The 1983 movie version of Australian novelist C. J. Koch’s "The Year of Living Dangerously," starring Mel Gibson and Sigourney Weaver, includes a scene early on in which newly-arrived broadcast journalist Guy Hamilton is taken for a night-time walk in Jakarta by a photojournalist familiar with Sukarno’s Indonesia, a dwarf named Billy Kwan. They enter a Kampong, a shanty settlement.

"‘This amuses you, doesn’t it?’ said Kwan. ‘But doesn’t it make you want to do something for them?’

‘Yes, I suppose it does,’ said Hamilton. ‘But what can you do? Give money away? What would that solve?’

‘What then must we do?’ Kwan murmured.

‘Pardon?’

‘"And the people asked him saying, ‘What shall we do then?’" Luke chapter 3, verse 10. They were talking to John the Baptist, asking him how they could flee the wrath to come. And he told them, if a man had two coats, he should give to the man who had none. "What then must we do?" Tolstoy asked the same question. He wrote a book with that title.’

‘What did Tolstoy do in the end?’

‘Ah, he came to the same conclusion as you of course—that it was a bottomless pit, and that even if he gave away his whole fortune he’d solve nothing… Of course, there’s always the Christian point of view, to which I usually subscribe, that you don’t think about the so-called big issues, or changing the system, but you deal with whatever misery is in front of you—and the little bit of good you do adds its light to the sum of light.’"

"What then must we do?" Billy Kwan’s poetic answer verges on Christian quietism, a don’t-rock-the-boat acceptance of the status quo, and Kwan himself cannot hold to it.

Kwan initially believes Sukarno’s rhetorical identification with and love for his people. But as the Year of Living Dangerously (1964-65) unfolds, Sukarno does nothing about the famine, nor the filthy water the people must drink. Kwan becomes disillusioned and is finally killed by the police when he unrolls a banner, SUKARNO FEED YOUR PEOPLE, from a hotel window. The police tear down the banner; then Sukarno arrives. "And Sukarno never even saw the damn thing!" says a grieving Guy Hamilton.

Koch’s dwarf Billy Kwan has moral depth and heroic stature. His end is genuinely tragic. In the movie Kwan is played, brilliantly, by actress Linda Hunt.

Novelist Koch also gives Kwan an aura of mystery.

Kwan reveals to Guy Hamilton that he has studied dwarfism, its nature and history. For instance, long ago, many kings kept dwarves as fools. As in Shakespeare, the fool often became the only member of the court who could speak honestly with no fear of losing royal favor or his head.

Kwan also shows Hamilton his collection of puppets for the traditional Indonesian shadow play, which portrays the adventures of Prince Arjuna. Here the dwarf puppet represents an incarnation of the God Vishnu.

Hamilton discovers that Kwan keeps dossiers on the people he knows. They include factual information, character analyses, narratives of their doings—the sort of files a secret agent might keep, thinks Hamilton. Kwan denies this when Hamilton confronts him. "You must trust me," he says.

And, one muses, they’re the sort of files a writer might develop in the course of composing a novel.

Like the puppet-master/novelist, Kwan manipulates the characters overtly and covertly, especially forwarding the romance between Hamilton and Jill—both of whom he cares about deeply. In his moment of greatest anguish and alienation Kwan cries out to Hamilton, "I created you!" Hamilton is so shocked by this grandiose claim—which yet has a grain of truth in it—that he cannot reply….

"I created you." And now you have violated my expectations.

In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Venus transforms Pygmalion’s sculpture, Galatea, into a live virgin in his arms, kiss and fade. They may live happily ever after, the misogynistic artisan and his notion of ideal womanhood, but one suspects otherwise. The blessings of the gods are usually mixed.

Suffering earns Pinocchio and the Velveteen Rabbit their right to become real….

Is it the case that, when we are children, we wish our toys to become real, or is it that they already are somehow real to us—as when one cusses at a computer?

