What will be your directive now.
In the recent movie Tron Ares this is the question posed to one of the film’s main protagonists, a digital creation and program (Master Control, played by Jared Leto, which has found itself needing to adapt to its encounters with the human world.
Tron Ares flips the script, making the story about how AI enters the world in the form of a permanence code, a code that allows these digital creations to manifest in the physical world without restriciton (meaning, without disintegrating back into the digital ethos that contains its code). Thus the arc follows two characters along parallel journey’s, a human (Eve Kim, played by the charismatic Greta Lee) whom is striving to discover this permanence code in response to a tragedy, and Ares whom seeks it as a means of adapting to this encounter with human emotions like empathy and sadness.
One of the observations the movie makes is how permanence is a bit of a misleading name for this code. To occupy space in the physical world and to be governed by its rules and laws means to have impermanance. This basic insight regarding the nature of life is given further context by way of Eve Kim’s story, a life that has been shaped by loss. As Kim states in the film, life is tough, because the very thing that brings us joy brings us life’s greatest pains and struggles. How we reconcile these things is not easy. In fact, it requires appealing to greater truths beyond ourselves to even begin to find coherence. We are driven by our imagination for a world without loss and suffering, and yet it is this experience of loss that sdrives uts to this end precisely because it makes us aware of what such things rob us of.
For Ares it is simpler. He (given that he manifests as a human male) knows his creator. He knows his directive. And yet these things hit a roadblock when the complexities of life enter the picture. He finds that life is not reducible to this functional program that he embodies. I found myself thinking in this moment, isn’t this how it goes with questions of God? We know our creator. We know what this affords us in terms of directive. But then life happens and creates this tension between who we understand God to be and the suffering and loss that we find in this world we inhabit.
In the case of Ares, the disonnance arrives in the contrasting images of this percieved tyrant creator and the empathetic human. At least in part, rather than imaging his creator he desires to become the image of this human. He sees in this human the ability to learn what it means to live with these complexities. In this sense, he sees it as advancement.
And yet (spoiler alert), when Ares ultimately becomes permanent, when he manifests in the physical world, this is the first question that faces his new future: what is your directive in a world of impermanence.
Asked in another way: what does it mean to be human in a world governed by the cruelties of the natural order.
His answer? I don’t know. As I see it, there are two ways we can interpret this answer. One, as a positive statement that says he is free to create his own directive without rules or code. Or, it reflects the emergence of a new kind of existential crisis that now drives him to seek an answer in a world defined by its own code.
Personally, I think its the latter. To me, the power of this story is found in these parallel threads between the two characters. In the case of Eve Kim, its one thing to accept that “this is the reality of things.” Thus we cannot ignore it. It is part of what we call the human experience. It’s quite another to to acknowledge that the pain and suffering she experiences suggest that life sees such things as a virus in this program we call the natural order. The human experience would cease to be coherent if it wasn’t free to respond to that which we deem to be not right. Hence the dilemma. Such things cannot be neutral when seen in the light of the human experience, be it when we see it in the world outside of ourselves or within our own embodied existence.
It is equally true that to suggest that to say the one thing AI would be struggling to understand is this human experience requires us to fundamentally define the human experience in terms that reflect something other than a purely functional code. After all, Ares understands “function” and utility. What Eras doesn’t understand is how to reconcile this reality with an awareness of these greater allegiances or truths that disrupt simple directives. Here in lies the modern problem. It finds itself saddled between two competing allegiances but without a meeans of grounding it in anything coherent or true. What we have is the myth of progress. This is why, as the movie points out, we tend to fear AI. We fear losing ourelves in the process. The question that we can’t actually answer is, what does it mean to be “ourselves.” What is lost when we reduce life to material function and see biological function to be synonymous with intellegience and knowledge (read: computer code)? Can we logically argue that these things are qualitatively different?
If Tron Ares has a reigning message, it is that the world is not ready to answer such questions, even as AI is already here and very much here to stay.
Interesting enough, a recent book I finished called A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence (Jeff Hawkins) arrives at precisely this conclusion. What we commonly see as “human qualities” is actually part of the old brain. The new brain is that which has evolved us into a superior “intelligent species.” Intelligence is defined as that which enables technological progress and advancement by way of processing information. The way the new brain is designed, expressely layered over top of the old brain which binds us to the sorts of emotions and drives that inhibit progress, is by way of a unified engineering center of information built off of numerous identical processing centers. These centers drive what and how we think through employing a voting process. The more of these identical processing centers that we have, the more voting can occur and the smarter we become.
For Hawkins, humanity’s future and survival depends on this intelligence creating computers that aren’t “human,” but rather modeled on new brain intelligence in ways that can be its own thing. Emotionless programs that are able to progress technological advancement.
Sounds like his theory would see Ares as a real problem for the future of humanity. In fact, it is the voting process that looks to exterminate him and his dysfunctional responses.
What is compelling to me on this front is to note how this basic scientific assertion regarding what intelligence is and what it means to the quesiton of defining the human directly contrasts with the vision Ares is pointing towards as a story. Here it imagines the “human” quality creating progress. Or at least the human quality it wants to raise up over the unwanted qualities it deems bad. Herein it seems to find the greatness and potential of the whole human enterprise. And yet, it can’t escape its own conundrum. In reality, the technological advancement and differences the program could make by prioritizing intelligence would be greatly superior if it had followed the purely functional and utilititarian vision of the “tyrant.” One could even argue this is actually how the world and it biological history works in reality.
This begs the question, from where does this allegiance to old brain emotions get its directive for the characters who sense the world cannot be reduced to material function? In a world governed by the natural order, loss is a means of adaptation and evolution. And yet in the realm of human experience we can see that loss is that which life fights against. Loss is, in relaity, disorder. Same with suffering. Same with violence. Unless we raise the inherent value of all life above the myth of progress we cannot justify the human agenda. This disonnance occurs because reality is based on this simple fact: the preservation of one thing requires the loss of another. Welcome to the program.
Which is why I think that for Ares’ character, permanence, better undestood as impermanence, creates an existential crisis that demands an answer. And if he understands that AI is expressely modeled after reality, this seems to logically conclude that this search at the very least desires and longs for some sense of a creator. Something that can root this new life he has now embodied in something true and coherent. After all, as he moves to explore the world, this world only intensifies and heightens the disonnance, especially if he has come to resist those modern tendencies to reduce reality to a functional, material property built on codes. This, I would suggest, is the seeking that affords a life of impermanence its directive. And its the very thing that seems to define the human experience throughout its long history: we seek God. This is true even where and when we redefine God in certain or uncertain terms. It is, by my best definition, what it means to be human.
The Stories of my Life 