Welcome to the Future

I’ll be your host today.

All jokes aside, if you’re anything like me, then you’ve always had the impression that the future will one day be suddenly forced upon you. You just wake up one day and see that you are now living in Adam Jensen’s metropolis with cybernetic eyes that are capable of showing you your tasks for the day.

Nowadays it’s becoming clear that this isn’t how the “future” comes at all. It doesn’t come at you like a crashing tsunami, but creeps up on you slowly without you even realizing it. The future, in many ways, is already here. Before you know it, you’re waking up and unplugging your electric car to get ready for work, as if it’s just a normal thing to do. Which, by now, it is.

One thing is for certain: the creeping future has ushered in incredible new technology in the form of artificial intelligence. Sure, much of the AI we see is still pretty crass and performs only basic tasks, but give it more time and some AIs will have a humanoid body as their host. Within 5 to 10 years, I believe we will see the birth of the very first fully functional android. Not the infamous Google Operating System, but an actual, extremely advanced artificial intelligence hosted in a humanoid body.

Quantic Nightmare

If you are a PlayStation owner, there’s a chance you’ve already tried out the demo of Quantic Dream’s latest masterpiece, Detroit: Become Human. Renowned for their excellent motion capture, captivating storytelling, and cinematic games, Quantic Dream are bringing a story about the future right to your living room with Detroit. If you haven’t had the chance to try it yet, head over to the PlayStation Store right now and get downloading — you’ll be glad you did.

(There will be spoilers from the demo throughout the rest of the article, so continue reading at your own volition.)

The Detroit: Become Human demo weaves a narrative featuring an android negotiator named Connor. The game is set in a future Detroit where AI technology has become so advanced that humanity enjoys sentient androids that help them with their daily tasks. As a negotiator, Connor’s main duty is to hunt down any deviants — a term for rogue androids that have deviated from their original programming or duty. In the demo, one of these said deviants has actually committed murder, which is the highest criminal offense an android can commit towards their human owners.

The interesting part about this demo (aside from the whole emotionally gut wrenching short story, obviously) is how Quantic Dream has managed to show us a glimpse towards the future. In this demo, the deviant android is not only capable of rewriting his own code to make an emotional judgement by killing the father of the household, but depending on your dialogue choices, is also capable of either killing the daughter or releasing her. This sentient and emotionally charged choice might seems like a very far fetched future problem, but if we just step back a little bit, Quantic Dream’s narrative can serve as a warning to where our current world is heading.

Artificial Intelligence and Self-Modifying Code

Before we dive even further to this discussion, let’s touch a little bit on what artificial intelligence is. Artificial intelligence (AI, or also known as Machine Intelligence) at its core is intelligence demonstrated by a machine in contrast to the natural intelligence of living, organic creatures. The term itself is colloquially applied when a machine mimics cognitive functions that humans associate with other human minds such as “learning” and “problem solving.”

Artificial intelligence was founded as an academic discipline back in 1956. The goal of AI research institutes include reasoning, knowledge representation, planning, learning, natural language processing, perception, and the ability to move and manipulate objects.

The field itself was founded based on the notion that human intelligence can be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it. This raises philosophical arguments about the nature of the mind and the ethics of creating of creating an AI being endowed with human-like intelligence.

According to Bloomberg’s Jack Clark, 2015 was a landmark year for artificial intelligence, with the number of software projects that use AI within Google increasing from “sporadic usage” in 2012 to more than 2700 projects. Furthermore, Clark also presents factual data indicating that the error rates in image processing tasks have fallen significantly since 2011. He attributes this to an increase in affordable neural networks due to a rise in cloud computing infrastructure and an increase in search tools and data sets.

Detroit: Become Human takes the story one step beyond standard artificial intelligence and into a specialized field known as artificial consciousness (also known machine consciousness or synthetic consciousness). This is a field of study related to both artificial intelligence and cognitive robotics. The aim of this artificial consciousness is “to define that which would have to be synthesized were consciousness to be found in an engineered artifact” (Aleksander, 1995). To put it simply, it is a field of study that will help an AI eventually achieve sentient awakening, which I might add is the main premise of Detroit: Become Human.

