A writer focused on the surprising connections between strange things - technology, psychedelia, science fiction, mysticism and esoterica, cute animals and strange peoples.
As part of the current philosophical discussions about robots and artificial intelligence, questions related to consciousness keep coming up: can a machine develop consciousness (or perhaps can consciousness inhabit a machine), does a machine need consciousness at all to be intelligent, and of course – what consciousness actually is. Science fiction writers have been discussing the subject for decades using robots, computers, and cyborgs that every science fiction prodigy can recite in their sleep: Frankenstein, HAL 9000, Marvin the Paranoid Android. But two characters from one of the most famous literary works in history have slipped under the radar all these years and it’s time to bring them up from the philosophical afterlife to the heart of our discussion in the 21st century – Tick-Tock and the Tin Man from “The Wizard of Oz” by L. Frank Baum.
As soon as 1900, in the first book of the series, The Tin Man appears, known as the Tin Woodman, or by his real and human name: Nick Chopper, since he was originally a real man whose body parts were replaced by metal parts. Indeed, in contemporary terms the Tin Man is a cyborg. Again, this is the year 1900, years before singularists struggling to cope with the anxiety of death would suggest that we start replacing our perishable organs with mechanical parts that last forever. Seven years later, the cyborg with the rusting limbs, along with Dorothy and the rest of the famous gang, will meet Tick-Tock – a robot in every sense of the word, except for the fact that the word itself has not yet been invented and is therefore referred to in the book as Clockwork Man. The fact that Tick Tock is a real tin man, completely brainless and unconscious, shines a bright light on our Tin Woodman, who is after a heart (as opposed to a Scarecrow who is hot for a brain for some reason).
Tik Tok of Oz, The Eighth Book in the Wizard of Oz book series by L. Frank Baum, first published in 1914
A cyborg in search of a heart in the early 20th century is a flashing red light that we’ve all missed in the last hundred and twenty years. We are all so preoccupied with the question of whether a machine can have consciousness that we have missed an equally interesting question: can a machine have a heart? After all, what are Philip K. Dick’s androids if not conscious, but heartless? What are the empathy tests that Descartes gives them if not a way to understand if they have a heart, or not?
A heartless intelligent machine is the machine we caution from, which comes to life as part of the race to develop artificial intelligence without measures being taken to ensure that it does not turn the entire universe into paperclips, as Nick Bostrom’s famous parable essay (more on this in Shalev Moran’s essay, Universal Perspective Machines). A machine with a heart will never turn the entire universe into pins, because it will realize that the universe is full of beings with hearts like itself – empathetic, with imaginations and dreams, turning them into a pin would not be so pleasant for them. One can only hope that if and when the imagined nightmare machine does wake up, it will ask that we take it down the yellow brick road to the Wizard of Oz, because we probably won’t do it ourselves.