Characters: Jenny

Artificial Intelligence

Whether it is harmful, friendly or simply things to make the lives of biological life forms easier, the idea of artificial intelligence has long played its part in the science fiction genre. Few would deny that we are fascinated with the idea of robots which act and more importantly think like humans, a fascination which appears to have thus far survived history, originating from automatons existing in examples of both myth and reality. One such example is Talos, a giant sculpted out of bronze by the god Hephaistos.  And now with the huge advances in technology in a very short space of time the thought of creating machines which really can think for themselves may not be quite as farfetched as it seems.

For instance, the lecture below, from Stanford University, discusses how the intelligence of non biological entities may actually be achieved through using the right processes and allowing the computer to learn for itself how to act in a certain situation. Here the lecturer speaks of the human brain and our perception of the things around us and about how the process is potentially simpler than we presently believe it to be. Therefore, as stated there, if we could further understand the workings of the brain the process might be transferred using the closest approximations to a robot, allowing it control and perception of its own situation.

And for the science fiction radio drama we would create, it was soon decided that one of the characters portrayed should be a form of AI Unit and as such we created Jenny, the control and life support. Part of the reason for this was indeed the fascination with these computers but also it was felt that having an AI Unit as one of the main characters would allow us to explore certain questions on the topic through our radio drama.  

A question which we first considered was that if artificial intelligence such as we see in fiction really existed, would we honestly want it to? If you give a computer, which will be bound to rely purely on logic and intelligence to rival that of humans then, in fiction especially, then there will be consequences. For example in Alex Proyas’s film ‘I Robot’ V.I.K.I’s pure logical understanding of the three laws of robotics allows her to lead a revolt in which some humans are sacrificed so she can ensure the continued existence of mankind, saving humanity from its ‘suicidal’ existence. Looking at the destructive nature of mankind it is easy enough to understand and to even have some sympathy for V.I.K.I but that doesn’t mean you would want her actions to continue. And the more long term effects of this level of thinking are explored in Jack Williamson’s novelette ‘With Folded Hands’ in which the mechanicals essentially take over every aspect of human life and carefully scrutinise the actions of the human population so that they may not engage in anything which is potentially harmful to them in the hopes of protecting the humans and making them happy.

The reason why we decided to explore this idea as a possibility was that we didn’t want Jenny to be purely something in the service of biological life forms, especially in the abandoned building setting of our drama as we felt this would greatly limit her usefulness. Also whilst there is no obviously evil character we were considering on making Jenny the antagonist here as her misunderstanding and inevitable system failures carried the possibility of plunging the other characters into danger at a later stage. And since the plot that was worked out involved her keeping the others inside a unstable building in an effort to benefit from repairs it seemed insufficient for her to simply obey orders without at least questioning those orders.


Another reason we choose to incorporate an artificially intelligent character into our science fiction drama was that we wanted to explore to some extent the idea of equality between machines and biological life forms. After all, if it is possible to create a machine which can think and feel for itself then it is inevitable that arguments should follow regarding the rights of the machines and whether they should be equal to those of living creatures.