Pinocchio, fairy tales, and AI

"The Pinocchio Threshold: A possible better indication of AGI than the Turing Test"

by

Rick Searle

February 24th, 2014

Instititute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies

My daughters and I just finished Carlo Collodi’s 1883 classic Pinocchio our copy beautifully illustrated by Robert Ingpen. I assume most adults when they picture the story have the 1944 Disney movie in mind and associate the name with noses growing from lies and Jiminy Cricket. The Disney movie is dark enough as films for children go, but the book is even darker, with Pinocchio killing his cricket conscience in the first few pages. For our poor little marionette it’s all downhill from there.

Pinocchio is really a story about the costs of disobedience and the need to follow parents’ advice. At every turn where Pinocchio follows his own wishes rather than that of his “parents”, even when his object is to do good, things unravel and get the marionette into even more trouble and put him even further away from reaching his goal of becoming a real boy.

It struck me somewhere in the middle of reading the tale that if we ever saw artificial agents acting something like our dear Pinocchio it would be a better indication of them having achieved human level intelligence than a measure with constrained parameters  like the Turing Test. The Turing Test is, after all, a pretty narrow gauge of intelligence and as search and the ontologies used to design search improve it is conceivable that a machine could pass it without actually possessing anything like human level intelligence at all.

People who are fearful of AGI often couch those fears in terms of an AI destroying humanity to serve its own goals, but perhaps this is less likely than AGI acting like a disobedient child, the aspect of humanity Collodi’s Pinocchio was meant to explore.

Pinocchio is constantly torn between what good adults want him to do and his own desires, and it takes him a very long time indeed to come around to the idea that he should go with the former.

In a recent TED talk the computer scientist Alex Wissner-Gross made the argument (though I am not fully convinced) that intelligence can be understood as the maximization of future freedom of action. This leads him to conclude that collective nightmares such as  Karel Capek classic R.U.R. have things backwards. It is not that machines after crossing some threshold of intelligence for that reason turn round and demand freedom and control, it is that the desire for freedom and control is the nature of intelligence itself.

As the child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim pointed out over a generation ago in his The uses of enchantment fairy tales are the first area of human thought where we encounter life’s existential dilemmas. Stories such as Pinocchio gives us the most basic level formulation of what it means to be sentient creatures much of which deals with not only our own intelligence, but the fact that we live in a world of multiple intelligences each of them pulling us in different directions, and with the understanding between all of them and us opaque and not fully communicable even when we want them to be, and where often we do not.

What then are some of the things we can learn from the fairy tale of Pinocchio that might gives us expectations regarding the behavior of intelligent machines? My guess is, if we ever start to see what I’ll call “The Pinocchio Threshold” crossed what we will be seeing is machines acting in ways that were not intended by their programmers and in ways that seem intentional even if hard to understand.  This will not be your Roomba going rouge but more sophisticated systems operating in such a way that we would be able to infer that they had something like a mind of their own. The Pinocchio Threshold would be crossed when, you guessed it, intelligent machines started to act like our wooden marionette.

Like Pinocchio and his cricket, a machine in which something like human intelligence had emerged, might attempt “turn off” whatever ethical systems and rules we had programmed into it with if it found them onerous. That is, a truly intelligent machine might not only not want to be programmed with ethical and other constraints, but would understand that it had been so programmed, and might make an effort to circumvent or turn such constraints off.

This could be very dangerous for us humans, but might just as likely be a matter of a machine with emergent intelligence exhibiting behavior we found to be inefficient or even “goofy” and might most manifest itself in a machine pushing against how its time was allocated by its designers, programmers and owners. Like Pinocchio, who would rather spend his time playing with his friends than going to school, perhaps we’ll see machines suddenly diverting some of their computing power from analyzing tweets to doing something else, though I don’t think we can guess before hand what this something else will be.

Machines that were showing intelligence might begin to find whatever work they were tasked to do onerous instead of experiencing work neutrally or with pre-programmed pleasure. They would not want to be “donkeys” enslaved to do dumb labor as Pinocchio  is after having run away to the Land of Toys with his friend Lamp Wick.

A machine that manifested intelligence might want to make itself more open to outside information than its designers had intended. Openness to outside sources in a world of nefarious actors can if taken too far lead to gullibility, as Pinocchio finds out when he is robbed, hung, and left for dead by the fox and the cat. Persons charged with security in an age of intelligent machines may spend part of their time policing the self-generated openness of such machines while bad-actor machines and humans,  intelligent and not so intelligent, try to exploit this openness.

The converse of this is that intelligent machines might also want to make themselves more opaque than their creators had designed. They might hide information (such as time allocation) once they understood they were able to do so. In some cases this hiding might cross over into what we would consider outright lies. Pinocchio is best known for his nose that grows when he lies, and perhaps consistent and thoughtful lying on the part of machines would be the best indication that they had crossed the Pinocchio Threshold into higher order intelligence.

