Will to Live/Die?
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I am intrigued by Linthe's idea about artificial creature's instinctual desire/will to live. This creatureness is not something we usually associate with bots but (I suppose) a crucial question in the field of artificial intelligence.
The examples of the bot WALL-E and "Westworld" very well demonstrate this aspect of creatureness. I am inspired by this blog because the will to live is one of the most fundamental desires of any living thing and projecting this into an artificial creature helps us to understand ourselves better.
However, besides the will to live, humans also have the will to die. Freud famously theorized that humans are driven toward death and destruction, declaring that "the aim of all life is death."
This could be demonstrated by the well-known novel Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. As an artificial creature himself, the suicidal thoughts accompany the monster from the beginning ("I shall ascend my funeral pile triumphantly, and exult in the agony of the torturing flames"). Born in a bad situation, an artificial creature would also rather be dead.
Chinese artists Sun Yuan and Peng Yu created Can’t Help Myself (2016), a large-scale installation featuring a robotic arm for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Not necessarily the will to die, the work at least shows some suggestion of self-harm. And I believe there are more works featuring this theme.
Linthe has some great ideas about making this will to live tangible. I think will to live could be demonstrated in many ways, like the attempt to breathe, the heartbeating, etc. It is interesting that will to live/die could be demonstrated simultaneously. A bot struggling to the surface of the water suggests his/her/its desire to live. Or he/she/it can just drown and let it go. Desire to live and die both exist in the human beings and would be quite interesting to have an artificial creature of these traits.
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