Meeting OSCAR and Erica.  On almost living bodies, new media aesthetics, and the East-West divide

Abstract In this paper OSCAR, the protagonist of the online science fiction project The Modular Body of Dutch media artist Floris Kaayk, meets Erica, an android robot, functioning as an autonomous conversation partner, and designed by the Japanese robotic engineer Hiroshi Ishiguro. It will be argued that these two cultural artifacts, despite striking similarities (both are advanced products of reductionist converging technologies, balancing between fiction and reality, and embedded in the mass medium environment of the Internet), from an ontological perspective they embody two different attitudes towards robots and artificial intelligences. Whereas The Modular Body is prototypical for the Christian Western worldview in which android robots are under taboo, the Asian love for android robots like Erica, which mimic human appearance and behavior as close as possible, is connected with the reflective anthropomorphism that characterizes Eastern religions like Buddhism and Shintoism.  Although we should be aware of a digital revival of orientalism (the more because in our globalizing world we increasingly exchange and share cultural forms, information and communication technologies being obvious examples), Westerners may learn something from Eastern robotics. Because of their religious traditions Asian people may be better prepared for the conceptualization and design of a society in which humans and artificial lifeforms harmoniously live together.  

1. Introduction

This year, I came across OSCAR and Erica, two cultural artefacts that intrigue me, each as such, and also as a pair, both because of their striking  similarities and differences. I call them cultural artefacts, because both are somewhat difficult to pin-point conceptually, notably because of their ontological vagueness. Each has a hybrid character and is located somewhere in between the partly overlapping domains of art and technoscience. At the same time they show some fundamental ontological differences, which ultimately seem to be of religious nature.

OSCAR is the protagonist in The Modular Body, an online science fiction project, made by the Dutch filmmaker and visual artist Floris Kaayk (see Figure 1).

Figure 1 OSCAR

In 2012 Kaayk got world wide attention through his project Human Birdwings, a series of video clips on YouTube about an engineer who succeeds realizing an old dream, flying with the help of bird-like wings. The series was viewed by millions, discussed on websites and television, and turned out to be a hoax. In The Modular Body, OSCAR is presented as a living organism, built from human cells by Cornelis Vlasman, a brilliant synthetic biologist. The Modular Body website[1], launched on April 13, 2016, consists of 56 interconnected videos, belonging to different genres, such as scientific documentaries, YouTube vlogs, and television talk shows – which together constitute an over-arching narrative. It is complemented by The Modular Body Facebook page[2], and most of the 56 videos are also launched on YouTube.[3] Again it was an instant success. By the end of June 2016, the website had been visited more than 500.000 times, the Facebook page got 83.000 likes, and the movie clips on YouTube has been viewed no less than 15.000.000  times. And just as in the case of Human Birdwings, it evoked loads of comments and discussion.

Figure 2 Erica

Erica is an android robot, acting as an autonomous conversational robot (see Figure 2). It was presented in 2015 by her creator, Hiroshi Ishiguro, professor in robotics at the Graduate School of Engineering Science of Osaka University, Japan.[4] In 2006 Ishiguro received a lot of publicity after the launch of his mechanical twin, the geminoid robot HI-1. The presentation of Erica, the “most intelligent and beautiful”[5] android ever,  was an international media event, too, and was reported worldwide. Erica is able to have natural interaction with persons by integrating various technologies such as voice recognition, human tracking, and natural motion generation. She has nineteen degrees of freedom for face, neck, shoulder, and waist, and can express various facial expressions and some gestural motions. She speaks with a synthesized voice.

The fact that OSCAR and Erica meet in this text is in a way rather contingent. It was motivated by the fact that my encounter with these artefacts took place within a time span of less than two months, just before and after a three-month stay in Kyoto Japan. Moreover, in both cases I had the chance to study the artefacts more closely.  In the case of The Modular Body, I was invited by Floris Kaayk to play a small role in one of the video clips (I was invited to perform as a professor in philosophy, who, as a guest in a talk show, comments on the creation of OSCAR, so acting naturally was not too difficult). In the case of Erica, I didn’t play a role (at least not as an actor), but visited Hiroshi Ishiguro’s Laboratories in Kansai Science City in June 2016 as a part of an article I was writing on the Japanese fascination for androids. I also gave a lecture at Ishiguro’s lab, on the Total Turing Test in recent science fiction films such as Ex machina (2015) and Uncanny (2015), and about the debate between Turing and Wittgenstein about the question whether machines can think, and within that context I discussed Erica with Ishiguro and his team.

