Where we are: To talk about how sci-fi AI attributes correlate, we first have to understand how their attributes are distributed. In the first distribution post, I presented the foundational distributions for sex and gender presentation across sci-fi AI. Today we’ll discuss categorically how intelligent the AI appears to be.
Narrow AI is smart but only in a very limited domain and cannot use its knowledge in one domain to build intelligence in novel domains. The Spider Tank from Ghost in the Shell in narrow AI.
General AI is human-like its knowledge, memory, thinking, learning. Aida from Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. possesses a general intelligence.
Super AI is inhumanly smart, outthinking and outlearning us by orders of magnitude. Deep Thought from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a super AI.
The overwhelming majority of sci-fi AI displays a general intelligence.
Where we are: To talk about how sci-fi AI attributes correlate, we first have to understand how their attributes are distributed. In the first distribution post, I presented the foundational distributions for sex and gender presentation across sci-fi AI. Today we’ll discuss goodness.
Goodness is a very crude estimation of how good or evil the AI seems to be. It’s wholly subjective, and as such it’s only useful patterns rather than ethical precision.
If you’re looking at the Google Sheet, note that I originally called it “alignment” because of old D&D vocabulary, but honestly it does not map well to that system at all.
Very good are AI characters that seem virtuous and whose motivations are altruistic. Wall·E is very good.
Somewhat good are characters who lean good, but whose goodness may be inherited from their master, or whose behavior occasionally is self-serving or other-damaging. JARVIS from Iron Man is somewhat good.
Neutral or mixed characters may be true to their principles but hostile to members of outgroups; or exhibit roughly-equal variations in motivations, care for others, and effects. Marvin from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is neutral.
Somewhat evil characters are characters who lean evil, but whose evil may be inherited from their master, or whose behavior is occasionally altruistic or nurturing. A character who must obey another is limited to somewhat evil. David from Prometheus is somewhat evil.
Very evil are AI characters whose motivations are highly self-serving or destructive. Skynet from The Terminator series is very evil, given that whole multiple-time-traveling-attempts-at-genocide thing.
Though slightly more evil than good, it’s a roughly even split in the survey between evil, good, and neutral AI characters.
Where we are: To talk about how sci-fi AI attributes correlate, we first have to understand how their attributes are distributed. In the first distribution post, I presented the foundational distributions for sex and gender presentation across sci-fi AI. Today we’ll discuss how germane the AI character’s gender is germane to the plot of the story in which they appear.
Is the AI character’s gender germane to the plot? This aspect was tagged to test the question of whether characters are by default male, and only made female when there is some narrative reason for it. (Which would be shitty and objectifying.) To answer such a question we would first need to identify those characters that seemed to have the gender they do, and look at the sex ratio of what remains.
Example: A human is in love with an AI. This human is heteroromantic and male, so the AI “needs” to be female. (Samantha in Her by Spike Jonze, pictured below).
If we bypass examples like this, i.e. of characters that “need” a particular gender, the gender of those remaining ought to be, by exclusion, arbitrary. This set could be any gender. But what we see is far from arbitrary.
Before I get to the chart, two notes. First, let me say, I’m aware it’s a charged statement to say that any character’s gender is not germane. Given modern identity and gender politics, every character’s gender (or lack of, in the case of AI) is of interest to us, with this study being a fine and at-hand example. So to be clear, what I mean by not germane is that it is not germane to the plot. The gender could have been switched and say, only pronouns in the dialogue would need to change. This was tagged in three ways.
Not: Where the gender could be changed and the plot not affected at all. The gender of the AI vending machines in Red Dwarf is listed as not germane.
Slightly: Where there is a reason for the gender, such as having a romantic or sexual relation with another character who is interested in the gender of their partners. It is tagged as slightly germane if, with a few other changes in the narrative, a swap is possible. For instance, in the movie Her, you could change the OS to male, and by switching Theodore to a non-heterosexual male or a non-homosexual woman, the plot would work just fine. You’d just have to change the name to Him and make all the Powerpuff Girl fans needlessly giddy.
Highly: Where the plot would not work if the character was another sex or gender. Rachel gave birth between Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049. Barring some new rule for the diegesis, this could not have happened if she was male, nor (spoiler) would she have died in childbirth, so 2049 could not have happened the way it did.
Second, note that this category went through a sea-change as I developed the study. At first, for instance, I tagged the Stepford Wives as Highly Germane, since the story is about forced gender roles of married women. My thinking was that historically, husbands have been the oppressors of wives far more than the other way around, so to change their gender is to invert the theme entirely. But I later let go of this attachment to purity of theme, since movies can be made about edge cases and even deplorable themes. My approval of their theme is immaterial.
So, the chart. Given those criteria, the gender of characters is not germane the overwhelming majority of the time.
At the time of writing, there are only six characters that are tagged as highly germane, four of which involve biological acts of reproduction. (And it would really only take a few lines of dialogue hinting at biotech to overcome this.)
XEM
A baby? But we’re both women.
HIR
Yes, but we’re machines, and not bound by the rules of humanity.
HIR lays her hand on XEM’s stomach.
HIR’s hand glows.
XEM looks at HIR in surprise.
XEM
I’m pregnant!
Anyway, here are the four breeders.
David from Uncanny
Rachel from Blade Runner (who is revealed to have made a baby with Deckard in the sequel Blade Runner 2049)
Deckard from Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049
Proteus IV from the disturbing Demon Seed
The last two highly germane are cases where a robot was given a gender in order to mimic a particular living person, and in each case that person is a woman.
