After Yang: Special Talk-Back Event

thank you all for being here my name is anne merchant and we are always glad that you are here and that we are here and of course the we is not only i but i'm rick lovert i'm the program director of the science and entertainment exchange a program of the national academy of sciences exactly and of course we are here for our um talk back for the virtual screening of after yang which was um the alfred p sloan foundation's uh winner of the from the um sundance film festival so we're extremely excited to be able to do that and of course one of the the topics of the film is ai and i never failed to mention the the relevant work from the national academy of sciences and we do have a host of reports that do relate to that topic and i think sochi is going to drop a link in the chat and it's a very varied kind of body of work that we have really interdisciplinary coming from our policy and global affairs division from our computer sciences and telecommunications board um from the division on behavioral and social sciences so you can really see that ai touches a lot of different topics in science and engineering and so i think that that's a really interesting way to approach the topic um but of course the other way to approach the topic is through the medium of film where i think it becomes sort of emotionally resonant for people and makes it really human and and relevant to a lot of people which is why the exchange exists and so of course rick this is where i hand it to you so you can explain a little bit about the mission of the science and entertainment exchange yes so if you're a writer director producer actor storyteller of any kind novelist documentary filmmaker you have a question about science you can call us we've done over 3 400 consults since we opened our doors in november of 2008 including so many movies where people wear full body spandex and shoelaces from their eyes so if you have uh questions about science please please be in touch and if you are a stem professional and you're just hearing about what we do and you're interested in being connected with storytellers please do contact us sachi's going to put some info for you to reach to us i want to thank our sponsors howard hughes medical institute without his support we would not be doing any events frankly um also of course the alfred p sloan foundation uh which i'll get into in just a second uh from whom we get major funding and also so many individual donors so many of you in the audience thank you if you gave uh for this event it goes right back into this programming thank you i want to thank also our team courtney sachi jeff ameche for technically producing these events ann and i would be lost without you we do not know what we are doing technically so i want to talk about the event structure today just a little bit we have a moderator and two speakers first b cavelo is the director of emerging technologies at the aspen institute and it's rare to find someone so just energetic and infectiously engaging as b no pressure b there you go uh we also have an extremely talented invisionary director in coconutta who is a favorite at the sundance film festival as well as a senior programmer from sundance moderating the conversation they will be talking in just a minute we're going to get off screen if you have a question at any time just please put it down here and i will forward it on to john uh we always get so many great questions sorry if we don't get to yours it's my fault not john's um if you want to see this after the fact if you want to check out the thing it will be on our website hopefully saatchi's going to drop a link down there too as well we get that question a lot so my rabbit hole for the week the thing that just caught my eye and i couldn't look away from as we were researching this event um so i have two things one is the coverage of samsung's latest generation of robot helpers uh they are nothing like yang but uh they're there it's pretty interesting what's coming and the other is habitat 2.0 which is facebook's project to have robot helpers in your home i do not want facebook folder my laundry this is a hard pass for me um and yeah so i had actually looked back at an older um article in the new york times it was john markoff's article called a case for cooperation between machines and humans and it's a provocative call for really limiting the way in which fully automated robots are allowed to fold our laundry or do much of anything else because the it's ben schneiderman who's at the university of maryland really warns us that this sort of absolves us of any ethical responsibility for the way in which robots act on our behalf so it's a very um interesting look at ai and so sachi has also dropped the link there yeah so our moderating monitor moderator today is a science uh senior programmer at the sundance film festival john 9. for more than a decade the exchange has been collaborating with john whenever he uh calls us up we always look forward to it um in conjunction with his work with the alfred p sloane foundation from whom we both uh with whom we both have a relationship um so the sloan foundation gives an award for a film that uh exceptionally portrays science and or scientists uh every year and john is involved with that i am so thrilled to have a veteran science and media pro like john on our stage uh john welcome hey thank you rick and ann appreciate it um i'm very grateful to be here i've been a watcher of many exchange events uh and and have loved all the places those conversations have taken me so i'm glad to be uh included here in part because then i say this somewhat sheepishly because i hear it so often um i really love films about science and science fiction um and i'm gonna try to offer a very quick frame for where we might go today in this conversation that looks at after yang in a kind of particular lens around its futurism uh it's world building and the science that it supposes how we might relate to technology and how our technology might uh one day relate to us so something that's always struck me about science fiction and why it's special at least to me is that it's kind of innately aligned with our sense of wonder the wonder that we have as kids that we look at the natural world and we wonder how things work that we look uh to the stars and we wonder what's out there or that we project our societies into the future and we wonder what we will be able to make or do and i realize i'm using science fiction in relation to this film and i'm the last person literally the last person to weigh down a work by putting it into a category um this is a film that exists uh very clearly as the expression of a filmmaker who has uh who's a real cinephile and who has so many different um preoccupations and interests and he has a very unique voice and this is a kind of way of blending some of the traditions and genres a lot of traditions and genres but one of amongst them science fiction and i think that both with this film and the