2. OSCAR and/versus Erica

In my comparison of OSCAR and Erica, I will discuss four aspects that together constitute their aesthetic, technoscientific and religious qualities, respectively their subject, their form (that is: the way the subject is represented), their expressive dimension  (that is: the way they emotionally involve their beholders), and finally, their interpretative context (the Western worldview in one case, deeply influenced by Christianity,  and the Eastern worldview in the other hand, more specifically by Japanese Buddhism and Shintoism).[6]

2.1 Subject

What OSCAR and Erica share is that they are both human artefacts, more precisely examples of artificial life and intelligence. As such they are both products of today’s state of the art information technologies, synthetic biology and robotics respectively, though both are closely connected with disciplines as information and communication theories, artificial intelligence and neurosciences as well.  They are typical products of the so-called converging technologies.

There are also some striking differences. Whereas OSCAR appears to be an impoverished organic model of human life: a collection of basic, lab-grown organs and limbs, controlled by a computer-brain, Erica, in spite of her mechanical character,  at first makes the impression of being a real human being, as she is able to communicate in a meaningful way, which is generally considered to be essential for the human lifeform. However, as all chatbots so far, her communicative skills are still quite primitive compared to a human being and restricted to particular subjects. She is still far from passing the Turing test.

What is important, both from an ontological and an aesthetic point of view, is that both OSCAR and Erica have a fictitious character, they are representations of something else, though in different ways. OSCAR does not exist in reality. It is a computer-animated character, part of a science fiction story, though many aspects of this story are derived from real science. Creating artificial life is the holy grail of synthetic biology, and step by step this goal is being realized in laboratories all over the world, by genome transplantation, the creation of biobricks, nanomolecular pathways, extended and alien DNA, and biochips, to mention just  a few examples of the present research into the origins of life. So although Oscar is fictitious, he is an almost real scientific fiction, a kind of science faction. Varying Aristotle’s famous remark in the Poetics that poetry is “something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universals, whereas those of history are singulars” (Aristotle, 1984, 1451b5-7), we might say that whereas the history of synthetic biology only show us particular aspects of the ongoing creation of life,  The Modular Body shows the coming universal truth about synthetic biology. And for that reason it is also able to raise all kinds of anthropological, ethical and political questions that are connected with the creation of life, as it is shown in the trailer of The Modular Body.

In the case of Erica the fiction has a different form. Erica is not a character in a science fiction series, but a real robot. However, she is fictitious in the sense that, as an android computer, she appears to be a human being, whereas she is not. The holy grail of android robotics is to create a robot which is no longer distinguishable from a real human. In that sense, android robotics could be called the science of deception, because unlike synthetic biology its aim is not to create a real human being, but a mechanical robot that looks and acts like a real human being. However, the same counts in a way for artificial intelligence in general. Take for example the famous Turing test. When Alan Turing proposed this test for artificial intelligence in 1950, the very point was deception: trying to make the questioner think that the machine is a human being (this is also the main theme in recent science fiction movies like Ex Machina and Uncanny). For that reason the criticism that was raised in 2014 against the creators of Eugene Goostman, the first softbot that passed the Turing test by presenting itself as a 13 years old Ukrainian boy which did not have English as his mother tongue – was somewhat strange, as the very aim of the Turing test is to deceive the questioner.[7] Maybe Turing was right when he called intelligence a foremost emotional concept! (Turing & Copeland, 2004, 431).

Anyway, also in the case of Erica, there is a lot of deception at stake. While during theatrical presentations and photo presentations in newspapers or on the internet Erica is presented as a creature which is bodily quite similar to a human being, the fact that Erica’s body is just one part of a complex network, consisting of computers with speech recognition and deep learning programs, speakers, a whole array of microphones speakers, even connected to the Internet through an open domain conversational system (which searches the web for usable snippets of similar conversations as she is presently involved in) etc. (see Figure 3).