Maria from Metropolis
Buffybot from Buffy the Vampire Slayer
I admit that I am only, say, 51% confident in tagging these as highly germane, since you could change the original character’s gender. But since this is such a small percentage of the total, and would not affect the original question of a “default” gender either way, I didn’t stress too much about finding some ironclad way to resolve this.
Where we are: To talk about how sci-fi AI attributes correlate, we first have to understand how their attributes are distributed. In the first distribution post, I presented the foundational distributions for sex and gender presentation across sci-fi AI. Today we’ll discuss subservience and free will.
The degree of free-willedness is tagged as subservience.
The majority of AIs are free-willed, that is, answerable only to their own conscience. Ultron from the Marvel Cinematic Universe is free-willed.
A large proportion answer to some master, but enjoy a wide berth in interpreting instructions, and can formulate new plans to achieve goals. There are tagged improvisational obedience. Gort from The Day the Earth Stood Still is one of these.
A few are tagged as slavish obedience, and will take no action unless ordered to do so and will only take the action instructed. Robbie the Robot in Forbidden Planet is slavishly obedient.
A small minority are bound to a master against their will. These characters are tagged with reluctant obedience. Ava from Ex Machina was only reluctantly obedient, and took great pains to escape.
Reinforcing the notion that from embodiment, the subservience of AI is the exception for these characters. Mostly they are as free-willed as people are. (Insert determinist counter-argument here.)
Where we are: To talk about how sci-fi AI attributes correlate, we first have to understand how their attributes are distributed. In the first distribution post, I presented the foundational distributions for sex and gender presentation across sci-fi AI. Today we’ll discuss the gender of the AI’s master.
In the prior post I shared the distributions for subservience. And while most sci-fi AI are free-willed, what about the rest? Those poor digital souls who are compelled to obey someone, someones, or some thing? What is the gender of their master?
Of course this becomes much more interesting when later we see the correlation against the gender of the AI, but the distribution is also interesting in and of itself. The gender options of this variable are the same as the options for the gender of the AI character, but the master may not be AI.
Before we get to the breakdown, this bears some notes, because the question of master is more complicated than it might first seem.
If a character is listed as free-willed, I set their master as N/A (Not Applicable). This may ring false in some cases. For example, the characters in Westworld can be shut down with near-field command signals, so they kind of have “masters.” But, if you asked the character themselves, they are completely free-willed and would smash those near-field signals to bits, given the chance. N/A is not shown in this chart because masterlessness does not make sense when looking at masters.
Similarly, there are AI characters listed as free-willed but whose “job” entails obedience to some superior; like BB-8 in the Star Wars diegesis, who is an astromech droid, and must obey a pilot. But since BB-8 is free to rebel and quit his job if he wants to, he is listed as free-willed and therefore has a master of N/A.
If a character had an obedience directive like, “obey humans,” the gender of the master is tagged as “Multiple.” Because Multiple would not help us understand a gender bias, it is not shown on the chart.
The Terminator robots were a tough call, since in the movies in which most of them appear, Skynet is their master, and it does not gain a gender until Terminator Salvation, when it appears on screen as a female. Later it infects a human body that is male in Terminator Genisys. Ultimately I tagged these characters as having a master of the gender particular to their movie. Up to Salvation it’s None. In Salvation it’s female, and in Genisys it’s male.
So, with those notes, here is the distribution. It’s another sausagefest.
Again, we see the masters are highly skewed male. This doesn’t distinguish between human male and AI male, which partly accounts for the high biologically male value compared to male. Note that sex ratios in Hollywood tend towards 2:1 male:female for actors, generally. So the 12:1 (aggregating sex) that we see here cannot be written off as a matter inherited from available roles. Hollywood tells us that men are masters.
The 12:1 sex ratio cannot be written off as a matter inherited from available roles. It’s something more.
Oh, and it’s not a mistake in the data, there are nosocially female AI characters who are masters of another AI of any gender presentation. That leaves us with 5 female masters, countable on one hand, and the first two can be dismissed as a technicality, since these were identities adopted by Skynet as a matter of convenience.
Skynet-as-Kogan is master of John, the T-3000, from Terminator Genisys
Skynet-as-Kogan is master of the T-5000 from Terminator Genisys
Barbarella is master of Alphy from Barbarella
VIKI is master of the NS-5 robots from I, Robot
Martha is master of Ash in Black Mirror, “Be Right Back”
Where we are: To talk about how sci-fi AI attributes correlate, we first have to understand how their attributes are distributed. In the first distribution post, I presented the foundational distributions for sex and gender presentation across sci-fi AI. Today we’ll discuss embodiment.
Another simple measurement is how the AIs are embodied. That is, how to they manifest in the world of the story (or diegesis): Are they walking around, appearing as a screen on a wall, or as pulsing stars in the cosmos?
The categories that emerged from the survey were as follows:
Virtual, where a character only had, for example, a body or face that was generated for presentation to other characters on a screen or via volumetric projection. Joi from Blade Runner 2049 is virtual.
Disembodied, if the AI doesn’t have a particular, or an ad-hoc embodiment. The Machine from Person of Interest is disembodied.
Edgar from Electric Dreams is a Personal computer. In this regard, Edgar is a sui generis, or a category containing only one example.
Architectural: Some AIs are stuck to the walls of a building. HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey is architectural.
Vehicular, where a character is embodied in a vehicle of some sort. K.I.T.T. from Knight Rider is vehicular.
Zoomorphic robot, where the robot is built to look something like an animal. Often these characters do not have voice. Muffit from the original Battlestar Galactica television series is an example.
