Robot Fingers in Ghost in the Shell (1995)
Microcritique: Why we find this scene amply memed
My first newsletter of 2023! A bit late to the party. I was re-watching Ghost in the Shell (1995) to see if it still holds up in 2023 (it does. Once more round the sun!) and fixated on this funny scene that I've seen memed. Enjoy!
These are the fingers of a professor, who has come to collect the body of a very special robot. The professor is typing lines of code into a computer to access certain parts of the captive robot’s thoughts. The possibility of the professor’s infinitely segmenting fingers is hilarious, memeable, but why?
Here a video if you need more context.
The answer is that AI has developed exponentially faster than robotics. (No disrespect to robot hustlers like Boston Dynamics, but generating language has proved more automatable than cheetah-tier bodies.) So, our experience of robot-generated language is actually the silent appearance of words on a page.
Computer code and natural language come out as blocks of text; fingers don’t come out and write them: it is as if the AI brain were thinking the words on a tabula rasa, and these thoughts were legible to us mortals.
So, the fingers’ expansion was an incorrect vision, or prediction, of the future. Not only that but their motion is bizarre. It is not just wrong, but hilariously wrong: a silly vision that came nowhere near materializing.
For reference, below is a video of where we’re at with robofingers. It’s still incredibly impressive but it’s not the technology we’ve selected for producing written language. ChatGPT—who everyone else has already written to you about—is the mechanism that we’ve selected for said purpose.
Have a good week.
Further reading
I found this more adulatory article about the robot fingers, for the curious: Triple Hands, Secret of the Tera Keyboard.