 However, these aspects of her artificial nature are carefully hidden in her media presentations, for example, in the advertisement, which appeared June 17, 2016  in the New York Times (UBS/BrandStudio, 2016), Erica is presented as an intelligent being, not as an artificial intelligence program that only pretends to be intelligent.[8]

Figure 3 Erica in laboratory setting

And in case of (the presentation of) her conversations with visitors, her artificiality is carefully hidden as well. However, although Erica appears to be an individual, she is actually no less modular than OSCAR. This brings me to the differences in the form of representation between OSCAR and Erica.

2.2. Form (of representation)

In the case of Oscar, his modularity is not hidden, but explicitly shown. As the title – The Modular Body – already indicates, modularity is the very theme of this project. Moreover, the presentation of OSCAR is modular as well (see Figure 4). As I already mentioned, the project is an interactive, multimedia project, consisting of a website with 56 video clips, which are also distributed on YouTube, and a Facebook page (itself already a modular medium, because each Web 2.0 page actually is an assemblage of elements taken out of the Facebook database (Van den Boomen, 2014, 163)). Moreover, the many comments, reactions and likes on Youtube and Facebook also became a part of the modular body.  As such, not only the subject of The Modular Body, but the form as well, are clear examples of what I elsewhere have called a database ontology (De Mul, 2009). Basically, a database is a collection of elements, which are organized according to a specific database model. In the computer age so-called relational databases dominate. In a relational database an entity is reduced to its most basic elements, which can be combined and recombined in an almost infinite number of ways, depending of the queries of the use. In a relational database with work contacts, these basic elements are- for example - name, company, street address, city, country, telephone number, and e-mail address. Due to this atomization, I can list the information in the database in all possible ways, for example alphabetically on name, by telephone number, by city, email address etc. In the age of computers, databases are not only practical instruments, but have increasingly become conceptual models for reality. Molecular biologists, for example, consider life to be database consisting of about 3 billion nucleotides, which can be recombined in an hyper-astronomical number of ways (De Mul, 2013a). The Modular Body explicitly represents both in its contents and in its form a similar database view on life. Actually, it represents a reductionist view on reality, which dominates the modern, mechanistic worldview at least since the 16^th century (De Mul, 2013b).

Figure 4 The Modular Body website

The way Erica is presented, on the other hand, is rather holistic. As a representation of a human individual, she is more than an amalgam of elements, but shows an organic unity, which is more than the sum of the constituting elements. At least, this is the way she is presented, because as a robot she is, no less than OSCAR, a product of the mechanistic and reductionist sciences and technologies. After all, in the domain of science and technology Japan is no less modernized than the Western world. Seen in this light, Erica’s anthropomorphic appearance rather seems to be a kind of ideological masking of mechanistic reductionism. Or is there more at stake here? In order to be able to answer that question, we should also take a look at the eye of the beholder, both in East and West.

2.3. The perspective of the beholder

Aesthetic experience is not only about the subject which is present (for example a landscape) or represented (a painting of a landscape) and the form of this subject, but is also connected with the behold-der, the way (s)he relates to and interprets the work.

One way to approach this dimension of aesthetic experience is to look at the specific perspective we take. The Modular Body is an interactive piece of work, which means that we not only have a freedom of interpretation (as we have when we read a novel or watch a movie), but we are actually responsible for the performance of the work. We have to find our own way through the database of 56 video clips, decide if we want to read the ‘About’ page or Colophon, share fragments with friends, contact the maker or move to the Facebook page or YouTube to read or leave comments.[9]  However, although The Modular Body project offers a lot of interactivity, we do not interact with OSCAR, the main character of the story, itself. We are unable to take a second-person perspective as we do when we communicate with a living person or even with a pet. It seems neither possible to imagine ‘what it is to be OSCAR’ (cf. Nagel, 1974). In other words, a first-person perspective identification is lacking as well. What we actually do is to observe OSCAR from a third-person perspective, in a rather objective way.