Mechanical robot, where the robot is mechanical (and more mechanical looking than humanoid looking). WALL·E is mechanical.
Anthropomorphic robot, where the robot is proportioned like a human, and has most all the surface features of a human, but is readily identifiable as a robot. The Iron Giant is anthropomorphic.
Indistinguishable from human, where the robot can “pass” as a human. Only detailed or violent inspection will reveal it to be non-human. Aida from Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is indistinguishable from humans.
Here’s what that looks like in a bar chart.
Sometimes the details are tricksy
Sci-fi can make these things tricky. For example, the virtual crewmembers of the U.S.S. Callister might be considered indistinguishable from humans—as long as they are wearing clothes. Their unfortunate captain (and captor) had them created in virtual space such that they had no genitals. They are listed as bodily male and bodily female (rather than biologically) even though they are also indistinguishable from human.
Similarly, David from Prometheus has a fingerprint with a subtle Weyland-Yutani logo maker’s mark built into it (see the image below), but since this would only be apparent to someone who knew exactly where to look and for what, David is also listed as indistinguishable from human.
He just has to find crimes that don’t involve fingerprints.
Why so human?
My conjecture to explain the high number of AIs that indistinguishable from human is threefold.
First, it is a matter of production convenience—that is, it is much easier and cheaper to insert a line of dialogue that establishes a character as a human-looking robot, rather than any of the other ways of signaling robotic-ness:
Create a costume like Robbie the Robot
Make a puppet like Teddy from A.I. Artificial Intelligence
Do prosthetic makeup like The Terminator
Create a set piece that syncs with audio like Alphy from Barbarella
Produce special effects, like Ava from Ex Machina
There’s also a fit-to-mediaargument which notes that people are much better and more comfortable at reading the emotional states of people than they are of machines. If catharsis, or the emotional journey, is part of what the art is about, humans work as a medium. (This lack of emotional information in interfaces was played to great effect in 2001: A Space Odyssey, unnerving us with the psychopathy of HAL’s unblinking eye.) Actors, too (I highly suspect) enjoy using their bodies, voices, and faces to do their jobs without the additional layers of prosthetics or puppetry. So we would expect an overweighting of indistinguishable from humans because they are often the best tools for the narrative job, from both the audience’s and the actor’s perspective.
Not a lot of emotive potential here.
There’s another argument—a genre-and-narrative argument—that people are mostly interested in stories about people, and most sci-fi is a speculation about social effects rather than actual technology, and so indistinguishable robots are the best embodiment of what we’re interested in, anyway. Humans, just with different rules.
In the first post of this series, I explained what I was out to learn, what I looked at, and how I tagged it. Ultimately, we want to look at the data and be able to answer questions like “Are female AIs more subservient than male AIs?” And in order to do that, we first have to understand what the distributions are for sex and subservience. So let’s talk distributions.
Distribution is a fancy term for how many of each value we see for a given attribute. For example, if we wanted to look at the distribution of eye color across the world, we would count how many browns, blues, hazels, ambers, green, gray, and reds that we see, (finding a way to deal with heterochromia, etc.) and compare them in a bar chart.
Of course eye color is not of interest in this case. For Gendered AI, we are interested in comparing other attributes to gender presentation. We’ll look at the other attributes in later posts, but we’re going to begin with sex ratio, and that will fill up a post all its own.
Simple sex ratio
Author’s request: With that section title I know some hackles are already raised. Please know this is very tough space to write for. Despite having paid for a number of paid content reviews, I may have made some missteps. I am a n00b writer on these topics, and I respond best to friendly engagement rather than a digital pillory.
The very simple explanation of sex ratio is women-to-men. But of course that’s waaaaay too simple for either the real world or our purposes. At the very (very) least, AI might have no gender, so we need a “none” or “other” category. Let’s start with these very oversimplified numbers and move to more detailed later.
The chart shown below shows the data from the survey focusing on simple categories of female, other, and male. The chart shows that AI characters are strongly overweighted male, with a rough ratio of 2 male : 1 female : 0.75 other. The 2:1 M:F ratio is eerily in line with USC Signal Analysis and Interpretation Laboratory’s finding where speaking roles in 1000 scripts they studied, men’s dialogue, and even the number of characters was double (or over) that for women. This is greatly different than the real-world sex ratios of 1:1 as reported in the Wikipedia article about world sex ratios.
I would talk about the weird discrepancies of just this distribution, but any ranting at this point would be overshadowed by the ranting that happens next. Deep breath.
Having an “other” category isn’t enough. After all, characters in one of these bars can be as different as HAL and Gigolo Joe, and that doesn’t seem right. So, let’s break this oversimplification down into more refined bits.
More detailed gender presentation ratios
First, of course, we should note that characters rarely discuss gender directly, and—at least in this sample—discuss gender dysphoria all of never. Also we can’t reach out to ask any of them directly since they’re fictional. So when I speak of gender, it should be read as “gender presentation,” and unfortunately at this point you are stuck with nothing more scientific than my reading of the following four variables.
Primary sex characteristics, or biological presentation: The presence of masculine or feminine sexual organs. None of the titles I reviewed were pornographic, and full-frontal nudity is pretty rare up until Westworld, so this often comes down to implication. Gigolo Joe, for instance, could not do what must be a key part of his primary function without male sex organs (with all the important caveats that penetrative sex is just one kind of sex), so he is listed as “Masculine” here.
Secondary sex characteristics, or body presentation: These are much more directly observable, and include those other markers of sex, like facial hair and shoulder-to-hip ratio.