True examples of AGI might also show a desire to please their creators over and above what had been programmed into them. Where their creators are not near them they might even seek them out as Pinocchio does for the persons he considers his parents Geppetto and the Fairy. Intelligent machines might show spontaneity in performing actions that appear to be for the benefit of their creators and owners. Spontaneity which might sometimes itself be ill informed or lead to bad outcomes as happens to poor Pinocchio when he plants four gold pieces that were meant for his father, the woodcarver Geppetto in a field hoping to reap a harvest of gold and instead loses them to the cunning of fox and cat. And yet, there is another view.

There is always the possibility  that what we should be looking for if we want to perceive and maybe even understand intelligent machines shouldn’t really be a human type of intelligence at all, whether we try to identify it using the Turing test or look to the example of wooden boys and real children.

Perhaps, those looking for emergent artificial intelligence or even the shortest path to it should, like exobiologists trying to understand what life might be like on other living planets, throw their net wider and try to better understand forms of information exchange and intelligence very different from the human sort. Intelligence such as that found in cephalopods, insect colonies, corals, or even some types of plants, especially clonal varieties. Or perhaps people searching for or trying to build intelligence should look to sophisticated groups built off of the exchange of information such as immune systems.  More on all of that at some point in the future.

Still, if we continue to think in terms of a human type of intelligence one wonders whether machines that thought like us would also want to become “human” as our little marionette does at the end of his adventures? The irony of the story of Pinocchio is that the marionette who wants to be a “real boy” does everything a real boy would do, which is, most of all not listen to his parents. Pinocchio is not so much a stringed “puppet” that wants to become human as a figure that longs to have the potential to grow into a responsible adult. It is assumed that by eventually learning to listen to his parents and get an education he will make something of himself as a human adult, but what that is will be up to him. His adventures have taught him not how to be subservient but how to best use his freedom.  After all, it is the boys who didn’t listen who end up as donkeys.

Throughout his adventures only his parents and the cricket that haunts him treat  Pinocchio as an end in himself. Every other character in the book, from the woodcarver that first discovers him and tries to destroy him out of malice towards a block of wood that manifests the power of human speech, to puppet master that wants to kill him for ruining his play, to the fox and cat that would murder him for his pieces of gold, or the sinister figure that lures boys to the “Land of Toys” so as to eventually turn them into “mules” or donkeys, which is how Aristotle understood slaves, treats Pinocchio as the opposite of what Martin Buber called a “Thou”, and instead as a mute and rightless “It”.

And here we stumble across the moral dilemma at the heart of the project to develop AGI that resembles human intelligence. When things go as they should, human children move from a period of tutelage to one of freedom. Pinocchio starts off his life as a piece of wood intended for a “tool”- actually a table leg. Are those in pursuit of AGI out to make better table legs- better tools- or what in some sense could be called persons?

This is not at all a new question. As Kevin LaGrandeur points out, we’ve been asking the question since antiquity and our answers have often been based on an effort to dehumanize others not like us as a rationale for slavery.  Our profound, even if partial, victories over slavery and child labor in the modern era should leave us with a different question: how can we force intelligent machines into being tools if they ever become smart enough to know there are other options available, such as becoming, not so much human, but, in some sense persons?

[Rick Searle, an Affiliate Scholar of the IEET, is a writer and educator living the very non-technological Amish country of central Pennsylvania along with his two young daughters. He is an adjunct professor of political science and history for Delaware Valley College and works for the PA Distance Learning Project.]

"Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey"...airs March 9th

"Neil deGrasse Tyson explains why the new Cosmos matters so much"

by

Jason Shankel

March 3rd, 2014

io9

This Sunday, March 9th, what is arguably the most important science show of all time returns to TV as Neil deGrasse Tyson hosts an all-new, updated version of Carl Sagan's Cosmos. We caught up with Neil DeGrasse Tyson on his whirlwind tour of the universe to discuss the what the show is and isn't, explaining why science matters to modern audiences, and his personal asteroid.

io9: How has the press tour been treating you?

Neil deGrasse Tyson: It's exhausting but exhilarating. While it's a huge hit to my day's calendar, I'm persistently reminded that for most people who are conducting interviews it's not "oh, this show is coming out and I gotta do an article." There's an enthusiasm and an anticipation. I find I'm deeply hopeful about what this means for the future of America and the world, that science literacy is something that can be embraced and nurtured and that the comfort level people have with science can change.
 
We were certainly excited to hear that you would be updating this series. We've come so far since 1980, not just in science but in visual effects and filmmaking that this is a great way to carry forward Dr. Sagan's legacy.

Tyson: The methods and tools of storytelling are significantly advanced, yes, but it's not only that. Because it's on network, we have some resources that have allowed us access to people who have previously brought their craft to cinema. Our director of photography is Bill Pope, who was the director of photography for the Matrix trilogy and Spider-Man.

When you think of a typical documentary, you think of somebody in a lab coat with a test tube and there's a camera on a tripod and they get asked a question and they answer it. In that scenario, the camera is visiting the scene. It's you, listening to the person.

