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| "I, Worker" Seinendan Theater Company |
Ever since the fictional Doctor Frankenstein created his
monster, people have been worrying about what may happen to them at the hands
of their own human-like creations. Usually
those worries have been about robots seizing power with their superior strength
and intelligence. But now, in the work
of Japanese playwright +Oriza Hirata, we see humans simply ceding power to
artificial beings that are not just stronger and more intelligent, but more
emotionally sensitive and stable than their human masters. That’s
the theme of two unsettling short plays, written and directed by Oriza,
performed by a cast of humans, robots and an android at Japan Society February
7-9.
In “Sayonara,” an absent father buys an android to read
poetry to his terminally ill daughter, to try to comfort her as she nears
death. The android has no feelings, but
it does have a mind elaborately programmed to learn about and adjust to the
needs of its client. And it does have a
clear purpose, to provide emotional support through art.
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| +Geminoid F and Bryerly Long in "Sayonara" |
The android speaks deliberately in a soothing female voice,
and is equipped with multiple air-pressure motors that enable her to mimic
human expressions. She’s lovely in a
way, and a calming presence, but not quite equal to the task of consoling a
lonely dying youth. Then again, how many
of us are? In the end, the android is unplugged
from her seat and hauled away to her next assignment – reciting poetry to dying
people in the Fukushima
In “I, Worker,” two household robots attend to the needs of an unemployed man and his anxious wife. As in “Sayonara,” what sets the machines apart is their steady sense of purpose, which helps to undermine the already weak sense of purpose in their human owners. The leading man is an idle thirty-something who is well on the road to becoming a hikikomori. That’s a syndrome peculiar to 21st century
This reclusive young man and his wife are cared for by an odd couple of robots. Momoko wears an apron and cooks delicious meals, having replaced the humans in the family kitchen. Takeo serves as a fountain of knowledge for the husband, who quizzes him on trivia like the number of Jupiter’s moons. But Takeo is starting to become infected with the same boredom and hopelessness that is paralyzing the husband. Created to work, Takeo has lost interest in his tasks. He doesn’t even want to leave the house to go shopping.
Increasingly the robots’ chief task seems to be providing
emotional support in the couples’ life of quiet desperation. In the last scene, Takeo reports that the
wife has gone outside to look at the sunset, and she is weeping. The two robots gently urge the husband to go
outside himself, and join his wife in contemplating the beauty of the
sunset.
“Humans are difficult,” the robots agree. They then try to form an understanding of
“beauty,” and conclude that “seeing it with someone else is what makes it
beautiful.” That’s only a provisional
understanding, they realize, because “we’re not that advanced yet.”
So the play ends with a tantalizing suggestion of a future where
robots will understand and be able to explain everything, even beauty, better
than the humans who actually experience it. The robots will have nothing to do except take
care of their owners, which will leave the humans with absolutely nothing to
do. That’s when we’re all in danger of
turning hikikomori.
One is tempted to think this is strictly a Japanese
scenario, until you contemplate how much of our own lives we’ve already turned
over to machines. In the last century, to take just a few
examples, machines have relieved human beings of the need to go outdoors, do
arithmetic, read a map, remember phone numbers, make their own music, supply
mental images to illustrate a story, or even talk to each other face to face. And they’re just getting warmed up. We can already foresee the day when shopping
and driving will be fully automated, too.
What’s happening?
According to one distinguished biologist, it goes along with
a long-term trend: the devolution of the human mind. Stanford University Prof. +Gerald Crabtree says the human
brain reached its maximum capacity thousands of years ago, and since then has
been mutating slowly downward. If a
citizen of ancient Athens, India or Africa were to appear among us, says
Crabtree, he would seem brilliant, equipped with a good memory, a wide range
of ideas, and a clear vision on crucial questions of life. He or she would also have an unusual degree
of emotional stability.
Crabtree traces devolution back to the invention of
agriculture, which began to weaken the link between intelligence and
survival. But he’s not a doomsday devolutionist. He holds out hope that the same science and
technology that weakened our gene pool can somehow in the future save us from
extinction, or even reverse the march toward idiocy.
Playwright Hirata also strikes a hopeful note. He says the mission of his Seinendan Theater
Company and the Osaka University Robot Theater Project is to help make robots part of human society. But hardly hidden in his work is a note of
despair for the hikikomori in all of us. One
of the Japanese poems recited by the android has this refrain: How far must I travel to reach a land where
there is no loneliness?
My hunch: a long way.
And we’re going in the wrong direction.
Copyright 2013 by Tom Phillips
Photos by +Julie Lemberger (top) and +Tatsuo Nambu
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