Voice presentation: This is my hearing of whether the voice has a lower, masculine register, or a higher, feminine register. (In a few cases I checked on the actor listing in IMDB and did web searches for evidence of self-identification.)
Pronoun presentation: How other characters refer to the AI character with pronouns. R2D2, for instance, has absolutely no sex characteristics, and no voice, but is still referred to as a “he” throughout the Star Wars franchise.
A note on labeling: I’m aware that there are tricky nuances in the labels. After all, how is body not part of one’s biology? But the shorthand proves useful so we can use the shorthand “BIO” and know what it means instead of always having to use the longer phrase “implicit or explicit primary sex characteristics.”
For each AI character, I tagged each of these variables as either Masculine, Fluid, Neutral, Feminine, Unknown, Multiple, Many, or N/A. (The “n/a” may seem weird, but for instance, HAL doesn’t have a body, so primary and secondary sex characteristics are not applicable.)
Socially male, but existentially neutral.
Combining voice and pronouns into “social”
There are plenty of characters with no voice or non-human voices, and a few characters that are not referred to by pronoun. Since these two indicate a social performance of gender, I treated them in the algorithms as an “OR” when considering stacking. That means if either variable was present, and they didn’t contradict, I counted it the presenting aspect. Compare these two examples…
R2D2: N/A Primary, N/A Secondary, neutral voice, male pronoun = alsosocially male
They stack
The main thing to note about how these three variables (counting voice and pronouns as “socially”) played out is that they overwhelmingly stacked. That’s not a term of art, so let me explain. It means that if a character has masculine primary sex characteristics, that invariably meant that he also had masculine secondary sex characteristics, and voice/pronouns. If a character had no evidence of primary sex characteristics, but had feminine secondary sex characteristics, she invariably had feminine voice/pronouns.
It makes more sense if I show you. So, here are six representative examples from the survey of how this monosex stacking looks.
I suspect this is an effect of binary concepts of gender on the part of the makers of the sci-fi, implemented as increasingly detailed costumes for the AI. But when you consider these variables, these 6 are a pale semblance of what could be. Include “fluid” or “nonbinary” as a possibility, and don’t bother with stacking, and there are 58 more possible combinations of these variables.
Click the image for a full-screen spread of possibilities.
Hey, want to feel both hyper-reductive and overwhelmed at the complexity of gender? Try writing a categorization algorithm for analysis.
Anyway, if they hadn’t stacked like they did, I would have had to describe their genders with a four-part-code that would result in 64 genders. But, because they do stack, that meant there were these 6, plus “multiple,” “genderfluid,” “neutral,” and “none,” for a total 9. Note that online lists of genders vary from the 58 available to Facebook’s users to the 229 found on this more creative list (my favorite is “Schrodigender – A gender which you can both feel and not feel” giving a clue to how serious that particular list is.) So while 9 can feel heavy, it does not compare to the complexity of the real world.
OK, given those descriptions of the subcategories, here’s how the numbers played out in the much more detailed analysis of gender presentation in sci-fi AI.
Detailed gender presentation
I’ve noted that we’re here for the correlations, not distributions, but in and of itself, this is remarkable. The subcategories provide a deeper (and more troubling) look into the data, and is necessary because these categories have to be thought of differently. Observe, for example, that the biologically-gendered characters are nearly at parity, while the bodily- and socially-gendered characters skew male. There is a frustrating 2:1 ratio for bodily male:bodily female and an infuriating 5:1 for socially male:socially female.
These ratios bear…discussion.
1 biologically male : 1 biologically female
A harsh interpretation of this stat would read a kind of heterosexual panic, where—when sex or procreation is involved—Hollywood needs to assert loudly over a hastily-ordered beer that whoa whoa whoa: Only AI chicks and AI dudes get it on. Or if they do get it on with people it’s with the right gender.
Or, more charitably I suppose, humans are largely heterosexual, and since there is a rough 1:1 sex ratio in humans, there should be a 1:1 sex ratio in them. (?) It’s a hard thing to second-guess.
It gets darker in the other categories where the sci-fi AI has a body but no biological apparatus. The ratios still skew heavily male. As if, when it comes to just being a person, a total sausagefest is the norm.
I await the disturbing fanfic.
2 bodily male : 1 bodily female
Recall from above that this category is reserved for those AI characters that present a gendered body but do not have gendered reproductive or sexual capabilities. We will discuss the germane-ness and embodiment of these AIs in a later post, but for now we can note that this category of AI character, with its 2:1 ratio is roughly in the middle between the biologically and socially gendered categories, and in-line with the oversimplified distribution seen above.
5 socially male : 1 socially female
This is the category where the only markers of gender are voice and pronouns. In other words, characters for whom a gender seems like an arbitrary choice. WTF is up with a 5:1 ratio? Why are all these “arbitrarily” gendered AI characters guys? We’ll talk about germaneness to the story later, but I want to see if there is some extradiegetic reason first.
Is it the available voice talent?
We have to acknowledge that filmmakers must hire someone to voice their speaking AI characters, even if there are no other markers. Despite the fact that…
…it’s fair to say that most available voice talent is recognizably gendered, and the AI character may just inherit the presentation of its actor. Then you might expect the roles to match the sex ratios in the available talent pool. I couldn’t find any formal studies of this, so I created a throwaway account on voice.com—a major job site for voice actors—and performed separate searches for male and female talent. There I found 42,786 males, and 24,347 female non-union voice actors, around 2:1. (Union actors were closer to 1:1, with 3,079 male and 2,336 female. n.b. The site gives only those two gender options in its search.) Though that’s more anecdotal than I’d like, even the worse ratio of 2:1 still pales compared the 5:1 of socially gendered AI, so no, that’s not it. You might think that explains the “simply” gendered characters, but my suspicion is that the genders of the characters are set in the script and pass down through the process, unquestioned after that.