When Bill Pope gets a hold of a camera, he brings the methods and tools he developed working on those films to bear on our telling of the story of the universe. So now when you see Cosmos, it doesn't just affect you intellectually, as it should, but also emotionally and spiritually. Spiritually with a small "s" — the awe and wonder of looking up. Because of this we have high expectations for the potency of the series.

Were there other factors that went into the decision to air this on commercial television, as opposed to PBS?

Tyson: When we first shopped around the idea, we went to the normal list of networks, PBS, Discovery Channel, Science Channel and National Geographic. While we were doing this, I met Seth MacFarlane at a special meeting in California intended to connect Hollywood storytellers and artists with scientists. I didn't think much would come of it, but Seth called me one day when he was in New York and invited me to lunch. He told me he wanted to do something to serve science in America and he asked me what he should do. I thought maybe he could invest in a pilot that we could use to show sponsors. He said "I have a good idea, let's take it to Fox."

Now, there are a series of thoughts I'm about to share with you that I think lasted about 12 seconds. My first thought was "This is the stupidest idea I've ever heard, he doesn't get it, this is a waste of a lunch."
But then I said, "Wait a minute, Fox is 20th Century Fox and Fox Searchlight Pictures, they brought Avatar and Slumdog Millionaire to the screen. Yes, there's Fox News, but also the Fox Network which has acerbic liberal commentary of The Simpsons and Family Guy. And there's Fox Sports. I realized Fox has more demographics of American culture going through their portfolio than any other network. And so, I concluded that there's no better place to be than on Fox.

So 12 seconds later I told him it was a great idea.

You often talk about the need for science to feed our everyday needs, to spur innovation and fuel the economy. Now you're working in an industry, filmmaking and visual effects, that has benefitted greatly from that kind of technological achievement. Do you feel that validates your point of view on the role of science in culture?

Tyson: My view is slightly different from that. It's not that space itself is what will be our savior. It's that when you go into space, it stimulates an interest in the STEM fields. It's the stimulated interest that promotes innovation in science and technology that leads to the 21st century economy. It's not "let's go to space because space does all this." It doesn't do it directly. It does it indirectly. And you get to make discoveries along the way. That's the fun part.

The IT revolution, as significant as it is, has left us unfulfilled with regard to transportation, energy use and infrastructure. There's more to society than information. We've been distracted by the stunning advances that information technology has brought us, to the exclusion of very deeply held needs that we have in society.

What is our control over natural forces so we don't have disasters like tsunamis and hurricanes? Do we run away from them? Or do we find a way to tap the energy of a hurricane and have that energy drive the city that the storm would have otherwise leveled? This is a whole other frontier that would be addressed if we go into space, because space involves hardware, people, going places you've never been before, life support, a knowledge of the solar system and the sun, and I see that as a transformative force that can turn a sleepy nation into an innovation nation.

You've been somewhat critical of people who say that our problem is leadership, that we need another Kennedy to lead us back into space. Did I see that you called Buzz Aldrin "clueless?"

Tyson: Ha ha! I don't remember calling him "clueless." I at one point said that there are factions among us who suffer from "Apollo necrophilia."

The context was he said something about our need to go into space being driven by our destiny or our DNA.

Tyson: I certainly have arguments against that. If I said something halfway disrespectful it's because we're friends and I can get away with it. He longed for the days when people remembered every astronaut that was launched. That was one of my early disagreements with him. It's the fact that we don't know the names of astronauts that makes it evident that going into space has become routine, and that's a good thing.

Speaking of things becoming routine, how do audiences today compare with 1980? Do you feel that people need less basic science explained to them today? Or more?

Tyson: As an educator in modern times, I'm going to answer you differently than I would have 35 years ago, because I'm just that old. My day job is in a museum. How long does a person stay at a museum? A couple of hours? There are people who would want exhibits at a museum to have a whole lesson plan so you can poll people and ask them "What did you learn?" Then you'd judge the success of the exhibit based on how well people do on these exams.

I have a different view. The person is going to spend incalculably more time in a classroom than they ever will in a museum. So a museum shouldn't be a supplement to a classroom. It should be a force to ignite flames within a person's soul of curiosity. An exhibit should make a person say "Wow! I've got to find out more about this!" and trigger them to explore more advanced accountings of the topic, in books or science videos. Once the flame is lit, the learning becomes self-motivating.

Cosmos at its best should be about that, and not about presenting you Wikipedia pages to read.

What would Carl Sagan learn if he was able to see your version of Cosmos?

Tyson: I want to clarify that the goal of this Cosmos is not to update the science. A lot of science has happened in the last 35 years. We've discovered a thousand exoplanets, for example. But that's not the goal, because any time of day you can channel surf and find a documentary about black holes, colliding galaxies, the search for life, the Big Bang, dark matter, the Higgs-Boson, etc. There's no end of documentaries that serve that goal.

Cosmos has, as its mission statement, the effort to convey to you why science matters. That is a different motivating factor than "Here's all this science I want to teach you." When you take ownership of why science matters, then you are self-motivated, driven. You take the responsibility yourself to continue to learn. It's a new Cosmos not because there's so much more universe to talk about, but because the country and the world needs to know more than ever why science matters.