The other side of this coin is what is known as self-modifying code. In computer science terms, self-modifying code is code that alters its own instructions while executing tasks. The modifications may be performed directly to the machine code instructions by overlaying new instructions over the existing ones. We have seen several examples of self-modifying code in our current world, and a quick Google search will show you what they are. Hell, you don’t even need to look further than some of your smartphone apps to witness self-modifying code at work.

Combining artificial intelligence, machine consciousness, and self-modifying code is what ultimately leads to the main premise of the Detroit: Become Human demo. A deviant android named Daniel has learned that he is about to be replaced, and retaliates by killing the father of the family he’s with as self-preservation. An act that was previously only reserved for sentient beings.

We do not have the full game yet, but the main premise of Detroit: Become Human will involve three main characters. We will have Kara, an android who escapes the factory she was made in so she can explore her newfound sentience; Connor, an android whose job is to hunt down deviants; and Markus, who devotes himself to releasing androids from servitude.

It’s easy to look at Detroit: Become Human and scoff at its warning narrative as something that is still far away in the future. After all, how many of us are worried that our Alexa units are capable of killing us in our sleep? It will be a long, long while before Alexa, Siri and Google get their own humanoid host, right?

Right?

Gaming Prediction of the Future

Not so.

The sci-fi genre where an android achieves sentience and turns against humans is a very popular one. 20 years ago, we watched the first Terminator movie and were at ease about it knowing that the events of the film were set in a distant future. But here’s the thing about that movie in 2018: T800 was sent back from the year 2029, approximately 11 years away from where we currently are.

I like to think of myself as a technophile as I try to devour all the latest technology as much as possible to keep up. If you’re like me, you know well that technological advancement has moved rapidly in the last 10 years. So much so that Moore’s Law about technological advancement will need to be rewritten to keep up with the current trend. For those of you who are not familiar with it, Moore’s Law is an observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years.

This law held true until around 2012 but technology has advanced rapidly since then. In 2017, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich stated that hyperscaling would be able to offset the cadence by aggressively scaling beyond the typical doubling of transistors. The main point of all this is that technology is advancing rapidly and there is a lot that can be accomplished in 11 years.

We have seen Adam Jensen’s cybernetic lenses in Deus Ex, and as of today, we actually have a bionic lens being worked on by a company called Ocumetics. We have seen Adam Jensen’s cybernetic limbs and a quick Google search will show you numerous companies that offer these types of replacement limbs. 10 years ago, the idea of having a robot cleaning your house might have seemed far fetched, but today I’m typing this as my Roomba is doing its daily task of cleaning up my apartment. And earlier I asked Alexa to set up my morning routine playlist and turn on my coffee maker, all without even lifting a finger or walking away from my home-office desk.

The prediction from these kinds of games are no longer mere predictions as some of what’s being “predicted” is already here. Give it enough time and the narrative warning in Detroit: Become Human will greet us as well.

Detroit: Staying Human

Let’s get one thing straight: this is absolutely not a jab towards the game. In fact, I was so impressed by the narrative technology of Detroit: Become Human that it actually inspired me to write this. It had me thinking if the events that unfolded with Daniel and Connor were really as far away in the future as Quantic Dream made them out to be. It made me dig a little bit deeper into the advanced field of artificial intelligence, robotics and synthetic consciousness.

What I found was a bit terrifying but mostly exhilarating. Technological advancement is rapidly evolving and there is simply no way we could or should stop it. However, this is where our main strength as human beings shines through: the ability to feel ethical empathy. We are not governed by a collection of 1 and 0s like an AI, and as their creators, this is what will at least mitigate the possibility of marauding rogue AIs in the future.

Either way, the future is here. I say we enjoy it, and when the time comes, hopefully we can be nicer to our android neighbors than we are to each other right now.

That would be great.

Detroit: Become Human will be releasing exclusively on PlayStation 4 on May 25, 2018.