Is it what sci-fi audiences want?
Might the ratio be some sales rationale, some presumption that sci-fi audiences are mostly men and therefore might only be more interested in male characters? No, of course numbers vary by show and genre, but this article by Victoria McNally shows that there is only a slight majority of men in these audiences (hovering around 60% male and 40% female, rather than 73% male and 17% female, which the 5:1 socially gendered ratio would have you believe.)
Plus the 2018 annual Hollywood Diversity Report by UCLA shows that “new evidence from 2015–16 suggests that America’s increasingly diverse audiences prefer diverse film and television content,” so we would have to greatly exaggerate the connection between the sex ratio of the audience and those we see here.
There has to be some other reason, and I suspect it’s the dark patriarchal notion that “male” is somehow the default gender. Even though it is, literally, not.
Is it that Hollywood itself is mostly white and male?
The 2018 Hollywood Diversity Report shows that gatekeepers, writers, directors, and (points at self) critics are still overwhelmingly white and male. White male writers and directors account for 91.9% and 86.2% if their fields, respectively. This is closer to the 73% male, but still a crappy, crappy excuse for the default assignment of AI as male. Representation matters and this is sorry representation.
P.S. Don’t get uppity, real world
The Global Gender Gap Report issued on 17 DEC 2018 by the World Economic Forum showed (in collaboration with LinkedIn) that women only occupy 22% of jobs in AI professions. (See page viii, 28–35 of that report.)
So yeah.
Pictured: Sci-fi AI, mostly
You probably had a general sense of this disparity from simply being an audience member. But it’s “nice” to have some data to back it up. Be forewarned: It gets worse when we look at correlations. (No, really.) But before we do that, we should look at the rest of the distributions, starting with embodiment in the next post.
Men are machines. Women are bodies. Male is extreme. Women are nuance. General AI has gender. Other AI does not. Male is free-will. Machine is subservience. Male is default. Women when it’s necessary.
At least in screen sci-fi.
Let me explain.
In November of 2018, a tweet thread between Chris Geison and Kathy Baxter called my attention to questions about the gender of AI in sci-fi. Baxter noted that most AI is male, and how female AI is often quite subservient or sexualized. In this thread, Gieson added Cathy Pearl’s observation that embodied AI is often female and male is more often disembodied and regarded as a peer.
I already had a “database” (read: Google Sheet) of AI in screen sci-fi from Untold AI, my 2018 study of the stories screen sci-fi doesn’t tell, but should. So, I thought I could provide some formal analysis to this Gendered AI discussion. To that end I’ve added around 325 AI characters to the Google Sheet, and run some analyses. This series of posts will break it all down for you.
Oh, we’ll come back to this little “guy.”
Now, it can get a little dry to talk about percentages and comparisons and distributions, so I’m going to do my best to keep tying things back to the shows and the characters and the upshot of all this analysis. But the way we get to that upshot is through the numbers, so stick with me. For this first post, I’m going to share what I captured, and what counts as an AI character for purposes of this study.
The following is true in the survey as of 08 APR 2019. The live data, available in Google Sheets, may be updated from this.
The data set
327 AI characters from science fiction (see the full list in the live sheet)
Movies and television shows from 1927 (Metropolis)–2018 (Upgrade)
Call to action: Of course I missed some movies and TV shows. Add them in the comments, including a link to their IMDB page.
The survey that drives this site has always focused on screen sci-fi for its ability to depict interfaces that can be reviewed. Literature is much more free to experiment with ideas than screen sci-fi, and so will have lots of additional examples, but won’t appear in the survey.
Each character is tagged multiple ways. More detail on particular attributes below.
Movie or Show Title and Episode if appropriate
Year
Name
Embodiment
Physicality/Virtuality
Gender Presentation (which is a roll-up of four separately tracked variables)
Appearance or evidence of primary sex characteristics
Appearance of secondary sex characteristics
Voice
Pronouns used by other characters
Subservience to humans
Germane-ness of gender (more on this in its own section)
Goodness
If not free-willed, the gender of the master
Category of AI (Narrow, General, or Super)
Whether their gender presentation changes over time
Genesis, or how the AI came to be. This is mostly used to distinguish AI that are copies of humans (whose gender would thereby be inherited).
Call to action: If you think there’s some critical attribute that I’m missing, pipe up in the comments. I can’t promise I can get to it before the next post, but I can consider it as a future enhancement.
Yes, but which Skynet?
With the exception of the flag marking changed genders, when characters change other attributes over the course of their stories, they are tagged for their final state. For example, the Maschinenmensch from Metropolis begins an anthropomorphic robot, but after Rotwang transfers Maria’s likeness to it, it becomes indistinguishable from human, and so is tagged as such.
If you’re looking at the Sheets data, you’ll see that text values have corresponding numerical columns to allow for easy sorting and graphing data, but I tried to gray them so they don’t distract from a reading of the raw data.
Full disclosure: Possible problems with this data
Sci-fi is a vast supergenre. There are certainly examples missing from the survey, so it should not be regarded as exhaustive. (I tried to get as many as I could.)
I generally target well-known examples rather than limited-release or student projects.