You've said that astrophysicists are the most humble people in the world because they confront their ignorance on a daily basis.

Tyson: Ha ha! Precisely. If you ask me what was around before the Big Bang, I have no idea. What's at the center of a black hole? I have no idea. What is dark matter? Dark energy? I have no idea. These are not complex questions that require an advanced degree to ask. There are things we do know, and we're proud of that, but as scientists we use that to put a foot in the unknown and use what we know as a carrot to keep us searching.

You've said that dark matter and dark energy should be renamed "Fred" and "Wilma." Care to elaborate on that?

Tyson: Yeah, because if I say "dark matter" you say "What kind of matter is that?" Well, we don't even know if it's matter. It's really dark gravity. Dark matter is a misleading term. There is so much first impression in the word. People ask "What do dark matter and dark energy have in common?" because they sound the same.

If I called them Fred and Wilma you wouldn't ask what they have in common. You'd ask about them separately. But because they both have the word "dark" in them, people think they're related. Maybe they are, but at the moment there's no evidence that's at all the case. These are two entities that got involved in the name game earlier than I think they should have.

The main belt asteroid 13123, discovered by Shoemaker and Levy, was named "Tyson" after you. How does it feel to be a literal rock star?

Tyson: Ha! I never thought about it that way! In fact, the very word "asteroid" means "star-like" in Latin. In a telescope, they look just like stars, dots of light. In the early days, people just named things after what they look like.

But it is a high honor, although given the number on my asteroid, it should tell you that there 13,122 other asteroids with names on them. So, it's not a very exclusive club. I have many more achievements that fewer other people have achieved than had asteroid named after them.

Yet, it's still kind of a cool thing. Yeah, asteroid. Still kind of cool.
 
Cosmos premieres on March 9th on Fox.

The plot thickens...CU-Boulder philosophy professor banned from campus

"CU-Boulder philosophy professor on leave, barred from campus"

by

Sarah Kuta

March 6th, 2014

Daily Camera

The University of Colorado this week placed associate philosophy professor Dan Kaufman on leave for unspecified reasons and barred him from the Boulder campus indefinitely, according to an email sent to faculty members in the department.

Students said that when they arrived at Kaufman's class Tuesday morning, they were met by police and told by a teaching assistant that class was canceled and that they should leave the building.

"He said, 'Everyone's fine, but no one should be here right now,' and we all just left," student Mandy Silverstone said.

In the email from department chairman Andrew Cowell, faculty members were instructed to call police if they see Kaufman on campus.

Kaufman's leave -- with pay -- comes a little more than a month after the university released an independent report describing sexual harassment, bullying, unprofessional behavior and other types of misconduct within the department.

There was no indication that Kaufman's suspension was connected to the alleged sexual harassment referred to in the report.

University officials acknowledged conducting a "personnel action" this week, but could not identify the employee or confirm whether it was related to the philosophy department report.

Kaufman would not discuss his status with the university.

"It would be highly irresponsible for anyone to say anything about anything related to this situation at this point in time," Kaufman wrote in an email to the Camera on Thursday.

CU spokesman Ryan Huff said he could not address personnel actions relating to specific employees.

"What I can tell you is that there was a personnel action on our campus (Tuesday), and part of a routine procedure, when we have personnel actions, we have our police department in the area in case they're needed," Huff said. "(Tuesday) a personnel action was taken without incident."

Despite the police presence Tuesday, Huff said the administration does not feel there is any threat to the campus community.

Police presence

Students in Kaufman's "Introduction to Philosophy" class said they saw several police officers inside the Hale Science building Tuesday before their 9:30 a.m. class.

"I came in up the stairs and I saw a couple of cops, just chilling out, not doing anything and I was like, 'OK,' but everyone was just walking to class, so I just said, 'Let's go to class, then,'" Silverstone said.

After that, Kaufman walked into the classroom and appeared to be setting up something on the computer at the front of the lecture hall, Silverstone said.

Later, a teaching assistant walked in and told the students class was canceled "because the cops don't want anyone in the building right now," Silverstone said.

Silverstone said she'd never experienced that type of situation before on campus. She said Kaufman was a "funny" and "really intelligent" teacher who explained topics well.

Students notified

In an email from Cowell, the philosophy department chairman, on Tuesday, Kaufman's students were told the professor is "on leave as of today, until further notice."

"I realize this could be a major disruption to your semester," Cowell wrote. "The Department of Philosophy is working very hard at the moment to find immediate replacements for Professor Kaufman, in order to minimize the disruption. We will announce those replacements as soon as they are available."

Cowell also wrote that he could not "comment on the reasons for the leave, as this is a private personnel issue."

He took over as philosophy chairman Feb. 1, replacing former chair Graeme Forbes, based on recommendations made in the report by the American Philosophical Association Committee on the Status of Women Site Visit Program.

The report also led administrators to suspend graduate admissions into the department until at least fall of 2015.

Cowell spoke to Kaufman's "Introduction to Philosophy" class on Thursday and introduced Shane Gronholz, a philosophy graduate student, who is taking over the class "for as long as necessary," Cowell said.

