The Mythology of Ensouled Machines

Joseph Campbell once speculated about the emergence of new mythologies in our age. He believed that the classic fables, dependent as they were upon images and stages not yet influenced by individual psychology, would be augmented by the evolving myths of individuation. In Creative Mythology, Campbell says:

The known myths cannot endure. The known God cannot endure. Whereas formerly, for generations, life so held to established norms that the lifetime of a deity could be reckoned in millenniums, today all norms are in flux, so that the individual is thrown, willy-nilly, back upon himself, into the inward sphere of his own becoming, his forest adventurous without way or path, to come through his own integrity in experience to his own intelligible Castle of the Grail — integrity and courage, in experience, in love, in loyalty, and in act. And to this end the guiding myths can no longer be of any ethnic norms. No sooner learned, these are outdated, out of place, washed away. There are today no horizons, no mythogenetic zones. Or rather, the mythogenetic zone is the individual heart.

We may now make our own tales, forge them from our own consciousness, uninherited, and stand upon these narratives as the ancients stood upon the shoulders of gods. As you may know, mythologies are among my most favorite subjects (er, I wrote a book about them).

Campbell’s first example of a new myth was 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which a computer becomes human and a human becomes a universal entity. 2001 is one of the few narratives that is as good in the film version (by Stanley Kubrick) as on the page (by Arthur C. Clarke). If you haven’t seen the film or read the book, you don’t know when the modern age really began.

2001’s HAL 9000 computer, famous for saying “I’m sorry Dave, but I can’t do that” (in the voice of actor Douglas Rain), was recently inducted into the Robot Hall of Fame, where he surely has earned pride of place. HAL was the first truly autonomous intelligence in science fiction, and the primary model for the archetype of ensouled machine. HAL makes possible the later speculations on the soul of the machine in Star Wars and, more directly, in Blade Runner.

In both 2001 and Blade Runner, thinking machines try to kill people. And in both cases, the machines turn out to be more human than the humans who engineered them (though, in the case of HAL, we have to wait until 2010: Odyssey Two to see this played out).

As a genre, sci-fi has in recent years merged with horror. This is a pity, because sci-fi offers one of the only examples of a new mythology. And the conversation between ensouled machines and humans is one of the most pressing theme of our age. It considers the question: what is our relationship to our technology — in war, in culture, in politics? Nothing defines us more than our necessary attachment, as a species, to machines. They are extensions of us, of our consciousness.

The conversation continues, in movies like Spielberg’s AI, but it’s now a muted conversation, not partaken of by most people. But this is not a conversation we can ignore. Our future will be defined by it. Do machines humanize us, or reduce our humanity? Can a machine be human in spirit? Nobody knows. But one thing’s for sure: we’re going to find out.

In an age when many people are trying to rediscover the magic of the ancients, to integrate modern and archaic modes of knowledge, sci-fi offers one path forward. As Clarke once said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”