“ . . . even the most extreme pessimist would surely realize the divine significance of this extinct species and say: It was a great thing, to be human.”

— Carel Kapek

As a species, we've been scared of AI longer than we've known what to call it. In fact, way before HAL, the killer computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), there was Radius, the killer robot from the 1920 play by the Czech writer Carel Kapek titled Rossum's Universal Robots.

Before that, we had no words for our fright over self-sufficient machines. Kapek wrote his play right at the dawn of Modernism, just after the First World War. If you look at the title page, you're looking at the first-ever appearance in print of the word robot. It's based on the Czech word, robota, which refers to forced labor, slavery or serfdom, and it was suggested to Kapek by his brother, Josef, a gifted painter.

Kapek himself came up with Radius, a robot who hates people, knows he's way more capable than a human, and is sick and tired of answering to us -- and so decides to give us a taste of having a master.

Act One features a visit by an unnamed nation's first daughter, Helena Glory, to her country's robot factory to meet with the scientists building the vast robot workforce. She's come to see for herself how and why these men are persisting in an endeavor that's taking all the jobs and driving down birthrates and causing Humanity to steadily lose our sense of purpose. Soon after her arrival, Helena figures out the director, Domin, fell in love with her at first sight. So she uses this to trick him into showing her the formula written by the factory's Frankenstein-type founder, Rossum -- now deceased -- for crafting a robot brain. She burns it.

In Act Two, it's ten years later, and the factory is under siege as a robot uprising rages outside that is steadily wiping out humanity. It seems once the robot workers discovered humans were no longer making robots, they rose up to force production to resume. Then they learned the truth, and that began a massacre.

So when Isaac Asimov comes along in the 40s and writes his story "Lost Little Robot" about Nestor 10, a robot that shows a disturbing ability to disobey the laws of robotics, he's already expanding on a familiar theme. Asimov's story is from his first collection, I, Robot, a title he stole from Earl and Otto Binder's 30s story of the same name.

I can still recall the moment, in a Kansas City multiplex in 1982, watching Sean Young walk out into frame as Rachael Rosen in the classic cyberpunk film Bladerunner with Harrison Ford. I was thinking how weird it was. Why would she be made up like a 40s gun moll? In fact, it jerked me straight up out of the fictive dream the storyteller is supposed to maintain for the audience when telling a modernist story. For a while, I couldn't get back to that hypnotic state so essential for modernist escape. I looked around. No -- nobody else cared. I wasn't even sure why it bugged me. But I couldn't let it go. I mean, why would a heroine living in grubby, rainy, climate-changed LA in the year 2019 do herself up like a femme fatale from a Bogart movie? It was just strange.

What I didn't realize, because I didn't know it yet, was that I'd just experienced my first post-modern moment. In a post-modern moment, the modern reality before us suddenly does the impossible. It glitches, warps or freezes. The dog looks up and says "Hey, how come I don't sleep in the house?" We awaken abruptly to the truth: we aren't really looking at real life. Instead, we're seeing the deeply-coded matrix. What we're experiencing is a simulation, made by fallible people like us, to serve an agenda of some kind. In my case, I was suddenly awake in a way I hadn't been a second before. But within minutes, I was asleep again and no longer cared why director Ridley Scott and writers Hampton Fancher and David Peoples -- working from Philip K. Dick's 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? -- wanted Young to enter like a dream girl from a Raymond Chandler novel.

I'd been absorbed again by the matrix. I only wanted to know more about these Nexus Six robots, so close to being human, they could go toe-to-toe with the Voigt-Kampff test -- a sort of robot polygraph -- and beat it. Much later, I would track down Dick's 1968 novel. It's a fine book but, carefully as I read, I couldn't see anything noir about it. Its settings are not moody, brooding, smoky or goth. It's not raining all the time. The book's hero, Rick Deckard, is not a dry, laconic, wisecracking gumshoe. Instead, he's a quite futuristic bounty hunter who takes on rogue robots and retires them. Fifty years after Kapek dreamed up the problem -- a rebel robot named Radius -- Philip K Dick cooked up the cure. It's Harrison Ford.

I then looked all over for even older robot stories, but found nothing, not even by big names like H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, and Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Of course, 1968 is critical due to that seismic event in the killer-robot genre known as 2001: A Space Odyssey. The script was written by Stanley Kubrick and based on a story written back in Asimov's day (1951) titled "The Sentinel" by Arthur C. Clarke. Any sci-fi book appearing just after the Second World War is, of course, doubly interesting because that's when the Beat writers like Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs also started to emerge. And Burroughs, in particular, will engage in some wild cross-breeding of literary fiction and sci-fi in his work that will influence Bladerunner.

In the Seventies, our killer-AI anxiety seemed to go to a back burner so we could attend to Vietnam and Watergate. It isn't until 1981 when, out of the blue, comes The Terminator, written by director James Cameron and starring Michael Behn and Linda Hamilton. It's based on a nightmare Cameron had of a gravely damaged chrome-steel robot dragging itself down a hallway towards a grim destiny using just its skeleton hands. Suddenly, Radius had morphed into Arnold, a fully-ripped killer bot following orders from a monstrous and fully sentient AI called Skynet.

