Is Virtual Reality about to obliterate all traces of singularity in the modern canons of beauty and lead our societies toward the standardisation of aesthetics?

Joi and agent K. – Blade Runner 2049

Have you already watched Blade Runner 2049? If not, I should make it clear now, before starting this post, that despite the critiques I will point out in a bit, I recommend to anyone who has not watched it yet to do so. Not that it is essential to understand what I am about to say (although this might be a bit of a spoiler for you if you haven’t) but simply because it is a sublime aesthetic experience: Denis Villeneuve revives the beloved ‘noire’ genre, attentively recalling details from the former movie and adding new meticulously thought ideas. He brings together astonishing visuals and a mind-blowing soundtrack by Hans Zimmer to create a magical experience and transport you into the future without you realizing. Thus, everything seems perfect… until a certain point. In fact, after about 40 minutes I started having a weird feeling of unease, mainly provoked by the appearance of Joi (Ana de Armas). She (or should I say it?) is a ‘sexy’, loving, devoted housewife, who cooks every evening for agent K (Ryan Gosling), fixes and washes his scratched clothes, dresses according to his imagination, never contradicts him and so on. The problem is that, ‘she’ is a hologram generated by an operating system bought by agent K to respond to his needs and desires. And, as if this was not enough, the advertisement of Joi displayed in the streets was: “Everything you want to hear”.

At first, this simply drove me mad. Why should a movie coming out in 2017 still display sexist societies?? Especially when it takes place in the future!
Although I won’t discuss this issue any further here, as it is not the purpose of this post, you can find a very good analysis by The Guardian on the topic here.

“Being unique is so much more beautiful than being perfect” – Antidote Magazine

It is only later on, after reading the article “Why is the fashion industry rejecting the standards of beauty?” by the Antidote Magazine that I started thinking about sexism in Blade Runner 2049 differently. I started wondering why such blockbusters still display the ‘perfect bodies’ as we would have wanted them to be in the 1990s, when the standards of beauty where at their highest. Why do so if today, according to the Antidote Magazine, we are supposed to defend uniqueness (to which I will also refer to as ‘singularity’ further on), against the diktat of beauty and its uniformity in the fashion industry? Why is Givenchy’s casting director, Daniel Peddle saying: “Individuality is really crucial at the moment”, while on the other hand the 2016 version of Lara Croft is still too similar to the 1996 one and Joi is a hologram saying “everything you want to hear” and wearing everything you want her to wear?

Joi Advertisement in Blade Runner 2049

Angelina Jolie as Lara Croft

I do not think these famous fictional characters are simply outdated. There must be another reason underlying the divergence between the ideas of the future instilled by pop culture and the reality of what the fashion industry is attempting nowadays.

In fact, in the last two decades our ideals of beauty may have gone too far. Pushed by the fashion industry they reached complete excess, turning what was supposed to be a model into something totally unachievable. Thus, to retrieve the viewers’ sympathy, the editors in chief and main actors of the industry started to prefer atypical faces, unusual bodies and to promote singularity, breaking with the as famous as it is absurd “90 – 60 – 90” mensuration of the supermodels until the 1990s.
By doing so, fashion broadens its horizons, embraces differences and remains extreme in its originality rather than in its perfection.

In the meantime, science technologists keep on researching about Virtual Reality (VR here defined as: “the creation of a virtual environment presented to our senses in such a way that we experience it as if we were really there“.) and developing its potential real life applications.
In the near future, they could provide us with a virtual world, a digital version of everything that surrounds us today and eventually an improved version of it. Moreover, as Lev Manovich puts it in his article published in CTHEORY, “Digit in Latin means number” and digital medias quantify everything. Thus, this means that in a VR world every single detail would be reduced to a bunch of numbers. Additionally, one must be aware that the cost of reproducing code is close to zero, meaning the cost of reproducing a virtual feature is also close to zero.
This leads us to my main concern today: reproducibility of everything in a virtual world.

