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reproduction and hybrids
Bear with me for a second here, but: should computers have genitals?
This is a question I've been asking myself since last week, when I went to go see Robot Stories, a collection of four robot-themed short films by Greg Pak that apparently won the Florida Film Festival's Special Jury Award for Emotional Truth. (!)
Three of the four films are science fiction, and while Pak seems to be a competent filmmaker, I can't say that I found his SF futures particularly well-conceived—his knack for the little details that make a future seem well-realized struck me as totally off.
In any case, one piece, "Machine Love," takes place in a future in which corporations utilize androids as sort of hyper-efficient temps. Two androids who work in adjacent buildings spot one another through the window, and, predictably (spoiler follows), fall in love, eventually meeting up and having a sort of "android sex," which involves them stroking one another's input ports, etc.
Emotional truth aside, this is a good example of the kind of fuzzy SF that operates in this film—to buy this vision, one needs to believe in a future where the android-manufacturers (modeled loosely after Apple in this film) don't forsee that two of their products might eventually work in close proximity to one another, and don't bother to take pains to, oh, I don't know, engineer this interaction to insure that it doesn't go so utterly haywire with so little provocation.
However, this complaint got me to thinking, what would happen if a forward-thinking designer designed the androids to fall in love and have "sex"? It's clearly supposed to be an anomaly in the film, but there could very well be a good reason to do enable them to do this. The androids in the film are adaptive—and while, in the film, they mostly "adapt" by picking up the lingo of their co-workers, one can imagine that a good android of this sort might also be able to learn various "expert strategies" used by skilled coworkers. Two adaptive androids, networked together, could potentially "breed" these strategies with one another, to yield a series of potentially new workplace strategies, some of which would be effective and could "survive," others which would not be effective and which would "die off," in the fashion of evolutionary algorithms.
This line of thought started me thinking "ok, well, what if, say, IPods could mate with one another?" One obvious application of networked IPods would be data transfer—two IPods could figure out which songs they shared in common, and download all the non-redundant songs from the other person's collection, akin to the way that Pokemon gamers can swap creatures through their networked GameBoys. But this isn't "reproductive" in the sense that I mean it: it turns the two entities involved into clones of one another rather than creating a unique new entity. Something more akin to what I have in mind could work at the level of the playlist: if each of us have a playlist called, say, "Roadtrip," we could network our IPods together and have them generate a series of recombinant playlists ("Roadtrip Jr."), each featuring a random selection of songs from each of our respective playlists. Sexy!
Or why not make hybrids at the level of the songs themselves? Once a song is converted to a digital format it becomes possible to perform mathematical operations on it; it should be possible to take any two songs and "breed" them—this is more or less what the eerily listenable Eigenradio is already doing. Most of what would result might be trash, but let enough people fool around with it and a fan culture would undoubtedly spring up, akin to mashup culture—people would want to showcase surprising / compelling / satisfying "offspring" that they'd created. And then there's the offspring of the offspring...
This could work with word-processing documents, too: check out The Dublin of Dr. Moreau (PDF), the offspring of James Joyce's Dubliners and H.G. Wells' The Island of Dr Moreau created (at least in part) by the textual analysis software Gnoetry (thanks to Grand Text Auto for introducing me to Gnoetry). |
Thursday, March 18, 2004
9:45 PM
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