The Veldt was written by American author Ray Bradbury in 1950, which is a science fiction about parents lose control of their children and get killed by them because of locking up their favorite nursery room in a super intelligent house. The Computing Machinery and Intelligence is one of the most profound article in computer science and artificial intelligence field written by Alan Turing published in 1950, which explores the question ‘Can machines think’ and that is also known to public as Turing Test. The purpose of this review is to probe the attitudes and thoughts from science fiction and academic perspectives about how people think of technologies and what are the relations between science communities and ordinary people.
I’d like to give a summary of the fiction first. The Hadley family lives in an advanced house that is capable of doing almost every task like clothing, feeding, rocking to sleep and even singing the songs. In particular, the nursery room provides with an augmented and immersive environment that can read children’s minds and present to them what they want to see with realistic images. Their parents notice violent scenes of lions hunting in Africa one day and thus decide to turn off the nursery room for a period, which arouses intense objection from the children. Therefore, the neurotic children lure the parents to the nursery room and kill them with lions. We may feel sort of preposterous concerning the section that what kids respond to the locking up of nursery room is to the extent of killing to resolve the divergence. However, it makes sense considering the two kids have neurotic symptoms which are caused by parents fulfilling almost every demand of the children and paying little attention to mind changes of them, which are shown through nursery room images, as mentioned in the story. Also, the fiction indicates the house has taken over the role as parents as quoted: “The house is wife and mother now, and nursemaid. Can I compete with an African veldt? Can I give a bath and scrub the children as efficiently or quickly as the automatic scrub bath? I cannot.” Which means, as the author deems, the children has treated the house as a human, or at least it is equipped with attributes as a human being. In this case, I can’t help asking, will the intelligent house pass Turing test?
Turing proposed an alternative question by ‘Would the digital computer do well in the imitation game?’ to replace the question ‘Can machines think’ since thinking is difficult to describe. The imitation game can be interpreted as: The game is played with three players, a human(A), a machine(B), and an interrogator(C) who is also a human. These three players stay in three rooms and the object for the interrogator is to determine which one is the machine and which is the human. The interrogator will ask questions to A and B and the answers are given in typewritten to avoid the help of appearance or voice and focus on the ability of thinking itself. If we match three players in the imitation game to the characters in science fiction story, the parents would be A, the house would be B, and children would be the interrogator, because two kids make a choice in the end that which side would take over the role as parents. Obviously, characters in the fiction don’t meet the conditions in imitation game as two kids realize their true parents are humans and should also know the house is the machine or tool for service, but we are here to mainly discuss human or unhuman factors that induce them to make the decision. So, the question becomes ‘which would be competent parents in ten-year-old children’s eyes?’.
We will follow a few of objections of Turing’s opinions in his article which on the contrary help to construct basic ideas of intelligent machines to measure the capability of the house. Turing proves the feasibility of imitation game, or empowers the machine with thinking to make it more human if we put it in another way, by refuting the dissenting opinions. Likewise, we will give parenting to the machine and try to argue it with the help of objections in Turing’s article. First objection is the theological objection which believes thinking only belongs to human beings not animals or machines. Turing points out limitations of religious doctrines by means of giving the examples of heliocentric theory by Copernicus and contradictions between religions. I’m pretty sure as well that they will insist the parenting right is the immortal soul in humans or animals but definitely not in machines. If we observe the nature attentively, there are a considerable amount of cross-species parenting behaviors like in birds, seals, cats and etc. that we don’t know why it happens though. The survival skills, mainly including predation, prevention of predation and reproduction, are taught by their adoptive parents which are essential for animals. It requires more as human beings not only survival abilities but also language skills, working and social skills. You may claim that the adoptions in nature are between animals with morphological similarities, but there are some species which consider the first sight object as their parents. To avoid the debates in this point, we can just build the machines with human shapes since the nursery room is able to simulate realistic objects by mechanical structures. Therefore, it could be an option if we compulsively regard the machine as kind of species. Then, we want to know if the house is capable of teaching human language and other required basic skills as human beings. In my view, the language skill is a prerequisite for other skills. Lightbown (1999) proposed the theory of first language acquisition that the children have the natural ability of distinguishing different meanings of words, learning words by imitation and producing simple sentences before pre-school period. The following systematic language learning is proceeded at school. Based on the theory, the basic language teaching by the machine seems feasible. Under the condition, the learning of working or socializing would be the matter of time and cooperation.
The second objection comes from the fear to thinking machines. The dissenters want to keep the pride as human superior to machines and other creatures on earth. They may feel even more inferior for the powerful computation and execution of computers nowadays, not to mention they have been surpassed in some ways at that time. Nevertheless, people take the advantages of computers to achieve marvelous goals but not be replaced by machines, people lay down regulations to restrain capabilities of computers but not let situations go as it is, such as Asimov (1950) wrote about three laws of robotics and EPSRC (Boden, M., etc. 2011) published principles of robots. Maybe the sense of fear The Veldt creates comes more from machine can kill rather than children become uncooperative because of the machine.