alexander weinstein short story saying goodbye to yang from which it is adapted um this is a film that imagines a future world with a technology that exceeds our own and and that brings up certain dramatic situations and certain ideas that wouldn't be possible without that world and one of them obviously is the idea of an artificial being i didn't realize until a few years ago that the word robot is actually a relatively recent word it was coined in 1920 in a play called ru r rossum's universal robots which is written by a czech playwright and novelist karel chapek and it's drawn from a slavonic word that means servitude or involuntary labor in the play a company uses advances in science to produce robot beings that perform basically work that humans don't want to and they end up rebelling against and killing their human creators um that's obviously not the after yang that we're watching uh this is a film that does not belabor uh those elements of the story its future is not showy um but lived in and technology is not particularly conspicuous and yet it's really intriguing um and it's i think you know it's a film that is uh more about family and memory and human nature it owes as much to ozu as it does to the tradition of science fiction but it's a really beautiful illustration of how expansive a form science fiction can be and the idea that it has this incredible philosophic reach and can be about ideas um and that's obviously not the kind of storytelling that we associate with the spectacle uh sci-fi it's i guess what we call more the lo-fi sci-fi and that's something that i think has been really interesting at least from my standpoint watching independent cinemas to look at the way independent storytellers have explored that genre and and have used science fiction to ask really interesting questions so um without further ado i know some of you have watched uh the film i think most of you have watched the film but i realized that uh some people weren't able to so i wanted to give one wanted to level the playing field really quickly and give those people an opportunity to at least get a taste of flavor of the film um we have courtesy of 824 who's releasing the film at the end this week we have the trailer for the film so i want to ask that we play the trailer for those people who weren't able to actually watch the film come on yank what are you doing come on [Music] what happened to yang i don't know shut down last night he won't restart has this happened before no [Music] if we can't get yang fixed i'm not gonna buy another sibling for mika [Music] it is an interior core problem [Music] i need your permission to break open the core we've always known that some bots are equipped with spyware you might not want this part in your house anymore [Music] i wish i had a real memory what do you mean [Music] did you want to be human that's such a human thing to ask isn't it [Music] may i be honest with you wait it's not being honest an option for you [Music] do you want him back of course i do i want him back too i just need a little more time [Music] what are you watching come on [Music] okay um thank you that is um you know it's it's a beautiful film it's premiered at the cannes film festival last year and we included it um in a very small section of films that we play from other festivals it was as ann mentioned the winner of the alfred p sloan foundation film prize um and the filmmaker kogonada was at sundance a number of years earlier with a film called columbus which one critic wrote was the gem of the festival they were right he's an amazing filmmaker and i'm going to bring him on right now along with technology and facilitation expert b cavello both of whom rick has already introduced you have their bios and lengthy bios online so i'm going to dispense with that for the moment and just get to our conversation i think as rick said you all have a lot of questions i'm going to go back and forth between questions that i have in yours but please um post them and uh and we'll get to as many as we can uh coconut b thank you so much uh for for joining us i'm excited to talk to you both about the film and i guess i wanted to start if i could um coconut i was i was being uh uh you know deferential in the sense of not wanting to call it science fiction purely but you know i i know you i know you are a real cinephile and admire so many other forms and i just wonder like talking about science fiction as a story telling form how you would characterize your interest in that whether it was as a kid as a cinephile as a storyteller um you know the distinction between lo-fi sci-fi what what was it that you brought to that and to you know what you thought you could do with with the story yeah uh thanks john and thanks for that really nice intro um yeah you know i think my first interaction with sci-fi was like a lot of uh people you know this the spectacle of it and and uh the escape that it offers and and was fascinated by it but you know i do think um you know there were these real moments of discovery for me in regard to what a certain kind of sci-fi how it could address questions that um i was uh wrestling with as a human as just someone uh struggling you know with with all of these questions of being alive in the present i think of things you know as like you know never let me go i think of um eternal sunshine of the spotless mind you know things that were speculative and and certainly would be categorized that way but also really integrating uh it didn't feel so much as other but also offering a space to really broaden the way we we think about things like memory or um identity or existence by just um expanding the now and allowing other things to to um you know things that are not a part of our present but bringing it into the dialogue of contemporary life and that was a whole new sort of world for me and and i'm certainly continue to be gripped by that and it can have a larger scale to it you know i think blade runner or even a rival was one of my favorite films of that year you know there's there's something about uh those kinds of uh yeah speculative fiction or sci-fi that is always interesting to me because it um both expands for me what what is possible and also gives me a different angle to questions that i've been wrestling with i'm sure you've been asked this a lot but i'm just curious if you know speaking specifically about the short story you know there's i'm sure there are so many things that could compel you to make a film uh can you can you just talk a little bit about what it was that spoke to you about that story yeah i mean i think that it was placed within the context of family domestic space a very everyday kind of space i had read a different short story there that this producer wanted me to read at first which was a very large sci-fi story of realities and and then but i was really drawn to this uh sci-fi that felt like it was about everyday life within a speculative world and i've always you know longed for that even when i'm watching star