In the hypothetic case of a virtual reality world, people would no longer need to go through great measures to resemble their beauty ideal. No one would need a haircut, a tint or a cream anymore to look like someone else: everybody could just replicate others’ features.
Finally, even the most extreme ideals could be reached without effort and the fantasies that were so well-anchored in our society and pursued for centuries, such as the examples mentioned in the previous paragraph, could suddenly become achievable and be resurrected, annihilating all the social progress that have been done in the last 20 years.

from left to right: C. Bruni, C. Schiffer, N. Campbell, C. Crawford and H. Christensen at the Versace Show in Milan – September 2017

On the one hand, Lev Manovich explains that electronic art was always based on assembling or modifying pre-existing pieces. On the other hand, Carol Gigliotti says in his paper on The Aesthetics of Virtual Worlds, that the purpose of virtual reality is the same as for any form of art, the attempt to better understand ourselves and our place in the universe. I do understand both arguments, and yet, I fear a loss of originality, the neglecting of uniqueness and a return to the plane ideals of beauty that have been chased for centuries, in a future where Virtual Reality would become part of our real world.

Finally, Paul Klee once said: “Art does not reproduce the visible, it makes things visible”, and so does Virtual Reality. Thus, one can wonder to what extent the first steps of VR truly are a sign of progress or the manifestation of old clichés under a new form? Are they a step into the future or the symptom of a society that still haven’t healed all its injury?
To conclude, it seems to me like VR could be a new way to vehicle centenary stereotypes by making them virtually achievable. We therefore should carefully think through the conditions of its use, to avoid confining our society in its past dreams and allow it to grow.

Artificial Intelligence, A social or antisocial ‘Revolution’?

If Deep Learning is a metaphor for learning about ourselves and the world, isn’t the ability to replicate all the faculties and virtues of the human species into machines the culmination of our quest? Is Artificial Intelligence the key to go beyond our human condition?

 

A cultural obsession

February 10^th, 1996. The day Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov under regular time control. A brand new computer, engineered by IBM, triumphant in front of the Russian reigning chess world champion. A highly mediatized event, as you can imagine, recalling some vivid memories of the Cold War, as once again the world was polarised: American capitalism on one side, Russian ‘hero’ on the other. But this time, the confrontation was also the beginning of a new era.

Garry Kasparov and Deep Blue chess match movie

Although this was the first popular event of that kind, engineers’ had started to dream of a computer able to assess opportunities and take the right decisions way before 1996. In fact, it is back in the early 1950s that Artificial Intelligence research first saw the light and was shortly followed by the development of the first neural networks: a system simulating the structure and functioning of neurons in the neocortex (or at least what we knew about it at the time).
Since then, research in that field may have slightly slowed down in the 70s but it never stopped and one reason for it is that funding never ran dry, instilling the idea that AI is something that could ‘revolution our society’ and ‘profoundly change our lives’.
Today, Google Fellow Jeff Dean, says “deep learning is a really powerful metaphor for learning about the world” and I take this a little further, saying that AI is a mean of exploring the human condition and getting to know what and who we are in the world.

Besides, looking at pop culture it seems like intelligent robots are not only a scientists’ fantasy. They appear in many of the most successful fantasy and science fiction movies of the XX^th century such as Star Wars or Blade Runner. In both the thinking creatures serve us, humans. They are perceived as inferior. This doesn’t seem to be a problem until in Blade Runner the replicants (fictional  bioengineered or biorobotic androids imagined for the purpose of the movie) start a rebellion and are tracked down by humans. The principal character of the movie Rick Deckard, in charge of their obedience to humans’ laws says:

“Replicants are like any other machine – they’re either a benefit or a hazard.”

This is the matter that awoke my inner social psychologist and led me to investigate the progress of AI research, try to understand the motivations behind this quest and finally reflect upon the consequences of the potential success of it. 

 

Introducing you to Artificial Intelligence

So far, one of the main challenges of Artificial Intelligence has been to build autonomous machines, who could learn by themselves, requiring as little as possible human input. This specific field is called Machine Learning (ML). Different attempts have been made to reach the goal. The early stages of AI from the 50s to the late 70s consisted in feeding computers with information about the world which besides requiring an enormous amount of time and people wasn’t helping to interpret ambiguous situations, as reported Robert D. Hof in the MIT Technology Review.