The sci-fi interfaces blog usually eschews comedy that breaks the 4th wall routinely, (e.g. Spaceballs), as this makes for very complicated analysis, and so the survey will be missing these examples as well.
I only speak English fluently, and so have only reviewed shows in English, with English dubbing, or with English subtitling.
I am not a data scientist. I’m a smart guy who tried his best, but may have made some errors in the formulas.
I am not an expert in gender issues. I may make unintentional errors in discussing or categorizing genders, use insensitive language, or have naive errors in my thinking. I have engaged a professional sensitivity review, but of course they might not catch everything, either.
I am a progressive, liberal, (imperfect, see above) feminist. Though I tried not to, my bias may have colored how I coded the examples and of course the interpretation of this data.
I have to go on a LOT of common-case presumptions. For example, men can have breasts for many reasons, but I used the presence of breasts as one marker of female-ness. I suspect this is a disservice to the real complexity of gender and sex in the world, but presuming the audience sees gender as primarily binary, it marks how these characters are likely perceived rather than what they are.
I’m not too worried about these caveats, though, since what we’re aiming for here isn’t precision engineering specs, but rather to get a numbers-based sense of the big patterns in screen sci-fi, and for that, a little bit of noise in the numbers is OK.
Lastly, not every character that you think might qualify does, so I should explain my rationale for what got in and what got left out.
What counts as an AI character?
I’ve tried to be strict about what counts as AI in that the intelligence of the character must be housed in non-biological circuitry. This leaves out some characters that on a cursory consideration would seem like a natural fit. For an example, compare The Stepford Wives (1975) and The Stepford Wives (2004). The wives in the original were robots through and through—mechanical, lookalike replacements of the original humans. But the wives in the remake were cyborgs, with robotic bodies housing their original, human brains. This means that in the original, the wives count as AI and appear in the survey. But because of this cyborg technicality, none of the “robotic” characters from the remake make it in. Not even the little cyborg dog.
Meanwhile, Rachel and Deckard, replicants from the Blade Runner universe, had a baby (according to Blade Runner 2049) so we can generalize and say replicants are capable of wholly biological reproductive acts. Given this you might think they’re out of the survey, but, since they are fabricated, they get into the survey.
Also, T-800s Terminators (the Arnold kind) get in, because even with their wetware bodies, the intelligence they carry is non-biological.
I know, it’s complex and sometimes counter-intuitive. Such is data.
OK, so looking at those attributes for those characters, the first thing we should look at is the distributions. This included all sorts of questions like: How many AI present as men? How many as women? How many are nonbinary? What kinds of bodies do they have? Who is master of whom?
It’s thrilling, thrilling data analysis action, so stay tuned.
Now we come to the end of Idiocracy, if not yet the idiocracy.
This film never got broad release. There are stories about its being supressed by the studio because of the way the film treated brands.
I don’t know what they’re talking about.
But whatever the reason, I’m happy to do my part in helping it get more awareness. Because despite its expositive principle being wrong (and maybe slightly eugenic), the film illustrates frustrations I also have with some of the world’s stupider ills, and does so in funny ways. Also, as I noted in the last writeup, it even illustrates speculative and far-reaching issues with superintelligence. So, it’s smarter than it looks.
I’d recommend lots and lots more people see this, generally, if only to reinforce the demonization of idiocy and make more people want to be not that. So first let me say: If you haven’t yet, see the film. Help others see it. Make People Valorize Enlightenment Again.
Now, let’s turn to the interfaces.
Sci: B (3 of 4) How believable are the interfaces?
This rating is tough. After all, the interfaces are appropriately idiotic. But, we have to ask: Are they the right kind of idiotic, given a diegesis where everyone is a moron and civilization is propped up by technologies created by smart people who died off? Well…mostly.
The FloorMaster is a believable example of narrow AI breaking down. The Carl’s Junior, Insurance Slot machine, and OmniBro are all believable once you accept that part of the Idiocracy is an inhumane, hypercapitalist panopticon. The IQ test has problems, like most do. The Time Masheen is believably an older ride that has had its dioramas replaced by the idiots. These are all believable.
The sleeping pods are in between. As a prototype, you might expect the unlabeled interface and lack of niceties. But the pods break believability by magically having enough resources (e.g. five billion calories, between them) to keep their occupants alive and healthy for 500 times their initially-planned run.
And some of the interfaces just could not have been created either by the dead, smart people, or the idiots. These are technology jokes that break the fourth wall, and earn it the grade it gets.
Fi: A+ (4 of 4) How well do the interfaces inform the narrative of the story?
The film knocks this out of the park. The interfaces are a key part of illustrating how it is that idiots manage to survive at all, and how stupidity from the top-down and the bottom-up gets into everything. Just fantastic.
Everything.
Interfaces: B (3 of 4) How well do the interfaces equip the characters to achieve their goals?
This one is also complicated. The interfaces almost universally serve to thwart the users, but we have to cut them some slack, because that’s part of their narrative point. (See, this is why it’s so difficult to review comedy.)
For instance, the Healthmaster Inferno likely does more to infect patients than to help cure them. (This has a historical precedent, as doctors used to reject the notion that they had to wash their hands between patients because harumph they were gentlemen and gentlemen are clean.) And while this is terrible usability, with no affordances, constraints, or safeguards, if the technology had worked, it wouldn’t help tell such a funny and disturbing story.
Then there are technologies like the St. God’s Intake interface that would pass a usability test, but serve to keep their users as mere babysitters for a technology that does the work, and would serve to keep them stuck in the same job, never improving. Come to think of it, this is a metaphor for the role of technology in the film: It just serves to keep them stupid by trying to provide everything for them. That’s a thought with troubling implications, unless we go about it smartly.