In the case of Erica, however, the interaction has a fundamentally different character.  As soon we enter a conversation with her, we almost automatically take a second-person perspective. This also enables us, up to a certain level, to identify with her from a first-person perspective. Although it is not possible to imagine ‘what it is like to be a robot’, we at least are invited to anthropomorphize our experience and to project thoughts, needs, desires, feelings and other mental and bodily states to her. It’s comparable to what my grandchildren do, when they say that the vacuum cleaner robot turns before the staircase, because “he is afraid to fall down stairs”. Although they know that the robot is programmed to behave in that way, it is not silly to talk about its behavior as having intentions. After all, aren’t our intentions programmed as well, by the blind watchmaker called evolution (Dawkins, 1986)?

Maybe it is because of the difference in perspectives from which we approach OSCAR and Erica, that our emotional response is quite different in both cases. A well-known dictum reads: beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Artworks not only express feelings and emotions, but they also evoke them in the beholder. However, in contemporary arts beauty is not the only, and maybe not even the dominant feeling or emotion. We live in the age of no-longer-fine-arts (nicht-mehr-schöne Künste) (Marquard, 1968, 1989). At least since Romanticism, many new aesthetic categories came into being (or were rediscovered), such as the sublime, the tragic, and the absurd. In the case of OSCAR a feeling often reported by visitors of The Modular Body website, Facebook page or YouTube, is disgust. OSCAR is far from beautiful, it is not even sublime (in the sense that it overwhelms us because of its size or force), but simply disgusting (which has its own type of unpleasant form of attraction, as we experience, for example, when we are confronted with a heavily wounded or dead body) (see Figure 5).

Figure 5 OSCAR

In the case of Erica and other androids, on the other hand, the situation is quite different. Especially in Japan. Japanese people are fond of robots, especially of androids.[10] They dance and sing at electronics exhibitions, show bridal dresses at the catwalk, and appear on television. Robot competitions are immense popular, as is the Henn na Hotel, (almost) completely staffed by robots. [11] Android robots even appear on stage and in movies, and last year one of the leading roles in the movie Sayonara was the Geminoid F, created by Ishiguro, which was even nominated at the Tokyo International Filmfestival for the best female actress award[12] (see Figure 6). Android robots – and the success of Sony’s robot dog Aibo shows that this also is true for robotic representations of other living beings – are by most Japanese people regarded as being cute, friendly, and even beautiful. Their love for robots sometimes even inspire them to have their robot blessed by a Shinto priest or bear it to its  final resting-place with Buddhist rituals.

Figure 6 Film poster Sayonara

This does not mean that there are no unpleasant feelings at all. In 1970 the Japanese robotics expert Masahiro Mori introduced the term bukimi no tani genshō for the uncanny[13] feeling that we sometimes experience when we are confronted with something which resembles a human being very closely, but yet differs from it in a fundamental way (see Figure 7). This not only is true, for, example, regarding a corpse, but also for androids (Mori, 1970). There seems to be some form of cognitive dissonance at stake. We approach the android like a human person, but are confused by, for example, its mechanic or stereotype behavior. 

Figure 7 The Uncanny Valley

However, the Western attitude towards robots seems to be fundamentally different. Although Westerners may have the same uncanny feelings like the Japanese people in the case of photorealistic androids, which fail to imitate human behavior in a realistic way, their attitude to robots in general seems to be much more negative. If we look, for example, to Western science fiction about robots, it is striking that it is, from the gothic novel Frankenstein, which Mary Shelly published in 1818, on (Shelley, 1994), predominantly apocalyptic. Movies like Bladerunner (1982), Terminator (1984) and - to take a more recent and already mentioned example - Ex machina (2015) all have as their central theme the destruction of human beings by robots. Even in the famous robot stories of Asimov, in which the robot laws that have to prevent that robots ever would harm humans play a crucial  role the theme is most times the trespassing of these laws (Asimov, 1982). And although The Modular Body is not about robots in the classic sense and is not explicitly apocalyptic, one is not tempted to attribute a positive outlook to this science fiction story.[14] And this apocalyptic look is not restricted to the arts. Scientists in the West often have a negative attitude toward robots. They publish alarming warnings that robots will take away our jobs, focus on the destructive character of drones (flying robots), and last year the famous physicist Stephen Hawkings even warned  us that robots may soon dominate and replace human beings.[15] Even in the most optimistic versions – like the heavenly fantasies of Moravec and Kurzweil about the coming singularity, there is no more room for human beings.

