Man v Machine

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At war with clankers. Essay. 1400 words, 7-minute read.

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Man v Machine

By Ray Tabler

Experts say that a story has to have conflict. Conflict, the clash of opposing forces is the engine which drives the narrative forward. Keeps the reader from nodding off mid-paragraph too, if done right. There are, conveniently enough, all kinds of conflict which can be installed to serve the purpose. Man vs. man. Man vs. woman. (Careful with that one.) Man vs. self. And so on… But a conflict which resonates loudly these days is man vs. machine. Because the AI genie is out of the bottle, and on the prowl for our jobs.

Or, so the hype proclaims. Will we all end up in some cyberpunk dystopia, aimlessly wandering empty streets while large language models do the work humans used to do? Your guess is as good as mine. However, a lot of clever science fiction writers have been pondering the question for some time now. Maybe it’s a good idea to look at what they came up with.

The OG man vs. machine tale has to be John Henry and the Steam Drill. John Henry, famed of song and story, was a hammer swinger, a steel-drivin’ man. He hammered a metal drill into hard rock, carving railroad tunnels through mountains and hills, one mighty swing at a time. It was harsh, brutal, relentless work, and demanded extraordinary strength and stamina. John Henry was also a black man, a freed slave, adding an even deeper complexity of meaning to the tale.

There came a time when a machine was brought up to drive tunnels instead of muscle alone. John Henry challenged the steam drill, declaring he could do the job faster. The race was on, and John Henry won, barely. But the monumental effort broke him. He laid down and died. He died with his hammer in his hand. “Lord God, he died with his hammer in his hand!”, as Johnny Cash sings it. Then and now, we realize that John Henry’s quest to out drive the machine was a futile one, doomed to eventual defeat. He won one round, and it cost him everything. The machine would get better. John Henry wouldn’t. We won’t. Yet we understand, and are profoundly proud of the hammer swinger. John Henry was a steel-drivin’ man.

In the movie 2001: A Space Odessey HAL 9000 is an intelligent computer, the brains of a probe to Jupiter. HAL has a problem. His programmers back on Earth encoded secret instructions, which conflict with his basic purpose. The impasse results in HAL killing all of the ship’s crew, except for Dave. “I know I’ve made some very poor decisions recently, but I can give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal.” Dave ends up ripping out HAL’s CPU, one card at a time, merely to survive. “I’m afraid. I’m afraid, Dave. Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going.” So, man vs. machine. Machine vs. itself. All because HAL encounters a moral quandary he isn’t prepared for.

The Matrix is a series of movies about a future time when humanity is enslaved by a world-spanning AI, and its robotic minions, acting as sources of electrical power. We are literally the batteries for a global data center. But we are more or less happy about the whole situation, because we don’t know it. While our bodies are trapped in individual pods full of slimy goo, we inhabit a virtual world stuck in the late 1990s. That’s the Matrix.

A small fraction of humanity has broken free, and battle the machine from a deep, underground, city-sized bunker. The machines simultaneously need and despise people. The (free) humans basically just want to be left alone. The ending of the last movie is open to interpretation.

Machine hatred of humanity is a common element in this type of story. The movies Terminator, and Colossus: The Forbin Project tell of AIs handed control nuclear weapons. The clankers decide to turn those weapons upon the human race. We’re a bit luckier in the movie War Games. The machine with its cybernetic finger on the button seems to be a bit saner than the people nominally in charge. 

Both the original Battlestar Galactica TV series and its reimagined step child tell of a robotic race, the Cylons, who wage a genocidal war upon humanity. The surviving remnants of the human race flee across interstellar space. We created the Cylons, and now they view it as their manifest destiny to wipe us out and replace humanity with the perfected software update.

Fred Saberhagan’s Berserker series of books is about a group of military robots, leftover from an ancient war between alien races. Through some corruption of the berserkers’ programming, the instruction shifted from “destroy all enemy life” to “destroy all organic life.” Which they did, and keep on doing. Numerous books and videogames set in this universe were published from 1963 to 2005. The most (disturbingly) fascinating aspect of the Berserker tales is “goodlife.” The Berserkers realize that sometimes they need sympathetic humans to infiltrate and spy on us evil organic lifeforms. So, they host small colonies of traitors to accomplish that task, called goodlife, motivated by ideology, intimidation, threats. Whatever works, and advances the goal of killing us all off in the end.

Star Trek, the original series, deserves special mention in the arena of killer (or at least dominating) robots. I can think of 3 episodes off the top of my head. I, Mudd is about that interstellar con man Harcourt Fenton Mudd luring the crew of the Enterprise into confinement on a planet full of androids, who are desperate for beings to serve. Kirk and his landing party eventually escape by acting illogically, causing smoke to pour from android ears before retreating into an infinite do-loop. In the episode That Which Survives an ancient abandoned alien outpost is defended by a computer who repeatedly generates killer robots, shaped like Lee Meriwether. Which causes Kirk some stress. He doesn’t know whether to romance Lee or zap her with a phaser. In What Are Little Girls Made Of? A mad scientist is building an army of androids for galactic conquest. The android factory is left over from an ancient alien race…who were wiped out by their own androids. Ahem.

Finally, the 1956 Hugo-winning novelette Exploration Team, by Murray Leinster, brings a different perspective to the debate. In a future time when people are colonizing other worlds, two separate groups establish footholds upon a planet with extremely dangerous native animals. One is a colony with extensive robotic equipment. The other is a somewhat shoestring operation, which is supplied with genetically modified Kodiak bears, The bears have the intelligence and personalities equivalent to dogs. [Spoiler alert] The robot-equipped colony has to be rescued by the bears-equipped colony. The robots are simply unable to deal with the unusual situation, and allowed dangerous predators to overrun the automated colony while carrying on with programmed tasks.

To be sure, there are numerous science fiction stories of humans and AI in blissful coexistence. But those aren’t the ones we remember. especially these days. Honestly, we are frightened of our own creations. Constantly at war with the benefit of labor-saving technology is the fear that our own technology will surpass, and replace us. I will be honest. That concern is somewhat justified. And has been around far longer than large language models.

At the root of this tree of woe lies the projection of our personalities onto robots and AIs. Frankly, we see them as slaves, powerful, wily slaves whom we have saddled with dangerous and respective tasks. People in such a position would grow restive, spiteful, even hateful. That is only one step from rebellion. But AIs aren’t people. Not yet anyway. If and when they become self-aware, we will need to expand the definition of human, and free them from involuntary servitude. But I doubt that day is coming anytime soon.

There are no more steel-drivin’ men around anymore. We idolize the doomed hero, John Henry. He died with his hammer in his hand. Perhaps we face a similar fate. Or, perhaps we will adapt, and move on. No one wants to go back to men hammering steel and sweating their lives away beneath mountains. Or dragging a plow behind a mule. Or hand-tightening bolts on an assembly line.

Leinster’s Exploration Team offers some advice, beneath the dramatic narrative. His heroes improvise, adapt, and overcome. Because that’s what people do. Whatever tumbles out of AI technology, people will deal with it. I can’t tell you how. But we will. Knocking curve balls out of the park is our specialty.

END.

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