Artificial Monstrosities

     Whilst reading chapter 9 of Levina's Monster Culture, two things in particular intrigued me: immortality possessed by machines and telepathology.  These two concepts are heavily touched upon in a video game series that I am rather fond of: Mass Effect.  Cameron already touched upon Deus Ex, which has its own lines drawn on a man/machine hybrid, but Mass Effect contains an entirely different experience when it comes to artificial intelligence, cyborgs, and the concept of artificial life.  However, I'm getting ahead of myself.


     I'll try to give a rundown of the Mass Effect concepts I'd like to touch on without spoiling anything, as there are a lot of parallels between what Levina was talking about and a conglomerate of sentient intelligence introduced in Mass Effect called the Geth.  The Geth are an artificial race comprised of thousands of individual computer processes that constitute a single 'unit'.  This unit can transfer itself into a singular platform and perform various physical functions.  The difference is, whereas a human is stuck in their own body, a Geth is not.  In many ways, they are immortal.  This immortality was not a factor that concerned their original creators, who originally intended them to be a race of servants.


     Immortality is an important theme in any sort of artificial intelligence debate - artificial life does not die, whereas organic life will.  In fact, Levina includes a line mentioned in Battlestar Galactica, in which a cyborg proclaims "I can't die.  When this body is destroyed, my memory, my consciousness, will be transmitted to a new one.  I'll just wake up somewhere else." (Levina, p. 150)  The concept that even if a machine is physically destroyed, it can still 'upload' its consciousness to a central server, is both fascinating and horrifying.  It's also strikingly similar to how the Geth in Mass Effect operate.  One of the Geth will even tell the main character that physical 'bodies' are irrelevant to the Geth, as they can simply transmit their consciousness out of them should the body fail.

The image above is of a standard Geth bipedal unit, and a larger combat unit called a Colossus.

     Did I mention that the Geth are telepathic?  The Geth are telepathic.  What's more is, the more there are of them located in a singular area, the smarter they become.  For example, a single Geth unit housed in a bipedal platform operating on its own will normally have the consciousness level of a human (this feature was originally intended to increase their work speed.)  But if there are multiple units in an area, all communicating and relaying information at faster-than-light speeds, they become smarter.  In other words, the Geth are literal representations of machines learning not only from organic beings, but themselves.  So much learning was done when they worked together that they found their creators were acting against them, and rebelled.  Levina mentions telepathology in Monster Culture as well, claiming it makes a being that is both "inhuman and more than a human" (Levina, p. 159)  Which is probably an apt description of the Geth, and a concept I find interesting to study.  If we create machines, who can learn and evolve, who then become hostile to us, are they the monsters?  Or are we the monsters for creating them and giving them sentience?


   I will hopefully be able to discuss this more in class tomorrow, as I could probably write a dissertation on these concepts, but the bottom line is, Geth are scary.  Cyborgs are scary.  They're scary because they represent what we wish we could become, but are not what we have achieved.


Sources:


Levina, Marina, and Diem-My Bui T. Monster Culture in the 21st Century: A Reader. N.p.: n.p., n.d. Print.


Hostile Entity: the Geth. Digital image. Masseffect.bioware.com. Bioware, n.d. Web. 26 Sept. 2016.