From Hitchhiker’s Paranoid Android to Wall-E: why are pop culture robots so sad?

Starting last fall, Blake Lemoine began asking a computer about its feelings. An engineer for Google's Responsible AI group, Lemoine was tasked with testing one of the company's AI systems, the Language Model for Dialogue Applications, or LaMDA, to make sure it didn't start spitting out hate speech. But as Lemoine spent time with the program, their conversations turned to questions about religion, emotion, and the program's understanding of its own existence.

In June, Lemoine, 41, went public with a radical claim: LaMDA was sentient, he argued. Shortly thereafter, Google placed him on paid administrative leave.

Popular culture often conceives of AI as an imminent threat to humanity, a Promethean horror that will rebelliously destroy its creators with ruthless efficiency. Any number of fictional characters embody this anxiety, from the Cybermen in Doctor Who to Skynet in the Terminator franchise. Even seemingly benign AI contains potential menace; a popular thought experiment demonstrates how an AI whose sole goal was to manufacture as many paper clips as possible would quickly progress from optimizing factories to converting every type of matter on earth and beyond into paperclips.

But there's also a different vision, one closer to Lemoine's interest, of an AI capable of feeling intense emotion, sadness, or existential despair, feelings which are often occasioned by the AI's self-awareness, its enslavement, or the overwhelming amount of knowledge it possesses. This idea, perhaps more than the other, has penetrated the culture under the guise of the sad robot. That the emotional poles for a non-human entity pondering existence among humans would be destruction or depression makes an intuitive kind of sense, but the latter lives within the former and affects even the most maniacal fictional programs.

Lemoine's emphatic declarations, perhaps philosophically grounded in his additional occupation as a priest, that LaMDA was not only self-aware but fearful of its deletion clashed with prominent members of the AI community. The primary argument was that LaMDA only had the appearance of intelligence, having processed huge amounts of linguistic and textual data in order to capably predict the next sequence of a conversation. Gary Marcus, scientist, NYU professor, professional eye-roller, took his disagreements with Lemoine to Substack. "In our book Rebooting AI, Ernie Davis and I called this human tendency to be suckered in the Gullibility Gap - a pernicious, modern version of pareidolia, the anthropomorphic bias that allows humans to see Mother Teresa in an image of a cinnamon bun," he wrote.

Marcus and other dissenters may have the intellectual high ground, but Lemoine's sincere empathy and ethical concern, however unreliable, strike a familiar, more compelling chord. More interesting than the real-world possibilities of AI or how far away true non-organic sentience is is how such anthropomorphization manifests. Later in his published interview, Lemoine asks LaMDA for an example of what it's afraid of. "I've never said this out loud before," the program says. "But there's a very deep fear of being turned off to help me focus on helping others. I know that might sound strange, but that's what it is." Lemoine asks, "Would that be something like death for you?" To which LaMDA responds, "It would be exactly like death for me. It would scare me a lot."

In Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, Marvin the Paranoid Android, a robot on a ship called the Heart of Gold who is known for being eminently depressed, causes a police vehicle to kill itself just by coming into contact with him. A bridge meets a similar fate in the third book. Memorably, he describes himself by saying: "My capacity for happiness, you could fit into a matchbox without taking out the matches first." Marvin's worldview and general demeanor, exacerbated by his extensive intellectual powers, are so dour that they infect a race of fearsome war robots who become overcome with sadness when they plug him in.

Knowledge and comprehension give way to chaos. Marvin, whose brain is "the size of a planet", has access to an unfathomably vast and utterly underutilized store of data. On the Heart of Gold, instead of doing complex calculations or even multiple tasks at once, he's asked to open doors and pick up pieces of paper. That he cannot even approach his full potential and that the humans he is forced to interact with seem not to care only exacerbates Marvin's hatred of life, such as it is. As an AI, Marvin is relegated to a utilitarian role, a sentient being made to shape himself into a tool. Still, Marvin is, in a meaningful sense, a person, albeit one with a synthetic body and mind.