The third argument is about whether the machine has consciousness. Turing thinks it as a solipsistic view to prove there is consciousness in the machine or even human. In our test, the only way to learn if there is consciousness either in machine or human is to ask them questions and analyze answers. Apparently, it highly depends on what answers the interrogator expect. For the children in the fiction story, they wish the competent parents could satisfy every need of them no matter whether the need is rational or satiable. In this respect, their real parents would definitely lose the game as not only they cannot do better than the house to take care of children’s living, but also they obviously would refuse unreasonable requirement like flying to New York by rockets. We can’t count on the ten-year-old children to ask questions like ‘what do you think of Picasso’. Besides, the nursery room has a function of reading children’s minds and respond to them, which I’m afraid none of people could do that. Further, if we suppose the house indeed has consciousness, it would be extremely horrible that the house may lure children to kill their parents to avoid itself being shut down forever. If so, it raises next argument from various disabilities, which means the disability the answer by the machine shows like calculation errors or instructions unexecuted is the real disability or deceptive action. We cannot know unless looking through every line of code and try to find out, which is as hard as talking with a knowledgeable philosopher trying to find out his logical fallacy.
We just leave out the rest of the objections and refutations like mathematical logic, machine creativity and nervous system which generally talk about the feasibility of a universal computer that have weak correlation to particular intelligent machine analysis. So far, we have discussed the possibility that the house takes over the role of parenting rather than real parents. The result is probably that two kids would believe the house is competent to do the parenting job. And it is indeed possible for the house to feed and give basic education to the children without interfere of human parents. Furthermore, it’s even better for themselves from the perspective of meeting demands. But we all know that the house cannot take place of their true parents at least for now, of which the reason is simple, the minds of children are far from healthy as a result of radical and offensive behaviors. While, even if we take on the ending of the story as kind of exaggeration of author’s worries about technology is estranging parents and children, which means the children choose the house instead of parents, I still feel surprised of enormous attraction of intelligent house to them although the house is nowhere near the Turing machine. Of course, the parents in the story have to take a fair amount of responsibility for the neglect of parenting. If we continue on how to raise children or do a better job of parenting, it will diverge from our topic here. Since we have compared the machine intelligence in science fiction story with Turing Test, I’d like to discuss more about what ordinary people and researchers think about technologies based on background of eras.
I think it’s normal reaction that people are afraid of new technology they haven’t heard before. In 1890s, people were worried about the automobiles driven by human rather than horses as they thought the horseless carriage didn’t take advantage of horse intelligence to shape the path. Similarly, in 1940s, we would believe people were afraid of televisions if we could reach an agreement that the novel was representative and the nursery room mentioned in Bradbury’s fiction could be seen as the imagination of future television since it gradually became popular to common families in America at that period. At present, new technologies centered in artificial intelligence like autopilot and voice assistant are raising worries from ordinary people and even scholars (but mainly in unrelated fields) in the same way even though the machine intelligence now is actually far from general intelligence or we usually call it thinking abilities. In the meantime, we know the Turing’s paper concerning the possibility of thinkable machine is based on strict logic and technology back then albeit the article is a speculation of machinery intelligence. Moreover, current academic articles are based on previous research and rigorous mathematical reasoning as well, which can be published after peer review.
From above, we can see that technologies popular in human’s history are always in the framework of academic works, which sounds so silly because technologies cannot be made just by fancy that obviously they are created by academic communities. However, the key word above is ‘popular’. What makes a fearful technology popular after years? What or who changes the attitude of the public? I believe the answer is the public itself. It’s extremely complex inside because of diverse communities, religions, customs, habits and even commercial promotions that work together to determine if one technology will be popular in the future as there are more technologies that are framed in the lab and stay in the end. So, it is not the public just takes new technology from science community but chooses it from the community. If we look at the history of these popular technologies and go back to The Veldt story, we will be surprisingly find that most of functions in the house have been partially or fully realized now like automatic light control and cooking, lacing shoes, odor transmission, video chatting, speech recognition and immersive virtual reality. And I believe most of people will accept these technologies though some may not be so popular then. Which means in some way that we are breaking through the baseline set sixty years ago inch by inch from the historical perspective and we will continue on that in the coming years. Maybe now our baseline is adjusted to no unmanned parenting, no complete manual breeding embryos. At this rate, what would happen next? I think the public will make the decision.
In the end, I’d like to quote Turing’s last sentence in the book: “We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.”
Reference
Turing, A. M. (1950). Computing machinery and intelligence. Mind, 59(236), 433.
Ray Bradbury. (1950). The Veldt. The Saturday Evening Post, 23th Sep.
Lightbown, P. M., Spada, N., Ranta, L., & Rand, J. (1999). How languages are learned (Vol. 2). Oxford: Oxford university press.
Asimov I. (1950). I, Robot. New York: Gnome Press.
Boden, M., Bryson, J., Caldwell, D., Dautenhahn, K., Edwards, L., Kember, S., … & Sorell, T. (2011). Principles of Robotics [online] Swindon, UK: The United Kingdom’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).
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