wars with my kids i'll be like but what about this family in the background do you see them i wonder where they go grocery shopping you know there's this kind of like once the the spectac like once that the spectacle is toned down i'm very interested in how people might get through that day with all the sort of new world environment so there was something that this you know story afforded me this this possibility of exploring domestic life and real fundamental questions of uh connection and loss and emotional attachment to things that um that might surprise us you know um i love this idea of catching up to grief that that was a part of that story um and yeah in memory and you know it was a very self-contained it happens over a day it doesn't involve you know it really is about the father and any kind of reflection he has on yang is not about yang's memory but the father has some flashback memories of of moments that he had with him and then by the end of the day as he's trying to fix him he just feels a greater connection than he imagined like some more emotional attachment but it felt like the ingredients to really explore something for me deeper and more personal and also the author was an asian but this idea of an asian robot and the construct of asian-ness that uh that i that resonates with me as someone who has struggled with my ethnic identity and feeling as if so much of that struggle is the construct of it my my perception of asian-ness my longing for it but what is it actually so that was another layer that i was really eager to explore yeah and i want to ask you about that in particular in a few minutes um we also already have a lot of questions around um some really interesting things relating to the ethics uh that are in the film so i'm gonna get to that but before we do that um b could i bring you in because you know today's science is quite a long way from yang but there are a number of aspects here that are very much part of work that scientists are doing and questions that they're asking around ai around human interaction around emotional intelligence you brought up the idea of continuity of thought so i just wonder for you watching the film how did you watch it in relation to some of that research what we're able to do and what we're not able to do yeah thank you and i think that i love that concept of kind of um you know expanding the now and thinking from what does exist today you know there are so many elements of uh what's embodied in yang that that are very real to our lives many of us do have um you know devices in our homes that are meant to help us out they could be even used for um helping our children and helping us to um you know navigate large amounts of information as young as um certainly uh really capable of doing but i think that you know when we think about the components you can kind of think of yang um through the lens of a couple of different kind of scientific and research uh horizons so one of those frontiers is around kind of communication and speech um there's a lot of work been advanced super super far in the last couple of years even around um synthetic speech and synthetic text um and you know really beginning to you know move us toward the idea of very human-like conversation back in 1950 with computing machinery and intelligence um you know there's this concept put forward of the imitation game known as the turing test um the idea that like could a person um be kind of fooled into believing that that this automated system is indeed um you know another person and only 14 years later with eliza which was a chat but that that was in some ways fulfilled right people are very good at projecting our our human like experiences uh onto technologies but the process of moving from chat bots into human-like speech um to really being able to hold a conversation continues to be something that's you know becoming more and more possible each day but still elusive in that um you know there are advances like open ai's gpt 3 which is a text um synthesizer that you know is able to generate incredibly um coherent text speech that you might think a human being has written um and there's a lot we could go into there but it's also something that um you know related to that continuity that we mentioned earlier it's also something that has trouble kind of remembering what it already said it has trouble remembering where in the context of a conversation it is um you know one of the wonderful things about a conversation like this with other human beings i think um is that you know we can jump back to something that was said at the very beginning that's still pretty difficult um for technologies today and that's something that i think as yang talks about you know wanting to have a real memory there's sort of like an illusion i think in ways to some of that um at the same time there's also the like physical embodied um element to yang there's a sort of uh you know robotic um computer system but it also you know there's a conversation around the the degrading um kind of body and and how this um how these technologies inter interlink and how long something can kind of be preserved as as a robot versus as a as a human being versus one of these kind of synthetic lives and that's a space that's um also seen a ton of advancement recently with machine learning and neural networks our robotic systems are getting a lot more coordinated they're getting a lot better at moving through the world in a less goofy way we take for granted how incredibly complex our sensor systems are for helping us make teeny little mini adjustments um as we move through the world we're getting closer to that um when we talk about robotics but we're also getting closer in terms of bringing robotics and bringing um you know digital and computing technology into our bodies or into other bodies i know there's a whole conversation to be had about neuralink but i'd also love to talk about things like pacemakers and just really truly the the work done to um make our bodies not reject the kind of cyborg things that we um do to them as a way of extending ourselves and then the third area that i'll talk about in terms of kind of where things are technologically and research-wise and the science horizons um that i think that this film really highlights is that around kind of um how people use space um one of the things that i think is really interesting in the film is the like really intimate moments within the vehicles as people are moving between spaces but also the interesting kind of intimacy or not intimacy of uh the sort of video call that takes place in in um you know in a restaurant and thinking about kind of how it is that we bring our social lives with us as we move through the world certainly most of us have uh you know devices that we now carry around with us but we're seeing um worlds where we're building more and more of that into our built environment into our clothing into um into our kind of everyday wear and i think that that's a really interesting space