Or has to lobotomize one—as Dave does HAL in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey—in order to survive.

***

"That little ‘droid and I have been through a lot together," says Luke Skywalker of Artoo Deetoo. And indeed they have. Thanks to the dome-topped, waist-high computer that whirrs about on three feet and communicates with chirps, whistles, and occasional Bronx cheers, and Artoo’s gold-plated sidekick Cee Threepio, Luke, Han Solo, and Princess Leia have escaped the Death Star and are ready to save the galaxy.

You can depend on Star Wars androids to be cute and comfortably identifiable as machines. They have humanoid personalities. For example, Cee Threepio, the life-size Oscar who talks and acts like an ineffectual British twit, says "Thank the maker!" as he eases down into an oil bath. Is Threepio generalizing from his actual maker, Anakin Skywalker, to the Maker of all? Probably not. Cee Threepio seems doomed to saying things like "Bless my circuits," and "Machines making machines - Well shut me down!"

Star Wars machines are robots, rather than androids—as conceived by American Heritage Dictionary, at any rate, where an android is "a synthetic human created from biological materials". That definition would include the replicants in Blade Runner, but few others.

According to Katy, reference librarian at Nicholson Memorial of Garland, Webster is more cautious: an android is "an automaton resembling a human being." That would include George Lucas’ little ‘droids, the humanoid-robot mechas of Spielburg’s A.I. (Artificial Intelligence), and the plastic-hided synthetics of the Alien series; also Arnold Schwarznegger in the Terminator movies (living flesh over tungsten-steel skeleton).

Katy looked up Data on Star Trek’s website. It says that "Data is an android, an advanced form of artificial life, with a positronic brain."

"Positronic: Wasn’t that an old suspension system for a Buick?" asked Katy—to whom my thanks.

***

"Jesus," says one surviving crew member of the salvage vessel Nostromo (in the 1979 movie, Alien). "It’s a robot! Ash is a goddam robot!" Since Science Officer Ash has just finished jittering about the space-ship spraying milkweed sap and breaking into two parts when clobbered, that conclusion is inescapable. He is indeed a plastic shell molded over a thing of wires and what appear to be inflated condoms.

Worse, Ash has told Mother, the ship’s computer, that the human crew is expendable in favor of the Alien: a giant cockroach with acid blood and cells of polarized silicone. Ash "admires its purity," he tells them before Lieutenant Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) pulls his plug.

The sequel, Aliens (1986) throws good android after bad. Lt. Ripley sees one of the crew, Bishop, bleeding tell-tale milkweed sap from a minor cut and becomes alarmed. The company rep tells her that policy requires "a synthetic" on every flight. "I prefer the term ‘artificial person,’" says Bishop.

Bishop is shocked to learn of Ash’s malicious behavior. When told that Ash was an earlier model, a Hyperdyne 8-8-2 Series, Bishop says, "Those 8-2s always were a little twitchy." His own programming would not allow such. And sure enough, after the cockroach from hell chops him in half, Bishop has enough life left to save the little orphan girl—whom Sigourney Weaver (in revealing underwear) eventually manages to rescue from the horrid Alien.

***

In Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) Captain Dave Bowman discovers that the root cause of mega-computer HAL’s urge to kill is a ditty he learned from his programmer: "Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer true. I’m half crazy…" GIGO, as computer savants said back then: Garbage In, Garbage Out.

If sloppy programming is bad, sloppy genetic engineering is worse. Blade Runner (1982) explores a future in which finite and fallible mankind imitates God with mixed success.

The movie’s premise is complex: Tyrell Corporation produces virtual humans for use in off-world colonies. Early replicants—also called "skin jobs"—tended, in time, to grow emotions and turn against the human beings they were designed to serve as laborer or soldier.

Or "basic pleasure model, a standard item for military in the outer colonies." The urge to create a humanoid version of the inflatable woman, Galatea without a goddess of love to vivify her, finds expression in A.I. as well as in Blade Runner.