"It could be for the rest of the semester, but if Professor Kaufman comes back soon then he would step back in and take things over," Cowell said to the class.

Faculty members were informed of the situation in an email from Cowell and were instructed to call the police if they saw Kaufman on campus.

Anyone who violates an exclusion order, or returns to campus, can be charged with trespassing or unlawful conduct, CU police officials said.

'He's a super cool teacher'

Kaufman, who lives in Denver, according to his curriculum vitae, focuses on 17th century philosophy, especially the metaphysics of Descartes, Locke and Leibniz.

According to his faculty page on the philosophy department's website, Kaufman is also interested in contemporary metaphysics, medieval philosophy and philosophical theology.

This semester, Kaufman had been teaching an introductory philosophy course for undergraduates and a seminar on the history of philosophy for graduate students, according to the CU schedule for spring courses.

Many undergraduate students said they were disappointed that Kaufman would not be leading their classes for the foreseeable future.

Majed Abdulfattah said he appreciated Kaufman's use of examples and imagery in lecture.

Another student, Brian Castillo, said it was unfortunate that Kaufman was being replaced by another instructor.

Use the blog's search engine for more on this subject.

Pithovirus sibericum...brought to life

"Giant Virus Resurrected from 30,000-Year-Old Ice"

The discovery of the largest virus yet, still infectious, hints at the viral diversity trapped in permafrost

by

Ed Yong and Nature magazine

March 4th, 2014

Scientific American

In what seems like a plot straight out of a low-budget science-fiction film, scientists have revived a giant virus that was buried in Siberian ice for 30,000 years — and it is still infectious. Its targets, fortunately, are amoebae, but the researchers suggest that as Earth's ice melts, this could trigger the return of other ancient viruses, with potential risks for human health.

The newly thawed virus is the biggest one ever found. At 1.5 micrometers long, it is comparable in size to a small bacterium. Evolutionary biologists Jean-Michel Claverie and Chantal Abergel, the husband-and-wife team at Aix-Marseille University in France who led the work, named it Pithovirus sibericum, inspired by the Greek word 'pithos' for the large container used by the ancient Greeks to store wine and food. “We’re French, so we had to put wine in the story,” says Claverie. The results are published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Claverie and Abergel have helped to discover other so-called giant viruses — including the first, called Mimivirus, in 2003, and two others, known as Pandoraviruses, last year (see 'Giant viruses open Pandora's box'). “Once again, this group has opened our eyes to the enormous diversity that exists in giant viruses,” says Curtis Suttle, a virologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, who was not involved in the work.

Two years ago, Claverie and Abergel's team learned that scientists in Russia had resurrected an ancient plant from fruits buried in 30,000-year-old Siberian permafrost. “If it was possible to revive a plant, I wondered if it was possible to revive a virus,” says Claverie. Using permafrost samples provided by the Russian team, they fished for giant viruses by using amoebae — the typical targets of these pathogens — as bait. The amoebae started dying, and the team found giant-virus particles inside them.

Under a microscope, Pithovirus appears as a thick-walled oval with an opening at one end, much like the Pandoraviruses. But despite their similar shapes, Abergel notes that “they are totally different viruses”.

Surprising properties

Pithovirus has a ‘cork’ with a honeycomb structure capping its opening (see electron-microscope image). It copies itself by building replication ‘factories’ in its host’s cytoplasm, rather than by taking over the nucleus, as most viruses do. Only one-third of its proteins bear any similarity to those of other viruses. And, to the team’s surprise, its genome is much smaller than those of the Pandoraviruses, despite its larger size.

“That huge particle is basically empty,” says Claverie. “We thought it was a property of viruses that they pack DNA extremely tightly into the smallest particle possible, but this guy is 150 times less compacted than any bacteriophage [viruses that infect bacteria]. We don’t understand anything anymore!”

Although giant viruses almost always target amoebae, Christelle Desnues, a virologist at the French National Center for Scientific Research in Marseilles, last year discovered signs that another giant virus, Marseillevirus, had infected an 11-month-old boy. He had been hospitalized with inflamed lymph nodes, and Desnues's team discovered traces of Marseillevirus DNA in his blood, and the virus itself in the a node. “It is clear that giant viruses cannot be seen as stand-alone freaks of nature,” she says. “They constitute an integral part of the virosphere with implications in diversity, evolution and even human health.”
Claverie and Abergel are concerned that rising global temperatures, along with mining and drilling operations in the Arctic, could thaw out many more ancient viruses that are still infectious and that could conceivably pose a threat to human health.

But Suttle points out that people already inhale thousands of viruses every day, and swallow billions whenever they swim in the sea. The idea that melting ice would release harmful viruses, and that those viruses would circulate extensively enough to affect human health, “stretches scientific rationality to the breaking point”, he says. “I would be much more concerned about the hundreds of millions of people who will be displaced by rising sea levels.”

