Passing The Turing Test

Conducting The Turing Test: The distinguishing of replicants from real humans lies at the heart of the Blade Runner movie. If thousands more refugee men, women and children are not to be lost in transit, “like tears in the rain”, then the First World’s leaders must prove that they, too, are human.

 

BLADE RUNNER is one of my favourite movies. From the film’s opening sequences, introducing a compellingly dystopian Los Angeles, to the stark poetry of the doomed replicant, Roy Batty’s, final moments, we are invited to consider, exactly, what it means to be human.

 

Based on the science-fiction writer, Philip K Dick’s, novella Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the movie raises all sorts of intriguing possibilities vis-à-vis the future of the human species. Not the least of these is the possibility that, at some point in the not-too-distant future, our technology may be able to replicate human-beings that are not only indistinguishable from the original – but more honourable and compassionate.

 

The distinguishing of replicants from real humans lies at the heart of the Blade Runner story. How to prevent these bio-mechanical devices from deceiving men and women into misidentifying them as fellow human-beings – that is the challenge.

 

From the moment they were conceived, the potential power of “thinking machines”, computers, troubled their creators. As the capacity of these machines increased, and the scope of their capabilities expanded, the ability of average human-beings to differentiate the computer from one of their own kind would, presumably, diminish. It was certainly a possibility that intrigued the father of the modern computer, Alan Turing.

 

Looking fifty years into the future, Turing, the mathematical genius who, by helping to crack the Germans’ Enigma Code, shortened the Second World War by two to four years, saw the need for some sort of test. The question he posed was: “Are there imaginable digital computers which would do well in the imitation game?” His answer was an emphatic “Yes”. He predicted that the computers of the future, responding to human questioners with text only answers, would be able to pass the “Turing Test” (i.e. fool the interrogators) about 70 percent of the time.

 

Blade Runner was released in 1982. Thirty-three years ago, the year 2019 seemed far away enough for all the technological wonders appearing in the movie to have been realised. Sadly, or, perhaps,  fortunately, humanity has yet to develop a significant “off-world” presence. And, while the science of robotics displays considerable momentum, replicants of Roy Batty’s sophistication still seem a long way off.

 

And yet, the questions raised by Philip K Dick, and translated into film by Ridley Scott, have not gone away. Indeed, computers have become so critical to human existence that it is now possible to ask whether the age-old desire to make machines that replicate humans has been abandoned in favour of a new mission to make humans that replicate machines.

 

More and more human-beings are defining themselves in terms of the networks they log-in to – so much so that to suddenly find themselves shut out of those networks would severely curtail their ability to function successfully. Increasingly, we are redefining and reprocessing experience in technological terms. A century ago, people marvelled that the moving images projected onto the cinema screen were “Just like real life!” A century later, people observe real life events and exclaim: “Just like the movies!”

 

Except that the real world is nothing like a movie, or, at least, like no movie any First World audience would willingly sit through. The ridiculously short and tightly edited clips of reality that appear on our devices convey only a fraction of the enormous scale and intensity of human suffering occurring out there in unmediated space – the real world.

 

The intrusion of tens-of-thousands of refugees into the European Union; a flood tide of human misery unprecedented since the end of World War II; is setting up a kind of Turing Test in reverse. In effect, the crisis is posing the question: “Are there imaginable First World human-beings who would do well in the imitation game?” Will the people fleeing from the unending stress and horror of the Middle East and Africa still recognise them as fellow humans, or, have they become so integrated with their devices as to be indistinguishable from machines?

 

The good news is that not even in the highly-networked, hyper-mediated nations of the First World has the capacity for human empathy been totally eliminated. Indeed, the devices that objectively distance us from reality are, paradoxically, without peer in carrying powerful emotional messages across all manner of boundaries. This is by no means an unqualified good, but in relation to the global refugee crisis it is proving to be a powerful goad for official action.

 

Less certain of passing the Turing Test, however, are the First World’s political leaders. Indeed, their responses are so emotionally out-of-sync with the rest of humanity that they seem more replicant than representative. If thousands more refugee men, women and children are not to be lost in transit, “like tears in the rain”, then the First World’s leaders must prove that they, too, are human.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 9 September 2015.

Sweden: A Home For All Peoples - Or The People's Home?