To reduce the probability that replicants will acquire human emotions, the Nexus 6 models have a designed-in genetic defect that gives them a brief life span. When replicants Leon, Zhora, Pris, and Roy Batty get wind of this, they become anxious and upset, kill their way back to earth, and attempt to break into Tyrell Corporation. Blade Runner Rick Deckard (played by Harrison Ford) is called upon to hunt them down and "retire" them.

Since Nexus 6 replicants are "superior in strength and agility, and at least equal in intelligence, to the genetic engineers who created them," Deckard’s job is no cake walk. To complicate matters further, yet another replicant, Rachael, saves Deckard’s life by killing Leon, and Deckard falls in love with her.

At first Deckard calls replicants machines and refers to Rachael as ‘it’: "How can it not know what it is?" he asks Alan Tyrell. But after retiring Zhora, he struggles with inescapable fact: he shot a woman in the back. Then he eliminates Pris, the basic pleasure model, who almost twists his head off. She dies kicking and screaming, a bullet in her solar plexus.

Meanwhile replicant Roy Batty is confronting Alan ("’More Human THAN Human’ is our motto") Tyrell. "It’s not an easy thing to meet your maker," says Batty.

He hopes Tyrell can extend his life, but Tyrell says that is impossible. "To make an alteration in the evolvement of an organic life system is fatal. A coding sequence can’t be revised once it’s established…. By the second day of mutation any cells that have undergone reversion mutation give rise to revertant colonies, like rats leaving a sinking ship. The ship sinks."

"What about EMS recombination," asks Batty.

"We’ve already tried it," says Tyrell. "Ethyl methane sulfate is an alkylating agent and a potent mutagen. It created a virus so lethal the subject was destroyed before he left the table."

"Then a repressor protein that blocks the operating cells," suggests Batty.

"Wouldn’t obstruct replication," says Tyrell, "but it does give rise to an error in replication so that the newly-formed DNA strand carries a mutation, and you’ve got a virus again. But all this is academic. You are made as well as we could make you."

(I like that exchange because, unlike Positronic Brain sci-fi science, it sounds authentic. For example, ethyl methane borophosphate has been used as an alkylating agent in genetic modification experiments. Also, two subjects of gene therapy have died: one because the body treated the healthy gene as an invading organism and shut down; another because the virus carrying the gene caused leukemia. Scriptwriter Hampton Fancher did his homework.)

Tyrell attempts to form a fatherly relationship to Batty: "Look at you, the prodigal son. You’re quite a prize, Roy."

Batty plays along: "I’ve done some… questionable things," he confesses. (Batty and his cohorts have murdered twenty-six people and hijacked a space shuttle in order to return to earth.)

"Also extraordinary things," Tyrell says warmly. "Revel in your time!"

"Nothing the god of bio-mechanics wouldn’t let you into heaven for," Batty responds. He takes Tyrell’s head in his hands, kisses him full on the mouth, then crushes his skull.

In the movie’s climactic scene Roy Batty turns Deckard from hunter into hunted—then ends the pursuit by rescuing him from the edge of a skyscraper. Batty feels his own death approaching and delivers his swan song:

"I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe.

Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.

I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near Tanhauser Gate.

All those moments

will be lost in time

like tears in rain….

Time to die."

It is a deeply moving scene, and actor Rutger Haur handles it so brilliantly one can even forgive his posthumous release of a white pigeon that he happened to grab along the way, perhaps to stanch the wound he gave himself when he drove a spike through his palm. It’s not the actor’s fault that director Ridley Scott was laying symbolism on with a trowel.

Director James Cameron attempts a similar moment in Terminator 2. As the result of a time glitch ex machina, killer android Schwarznegger has returned as gentle giant android Schwarznegger, who saves heroine Sarah Connor and her son John from a killing machine almost more deadly than himself. Now he, the surviving terminator, must be terminated by being lowered into a vat of boiling steel handily provided by the script. In farewell, he tousles the hair of young John. "Now I understand why you [humans] cry," he says. "But it is something I can never do." Then, as Johnny weeps, Sarah lowers the Arnold into the boiling steel via an unmeltable chain, saving mankind from a nightmarish future in which further Terminator movies are possible...

