ABSTRACT
In her essay A ‘Feeling for the Cyborg’ Kathleen Woodward asks the crucial question: ‘What is the key to believing that a digital life form (a ‘bot’, for example) possesses subjectivity?’ (2004, 191). 1 As Woodward herself reflects, there is no easy answer here, because the attribution of emotions to computers, robots, and cyborgs, is more fantasy than fact, and its fantastic qualities ‘serve as a bridge, an intangible but very real prosthesis, one that helps us connect ourselves to the world we have been inventing’ (Ibid.). The key to believing that a ‘bot’ has emotions is intermingled with the same kind of ‘suspension of disbelief’ that science fiction films demand of the spectator, and for Woodward this suspension is powerful enough to abandon the perspective of critical theory, and address science fiction as a form of ‘future fact’. 2 The co-mingling of fiction and fact, present and future, brought together in the oxymoron ‘future fact’ calls attention to the kinds of reconciliations that have to occur in order for the concept of emotional cyborgs to resonate with existing, historically formed understandings of machine-human interaction. Other such cultural/epistemic shifts have already broken the ground for the idea of a feeling ‘bot’: we think of the attribution of being (in Artificial Life), of space (in cyberspace) and of reality (in ‘virtual’ or ‘mixed’ reality). However, these sweeping redefinitions of cultural and metaphysical categories lack the frisson that the concept of ‘affectionate machines’ often provokes. Looking to popular culture, we see that the difference between having and simulating emotions, the difference, in essence, between human and machine, is established, over and over again, within narratives about technology. The film Blade Runner epitomizes this cultural obsession with defining and re-defining what being human is through an appeal to the presence, or absence, of ‘real’ emotions. We think here of the scene where Rachael, a replicant destined to be ‘retired’ before her emotions can develop, takes the Voight Kampf test – during which her pupils are scanned for signs of a physical response to the emotionally charged questions she is asked. Or Spielberg’s Artificial Intelligence, where the obsessive life quest of the robot child is to make his adoptive mother love him. There are numerous examples of humans outwitting machines because of their superior emotional integrity, and this quality has acted as a barrier against some of the more technophobic trends in modernity – especially the fear of becoming automatons, or of becoming redundant through automation. But looking outside the sphere of science fiction, to the insights and fantasies of art, and the field of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) that focuses on the computation of affect, I want to re-pose Woodward’s question in broader terms, to ask not if a ‘bot’ can feel, but what it would feel, and what kind of empathetic relationship would be possible between it and us? Specifically, I will read Catherine Richards’ Method and Apparatus for Finding Love, and Ben Rubin and Mark Hanson’s Listening Post – both pieces that employ ‘bots’ to establish relationships between technological systems and humans, and both instances of art creatively unsettling some of the basic assumptions of science.