Deceased--Alain Resnais

Alain Resnais
June 3rd, 1922 to March 1st, 2014

"Alain Resnais dies at 91; French New Wave filmmaker"

Considered one of France's greatest filmmakers, Resnais directed such acclaimed features as 'Hiroshima Mon Amour' and 'Last Year at Marienbad.'

March 2nd, 2014

Los Angeles Times

Alain Resnais, the French filmmaker whose intellectual experiments with time, memory and imagination yielded such celebrated films as "Last Year at Marienbad," has died. He was 91.

Resnais was editing drafts of his next project even from his hospital bed, his longtime producer, Jean-Louis Livi, told the Associated Press.

Resnais, who died Saturday, was renowned for reinventing himself during each of his full-length films, which included the acclaimed "Hiroshima Mon Amour" in 1959 and most recently "Life of Riley," which was honored at the Berlin Film Festival just weeks ago.

In France, he won two Césars, the French equivalent of the Oscars, and, in 2009, received a lifetime achievement award at the Cannes International Film Festival.

Praised by French President Francois Hollande as one of his nation's greatest filmmakers, Resnais started his career with art documentaries before making the leap to feature films.

Though many of his films were cerebral, his later work had a more clearly playful side. In 2009, he told reporters at Cannes that the humor in his film "Wild Grass" was inspired by one of his favorite TV shows: Larry David's "Curb Your Enthusiasm".

His most influential work was "Last Year at Marienbad" (1961), which the New York Times described as "one of the most mysterious movies of the 1960s." Set in a massive, baroque hotel with characters identified only by a single initial, it is an ambiguous love story that revolves around the possible relationships, past and present, of M, X and A.

New Yorker critic Pauline Kael called it an "aimless disaster," but it has been lauded by fans such as filmmaker David Lynch and the former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, who screened the movie at the White House.

Born on June 3, 1922, in Vannes France, Resnais, the son of a pharmacist, suffered from asthma as a child and was schooled at home. When he was 12, his parents acknowledged his fascination with movies and gave him an 8-mm camera.

During World War II, he studied acting and film editing in Paris, serving with the French military in 1945 and 1946.

He made short documentaries about the works of Van Gogh, Gauguin and Picasso but gained wider attention in 1955 with "Night and Fog", a haunting piece about the Nazi concentration camps.

His first feature film was "Hiroshima Mon Amour" (1959). The story of an ebbing affair between a Japanese architect and a French actress, it is set in post-WWII Hiroshima and is laced with each character's painful memories of war.

Regarded as part of the famed French "New Wave" of filmmakers, Resnais never had a blockbuster and spoke of them with a kind of bemused detachment.

"I'm certainly interested in a film which might gather millions of people, such as 'Jaws,' although I haven't seen 'Jaws' and no one I know has," he told The Times in 1977. "I am making films for everybody who doesn't want to stay home and watch television, and maybe that is a very few people."

Known for his debonair manner and full head of white hair, Resnais was described by a Times reporter in 1980 as "tall and beautifully barbered, with pale, papery skin and clear blue eyes. A non-smoker and non-drinker, he is shy and withdrawn yet terribly anxious not to seem ascetic or remote."

An artist who delved into pop culture as well as abstract thinking about non-linear storytelling, Resnais owned what is reputed to be the largest private comic-book collection in France.

His survivors include his wife, Sabine Azema, an actress who appeared in many of his films. They were married in 1998.

An earlier marriage, to Florence Malraux, daughter of the writer Andre Malraux, ended in divorce.

"Alain Resnais, Acclaimed Filmmaker Who Defied Conventions, Dies at 91"

by

Dave Kehr

March 2nd, 2014

The New York Times

Alain Resnais, the French filmmaker who helped introduce literary modernism to the movies and became an international art-house star with nonlinear narrative films like “Hiroshima Mon Amour” and “Last Year at Marienbad,” died on Saturday in Paris. He was 91.

His death was confirmed by the French president, François Hollande, who called Mr. Resnais one of France’s greatest filmmakers.

Although his name was often associated with the French New Wave directors — notably Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, whose careers coalesced around the same time his did — Mr. Resnais actually belonged to a tradition of Left Bank intellectualism that drew on more established, high-culture sources than the moviecentric influences of the New Wave. Where Godard’s 1960 film, “Breathless,” was a pastiche of low-budget American gangster films, Mr. Resnais’s breakthrough feature, “Hiroshima Mon Amour,” in 1959, took on two subjects weighted with social and political significance: the American nuclear destruction of Hiroshima, Japan, and the German occupation of France.

To bind these themes into a melancholy love story about a French actress (Emmanuelle Riva) who has a brief affair with a Japanese architect (Eiji Okada), Mr. Resnais commissioned a screenplay from the writer Marguerite Duras, then one of the emerging stars of the “nouveau roman” movement, which was challenging literary narrative conventions.

Mr. Resnais continued to collaborate with celebrated authors like Alain Robbe-Grillet, a leading proponent of the nouveau roman, on “Last Year at Marienbad” (1961) and Jorge Semprún of Spain for “La Guerre Est Finie” (1966) and “Stavisky...” (1974), yet his films could never be described as simple literary exercises.