Bladerunner comes just a year later. Weirdly, three years prior, in 1979, William S. Burroughs would publish a treatment for a movie titled Bladerunner that's actually based on a 1974 novel, The Bladerunner, by a writer named Alan E. Nourse. But it's got nothing to do with killer androids. Instead, it speculates on the dystopian future collapse of the healthcare system. All the good doctors are forced underground and must buy their supplies from smugglers known as "bladerunners," named as such because scalpels are the hottest item they source. Nobody will be surprised that Burroughs' treatment has vigorous gay sex scenes and zero resemblance to Ridley Scott's script for the 1982 film. But the story Burroughs tells is uncannily similar to John Carpenter's 1981 Escape from New York, with Kurt Russell as Snake Plissken, a Burroughsian mercenary figure.

Of course, the big cyberpunk event of the 80s is still coming and it's William Gibson's 1984 killer-AI novel, Neuromancer. Here's the book that will introduce that whole cyberspacey, matrixey thing to the world. Though you still have to hand it to writers Steven Lisberger and Bonnie Macbird, because they wrote the movie Tron (1982), really the first script to offer any inkling of what battle in cyberspace might look like. Gibson was still revising his novel when he happened to see Bladerunner, was struck by the parallels, and made big changes to put distance between his work and David Peoples'. Gibson's story has a hacker hero named Case, a guy with no idea who hired him to take out a rogue AI. Nevertheless, he will go after a soon-to-be-sentient AI named Wintermute. Gibson imagined a future so weird, it's beyond description. Even Proust would struggle to render this setting. It's a place with three layers. The first is physical and called The Sprawl. Picture any blighted urban corridor in any major city. The second and third are virtual. Number two is cyberspace, which is infinite, obeys no laws of physics, and isn't really there. Number three is the matrix, which is a mock-up of an idealized Earth, and also isn't really there.

Case enters virtual reality just like Keanu in The Matrix (1999), by "jacking in" or sticking a computer jack in his brain. Once he's in, Case can do one more trick. If his mission partner, Molly, is jacked in, too, he can "flip the switch" and jump from his brain to hers and see and feel everything she can. The name Molly, as in "gun moll," is about the only noir touch Gibson employs. So the question persists: How the hell did noir get into Bladerunner, the movie? It doesn't show up in other killer-robot stories of the period.

And what is with the origami? Origami turns up twice in the 80s killer-robot genre, once in Bladerunner, in 1982, and again in Gibson's novel Neuromancer, 1984. In Bladerunner, it's the habit of an older bounty hunter played by James Olmos to leave teensy paper animals at crime scenes as his calling card. Gibson's book is set in Chiba City, Japan, an 80s epicenter for virtual-reality gaming platforms like Sega and Nintendo. His hero Case describes cyberspace itself as an origami-like construct, capable of a geometric unfolding, infinitely, in any direction.

But this is getting us no closer to a reason for noir in Bladerunner unless we reach back to the earliest influences on 80s Sci-Fi. After Asimov came out with I, Robot, he followed up in 1954 with a novel called The Caves of Steel. The 1991 Bantam edition cover features a trench-coated detective holding what appears to be a Colt model 1911, also Sam Spade's weapon in Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon (1930). It turns out Asimov always believed that detective fiction and sci-fi were two genres that absolutely should cross to form hybrid stories superior to either alone.

In Caves of Steel, Asimov moves the story three millenia in the future, when we at last roof over the cities, ban combustion engines, filter the air, and live indoors. By then, we've colonized fifty surrounding planets, and robots have risen from menials status to serving in law enforcement. His robotic partner, R Daneel Olivaw, is helping the hero, Lije Baley solve a murder. But this time, it's the human who doesn't like or trust androids and finds it degrading to have one as a peer. It will take several years, enough time for writer Arthur C. Clarke to meet and start working with Stanley Kubrick, for the invention of the devious, murderous, power-grabbing AI known as HAL 9000. But he's just Radius in another form, an angry, mistreated serf. One-hundred-and-seven years later, we're afraid it's Radius who's come to get even for generations of subjugation.

The answer to what noir is doing in Bladerunner is probably simple. Eighty years ago, Asimov must've thought it would be cool to cross the streams. But that's how the postmodern has always worked, through mashups and juxtapositions of unlike forms that nobody thought to combine before, making something new, bizarrely interesting, and even, occasionally, groundbreaking.

A movie I like this time is The Amateur with Rami Malek and Laurence Fishburne (Orpheus, The Matrix). It's a twisty thriller about a CIA analyst who uses his wits to avenge his girlfriend's murder. Warning: it's only slightly easier to follow than Neuromancer.

For any new readers: My novel, Tania the Revolutionary, is available on Amazon for Kindle and paperback or Barnes & Noble for eBook.

The AI Issue

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