Robot themed dramas have been embraced by popular culture for almost a century, and been a mainstay of our theatres, cinemas and TV screens for decades now for the first time they have become part of the cast
And the latest incarnation of the idea first popularised by the Czech writer Karel Capek is a German opera performance called My Square Lady which stars a robot named Myon who is real competition to humans because it breaks the last human frontier, it can sing, dance and act. All something of a technological achievement – for example it took two years to teach the robot to walk and Myon learns to express human emotions and how to interact with others.
The 2 hour performance was inspired by the original Greek tragedy Pygmalion where the sculptor falls in love with one of his statues and by the British musical My Fair Lady, where cockney flower girl Elisa Doolittle is transformed into a Lady after being given speech lessons by Professor Henry Higgins.
PassW0rd Radio’s Berlin correspondent Jane Whyatt talked to the theatre critic Rebecca Jackson about the German performance.
She tells Jane the play was an “Artistic, aesthetic mismatch of things, I was game for all those things they were throwing at us… how it adds up, I’m still trying to figure that out!”
Apart from the novelty of watching robots sing, the concept of being made human or being programmed to be humanlike is one of the central questions of the opera and asks: ‘Is there a clear distinction?’
It’s become a popular recent theme the British science fiction film Ex Machina perfectly portrays this conundrum, especially in the case of humanoids, robots designed specifically to exhibit human likeliness.
Channel 4 has also created a gritty British drama starring mostly humanoids where the issues of our Digital Age are highlighted such as our dependence on technology and the effect robots are having on the jobs market where more and more self-service machines are taking over responsibilities that have been traditionally carried out by humans.
It is a trend that scientists expect will only snowball, Oxford University research has predicted that millions will lose out due to the boom in Artificial Intelligence, and that one third of jobs could be done by robots by 2024.
Creative and spiritual jobs were thought to be safe but recently, Google made it known that it uses an intelligence programme named Artificial Neural Networks to distort images in an abstract artistic fashion.
An app is now available called Deep Neutral Net Dreams or “Deep Dream” to create art using your own image, now making #deepdream a trending topic on the social networking account Twitter.