to explore too is you know yang is kind of discreet and distinctive people but there's a whole universe of information being collected and and stories and memories potentially being stored um as a person carries their cell phone with them day to day and i think that um you know we're we're at a point where the kind of embodiment that yang is is still a ways off but many of these kind of slices many of these different elements are very much our our everyday lives um and you know you're bringing up a lot of things that relate to the ethics of and the idea of a responsible ai and there are a lot of questions from the audience and i'm promising everybody we're going to get to them because i think it's really rich for conversation um before we do that real quick though um something that was just said earlier and it relates to a question that somebody has this idea kogonada that um you know a lot of times the inquiry um relating to films about artificial beings is this idea of wrestling with what it means to be human and i think you've done something really interesting here you've sort of flipped the question and you're watching a human try to understand what it meant to be an artificial being um richtee in the audiences sort of made the comment from the trailer like uh why does everybody want to be a human what what's so great about being a human and i know you've talked about that so what you know what was interesting to you about like sort of flipping that question that is often asked and and watching someone try to actually understand the experience of of yang yeah i mean because i i and and again it's not that i don't uh love films that ask that question and that that pinocchio story there's a reason why it resonates with us and and we've had versions of it but i often have you know as someone who struggles with being human existentially you know i'm not you know like i think the one thing that we humans have is like um our origin story and really understanding what it means and the meaningfulness of our lives and i often thought well you know an uh a robot or an ai they kind of have a real definite sense of their purpose and and this a larger existential question is sort of already answered um but you know there were other questions that i also thought might be interesting in this case but in regard to that human notion of projecting ourselves into this artificial being and asking that question yeah i wanted to put that into question you know and i have you know i have um pets you know that i adore feel attached to but i never think well i wonder if my cat wants to be human you know i actually think my cat is very happy being a cat and sometimes i'm like god i wish i was more like my cat who seems so content and doesn't have to worry about the you know life like i do and so um so there was this sort of moving past that question for this particular film and then you're right and then sort of flipping it and saying you know this idea again that jake feels like oh he has to fix you know for him at that moment like an appliance there's not yet a real emotional attachment um and in doing so that he himself is sort of getting fixed as a human that that that there is something about him you know in traditional storytelling we'd be like oh he's the hero trying to save this robot but i wanted to flip that and say you know in his attempt to understand this robot he's sort of saving himself that it's revealing something uh in him you know revealing it it has captured time and memory in a way that he as a human being is overlooking that he is a human being has been sort of distracted from you i mean that brings up this idea of what the ethical obligations are towards the technology that we create um and there are a number of questions from the audience about this and and um something i'd like to ask you about one for example mark uh sort of relates the narrative or asks about the relation to the narrative maybe being similar to the idea of a slave-holding family that mourns the death of a slave but then never considers you know while he was alive the hopes and dreams of that person while they were alive um there's the way in which jake here clearly comes to terms with the idea that there was a being here and and that's part of the experience and i also even remember there's part of the short story that i really love where where um the two of jake and yang are working together doing leaves or something and they have a beer and it it it occurs to jake that at one point in time this being will be sitting in a basement um because it's been outgrown so to speak so you know i wonder if you want to talk a little bit about that idea of um of of the ethical obligations towards this being that's created yeah you know i did i did think about this in a larger conversation not you know um about the politics of being you know just the pot like once you're on uh whether you're a human or not uh and with the possibility of being off you know what you know and i think it's gonna have to expand the way we think about um existence and being and not just place it in the conversation of humanity you know and obviously there are people who fight for animal rights or who have done that but i think again and i think that's a great question about ethics i i think that you know the beginning of asking that question about are these beings really slaves is to um get to the point where jake finally gets to where he's he's recognizing some sort of value that he actually recognized it as as a loss as long as it's an appliance there's no kind of sense of um relationship or or uh you know or value in in the existence i think we're so used to saying oh it's humanity but i don't know if it has to have humanity as we understand it and i think the long history of prejudice in our uh in our world is that you know you just constantly find the other you know and so you know it could be uh the irish are other in america and they're you know they're not worthy of the rights and then the italians and then all and then you know and increasingly if you find the other is not just about exclusion but it's about the inclusion of those who belong to to what what we feel like is you know worthwhile and and and and um worthy to protect and value and so we just continue to replace that and then it may be gender and it may be another you know maybe asians and uh african-americans but i think it's our human tendency because to to constantly find something that we can cast as other and until we wake up to the fact that they too should be incorporated into the the same rights and values that we might have uh we we can't ever really confront it so in some ways you know i think it makes it even more i think you know to go back to b's point you know if i would have projected yang not with human you know form but like as a box uh that looked like some you know bigger version of a iphone we might not have that inclination to say oh he's a slave because we're used to this being like serving us but the question is