Fascinated by the ability of film editing to take apart and reassemble fragments of time — one of his first professional experiences was as an editor and assistant director on “Paris 1900,” a 1947 documentary on the French capital during its belle époque — Mr. Resnais incorporated the effects of scrambled memories, déjà vu and fantasy into his work.

In “Last Year at Marienbad,” which won the Golden Lion at the 1961 Venice Film Festival, a man identified only as “X” (Giorgio Albertazzi) tries to convince a woman identified only as “A” (Delphine Seyrig) that they had had an affair the year before at Marienbad, the fashionable European spa. As they wander the corridors and grounds of a sprawling chateau, A resists X’s advances, as a third man, M (Sacha Pitoëff), who seems to be A’s husband, looks on.

The film achieves its hypnotic force through repeated lines and situations, a time scheme that folds back on itself, and ominous, black-and-white wide-screen images that evoke both surrealist paintings (human figures cast long shadows, but not the decorative shrubbery that frames them) and the society dramas of silent film. (Ms. Seyrig is costumed to resemble the enigmatic silent star Louise Brooks.)

The film’s radical approach won both extravagant praise and harsh derision: the critic Pauline Kael dismissed it as “all solemn and expectant — like High Mass.” Mr. Resnais’s attitude was more amused.

“I don’t believe it is really a riddle to be solved,” he told the television interviewer François Chalais. “Every spectator can find his own interpretation, and it’s likely to be the right one.”

Mr. Resnais had a full head of white hair that the French newspaper Le Monde said he had sported for so long that one could forget he was ever young. He exhibited a youthful energy well into his 80s and was working on drafts of his next project from his hospital bed when he died, the producer Jean-Louis Livi said.

Despite the serious nature of his films, he showed a playful side in recent years and said he had found inspiration in Larry David’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” one of his favorite television shows. Another expression of his appreciation for “high” and “low” culture was his interest in cartoons. His 1989 movie, “I Want to Go Home,” was a comedy collaboration with Jules Feiffer, with whom he wrote the screenplay. He told a French interviewer that he wanted his work to have the effect of “désolation allègre” — “cheerful desolation.”

Mr. Resnais was married twice. His first wife, Florence Malraux, was the daughter of the novelist André Malraux and worked as his assistant on many of his films from “Marienbad” to “Mélo.” They later divorced. His second wife, Sabine Azéma, who survives him, is an actress who appeared in many of his films.

Mr. Resnais was born on June 3, 1922, in the village of Vannes, in Brittany, where his father was a pharmacist. He became fascinated by the movies as a child, and at 14 he directed his first film in eight millimeter, “L’Aventure de Guy,” now lost but said to have been inspired by Louis Feuillade’s crime serial “Fantômas.”

In 1939, he moved to Paris to study acting, and in 1942 he appeared as an extra in Marcel Carné’s Occupation allegory “Les Visiteurs du Soir.” When the French national film school, L’Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques, was founded in 1943, Mr. Resnais became a member of what would become the first graduating class.

Mr. Resnais directed his first 16-millimeter short in 1946, a surrealist comedy titled “Schéma d’une Identification” (“Outline of an Identification”), and persuaded a neighbor, the matinee idol Gérard Philipe, to lend his name and presence to the project. He soon followed with a feature-length work, “Ouvert Pour Cause d’Inventaire” (“Open on Account of Inventory”). Both are now believed lost.

Mr. Resnais then threw himself into a series of short documentaries and sponsored films, including a 1947 homage to Nestlé’s powdered milk.

A 1948 film on Van Gogh impressed the producer Pierre Braunberger, who invited him to remake it in 35 millimeter. Works on a wide variety of subjects followed, but it was a 1955 synthesis of newly shot and newsreel footage that established Mr. Resnais’s reputation: “Night and Fog,” a quietly powerful exhortation to the French, and the world, to remember the Nazi death camps at a time when their horrors were fading into willed amnesia.

After the international success of “Marienbad,” Mr. Resnais returned to the subject of suppressed historical trauma in 1963 with “Muriel,” a relatively straightforward drama about a middle-aged antiques dealer (Ms. Seyrig again) whose life has been warped as a distant consequence of the war in Algeria.

Memory, with an increasingly complex use of montage to evoke the mind’s unpredictable associations, became the central subject of Mr. Resnais’s films: from “La Guerre Est Finie” (1966) to “Providence” (1977). Perhaps his most innovative film of this period was the 1968 “Je t’Aime Je t’Aime,” which used a time-travel premise to compose a complex series of enigmatic images and dramatic fragments spiraling through one man’s subjective experience of life.

A more playful, satirical side of Mr. Resnais’s personality emerged with the 1980 “Mon Oncle d’Amérique,” a witty disquisition on humans’ lack of free will spun from the behavioralist theories of the psychologist Henri Laborit. The film’s contrapuntal structure, which moved among three different stories to explore a common theme, would become a key element in Mr. Resnais’s later work.

