside. The idea was ridiculous. How could such a thing truly think? How could a thing like that have been a person? After all, it was only an animal.
NOTES
1
However, for a good discussion of the issue, I recommend J. Perry, ed.,
Personal Identity
(Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 2008).
2
Philosophers often like to point out that to call such tests “Turing Tests” is inaccurate, since the computer genius Alan Turing (1912-1954) never intended for his work to be applied in this way and, in fact, thought that the question of whether machines think is “too meaningless” to be investigated; see Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,”
Mind
59: 236 (1950), 442. For the sake of convenience, I’m going to ignore that excellent point and use the term in its most common sense. By the way, it would be hard to overstate the importance of Turing’s work in the development of the modern computer. If Kyle Reese had had any sense, instead of going back to 1984 to try to stop the Terminator, he would have gone back to 1936 and shot Alan Turing. Not only would this have set the development of Skynet back by years, it would have been much easier, since Turing did not have a metal endoskeleton.
3
Not all philosophers would agree. For a good discussion of the issue of whether machines can think, see Sanford Goldberg and Andrew Pessin, eds.,
Gray Matters
(Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1997).
4
For a particularly good discussion of the relationship between behavior and thinking, try the book
Gray Matters
, mentioned in note 3.
5
John Searle, “Minds, Brains and Programs,” in
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
, vol. 3. Sol Tax, ed. (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1980), 417-457.
6
Maybe Skynet is performing a kind of Turing Test on him to try to determine whether human beings can think. Skynet may be wondering whether humans are
people
like machines are. Or maybe Skynet just has an insanity virus today; the tanks are dancing in formation, and the Terminators are full of small Austrians.
7
Do you have a
better
explanation for why Skynet decided to give the Terminator an Austrian accent?
8
Not all philosophers would agree. Many have been unconvinced by John Searle’s Chinese-room thought experiment. For a good discussion of the debate, I recommend John Preston and Mark Bishop, eds.,
Views into the Chinese Room: New Essays on Searle and Artificial Intelligence
(New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2002).
2
TRUE MAN OR TIN MAN? HOW DESCARTES AND SARAH CONNOR TELL A MAN FROM A MACHINE
George A. Dunn
James Cameron wasn’t the first to imagine human beings sharing a world with sophisticated machines. He didn’t come up with the idea that such machines could so realistically mimic the outward signs of sentience and intelligence that virtually everyone would mistake them for living, conscious beings. Centuries before the first
Terminator
movie introduced the idea that an automaton could resemble an Austrian bodybuilder, long before the first techno-doomsayers started fretting over computers and robots rising up to enslave or destroy their creators, when the first computers as we know them weren’t even a twinkle in their inventors’ eyes, René Descartes (1592-1650) envisioned a world in which human beings live side by side with astonishingly complex machines, interacting with them daily without ever suspecting what these mechanical marvels really are. Descartes didn’t offer this as a cautionary tale of what our world might become should we lose control of our own inventions. This is what he believed the world was already like in the seventeenth century. The machines weren’t just
coming
, he announced—they were already there and had been for a good long time!
Rise of the Bête-Machines
So why didn’t Descartes get carted off to a rubber room (or wherever they housed madmen back in those days) like James Cameron’s heroine Sarah Connor, who suffered that very fate for telling a similar story? Perhaps it was because the machines that dwelt among us, according to Descartes, weren’t robot assassins dispatched from a post-apocalyptic future but were instead the everyday, familiar creatures we know as
animals
. All the fish, insects, birds, lizards, dogs, and apes—every last one of those scaly, feathered, and furry creatures with whom we share our world—are really, for Descartes, just intricately constructed machines. Their seemingly purpose-driven routines, like seeking food and mates and fleeing from danger, might cause us to mistake them for sentient (perceiving, feeling, and desiring) beings like ourselves, but behind those sometimes adorable, sometimes menacing, always inscrutable optical sensors, there’s not the slightest glimmer of consciousness. The whole “mechanism” is running on automatic pilot.
An animal, according to Descartes, is just a soulless automaton with no more subjective awareness than the coffeemaker that “knows” it’s supposed to start brewing your morning java five minutes before your alarm goes off or the ATMs that kept young John Connor flush with cash while his mom was remaking herself into a hard-bodied badass at the Pescadero State Hospital. A tribesman born and raised apart from “civilization” might swear up and down that there must be some kind of mind or spirit lurking inside the coffeemaker and ATM. Similarly, we naturally tend to assume that the so-called higher animals, such as dolphins and apes, that exhibit complex and (to all appearances) intelligent patterns of behaviors are creatures endowed with minds and wills like us. But, says Descartes, we’ve been duped by a clever simulation.
If you’re still wondering why this belief didn’t earn him a long vacation at the seventeenth-century equivalent of the Pescadero State Hospital, you’re in the excellent company of many contemporary philosophers (myself included) who find Descartes’ theories about animals implausible, indefensible, and even, well, a little bit screwy.
1
But it still might be worthwhile to consider why Descartes thought our barnyards, fields, and streams were teeming with machines. For what we’ll find is that his belief that machines dwell among us was one facet of a remarkable worldview that laid much of the groundwork for the ideas about artificial intelligence and robotics upon which the
Terminator
franchise is premised.
Descartes was one of the chief architects of the worldview known as “mechanism,” which inspired many of the spectacular advances in knowledge that we associate with the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. The term “mechanistic” is suggestive not only of the image of the universe as a well-oiled machine in which planets and stars make their rounds in the heavens with the steadfast regularity of clockwork. It also—and even more importantly—implies that this universe operates in accordance with what we might call “billiard ball causality.” Everything that happens in this kind of universe is the calculable and predictable outcome of matter colliding with matter while obeying mathematically precise laws of motion. The mechanistic worldview claims that our knowledge of these laws could potentially help explain and predict everything that occurs—or, as Descartes somewhat more modestly claimed, everything with
one single exception
, which we’ll discuss shortly.
For a glimpse of how this works, consider what happens when the T-101—the Arnold Schwarzenegger Terminator model—confronts some hapless biker in a bar, whose misfortune it is to be wearing clothes that are a “suitable match” for a six-foot-one mesomorphic cybernetic organism. When the T-101 tosses this leather-clad ruffian across the room and into the kitchen after he refuses to disrobe on the spot and surrender the keys to his hog, every aspect of the trajectory, duration, and speed of his flight through the bar can be deduced from our knowledge of the laws of motion and an assessment of the forces applied to him. We can even predict the exact spot where he will come to an abrupt halt as he collides with another object—the sizzling surface of the kitchen grill—in much the same way that a skilled billiards player can predict just where his ball will come to a rest. But a thoroughgoing mechanist will take this one step further. The frenzied tarantella of pain that our luckless biker performs as the heat of the grill sears his flesh is also an instance of matter obeying mechanical laws of motion. Our bodies, according to Descartes, are machines that nature has designed in such a way that having our flesh fried on a grill triggers that sort of energetic dance
automatically
, without any conscious decision or desire on our part. For when it comes to natural reflexes, what the T-101 says of himself is true of us all: “Desire is irrelevant. I am a machine.”