you know if it did in fact have memories and consciousness uh those those same kinds of questions i think would apply so obviously i'm just sort of scratching the surface telling some other you know story but um i think i i take that question to heart you know i but i think it's like what you do have to recognize you know are are uh the ease of othering anything is is something that you always have to fight against and resist i thought that there was the interesting kind of allusion to that too you mentioned not just the the kind of explicit lines or sometimes implicit lines that are drawn around the other but also who gets included in the us and i think that you know the film talking about kind of like clones and other ways of being being human even um kind of has to have these various hierarchies to them and i think that there's some really you know tough topics to explore you know i highly recommend um exploring work from disability justice advocates in terms of thinking like how do we even define who gets to be um human who gets to be treated as human but there's so much you know there's so much um that we have not addressed that amongst amongst humans um that introducing other beings into is such a valuable um kind of way of of reflecting on where we are but it's also sometimes a little bit spooky to think like you know we haven't figured this out yet and now we're complicating the picture even more yeah i mean i can imagine i can imagine a lair a time where there would be something out of humanity that would again unify humanity but because it's like us and you know and maybe you know who knows what what the progression of that would be but i i do think yeah that's that's an interesting um element of of yeah yeah how we how we should perceive us and what is us and them yeah be you know that this area this area around ethics responsible ais is really something that you work in in you know great detail and i'm just wondering there's a there are a lot of hints here um around the potential dangers of some of this technology you have um you know sort of the the corporate presence that's suggested here and um the idea of what happens to yang that he can be recycled or salvaged et cetera et cetera there's the suggestion of spyware um mining yang's data um as uh as dav uh brought up in a question here there's the idea of right to repair which i know is something you're really interested in as well so i'm just curious um you know if you want to speak to some of the ways that you read it as a reflection on the work that you do around responsible ai absolutely yeah i mean there are so many different directions to take things in and and like you said you know some of this is about the ai element and some of it is you know this framing of like an appliance and what did one of these devices um what do they do for us what do they mean to us um and what what are their impacts you know on our lives uh as we find ourselves depending on them but also how do we think about um you know what their continued lives are like um even even if they are the kind of uh less humanized versions of things and i think that the right to repair element to this story is really interesting on a couple of those levels so one you know they're the kind of key framing or the key conflict that arises is that yang breaks down he he stops responding he stops working and you know jake and the family are faced with this decision about what to do about this situation and it's really interesting how incredibly relatable his experience of trying to get customer service support and things are to so many of us who have ever encountered you know challenges in our technology and one of the things that i think comes up in this is how absolutely opaque um everything is it's very unclear what yang's past history has been it's very unclear which companies are actually in charge of providing services it's very unclear what you can even do to try to fix things if fixing things is even possible um and i think that you know looking at it through this lens of you know if we put aside for a moment yang as this being with a life of his own and we even just think of this as this technology that has existed in these people's lives um there are so many things that are really resonant in terms of how difficult it is once you've come to depend on a technology i think of this sometimes i like to think about the technologies that are like really really old school in my life like shoes um you know i am so dependent on my shoes if i go out into the world without them i'm gonna have a bad time and increasingly we're building more of these technologies into our lives and we're really dependent on them and when they don't work properly it can be really difficult to figure out you know i might be able to recognize there's a hole in my shoe but it might be really hard for me to figure out what's going on that's wrong with my phone or my computer or other parts of um our kind of technologically advanced world and so one thing that was really resonant to me from kind of the right repair perspective is like people don't have they're not empowered to um fix these technologies in their lives on their own there's a whole taboo about opening things up and trying to understand what's going on there's a lot of proprietary kind of um guardedness around uh what how these how these beings function there's also this question around well what does opening things up mean ultimately you know they are able to access yang's previous memories and in that experience expose all of these other people's lives like really intimate moments um and i think that that's really also important as we think about the ethics of these systems as we think about what it means to really integrate these technologies into our lives you know you might have when clearing out an attic come across some previous homeowners like grandmother's letters or something and there's this like sort of acknowledgement that there are little breadcrumb trails of ourselves that we leave in life but as we build more technologies into our lives those breadcrumb trails become incredibly rich incredibly full of information about our private intimate moments and there are ways in which that can be incredibly um connecting and there is a humanizing um you know in terms of helping us recognize um you know that we are our full selves but they can also be kind of concerning you know like when jake goes and brings yang um to the repair shop to have things looked at it's it's a tense moment right it's it's hard recognizing um that there are so there's so much of ourselves that are put into these technologies and we ultimately most of us don't actually know how to extricate that we don't know what other people can see about that um a lot of the debates in fact there was just a hearing in the house today um in the us congress around kind of holding big tech accountable and a lot of it centered on like people don't know what's going on there's not a lot of visibility and accountability and