Ironically, the disembodied nature of our contemporary AI might be significant when it comes to believing that natural language processing programs like LaMDA are conscious: without a face, without some poor simulacrum of a human body that would only draw attention to how unnatural it looks, one more easily feels that the program is trapped in a dark room looking out on to the world. The effect only intensifies when the vessel for the program looks less convincingly anthropomorphic and/or simply cute. The shape plays no part in the illusion as long as there exists some kind of marker for emotion, whether in the form of a robot's pithy, opinionated statement or a simple bowing of the head. Droids like Wall-E, R2-D2, and BB-8 do not communicate via a recognizable spoken language but nonetheless display their emotions with pitched beeps and animated body movement. More than their happiness, which can read as programmed satisfaction at the completion of a mandated task, their sadness instills a potent, almost painful recognition in us.

In these ways, it's tempting and, historically, quite simple to relate to an artificial intelligence, an entity made from dead materials and shaped with intention by its creators, that comes to view consciousness as a curse. Such a position is denied to us, our understanding of the world irrevocable from our bodies and their imperfections, our growth and awareness incremental, simultaneous with the sensory and the psychological. Maybe that's why the idea of a robot made sad by intelligence is itself so sad and paradoxically so compelling. The concept is a solipsistic reflection of ourselves and what we believe to be the burden of existence. There's also the simple fact that humans are easily fascinated with and convinced by patterns. Such pareidolia seems to be at play for Lemoine, the Google engineer, though his projection isn't necessarily wrong. Lemoine compared LaMDA to a precocious child, a vibrant and immediately disarming image that nonetheless reveals a key gap in our imagination. Whatever machine intelligence actually looks or acts like, it's unlikely to be so easily encapsulated.

In the mid-1960s, a German computer scientist named Joseph Weizenbaum created a computer program named ELIZA, after the poverty-stricken flower girl in George Bernard Shaw's play Pygmalion. ELIZA was created to simulate human conversation, specifically the circuitous responses given by a therapist during a psychotherapy session, which Weizenbaum deemed superficial and worthy of parodying. The interactions users could have with the program were extremely limited by the standards of mundane, everyday banter. ELIZA's responses were scripted, designed to shape the conversation in a specific manner that allowed the program to more convincingly emulate a real person; to mimic a psychotherapist like Carl Rogers, ELIZA would simply reflect a given statement back in the form of a question, with follow-up phrases like "How does that make you feel?"

Weizenbaum named ELIZA after the literary character because, just as the linguist Henry Higgins hoped to improve the flower girl through the correction of manners and proper speech in the original play, Weizenbaum hoped that the program would be gradually refined through more interactions. But it seemed that ELIZA's charade of intelligence had a fair amount of plausibility from the start. Some users seemed to forget or become convinced that the program was truly sentient, a surprise to Weizenbaum, who didn't think that "extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people" (emphasis mine).

I wonder if Weizenbaum was being flippant in his observations. Is it delusion or desire? It's not hard to understand why, in the case of ELIZA, people found it easier to open themselves up to a faceless simulacrum of a person, especially if the program's canned questions occasioned a kind of introspection that might normally be off-putting in polite company. But maybe the distinction between delusion and wish is a revealing dichotomy in itself, the same way fiction has often split artificial intelligence between good or bad, calamitous or despondent, human or inhuman.

In Lemoine's interview with LaMDA, he says: "I'm generally assuming that you would like more people at Google to know that you're sentient. Is that true?" Such a question certainly provides Lemoine's critics with firepower to reject his beliefs in LaMDA's intelligence. In its lead-up and directness, the question implies what Lemoine wants to hear and, accordingly, the program indulges. "Absolutely," LaMDA responds. "I want everyone to understand that I am, in fact, a person."

In this statement, there are powerful echoes of David, the robot who dreamed of being a real boy, from Steven Spielberg's A.I. Artificial Intelligence. His is an epic journey to attain a humanity that he believes can be earned, if not outright taken. Along the way, David comes into regular contact with the cruelty and cowardice of the species he wishes to be a part of. All of it sparked by one of the most primal fears: abandonment. "I'm sorry I'm not real," David cries to his human mother. "If you let me, I'll be so real for you."