Compared to Western science fiction, Japanese science fiction in general is much more positive about robots. Robots like Astroboy, for example, the main character in a manga comic that appeared between 1952 and 1968, and which has been adapted several times to animation movies is not an enemy, the negative Other of man, but rather aa helper and friend of humanity. 

How should we interpret this striking difference in attitude between the Western world and Japan? This is the topic of the last section of this essay.

2.4. Interpretation

Although Western culture, especially European culture, has a predominant secular character, it has been heavily influenced by Christianity. One aspect of this Christian legacy is the taboo on ‘playing God’. Although God has made man the steward of life on earth, and is even permitted to experiment with it to a certain extent, creating life, and especially human life, is the exclusive privilege of God. Even in secularized culture scientists and roboticists who break this taboo, are reproached for acting out of hubris, which in Christian culture is the mother of all deadly sins. And as also taught by Greek tragedies, hubris  inevitably leads to disasters and catastrophes.

Moreover, Western metaphysics since Socrates and Plato on, but especially in the modern age of science and technology, has always been characterized by a separative desire. In the West, the separation between life and death, body and mind, man and animal, mortals and gods, man and wife, often has an absolute character. In Asian cultures, Japan especially, the boundaries between these opposites are – as we find it visually expressed in the famous yin-yang symbol - much more vague and fluent. This is especially apparent in the domain of religion, and this has profound implications for the Japanese attitude towards robots. In the animistic tradition of Shintoism not only human beings have a spirit (kami), but animals, plants, and even stones as well. It is not surprising that within this worldview also robots are attributed with a spirit. And from a Buddhist perspective, robot Masahiro Mori states that robots also aim for the realization of the Buddha nature (Mori, 1982).

Like in the West, Japanese people compare human beings with animals, but not only or predominantly to determine the differences, but also to point at their likeness. In modern Japan, for a large part, robots have taken over this mirror function. Within this “reflexive anthropomorphism” (Sone, 2012), robots do not stand against human beings, but are part of their nature. Is it for that reason that skillful behavior in Japan often makes the impression of being robot like, carefully following a script?

In our globalizing world, the opposition between East and West is increasingly becoming more relative. Converging technologies are a global phenomenon. As I have tried to show with regard to OSCAR and Erica, in spite of some fundamental differences, there is a lot that these artefacts share. Moreover, absolutizing the differences between East and West would be motivated by a separative drive that has resulted in all kinds of theoretical and practical problems (think of the insolvable mind-body problem in Western philosophy). Just like Asian countries have incorporated much aspects of modern, Western culture is increasingly open for alternative ways of looking at human life. And as my example of ascribing intentions to a robot vacuum cleaner showed, in the West there is also an  increasing openness towards the Asian approach of technology.

However, ascribing a soul to a robot still is for many Westerns a bridge too far. Within a still strong reductionist and mechanistic tradition, many philo-sophers even doubt if human beings have a spirit. Maybe, because of their animistic tradition, Asian people are better prepared for conceptualizing and designing a human life with robots than Westerners. OSCAR still has something to learn from Erica.

3. Conclusion

Of course, we should be beware of digital orientalism, uncritical idolization of Eastern robotic wisdom. After all, even in robot loving Japan the integration of robots in human culture is not without problems. This becomes clear, for example, when we read the user contract designed by Softbank for the buyers of Pepper, advertised as the world’s first emotional robot. The creators of the robot have specified in the contract that buyers must not use it for "acts for the purpose of sexual or indecent behavior."[16]  This specification does not seem to be motivated, like the recently launched UK Campaign against Sex Robots, by the fear that such robots might dehumanize women, but rather out of care for the fragile soul of this emotional robot. Not everyone in Japan has already realized Buddha nature, so it seems. Maybe we should be glad that the consumer version of Erica is not yet for sale.

4. References

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Marquard, O. (1968). Zur Bedeutung der Theorie des Unbewußten für eine Theorie des nicht mehr schönen Kunst. In H. R. Jauß (Ed.), Die nicht mehr schönen Künste. Poetik und Hermeneutik 3 (pp. 375-392). München.

Marquard, O. (1989). Aesthetica und Anaesthetica. Philosophische Überlegungen. Paderborn: Schöningh.

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