it's also incredibly hard to separate once you've actually incorporated these technologies into your life i feel like that this area is so rich and it has to do with a lot of the agendas that are um exposed in the film they're like almost everybody has an agenda even the ones that seem virtuous to some degree uh and that brings up some really interesting questions around you know sort of the the civic space the idea of private versus public all those things there are so many awesome questions from the audience though that i really want to try to to get to some of them maybe we can get back to this but elizabeth is asking a question um saying intrigued about the role of clones in the world of the movie and why the why jake is is anti-clone and that i think kuganata hints back to something in the short story that sort of alludes to the idea that he's they're progressive because they wanted to have um you know yang instead of a clone can you talk a little bit about how you see that the the role of the clone in the story world yeah i mean i think um i i love that of the short story and you know the blind spots that we have even you know i certainly identify as progressive but that we are um yeah that we have our own and maybe very thought out you know uh and and i'm sure he could argue why until he's confronted you know by by someone uh who is uh pressing him on on his uh that sort of perspective um but i also you know i i did want to um kind of create a world in which these things that are huge ideas for us whether it's clones or ai had already been lived and they're just mundane now in this sort of world and people have positions and and all of that i mean going back to ozu when i watch ozu films in the 50s you know having a vacuum cleaner or an or a dishwasher is a huge deal in that japan space they always talk about they talk about the catalogs and you know i'm sure for everyone viewing it it was like oh my god what did this is going to change everything you know tv in his world and i sometimes feel like our sci-fi can get stuck right there that it's just so spectacular to us that every thing that is sort of new is has a gigantic space in that that film but um i love the idea that all of you know once vacuum cleaners become a part of our everyday lives they don't become a real subject of conversation but we have attitudes towards these things that are just you know mundane and so i knew that i wanted to treat clones not as like oh you know a space for us to all sort of have our our view of clones but but that is just a part of our world and there are people who have you know uh from whatever spectrum um have uh these sort of differing opinions of it and of course i have you know thoughts about it but it was really trying to write that into to jake and part of his own progression of of having to rethink uh otherness in many ways you know and as someone who also is in this sort of incredibly diverse family it almost seems like oh he's a representation of someone who has already figured it out but there's there's more you know moral conversation i'm sorry go ahead b i just couldn't help but notice too that yang himself kind of like seeks out this clone for like not who she actually is right or who they actually are like that like that relationship is also based on like not exactly who that person is and and i think that there's like really interesting layers to you know there's the kind of darning the sock um idea or ship of theseus or whatever at least like ideas of like when you know i'll get it wrong so i'm not gonna pretend to know anything about the biological science of like how uh often different cells in our bodies um you know change out but there's this idea of like who is the true self and with technologies it's commonly discussed in kind of robotic science fiction like oh if we replace all these robots parts once when does it stop being that robot but in this world we also see yang kind of like carry out this interesting pattern matching behavior where he sees this person but that's that's not who that person is they're they're a clone they're a different version of that yeah that's that's a lovely insight yeah that's great well speaking of of who who they are um there are you know i'm interested in in the idea that you brought up earlier coconut about the notion of a sort of manufactured identity is yang asian because he's essentially programmed to be asian and we see how that is expressed in the film and it this is a question that um several other people watching have amma is interested in hearing more about the construct of uh of of asian and kogonada's exploration of that in the film and there's another question here about um you know sort of the european non-white ai parallels of othering um the eurocentric conception of asians as you know monolithic robotics certain things so i just is a big big unwieldy topic but but you know it's clearly something that drew you to it this idea of identity yeah i mean i think you know there's a real history of orientalism in the west and and in it you know um you know and not always for bad intentions you know i think there there's sometimes real you know um love and aspiration of all things asian and then when you are in this world so just first of all beyond the sci-fi just living in this sort of world in which objects represent um a culture and identity and often presented by westerners and then you are trying to make sense of yourself and in that context of objects and the expression of asianness both um from people who are not asian but also within the you know so much of asian cinema has also really defined me and of course my father and other asians and really trying to understand what it means is very elusive you know and i i think i've i've come to peace with that elusiveness of of so many things not just being asian but being human i i think the um elusiveness of all of those questions i'm more at peace with you know when you're young you just want answers and you want to feel certain about certain things but there there is that um constant uh you know reach for something uh but in my own i think i think because yang is such a representation of a kind of uh corporate manufactured uh presentation evasion is for the purpose of of transferring asian-ness to real asians um there was a layer to that that i wanted to explore and still exploring in my mind i mean i i didn't commit with it like oh i here's the ingredients i haven't answered that i want to convey to everybody it was really like here is something that is very elusive to me and complex and it and sci-fi is giving me an opportunity to rethink my asian-ness in the context of manufactured asian as you know and so a lot of that film was really working through that and you know one of the things i postulated for whether it's cinematic or human you know uh reasons um that his longing again was not to be uh human but to under to have a real sense of place and a sense of of of this task he was you know uh was kind of created to do and