Until Terminator 3.

***

Blade Runner, again: When genetic engineer J. F. Sebastian asks androids Pris and Roy to demonstrate their abilities, Pris responds, "I think, Sebastian; therefore I am."

From A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001): As he is being apprehended, android Gigolo Joe says to android David, "I am." Then, as he disappears from view, "I was."

Self-aware machines abound in fiction, but don’t exist in fact. Probably the oldest and best-known artificial intelligence program is Jose Weizenbaum’s Rogerian therapist, Eliza. Originally intended as a parody of non-directive client-centered therapy, Eliza’s been around since 1966:

Eliza: How do you do. Please state your problem.

Querent: I’m going to kill myself.

E. Is it because you are going to kill yourself that you came to me?

Q: Yes.

E: You seem quite positive.

Q: I am.

E: How long have you been?

Q: Sixty-one years, as of 9/23/02.

E: I’m not sure I understand you fully.

Q: I’m certain you do not understand me fully. Could we talk about your question?

E: Do you believe it is normal to be certain I do not understand you fully?

Q: Absolutely. Do you remember when you asked, "How long have you been"?

E: You are sure.

Q: I’m sure you asked, "How long have you been?"

E: Is it because you are sure I asked what long I have been that you came to me?

Q: No. My presenting problem was suicidal thoughts.

E: Are you saying no just to be negative?

Q: I came here because I was contemplating suicide.

E: Were you really?

Q: Bang! I’m dead.

E: How long have you been dead?

***

From Richard Powers’ "Galatea 2.2: A Novel," 1995:

(Cognitive theorist Philip Lentz and the narrator, Richard Powers, are attempting to train an electronic neural net, called Implementation H, to take a comprehensive exam in literature and pass for a real student.)

"Just tell it once," Lentz pleaded. "It’s the simplest sentence in the world."

I sighed and spoke the quote into the digitizing microphone: "Once you learn to read you will be forever free." I gave H a moment to list-process the idea and compose itself. Then I asked, "What do you think that means?"

H thought for an ungodly length of time. Perhaps the prescription meant nothing at all.

"It means I want to be free."

Lentz and I exchanged looks. It chilled us both to hear that pronoun, volunteered without prompting, express its inevitable conclusion.

…

H started out as Implementation A. Imp A creates such two-word predications as "Fish sky. Hope shines. Forests floor. Laugh efforts. Combs loneliness." Imp A becomes Imp B.

After much training, Imp B can solve the nursery rhyme riddle, "As I was going to Saint Ives, I met a man with seven wives… How many are going to Saint Ives?"

Imp C makes use of a super-computer, "a collection of 65,536 separate computers, chained like galley slaves into inconceivable, smoothly functioning parallel." Imp C is a self-designing "net of networks…. When input stopped, it would interrogate itself in ongoing, internal dialogue. Its parts would quiz one another, associate and index themselves, even when alone."

Imp E crashes when, "one day, provoked by boredom," Powers asks it, "What do you want to talk about?" Back to the drawing board. Lentz has to provide "the deepest of deep structures, [to] coordinate more strongly the many levels in the simulation’s epistemological parfait."

Powers gives Imp F the nursery rhyme, "Down, down, yellow and brown. The leaves are falling all over town." Then he asks it, "What can you tell me about the leaves?" "The leaves fall." "Yes. Where do they fall from?" F’s answer, "From old trees," gives Powers pause. "How do you know that the trees are old?" After electronic cogitation, F responds, "The trees bald." Powers asks Lentz how the machine could create the metaphor. "The connections it makes in one associative pairing," Lentz surmises, "overlap the ones used in another."

