The Peripheral 1.5: The AI Therapist

The mention of an "AI therapist" caught my attention in the first few minutes of The Peripheral 1.5 on Amazon Prime Video tonight.  It reminded me of Joseph Weizenbaum's ELIZA program at MIT in, what, our late nonfiction 1960s?  His program passed the test of being believed to be a human psychologist by subjects who communicated with it and didn't know they were exchanging information with a  cleverly programmed computer.

Information is what this episode, which continued to be excellent, was all about.  (Makes sense, in an episode of a series which is prime cyberpunk.)  In one of the best scenes, Flynne explains to her mother that she did not get her medicine from the future.  Rather, Flynn got information in the future about how to make this powerful medicine, which in a nice touch was "printed" (Flynne's word) on a 3-D printer.

Flynne goes on travel to the future -- informationally -- to ask Wilf he was trying to seduce her via the haptic union they had, and he either plays dumb or honestly tells her he has no idea what she's talking about.  Meanwhile, it becomes palpably clear, once again, that not just information can travel from the future to the past when a car materializes and crashes into the police car carrying the Irish assassin with an ok American accent.   But did the car that hit the police car really come from the future, just like the coffee container a few episodes back, or was the car printed in the past (which is more or less the present in the story), and somehow teleported to collide with the police car?   Come to think of it, could the coffee have come from a current printer, too?  With all those expresso commercials with fancy machines on TV these days with Brad Pitt, somehow the idea of 3-D printing coffee doesn't seem that absurd.

It's almost enough to get you to a therapist, though an AI therapist in this case likely wouldn't be the best.  Speaking of which, the episode ends -- apologies, I didn't advise you about spoilers -- with Flynne's avatar in the future rendering the powerful Cherise into unconsciousness in a fight.  So, how did Flynne become such a proficient fighter?   Maybe she picked up some useful martial information from the future.

See also The Peripheral 1.1-1.2: Cyberpunk, Time Travel, and Alternate Reality ... 1.3: John Snow ... 1.4 Who Took Lev's Tea?

alternate reality about The Beatles on Amazon, and  FREE on Vocal

 

Humans 2.2: The Consciousness Code

Humans 2.2 begins with talk of a "consciousness code" - a good description of what Niska has digitally sent out to the world, a code like a virus, that operates in an inexact, unpredictable way, triggering consciousness in just a relatively small number of androids - as far as we know - and maybe not at the same time.  This also is a good description of the unpredictable power of the overall series.

Episode 2.2 can be seen as various riffs on this consciousness code.  Athena is trying to transplant her AI desktop creation into an android body.  She doesn't say this, but she's probably read Merleau-Ponty and his notion of a "metaphysics of flesh" - that you can't have true human sentience in just a nonliving machine, what's needed is a brain in an physical, living, moving body.  Merleau-Ponty was talking about how human intelligence evolved and exists, but the same presumably would apply to artificial brains or AI - they require bodies.   So Athena's on the right track, but her attempt tonight fails.

Mattie's working on this, too, in a different way.  She has a copy of Niska's code, and she wants to create a human sentient android out of a stock model, by uploading the code in its/his brain.  She looks like she's well on the way.

As in season 1, we also are getting a good display of other androids, almost sentient, or sentient in different ways from our main characters.  The shrink introduced last week is back again, and is as well versed in accents as in therapy.  This android psychologist - a psychologist who is an android, not a human psychologist attempting to understand an android -  is actually a good joking commentary on Rogerian therapy, which, as Joseph Weizenbaum demonstrated decades ago, can be easily mimicked by even a primitive AI program.  It's also a riff, come to think of it, on that old joke - "I went to see a child psychologist, and that kid was useless!"

And the android who was a detective - DI Voss - is back again this year.   She seems as sentient as Niska, Mia, Sam, and the rest - but there's something a little different about her consciousness code too, and it will be fun and provocative to see how it plays out.

And I'll be back here with more musings on all of this next week.

See also Humans 2.1: Westworld meets Nashville

And see also Humans: In Ascending Order ... Humans 1.7: "I Think You're Dead, George"