Premature Celebrations: Swedish Democrats Party members cheer the news that its anti-immigration policies have elevated it to third-largest-party status. Three months after the SDPs election success, however, the centre-left and centre-right parties have come together in defence of Sweden's multicultural dream - thereby excluding the SDP from the mainstream of Swedish political life.

MOST NEW ZEALANDERS are immensely proud of their country’s anti-nuclear policy. So many, in fact, that the National Party, which originally opposed the policy, was eventually required to say “me too”. Indeed, since the late-1980s, such a strong bi-partisan consensus has grown up around New Zealand’s anti-nuclear policy that, today, no sensible politician would seriously contemplate knocking it down.

 

Viewed in this light, the ban on both nuclear-powered and armed warships and on nuclear power generation stands as one of the signal achievements of “progressive” New Zealand. Along with votes for women, industrial arbitration and the welfare state, this country’s anti-nuclear stance is held up as proof of New Zealanders’ political enlightenment. It represents the last unequivocal contribution to our reputation as the “social laboratory of the world”.

 

What the anti-nuclear policy is to progressive New Zealanders, Sweden’s incredibly generous immigration laws are to progressive Swedes. Conceived and born in the late-1960s, the hey-day of Swedish social-democracy, Sweden’s commitment to the world’s refugees re-iterated the (long since discarded) promise carved into the base of America’s Statue of Liberty:

 

Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me …

 

As with our own anti-nuclear policy, there was an “anti-imperialist” (i.e. anti-American) element to Sweden’s immigration policy. While the rest of the West were creating refugees, Sweden, that beacon of freedom, equality and solidarity in a darkening world, was lifting her lamp “above the golden door”.

 

Sweden’s welcome to “the wretched refuse” of the world’s conflict zones was a source of pride to her progressive citizens. It reinforced everything they believed was special about their country and its internationally acclaimed progressive movement, led by the Swedish Social Democratic Party (SSDP) which had been in office for the best part of forty years.

 

Not surprisingly, the demands of effective political competition led the SSDP’s centre-right rivals to embrace its commitment to the world’s refugees. Like New Zealand’s anti-nuclear policy, Sweden’s bi-partisan commitment to progressive immigration and refugee resettlement programmes became politically unassailable.

 

Until recently.

 

As anyone reading Henning Mankell’s Inspector Wallander novels soon discovers, the SSDP’s progressive ideals have never been universally accepted by Swedes. Prior to World War II the country boasted a vigorous and vociferous national-socialist movement, and even the SSDP, in the 1930s and 40s, pursued eugenic policies barely distinguishable from those of Hitler’s Nazis’.

 

Indeed, some have argued that the SSDP’s extraordinary electoral success was based not upon socialist internationalism but upon the party’s key concept of the Folkhem (literally, “People’s Home”). Swedish generosity was for the Swedes and only the Swedes. Socialist “charity” began, and ended, where it belonged – at home.

 

Thus it was that as progressive Sweden opened its golden door to the homeless and the tempest-tossed, that other Sweden, the one that saw itself as a single, albeit vast, extended family, recoiled in dismay, and then in anger, at the sudden (and in many locations overwhelming) influx of foreigners.

 

Far from the metropolitan haunts of progressive Sweden, sprawling, prefabricated refugee camps proliferated. Once naturalised, the inhabitants of these camps moved into the packed social-housing estates of Sweden’s provincial cities. So ethnically and religiously undifferentiated were these immigrant communities that they became effectively self-governing. There are places in Swedish cities where the Police and other emergency services hesitate to intervene. Very unofficially, the Swedes call them “No-Go Zones”.

 

The inevitable electoral response came in the form of the Swedish Democrat Party (SDP). In the recent Swedish General Elections it captured 13 percent of the vote – and the balance of power.

 

The SDP promised to co-operate with the minority SSDP-Green government – but only on condition that Sweden’s immigration and refugee resettlement regime be radically overhauled. The SSDP and their Green allies refused, prompting the SDP to, as promised, reject the new government’s budget. Swedes were poised for their first snap-election since 1958 when the centre-right opposition Alliance Party closed ranks with the centre-left parties to freeze out the anti-immigration movement until at least 2022.

 

This is a dangerous experiment, undertaken by the Swedish political class in defence of the increasingly contested humanitarian ideals of the 1960s. The SDP, now casting itself as the last, defiant, defender of the Folkhem, are rubbing their hands in glee.

 

Political nostalgia cuts both ways.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 2 January 2015.