Later, in the mid-80s Hinton and others defined a new model of learning called Deep Learning. This used more layers of software neurons similarly to the structure of the neocortex. Initially, this still required too much computer power and human involvement as programmers had to label all data before adding it in the networks.

However, in 2006, Hinton and others managed to build a more sophisticated system in which the first layers recognize the primitive features of an image or a sound and then sends it to the next layer able to detect more complex information and so on, until the image or sound is identified.

The latest victory of the technique explained here above was the presentation by Google of one of the largest neural networks existing today. The system had to recognize the presence of cats, faces and yellow flowers without having anyone ever labelling these objects… and it did. Nearly perfectly. Says Mr Hof.

 

Is AI really going to be around us soon?

We have very good reasons to believe in the prompt arrival of a strong AI in our daily life as in many fields such as computing, transportation, communication etc. AI is already here. Although, as Toby Walsh likes to say, it is still at its early stages of ‘stupid’ robot. This means the current applications of AI do not use ML yet. A good instance of it is Siri, your iPhone’s ‘intelligent personal assistant’ or Microsoft’s voice recognition program. While in these sectors the challenges are big but the risks are minimal, there are other domains where the challenges are just as big and the risks are higher too. IBM’s Jeopardy!-winning Watson computer is a machine supposed to help people make better business decision. It is currently being applied in many fields, one of which is medicine, to avoid human errors of which 70% are preventable and often due to negligence (!).
 

IBM Watson computer

 

And will it really change the world?

One of the main conceptions of the world when smart robots will live by our side, is the idea of ‘robotisation of work’. This idea goes in the continuity of the Industrial Revolutions.
A 2013 study from Oxford affirmed that 47% of jobs could be automated in the next 20 years. When one hears such a statement, the first thing that comes to mind is the quite alarming question: ‘Will we all be unemployed by 2060?’ But you can sleep soundly tonight: the answer is ‘no’.
Even if this estimation was accurate (and it is not), 47% automating would not result in 47% unemployment. Firstly, because just like in the Industrial Revolutions, these technological improvements would destroy some jobs but they would also create new ones. Secondly, the estimation made by Oxford, appeared to be inaccurate on several points, which I won’t discuss any further in this post but you can find it here.

Self driving car advertisement from the 60s

Furthermore, the idea of robotisation of work can be developed, taking us to the concretisation of the sci-fi representations of the future, displaying robots assisting us and working for us.
As Hal Varian, the chief economist of Google recently said: “the future is what rich people have today” and by that he meant self-driving cars instead of chauffeurs, robot bankers instead of private bankers etc, made possible by the almost null cost of reproducing a code.
Thus, robotisation of work would mean building smart machines thinking faster and performing better than us, therefore able to accomplish all the unpleasant tasks we do not want to do anymore rather than stealing our jobs. This way, we could only do what we want and not what we need. Our needs would be fulfilled by robots, freeing us from any constraint, allowing us to devote ourselves to what makes us humans and what we like the most according to Walsh, such as crafts, creativity, leisure…

 

But do we really want it?

If I were completely free, no doubt I would begin with abandoning myself to creativity, thinking and socialising. But I doubt this would fulfil me forever. I am actually pretty sure it would drive me crazy after a little while.

In fact, I believe we were never meant to be deprived from the necessity to work and to make efforts: we were born with needs and the willingness to satisfy them. Creativity surely is one of the things that make us humans but not the only one. Without a goal in life we sink: this is the first symptom described by people suffering from depression. We are social animals and having distinct tasks and roles within the group has always defined who we are and it has always been a fundamental principle of our society. In other words, our job it is part of our identity and thanks to it we feel integrated in the group: a vital necessity for us.
To conclude, the desire to build intelligent robots sounds like a great cultural challenge but also an aspiration that might go against our own nature and wellbeing.

La condition humaine, René Magritte

Les vacances de Hegel, René Magritte