And, hilariously, there is one function in the film that is particularly brilliant, and points out how prudish we are not to implement it today. (The fart fan.)
Anyway, the tech that is broken is so obviously broken (the IPPA machine being perhaps the best example) that I’m not counting this against the film’s Interfaces ratings. Real world designers should not mimic these or draw inspiration, but the stupidity is so deliberate and apparent, I don’t believe anyone would. In fact, the film leads them to look for why the technologies are stupid and do not that, so it scores high marks.
A quick note to close out this set of reviews. People who like Idiocracy may be interested to know it is a spiritual inheritor of a 1951 story called The Marching Morons. The text hasn’t aged well, but it’s still worth a read if you liked this movie. Similar premise, similar difficulties.
Compare freely
“We need the rockets and trick speedometers and cities because, while you and your kind were being prudent and foresighted and not having children, the migrant workers, slum dwellers and tenant farmers were shiftlessly and short-sightedly having children—breeding, breeding. My God, how they bred!”
The Marching Morons, by C.M. Kornbluth, 1951
This short story is over 50 years old. I’m just going to guess that since intelligence is relative, even as average intelligence continues to rise, there will always be grousing by the intelligent about the less intelligent. And I think I’m OK with that. Or at least, the effects of it. I hope you are, too.
It seemed grotesquely prescient in regards to the USA leading up to the elections of 2016
I wanted to do what I could to fight the Idiocracy in the 2018 using my available platform
But now it’s 2019 and I’ve dedicated the blog to AI this year, and I’m still going to try and get you to re/watch this film because it’s one of the most entertaining and illustrative films about AI in all of sci-fi.
Not the obvious AIs
There are a few obvious AIs in the film. Explicitly, an AI manages the corporations. Recall that when Joe convinces the cabinet that he can talk to plants, and that they really want to drink water…well, let’s let the narrator from the film explain…
NARRATOR
Given enough time, Joe’s plan might have worked. But when the Brawndo stock suddenly dropped to zero leaving half the population unemployed; dumb, angry mobs took to the streets, rioting and looting and screaming for Joe’s head. An emergency cabinet meeting was called with the C.E.O. of the Brawndo Corporation.
At the meeting the C.E.O. shouts, “How come nobody’s buying Brawndo the Thirst Mutilator?”
The Secretary of State says, “Aw, shit. Half the country works for Brawndo.” The C.E.O. shouts, “Not anymore! The stock has dropped to zero and the computer did that auto-layoff thing to everybody!” The wonders of giving business decisions over to automation.
I also take it as a given that AI writes the speeches that King Camacho reads because who else could it be? These people are idiots who don’t understand the difference between government and corporations, of course they would want to run the government like a corporation because it has better ads. And since AIs run the corporations in Idiocracy…
No. I don’t mean those AIs. I mean that you should rewatch the film understanding that Joe and Rita, the lead characters, are Super AIs in the context of Idiocracy.
The protagonists are super AIs
The literature distinguishes between three supercategories of artificial intelligence.
Narrow AI, which is the AI we have in the world now. It’s much better than humans in some narrow domain. But it can’t handle new situations. You can’t ask a roboinvestor to help plan a meal, for example, even though it’s very very good at investing.
General AI, definitionally meaning “human like” in it’s ability to generalize from one domain of knowledge to handle novel situations. If this exists in the world, it’s being kept very secret. It probably does not.
Super AI, the intelligence of which dwarfs our own. Again, this probably doesn’t exist in the world, but if it did, it’s being kept very secret. Or maybe even keeping itself secret. The difference between a bird’s intelligence and a human’s is a good way to think about the difference between our intelligence and a superintelligence. It will be able to out-think us at every step. We may not even be able to understand the language in which asks its questions.
Illustration by the author (often used when discussing agentive technology.)
Now the connection to Joe and Rita should be apparent. Though theirs is not an artificial intelligence, the difference between their smarts and that of Idiocracy approaches that same uncanny scale.
Watch how Joe and Rita move through this world. They are routinely flabbergasted at the stupidity around them. People are pointlessly belligerent, distractedly crass, easily manipulated, guided only by their base instincts, desperate to not appear “faggy,” and guffawing about (and cheering on) horrific violence. Rita and Joe are not especially smart by our standards, but they can outthink everyone around them by orders of magnitude, and that’s (comparatively) super AI.
The people of Idiocracy have idioted themselves into a genuine ecological crisis. They need to stop poisoning their environment because, at the very least, it’s killing them. But what about jobs! What about profits! Does this sound familiar?
Pictured: Us.
Joe doesn’t have any problem figuring out what’s wrong. He just tastes what’s being sprayed in the fields, and it’s obvious to him. His biggest problem is that the people he’s trying to serve are too dumb to understand the explanation (much less their culpability). He has to lie and feed them some bullshit reason and then manage people’s frustration that it doesn’t work instantly, even though he knows and we know it will work given time.
In this role as superintelligences, our two protagonists illustrate key critical concerns we have about superintelligent AIs:
Economic control
Social manipulation
Uncontainability
Cooperation by “multis.”
Economic control
Rita finds it trivially easy to bilk one idiot out of money and gain economic power. She could use her easy lucre to, in turn, control the people around her. Fortunately she is a benign superintelligence.
Yeah baby I could wait two days.
