A talent for fooling ourselves

Not too long ago I came across a demo video (about 2 mins.) created in real-time by a physics/ray-tracing engine for a gaming system. It's pretty amazing how realistic everything in this virtual world looks, and how convincing the movement is—aside from the superhuman abilities required of the avatar (pretty usual in gaming). In the name of entertaining each other, we've developed a singular talent for fooling ourselves with our amazing technology.

On that theme of fooling ourselves, a contrast sprang to mind. Warning: there are spoilers below for the two works mentioned.

On the one hand, we have The Twilight Zone episode "The Lonely" (first aired November 13, 1959) in which a convict imprisoned on an asteroid is given a convincingly female robot as his companion in loneliness. After many years in her company, he nearly gives up his chance to return to Earth because of his attachment to her. But he realizes his mistake after the policemen who is his friend takes drastic action to demonstrate that she is not real. In the end, he returns to Earth and relationships with real people.

On the other hand, we have the recent Star Wars installment by Disney, Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018), in which the young Lando Calrissian has a thing for his "female" robot co-pilot. Actually the robot is only vaguely even humanoid, let alone like a woman, and "her" femininity consists of (1) a female voice, and (2) wide "hips." Spoiler: the robot "dies" near the end of the movie and the event is accented as the loss of twu wuv for poor Lando.¹ In reality, fascination with a female-themed machine amounts to a fetish. And it's not as if Solo is unique here. It's just one example that springs to mind among countless others in which a dash of femininity in an artifact is sufficient to motivate a love story, or at least sub-plot.

Notice the historical movement. In sixty years we've gone from recognizing that a mere machine, no matter how convincing, cannot truly replace a woman, to saying that an animate anything, man or machine, donning the figurative wig and dress is really and truly a woman.

But in a larger context, it's not as if we shouldn't have expected this growth in confusion with the rise of technical prowess. The technology that gives us control over nature, also gives us control over each other². You may recognize this quotation: as C.S. Lewis wrote, “What we call Man's power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.”³

The godfather of the modern world, Francis Bacon (1561–1626), predicted as much in his utopian novel "New Atlantis." Bacon uses the device of European sailors who chance upon the island of Bensalem in the Pacific to describe the utopian society that has developed there, with reason and science as priorities. The research institute of Salomon's House exercises control over much of the island's affairs, and it's pretty clear, if one reads between the lines, that this control is not entirely open and honest. For example, the entire New Testament is said to have been introduced miraculously to Bensalem under a pilar of light in 50 A.D. (decades before the New Testament was completed), and later Salomon's House is revealed to be skilled at creating illusions of light. You can read more in the Wikipedia article on New Atlantis.

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Notes

1. I'm still wondering what it means for any mechanical device to die. Since every artifact is assembled by outside agents, presumably it can be reassembled. But Hollywood.

2. As well as extrinsic control over ourselves, that is to say, control outside our intrinsic, co-natural control through our wills (that is, self-control). For example, technology allows people to take diet pills or to use contraceptives instead of controlling their appetites.

3. The Abolition of Man, chapter 3.