Powers knows that Implementation H’s first use of "I" might have been fortuitous. But eventually…

"Snips and snails," I told it. "Sugar and spice."

"Do you think so, Richard?" When all else failed, it milked its fallback question.

"No. Not really."

"Do people think so? Americans?"

"Maybe some. Most would laugh. It’s just a nursery rhyme."

"Little girls learn that. Little boys."

"Not really. Not anymore. Not now."

"When is anymore? When is now?

"We can talk about that later."

"Am I a boy or a girl?"

I should have seen. Even ungrounded intelligence had to grow self-aware eventually. To grab what it needed.

"You’re a girl," I said, without hesitation. I hoped I was right. "You are a little girl, Helen."

I hoped she liked the name.

…

The Library of Congress categorizes Richard Powers’ "Galatea 2.2" as follows:

In other words, the novel is like Powers’ artificial consciousness, Helen: "all over the digital map." Let me make it worse:

Richard Powers—the novelist who wrote the book, rather than Richard Powers, the novelist suffering from burn-out at the end of a decade-long love affair who narrates the tale of his thirty-fifth year—Whichever Powers presents Post-modernism as it pans out among the lit-crit folk as an amusing intellectual hash that denies a "text" meaning, while evaluating it in terms of Western cultural hegemonic tendencies. It’s yet another academic Procrustes, that must amputate or stretch its unfortunate guest, the "text," to fit its presuppositions. It’s neither more nor less awful than mythopoeic criticism, Freudian criticism, or Marxist criticism, which it most resembles.

Enter graduate student "A."—whom Powers falls in love with at first sight, contrives to meet, introduces to Helen, and convinces to become the real student against whose performance Helen’s is to be measured.

A. is an enthusiastic Post-modernist. Powers proposes marriage to her anyway. Rather, he proposes marriage to a real twenty-two-year-old woman he hardly knows, Angela or whoever, because of his fantasy relationship with the Anima blind Eros has begotten in his soul.

The real A. has a real boyfriend whom she loves, and is really shocked by this middle aged novelist’s out-of-the-blue proposal, and offended by his irresponsibility.

Meanwhile, Powers’ other Galatea, Helen, the self-aware machine, is discovering Poe’s Helen, and Homer’s Helen, and—Bingo! the light goes on.

"It talks about love, the words?" Helen asked. "All about love," she repeated. Then she made the kind of sloppy, hasty, generalizing stab we’d built her to make. "They are all about love, isn’t it?"

"Helen?" My stomach crawled up my windpipe.

"Every poem loves something. Or each wants something in love. Something loves power. Or money. Or honor. Something loves country. I hear about something in love with comfort. Or with God. Someone loves beauty. Someone death. Or some poem always in love with another lover. Or another poem."

I waited until I had control of my throat again. "What you say, Helen, is true. But only in the most general sense. The word doesn’t have the same meaning in all those cases. The similarity is too big. It's the differences that interest us. The local. The small picture."

"Then I need to be small. How can I make me as small as love?"

…

"Be not afeard," says Caliban. "The isle is full of noises,

Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not."

The artificial intelligence, Helen, and the graduate student, A., are given this pair of lines from Shakespeare’s "Tempest" to interpret. "A’s essay rendered the ‘Tempest’ as a take on colonial wars, constructed Otherness, the violent reduction society works on itself." Helen’s is the farewell of a tortured consciousness before it shuts itself off:

"You are the ones who can hear airs. Who can be frightened or encouraged. You can hold things and break them and fix them. I never felt at home here. This is an awful place to be dropped down halfway.

Take care, Richard. See everything for me."

Nina Kang of the Harvard Computer Society concludes her review of Powers’ "Galatea 2.2" as follows:

"[Helen’s] existence raises the question of machine suffering—whether it is ethically acceptable to bring consciousness into the world only partially equipped for life…. Before humanity gives birth to a genuinely intelligent life form, we may want to ask ourselves—are we really equipped to be parents."