In the Chapter 6 of the seminal work on the subject, Superintelligence, Nick Bostrom lists six superpowers that an ASI would work to gain in order to achieve its goals. The last of these he terms “economic productivity” using which the ASI can “generate wealth which can be used to buy influence, services, resources (including hardware), etc.” This scene serves as a lovely illustration of that risk.
Of course you’re wondering what the other five are, so rather than making you go hunt for them…
Intelligence amplification, to bootstrap its own intelligence
Strategizing, to achieve distant goals and overcome intelligent opposition
Social manipulation, to leverage external resources by recruiting human support, to enable a boxed AI to persuade its gatekeepers to let it out, and to persuade states and organizations to adopt some course of action.
Hacking, so the AI can expropriate computational resources over the internet, exploit security holes to escape cybernetic confinement, steal financial resources, and hijack infrastructure like military robots, etc.
Technology research, to create a powerful military force, to create surveillance systems, and to enable automated space colonization.
Economic productivity, to generate wealth which can be used to buy influence, services, resources (including hardware), etc.
Social manipulation
Joe demonstrates the second of these, social manipulation, repeatedly throughout the film.
He convinces the cabinet to switch to watering crops by telling them he can talk to plants.
He convinces the guard to let him escape prison (more on this below).
Joe’s not perfect at it. Early in the film he tries reason to convince the court of his innocence, and fails. Later he fails to convince the crowd to release him in Rehabilitation. An actual ASI would have an easier time of these things.
Uncontainability
The only way they contain Joe in the early part of the film is with a physical cage, and that doesn’t last long. He finds it trivially easy to escape their prison using, again, social manipulation.
JOE
Hi. Excuse me. I’m actually supposed to be getting out of prison today, sir.
GUARD
Yeah. You’re in the wrong line, dumb ass. Over there.
JOE
I’m sorry. I am being a big dumb ass. Sorry.
GUARD (to other guard)
Hey, uh, let this dumb ass through.
Elizer Yudkowsky, Research Fellow at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, has described the AI-Box problem, in which he illustrates the folly of thinking that we could contain a super AI. (Bostrom also cites him in the Superintelligence book.) Using only a text terminal, he argues, an ASI can convince an even a well-motivated human to release it. He has even run social experiments where one participant played the unwilling human, and he played the ASI, and both times the human relented. And while Elizer is a smart guy, he is not an ASI, which would have an even easier time of it. This scene illustrates how easily an ASI would thwart our attempts to cage it.
Cooperation between multis
Chapter 11 of Bostrom’s book focuses on how things might play out if instead of only one ASI in the world, a “singleton” there are many ASIs, or “multis.” (Colossus: The Forbin Project and Person of Interest also explore these scenarios with artificial superintelligences.)
In this light, Joe and Rita are multis who unite over shared circumstances and woes, and manage to help each other out in their struggle against the idiots. Whatever advantage the general intelligences have over the individual ASIs are significantly diminished when they are working together.
Note: In Bostrom’s telling, multis don’t necessarily stabilize each other, they just make things more complex and don’t solve the core principal-agent problem. But he does acknowledge that stable, voluntary cooperation is a possible scenario.
Cold comfort ending
At the end of Idiocracy, we can take some cold comfort that Rita and Joe have a moral sense, a sense of self-preservation, and sympathy for fellow humans. All they wind up doing is becoming rulers of the world and living out their lives. (Oh god are their kids Von Neumann probes?) The implication is that, as smart as they are, they will still be outpopulated by the idiots of that world.
Imagine this story is retold where Joe and Rita are psychopaths obsessed with making paper clips, with their superintelligent superpowers and our stupidity. The idiots would be enslaved to paper clip making before they could ask whether or not it’s fake news.
Or even less abstractly, there is a deleted “stinger” scene at the end of some DVDs of the film where Rita’s pimp UPGRAYEDD somehow winds up waking up from his own hibernation chamber right there in 2505, and strolls confidently into town. The implied sequel would deal with an amoral ASI (UPGRAYEDD) hostile to its mostly-benevolent ASI leaders (Rita and Joe). It does not foretell fun times for the Idiocracy.
For me, this interpretation of the film is important to “redeem” it, since its big takeaway—that is, that people are getting dumber over time—is known to be false. The Flynn Effect, named for its discoverer James R. Flynn, is the repeatedly-confirmed observation that measurements of intelligence are rising, linearly, over time, and have been since measurements began. To be specific, this effect is not seen in general intelligence but rather the subset of fluid, or analytical intelligence measures. The rate is about 3 IQ points per decade.
Wait. What? How can this be? Given the world’s recent political regression (that kickstarted the series on fascism and even this review of Idiocracy) and constant news stories of the “Florida Man” sort, the assertion does not seem credible. But that’s probably just availability bias. Experts cite several factors that are probably contributing to the effect.
Better health
Better nutrition
More and better education
Rising standards of living
The thing that Idiocracy points to—people of lower intelligence outbreeding people of higher intelligence—was seen as not important. Given the effect, this story might be better told not about a time traveler heading forwards, but rather heading backwards to some earlier era. Think Idiocracy but amongst idiots of the Renaissance.
Since I know a lot of smart people who took this film to be an exposé of a dark universal pattern that, if true, would genuinely sour your worldview and dim your sense of hope, it seems important to share this.
So go back and rewatch this marvelous film, but this time, dismiss the doom and gloom of declining human intelligence, and watch instead how Idiocracy illustrates some key risks (if not all of them) that super artificial intelligence poses to the world. For it really is a marvelously accessible shorthand to some of the critical reasons we ought to be super cautious of the possibility.
