Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet

Chapter 6

The material below represents notes compiled by Robert Keel and Takako Nomi in their reading of Turkle's, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, Simon and Schuster, 1995.. They are intended for classroom use.

Artificial Life As The New Frontier

The object of Artificial life

Marvin Minsky: A-Life is "the discipline of building organisms and systems that would be considered alive if found in nature."

Some A-Life researchers -- simulation of the appearance of life, e.g. flocking behavior, in order to better understand how that aspect of life functions in nature.

Other researchers -- creation of life, e.g. the emergence of new human-desighned organisms "alive under any reasonable definition of the word."

Digital chromosomes -- "mate," "mutate" and "evolve" "Evolving creature in virtual ecology"

Four qualities to qualify as life artificial organisms

1. Evolution by natural selection. (the Darwinian aspects of our definition of life)
2. A genetic program, the instructions for their operation and reproduction. (the DNA factor in our definition of life)
3. A high level of complexity -- the characteristics and behaviors emerge unbidden
4. Self-organization

• Life as it is (nature) and life as it could be ( A-life) -- equally alive (tow different forms) for the new discipline
• A challenge to the most fundamental social moral, philosophical, and religious beliefs -- reexamination of our place in the universe and our roles in nature. Threat to human uniqueness not merely in terms of intelligence but in terms of biological life itself

People's responses Lack of personal concerns (A-life is less threatening than AI? ) Peoples imprisonment on the screen -- easier to accept without feeling frightened

Game of Life An "emergent object" "Things come together and flew apart, shapes emerged, receded, and reemerged." "Repetition and sameness, surprise and pattern" Life within a machine

Impact -- Changes in our views on "machines" and definition of "life" -- reflected in the language we use, which reflects realities that we construct

Our construction of reality -- Language Definition of what life is and what "natural" is -- our constructions Possibility of deconstruct and redefinition Language of molecular biology -- life in terms of DNA not in terms of metaphysical entity Self-reproducing and evolving objects that exist only within computers-- can they be considered as something alive?

Genetic Algorithms -- a class of programs characterized by a mixture of centralized control and bottom-up evolution. Randomly generated strings of binary numbers (zeros and ones) -- defined as "chromosomes" Evolving chromosomes -- the designated winners have higher chances of being selected to be copied -- "Reproduction"

• A question : "How much should these artificial organisms inform our thinking about naturally occurring life?"
• Displacement of beliefs of "Evolution" held by biologists by A-Life researchers
• A central motor of evolution -- "mutation" vs "crossover." As if we were playing God, "If God had a design and He had wanted to evolve humans, this is how he could have done it."

Tierra and "Natural" Artificial Evolution Tierra (Earth) -- evolution not determined or judged by users -- no programmed functions, no breeders and no predetermined goals for evolution. Evolution -- purely in response to the requirements of their digital environments -- mutation built into the system The "biological" property of computer viruses -- "Naturally" evolving digital organisms Designing a digital organism ("the ancestor") capable of "replication" and "mutation" All organisms -- competing for the scarce resources (processing time and memory) The winner (well functioned organisms) rewarded with CPU (Central Processing Unit) time. (if they don't function well, punished with "death") Self-replicating. Open-ended and evolving systems -- A new object-to-think-with for thinking about life -- "Evolution is life"

A Picture is Worth

Simulation of natural lives :

• Nature -- there is a structure underlying apparent randomness
• An assumption : A seeming complexity of behavior might arises from simple responses to a complex environment
• The Boid program -- simulated natural flocks -- the creation of a flock of virtual birds called "boids" (a species of 'almost-animal) Flocking behaviors -- no leaders nor intention Simple rules for each "boid" : if you are too close to a neighboring boid, move away from it; if you are not as fast as your neighboring boids, speed up
• Seemingly intentional behavior -- nothing but a set of simple local rules. Behavior emerging out of simple rules -- no intentions, no leaders to follow
• What is 'life' ? -- "What counts most (in defining life) is not what life is made of but the organizing process behind it"

An Object is Worth

• Lego-Logo -- Robots, which have the qualities of emergent, evolving intelligence, and bottom-up operations (Traditionally, top-down, rule based operation)
• Children -- the attributions of personality and intentionality to Robots --
  1. Psychological properties
  2. Their complex behaviors -- emergence from simple rules -- "You can get more than you tell it to do." --
  3. Unpredictability
  4. Objects-to-think-with about decentralization -- a challenge to western monotheistic religious traditions and to our experiences as unitary actors Unity of God and science? --
  5. Emergence as a force

Simlife Simulation -- Simlife, SimCity and SimAnt -- A-Life A-Life -- bottom-up approach -- "start with single cells and grow/evolve life with intelligence" Intelligence as a whole, not individually Alive but 'not real'

Creatures -- can they have consciousness and intentionality without being alive, or are they alive because they move and have psychological properties, but they are not 'real'??

Morphing and Cycling Through

Children's views on intelligent toys Psychological attributions to the toys Construction of a new theory about life

The Aliveness of A-Life objects

• Where can A-Life fit into our way of thinking about life? --
• Parallel definitions
  • "The robots are in control but not alive, would be alive if they had bodies, are alive because they have bodies, would be alive if they had feelings, are alive the way insects are alive but not the people are alive."
  • "Tierrans are not alive because they are just in the computer, could be alive if they go out of the computer, are alive until you turn off the computer and then they're dead, are not alive because nothing in the computer is real"
  • "Sort of alive" "Alive in a way, but not alive like humans or animals, as information but not body, as alive but not spiritually alive, or as our creature but not God's creature, thus not alive"

Cycling through

The alternation of identities in virtual reality