really to get to something that would uh feel more valuable to him you know if he really did so um yeah so you know all that just to say it was fertile ground for me to wrestle with my own sense of self you know um i want to get i'm so glad that there's a question here from bronwyn about a scene in the movie which is maybe my favorite scene and i keep thinking about it and um bronwyn writes it's a scene in the movie around preparing and the experience of tea as well crafted for me it brought up a philosophical question of perception with yang's and the father's understanding of team both through their different senses and experiences it touches also touches on appropriation and being an immigrant can you speak to this scene and how it came about i had a completely different interpretation of the scene but that's great that's one of the things that's so great about this so maybe koganata could you talk a little bit about that scene what it meant for you yeah i mean there's so many things that contributed to that scene you know um that both i found you know very personal and then even formally i you know to me in the film you know you have these sort of uh robot memories of yang which are very uh even though the interface to me you know i wanted it to be sort of more mysterious i didn't want to know how it actually worked but the um but the memories themselves were concrete they were revisited you could they they always remain the same um and i knew that these memories were human memories that it was jake trying to recollect this this conversation and it has a different obviously rhythm to it it's repetitive he it's uh not stable uh you know he's trying to get to whatever at that moment uh is uh important to him and you know i love that about human memory it's so you know both unreliable and it's elusive and and uh you know i think research says that every time you recall something it changes but it but then the conversation that's being revealed i think has it's hard to i don't want to fully unpack it because it there's so many layers to it um but but i love that you know that uh interpretation because there is so one of the layers is that uh it was my version of that short story where he's uh having a uh you know a soda with his you know his son and there's a moment of real connection but also disconnection and you know to me and it goes into orientalism as well you know jake loves this this thing it's an obsession for him and it has asian history and somehow he's never made this connection to to you know he has this resource and there's this real moment where he's like oh do you want me to share these facts but it's a different level of understanding this this craft and uh so there's there were things in that that were really interesting to me there were elements of just finding meaning in something like tea or for me cinema or you know pasta or architecture that exists in our modern world you know i'm a constant struggler of like what does it mean to be in this world and what can give meaning in my life and and the way in which those things can you you can start becoming disillusioned about that you know when film becomes a subject of study at a grad program suddenly the love and the meaning that it had as i'm trying to like deconstruct a film in an academic language i start feeling like i'm killing the thing i love or when it becomes a job and you feel burdened and you have hours and you're then it you know and so part of it is about jake and trying to rekindle or reconnect to what has been lost in his life um so it's you know it it did really provide so much for me to and when i was writing that conversation i genuinely didn't know how that conversation was going to happen i loved that bee talked about uh like you know i i wrote this line about him saying oh i lost my train of thought or like when he tries to recall and i you know i didn't think i even knew what that meant it just felt like the you know it like yang remained a mystery to me and when he said that i thought is he trying to comfort human beings or is it hard for him to re-call something you know and all of that was very interesting to me so um yeah that's not really an answer but it is one of my favorite scenes yeah i i love it too and it's funny that you mentioned um the you know relating it to language and and to me you know one of the things is that they there are two beings who lack the language of experience in common and therefore they're trying to find something that they do have and they're trying to understand through this kind of poetic concept of the t it's a beautiful scene anyway i i v i it made me think though something um that you had mentioned around the idea of these memories and um how they play out in the interface that exists for jake to interact with um these memories and how that was intriguing to you around you know visualizing file systems and things like that i'm just curious you could talk a little bit about that yeah oh my gosh i mean a coconut i'm sure you know there's like a whole fascinating um kind of uh visual library now that exists of like what does it what how do we navigate computer systems visually uh making them interesting in a cinematic sense um and i think that you know whether it's like hackers or uh you know all of these different um attempts at visualizing uh memory there is this draw to make cityscapes to make webs to make um these kind of three-dimensional spaces and it was reminding me of kind of how memory in humans is so spatial it is so physicalized um you know in terms of like mind palaces and memory maps and so as i was thinking about this kind of you know on the one hand we see today that um and i think there's a interesting thread to explore too around jake's relationship with yang like the generational difference between seeing something as an appliance versus seeing something as a friend or as a brother or something um but there's also this this divide that's happening now in fact um there was an article recently about computer science students not understanding the idea of the directory of file systems the kind of hierarchy of information because they've grown up in an age of the search bar and you don't necessarily have to have those hierarchies you navigate things in this totally different way and so i thought it was really interesting the way that jake sort of navigates the system which both has you know the seemingly really advanced interface of like swimming through these memories and kind of floating through this space but also like a refusal to acknowledge voice commands that aren't said in the exact right language these are little moments you know that concept of expanding on the now there's these moments that are just like so true to life um but i really liked that kind of juxtaposition of um you know being in this really spatial uh environment this kind of like advanced mind map um world that we don't understand um and then also kind of running into those same frictions that so many of us have experienced with our