Breathing Life Into the Inanimate: The History and the Promise of Artificial Intelligence
The concept of anthropomorphic objects is ancient.
Long before artificial intelligence entered our homes, our pockets and our vocabulary, it existed in our imaginations. Across continents and cultures, humans have imagined inanimate objects coming to life, taking on human qualities and interacting with us.
The theme of imagining life into the lifeless existed in classical mythology. In the Greek myth of Pygmalion and Galatea, a sculptor falls in love with a statue, and a goddess brings the statue to life. In another example, the Kourai Khryseai were maidens sculpted from gold by Hephaestus to attend to his household.
From myths to poetry to literature to cinema, creating a non-human human has been embedded in our storytelling. The Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz walks, talks and wishes for a brain, and the Tin Man wishes for a heart, offering a comment on both emotional and intellectual intelligence. Disney’s Cars are self-driving, conversational and emotionally intelligent. They are not dissimilar to Waymo’s autonomous vehicles, which have their own ethical system embedded in their hardware. In Star Wars, R2-D2 and C-3PO function as sources of information, develop emotional relationships and feel pain. For example, C-3PO knows millions of languages and speaks of suffering. Toy Story also explores a world where ‘inanimate’ objects come to life and have a wide range of human emotions.
This concept of robots having emotional capacity has been explored many times in both the fictional and real world. Pixar’s lonely Wall-E falls in love with EVE, another robot; Short Circuit’s Number Five is a robot who comes to life; and DreamWorks’ The Wild Robot forms loving bonds.
Some beloved stories examine the ethical and moral dimensions of creating such powerful technology. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein imagined a human-created ‘being’ whose entire existence was an ethical quandary. In Pixar’s Wall-E, robots run what is left of the world for humans, while humans exist in a state of dependence. Wall-E portrays a life with more leisure time, a benefit promised to us by robots, as dystopian, rather than aspirational.
Stories can be mirrors allowing self-reflection.
Art can function as an exaggerated mirror of our life, prompting reflection and beneficial change. Spike Jonze’s film Her, in which a lonely man falls in love with an AI operating system, is both extreme and thought-provoking. Sadly, Her reminds us that when we turn to our phones or computers to ward off loneliness, we may be exacerbating our isolation. An image by ClownVamp titled JUNK #8 shows a beautiful woman sitting in a desert, but upon closer reflection, she has six fingers, about three legs and four calves, a reminder to value what is real.
AI’s intricate dance between humans and technology has long fascinated us.
Humans have also been fascinated by stories that merge humanity with machines, such as Edward Scissorhands, Star Wars’ cyborg Darth Vader or pretty much any superhero.
Conversely there is a tendency to give robots human characteristics. For example, Amazon’s Alexa speaks in a friendly young woman’s voice rather than a mechanical tone, has a human name and is often referred to using human pronouns. This is a deliberate choice based on our psychological preferences. Humanizing AI, particularly through female traits, builds trust and familiarity, making consumers more likely to welcome it into their homes. Technology has followed suit with bionic limbs that, with the help of AI, sensors and microcontrollers, have successfully created robotic body parts. These prosthetics can be made of soft silicone resembling human skin, further blurring the line between humans and machines.
Siri and Google Assistant also capitalize on this bias. When self-driving cars were first on the roads, pedestrians had a hard time trusting that it was safe to walk out in front of them. To make the cars seem more trustworthy, the researchers added a set of cartoon eyes. This pattern reflects a deep-rooted human impulse: we feel comfortable imagining life into the lifeless.
Some of the stories we have told to breathe life into the inanimate emerged to explain the unexplainable: religion, magic or the unknown. Broomsticks have followed witches’ commands in countless tales from Kiki’s Delivery Service, where a young witch speaks to her broom and begs it to behave, to Harry Potter, where witches and wizards learn to control their broomsticks masterfully.
Stories of artificial life have much to offer as technology advances.
The phrase “artificial intelligence” predates the digital era by more than two thousand years. The concept of AI goes back as far as 400 BC and stories of artificial life go back as far as 700 BC when Hesiod created the tale of Talos about a bronze man who defended the island of Crete. The term “robot” was coined in 1921 in the play Rossum’s Universal Robots, well before robots actually existed. This long cultural obsession helps explain why modern conversations about AI often veer into generalities and exaggerations. To many, AI still feels like magic; something powerful, mysterious and only partially understood.
Given their mirror of reality, we should pay closer attention to these cautionary tales. Although it may seem unseemly to learn such important policy lessons from cartoons, Hollywood blockbusters and old myths, they represent a greater human consciousness that goes back to 400 BC.
The relationship between our imaginations, art and technology reminds us that creativity doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and the arts and sciences are more intricately connected than we often admit. The stories we tell inspire the technology that eventually follows.
For further reading from our website on the topics discussed here, see the following insights and IP Bits & Pieces®: AI Can’t Hold Copyrights, Legal and Ethical Issues in Posthumous Art and Artificial Intelligence, and our Copyright and AI FAQs.