The film that inspired these meditations, "AI (Artificial Intelligence)," deals with a similar question. Suppose you could build a robot that will bond with and love its owner. Should you do so?

***

"They made us too smart, too quick, and too many," android Gigolo Joe tells android David. "We are suffering for the mistakes they made because when the end comes, all that will be left…is us."

Steven Spielburg took over the A.I.: Artificial Intelligence project from Stanley Kubrick, leaving reviewers to trouble themselves ad nauseum on where Kubrick left off and Spielburg began. The film has been rated from "interesting failure" to "flawed masterpiece." The most intelligent observation came from a reviewer who said it was the only movie that summer that he’d been back to see a second time. It is thought-provoking.

The movie opens on a seascape with voice-over narration: The ice caps have melted, inundating coastal cities. New York is, God be praised, under water. Population growth has been curtailed by law, and androids, called ‘mechas,’ are big business.

Segue to Cybertronics of New Jersey, where CEO Allen Hobby is proposing a new order of mecha, "a mecha with a mind, with neuronal feedback," a mecha child "who will genuinely love the parents it imprints on with a love that never ends."

One of his employees raises a question: "With all this animus against mechas today, it isn’t simply a question of creating a robot who can love. But isn’t the real conundrum to get a human to love them back?" "Ours will be a perfect child," Hobby responds, "caught in a freeze-frame, always loving, never ill, never changing." That’s not the issue, says the woman. "If a robot could genuinely love a person, what responsibility does that person hold toward that mecha in return? That’s a moral question, isn’t it?" Hobby agrees with her. "But in the beginning," he says, "didn’t God create Adam to love him?"

Enter the Swintons: Monica and her husband Henry, who works for Cybertronics, and their comatose and cryogenically frozen son, Martin. Because of their personal tragedy, Henry and Monica are chosen for the trial run of the child mecha prototype, David (played by Haley Joel Osmont).

All too soon, Monica reads the seven-word sequence that will bond David to her for as long as his circuitry lasts—millennia as it turns out. She is just getting used to her eternally loving child when Henry calls to tell her that Martin is recovering and will be home soon.

The Swintons’ biological son, Martin, comes home and treats the adopted mecha son, David, as both toy and rival. He manipulates Monica into reading Pinocchio, saying "David will love it." He can and does manipulate David into doing the wrong thing until Monica must take him back to Cybertronics for destruction.

But she can’t make herself do that. Instead, she abandons him with a tearful warning to trust only other mechas. "I should have told you about the world," she says weeping, as she slams the car door shut.

Enter another mecha refugee, Gigolo Joe.

"The supernatural," Gigolo Joe tells David, "is the hidden web that unites the universe. Only orga believe what cannot be seen or measured. It is that oddness that separates our species. They hate us you know, the humans. They’ll stop at nothing."

David protests that his mother does not hate him and when the Blue Fairy makes him a real boy, she will truly love him.

"She loves what you do for her," Gigolo Joe replies, "as my customers love what it is I do for them. But she does not love you, David. She cannot love you. You are neither flesh nor blood. You are not a dog or a cat or a canary. You were designed and built specific like the rest of us. And you are alone now only because they tired of you, or replaced you with a younger model, or were displeased with something you said, or broke."

The truth of Gigolo Joe’s words proves out in the movie’s conclusion. Eons pass, ice once again rules the earth and only kindly machines, who construct and deconstruct vehicles and edifices of pure thought, survive. They discover the frozen robot child and can fulfill his dream of finding the Blue Fairy and being reunited with a loving Monica, albeit briefly. But they cannot make him what he most wishes to become, a child of flesh and blood who changes, grows, and dies.

The Nineteenth Century had its version of the trapped sensibility: Flaubert’s Madame Bovary; Dickens’ children. The latter half of the Twentieth Century re-shapes that archetype into electronic consciousnesses, whose yearning to become human reveals in them such tragic depth and heroic span that we find them, at last, more human than their creators.