um trying to run a basic search yeah that's great we only have a few minutes left so i'm gonna try to get to like at least one or two more questions um richard asks uh clone ada and original ada would be quite different people yang presumably knows this which is why he's so careful in approaching clonada and not telling her backstory was there any thought to exploring uh clone dynamics or is that for the sequel [Laughter] yeah that's for the sequel that's great yeah i mean it was fascinating you know it was a sort of a late you know you just introducing it again like just sort of very naturally that clones lived in the world but i'm fascinated you know i mean it obviously it's in that speculative way there's so much to explore about about all of that um and that's again just such an astute observation in regard to yeah you know it was like thinking through his feeling of responsibility to the the copy and all of that you know it's um yeah i mean it's fascinating let me ask you real quick if i could and maybe you can both uh comment on this but kuganata um the elements of the story that relate to science that are not uh the yang and and an artificial being um this is clearly a world in which there has been some kind of climate catastrophe and the the architecture of the world reflects that there are self-driving cars um i wonder if you could talk a little bit about uh you know that process of envisioning the future and and how it's really backgrounded but in a kind of really evocative way yeah i mean i think i really wanted uh my the sci-fi you know to be about possibility you know and i i'm not that interested in i mean there's a sci-fi that kind of just borrows the the story structure of so many things which is hero villain you know this sort of uh uh mythic structure and and and fear you know being a real driving force of that um but i was just very interested in a a future of possibility not necessarily a utopian one so you know we started this backstory of of this society having to contend with nature no longer being able to it's no longer a trend it's no longer it's just like survival like they you know that it's um not sustainable you know and i wonder sometimes if like the world the dystopian worlds we create where there's no grass in sight like blade runner how that planet even exists you know because we already know the dangers of that so like it was also for me very reasonable to think we're coming to a point where either we you know uh annihilate ourselves or we have to you know make sense of it so it really was about and once we had that in our minds it was about create designing that post you know catastrophic sort of society um which was you know really really uh a delight you know i just kind of quickly because bee had such a great you know this whole thing about black box uh theory and and uh just so many things about that discussion and i was i wanted to just jump in at one point because i i so much agree with her that it is like such a frustration in my own life and and you know the idea of what's concealed from us and language like certified i mean we we say it throughout like it's certified refurbished and it just comforts you you don't even know what it means and it might not even be true but it's like someone has certified it and all the trust we have with the people in power and then the other thing that was fascinating to me is the different context in which because i think genuinely privacy is an issue and you have the conspiracist and russ and you know it never uh didn't dawn on me that it could be something very disturbing but i also like how different spaces look at these things and it's interesting as a filmmaker talking to someone in the space that b is in and and how important that is because you know i the museum space which you know ultimately suddenly the it's transferred to uh her and museums are so fascinating because you know she's interested in the research the possibility even though it might be something that's private and you know i think about the museum space and how complicated that space is how they have you know taken from other countries and other societies but yet there's something valuable there too you know that we you know that that is such a you know complex space so i always wanted to bring the zim space into this sort of larger uh story which you don't often see you know in sci-fi but that's something that has always been a complicated space for me that that has um you know offered me so much and and yet stayed complex so anyway i mean it feels like that is one of the great things about the living in the ambiguity uh that you do in this film um i see rick and anne here which means that we're officially out of time i was trying to hold them off i don't know what the digital wizard that is the wait before they come on can we just have koganata please tell everybody how to see this film for those of you who haven't seen it uh how can they watch this film when it comes out this week yeah i think it's in uh 20 over 25 marcus so you could definitely see it in the theater and then it's also playing on showtime for a limited time and then then it'll be available in different ways online and just thank you again for the organization b thank you that was so insightful and i wish we could have a longer conversation there's so much for for me to think about and learn and uh john always i'm so grateful for you and uh for this conversation so this has been super fun thank you to you to both of you really um fascinating conversation all three of you come back any time any time yeah we always wish we could keep going that's that's one of the things that we lament at the end of these that there's not more time but we do appreciate the time that you did give us because that's what our audiences are here for and and so thank you for that and we hope you'll come back next week not the three of you although you're welcome to come back and be in our audience but we will have next week we have um another speaker right rick and so we've got a good friend to the exchange coming back with us yeah matt uh is it fryman or freeman that is going to talk to us that's all we have to know right yeah exactly and um he's going to be talking about the vaccine for all coronaviruses not just we've known so intimately over the last couple of years but which i love them so that's a conversation hey i want to thank everybody who asked a question today we had about 50 of them we couldn't get to all of them we got as many as we could john you did a tremendous job of getting to a ton of questions so thank you for that i want to thank all of our supporters at the hundred dollar level or more also john koganata b uh and also max simonson without whose help we uh would not have been able to wrangle coconut schedule so thank you for that i really appreciate it and uh that's all i had in what about that we're done that's it we're done all right talk soon everybody bye

2022-03-08 19:17

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