Vanishing Into This Machine When Robots Sing

Marcus Goodyear

Vanishing Into This Machine When Robots Sing

Does poetry make us human?

November 2010

Machines will take over the world. It is just a matter of time, according to science fiction writers. Think of The Terminator movies or The Matrix or Battlestar Galactica and its cylon robots that destroy civilization out of sheer spite.

Of course, you don't have to watch science fiction to be nervous about where our technology is headed these days.

In its June issue, Scientific American predicted that we will likely create self-aware robots by 2050. The issue quotes Will Wright, co-founder of a robotics development shop in Berkeley: "This could happen in our lifetime. And once we're sharing the planet with some form of [robotic] superintelligence, all bets are off." Will Wright could be deluded, but there are plenty of other reasons to fear robots. NASA robots already took over Mars. Manufacturing robots took over our manufacturing jobs. And online publications everywhere are slaves to the google bots that secretly gather information to make our search engines work.

What does any of this have to do with books or culture?

Books are a technology we rarely fear. We're so comfortable with books that we've forgotten how dangerous they can be. Not that I think we should do away with books, mind you. Plato worried that the written word dehumanized people by separating an idea from our bodies. Thoughts belonged in our memories and our speech, Plato said. But Plato was a technophobe.

I'm not. I find the Roomba robot vacuums equally cool and creepy, but I doubt they will lead to a robot apocalypse. Still, I'm sure technology controls me more than I realize.

Too Much Technology Threatens our Humanity

Beth Revis understands this. The opening chapter of her young adult novel Across the Universe, due out in January 2011, reads like a technology train wreck. Amy and her family submit themselves to being frozen in order to travel across deep space, but the cryogenic process is horrifying. The technology replaces Amy's blood and bodily fluids with blue goo. The technician then installs monitoring wires, which Amy says feel "like a greased broomstick being crammed down my mouth." She is barely a person by the time the technology is finished with her.

Robert Pinsky explores the same fear in the new robot opera Death and the Powers. Although the opera won't open in America until March 2011, Poetry magazine published the libretto this summer. Like Revis' opening chapter, Pinsky presents a world where technology destroys us. In the opera, Simon Powers downloads himself into the System, a machine designed to help him cheat death. As he disappears, his wife cries out, "Show that you are frightened. I feel you already vanishing into this machine." Simon does vanish into the machine, an enormous robotic set that moves in sync with an actor's movements, but no one can tell if the machine Simon is legitimately human.

The opera's frame narrative answers the question for us. All of the performers are robots in the future, themselves part of the System started by Simon Powers. We never learn how the world moves from Simon to robot apocalypse, but we know these machines are not remotely human. They perform the opera and its poetry because they are programmed to do so. It is a duty they do not appreciate. As they say, "All we can understand is the human creator's command."

The robots have no heart to rouse. They have no imagination. They do not have the spark of creativity and passion because they have been made in the image of their fallen creators. They are not stamped with the imago Dei. We know this because they cannot understand poetry.

Can "Robots" Help Us Write Poetry?

I don't care what Will Wright says. I don't believe we will create a robotic superintelligence that improves itself. Even if we do, it won't be human. It won't understand poetry.

But we will. Ironically, robots are already helping us understand poetry in new ways. Some friends of mine have been playing poetry games at Tweetspeakpoetry.com for nearly a year now, and these games depend on very simple Twitter robots.

Recently, we played a game based on Death and the Powers, shouting out our lines to each other during one intense hour of raw creativity. Afterward, Glynn Young edited the lines into poems like these:

When Robots Sing
Hum and strum, and
play black keys with
both thumbs, one
tongue breaking the air,
laughing in code, singing
arias to metal father's and
ghosts of metal fathers. I'll
blink my aria to you in code.

Blink to me in code? Sing to
me in arias; feed me melted
love from your sweet hand.
Sing to me of metal mother's
milk, frozen in time, frozen in
a terrible rhyme spit from
robots like shots of vodka
spilled cold at a binary bar.

The Children of Robots
On the phone my metal father
speaks in my ears, across
the air, ghosting through walls.

The game's robots are so simple it is really a stretch to call them robots. Whatever you call the technology, it can't turn our lines into great poetry. But it does give human editors a new tool to rouse the human heart.

William Carlos Williams explains it well at the end of "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower." His passions swell in the final 18 lines because poetry reminds him what it means to be human. Williams calls this reminder simply "the news," but Christians prefer a different phrase, "the good news." If we don't know the good news, we will die.

My Heart Rouses to Bring You Good News

Too often we think the good news is to be found in whatever is new. This is a deep paradox of our faith. The good news is not news. It has existed since the beginning of time. In the beginning was the Word. God created using the spoken word. We transferred our words into technology, downloaded our memories onto papyrus scrolls and parchment, but they were still words and we were still human.

Without words or language, we lose our creative spark. We lose what makes us human. No one presents a better argument on this front than Radiolab. Their recent episode about Words will astound you. Listen to it, and think about what it means for the apostle John to write, "And the Word was with God and the Word was God." Without language, we are as simple as lab rats. That is not a metaphor, it is the conclusion of scientists studying people who have lost their ability to use words.

Arguably, we cannot think without words--at least not as we understand thinking. We are not human without words--at least not as we understand what it means to be human. Without words, we may not be able to carry the imago Dei.

But I am no technophobe. I do not fear that technology will separate us from the Word and our words. History has proven Plato to be wrong. We can transfer our words from speech to print without losing our humanity. It was a messy process at first. The moveable type press created as much misinformation as it did information. But humanity never lost its words.

Shane Hipps is right in Flickering Pixels: technology is scary and hard and dangerous. But the solution to our problem is not to ignore the problem. Rather than struggle through the challenges facing humanity, too many Christians are choosing to withdraw. They cite Marshall McLuhan like a prophet. "The medium is the message," they say, suggesting that our message is too important to allow it to be sullied by technology.

But McLuhan was only partially right. The medium may define the message when the medium is new, but eventually the medium becomes part of who we are. Eventually, print is not a technology at all. Eventually, there is a television in every home. Eventually, everyone is online recording his or her personal history.

In the meantime, we struggle together to reflect the truth in all that we do. But the struggle is not a war. It is a game. Let's play.

Marcus Goodyear is senior editor for TheHighCalling.org. He is the author of a collection of poems, Barbies at Communion.

Marcus Goodyear

Vanishing Into This Machine When Robots Sing

*

November/December 2016