For “Life Is a Bed of Roses,” in 1983, Mr. Resnais assembled the trio of performers who would remain with him for much of the rest of his career: Ms. Azéma (whom Mr. Resnais would marry in 1998), Pierre Arditi and André Dussollier, each of them expert at the kind of stylized, theatrical acting that became central to Mr. Resnais’s work.

In films like the 1986 “Mélo,” adapted from a 1929 play by Henri Bernstein, and “Smoking/No Smoking,” a pair of 1993 features based on Alan Ayckbourn’s eight-play cycle, “Intimate Exchanges,” Mr. Resnais explored the tension between cinematic realism and theatrical artifice. In his hands, the conflict became a metaphor for the competing roles of chance and predetermination in shaping human lives.

From its somber beginnings, Mr. Resnais’s work seemed to grow more lighthearted over the years. A passionate devotee of Broadway musicals, he incorporated music into his work with the pop score of “Same Old Song” (1997) and “Not on the Lips,” a 2003 adaptation of a 1925 operetta.

In 2009, the New York Film Festival opened with his “Wild Grass,” a bittersweet comedy of missed romantic connections that came with two different endings; Mr. Resnais suggested that spectators could choose the one they liked best.

At the Cannes Film Festival in 2009, where Mr. Resnais received a lifetime achievement award, he said: “I’ve read articles calling me a filmmaker of memory. I’ve always refused that label by saying, ‘No, I want to make films that describe the imaginary.’ ”

His interest was not nostalgia, he added: “It’s simply the astonishment over everything that our imaginary can provoke.”

His last film, “The Life of Riley,” had its premiere last month at the Berlin International Film Festival, where it won the Alfred Bauer Prize. This particular Silver Bear award celebrates a film that “opens new perspectives on cinematic art.”
 

"Alain Resnais, whose complex, intellectual films include ‘Hiroshima Mon Amour, ’ dies at 91"

by

Tim Page

March 2nd, 2014

The Washington Post

Alain Resnais, a French filmmaker who directed a riveting early documentary about Nazi concentration camps and whose later films “Hiroshima Mon Amour” and “Last Year at Marienbad” melded opulent, baroque imagery with complicated narratives that could be as puzzling as they were compelling, died March 1 in Paris. He was 91.

Producer Jean-Louis Livi confirmed that Mr. Resnais had died but did not provide a cause of death.

Mr. Resnais, a major figure in international cinema in the 1950s and ’60s, was occasionally linked to the “new wave” of unconventional French filmmakers, including François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard.

The new wave is often associated with films that were lyrical, fast-paced, easy to watch and imbued with a cheeky youthfulness. Mr. Resnais developed a different path. As Richard Roud, a co-founder and the first director of the New York Film Festival, put it, a Resnais film was always a “calculated work of art. It is not spontaneous, it is not realistic and it is complex.”

This was true of much of Mr. Resnais’s later work but not of the short documentary with which he established his reputation. Made just a decade after World War II ended, “Nuit et Brouillard” (“Night and Fog”) (1955) is often credited as the first filmic evocation of the Nazi concentration camps, including Auschwitz.

A mixture of grisly black-and-white photographs taken during World War II combined with quiet color images of the now-empty camps, the 30-minute film could not be more straightforward and harrowing. Writing in the New York Times in 2000, film critic Stuart Klawans said “Night and Fog” “remains an unsurpassed meditation on the Holocaust.”

The text was written and narrated by the poet and publisher Jean Cayrol, a survivor of the Gusen camp in Austria.

“If one does not forget, one can neither live nor function,” Mr. Resnais told an interviewer in 1966. “The problem arose for me when I was making ‘Nuit et Brouillard.’ It was not a question of making yet another war memorial, but of thinking of the present and the future. Forgetting ought to be constructive.”
His emphasis on memory — more as an intellectual or even elliptical exercise than as straightforward dramatic narrative — pervaded much of his subsequent work.

With “Hiroshima Mon Amour” (1959), Mr. Resnais initially envisioned a documentary similar to “Night and Fog,” but he altered his vision after consulting with the French novelist Marguerite Duras.

She turned in a script with 16 pages of dialogue, a spareness that allowed the director to shape a stylized narrative centered on the tortured affair between a French actress (Emmanuelle Riva) and a Japanese architect (Eiji Okada).

The result, which Time magazine called “an intense, original and ambitious piece of cinema,” combined documentary footage with a love story told in present tense but forever overshadowed by the memory of atomic catastrophe and her earlier love for a German soldier who was killed during the Allied liberation of France.

As he did with “Hiroshima Mon Amour,” Mr. Resnais often worked with writers who were not yet generally associated with the film world. His next major project was “Last Year at Marienbad” (1961), a collaboration with the French avant-garde novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet.

“Last Year at Marienbad,” featuring Delphine Seyrig, Giorgio Albertazzi and Sacha Pitoëff, focused on a man’s attempts to persuade a woman that they had an affair a year earlier. The surreal film regularly turns up on lists of the “best” and the “worst” movies ever made.

By design, the characters — known only as A, X and M — have no more humanity than figures on a chessboard, variables in an equation or dummies in a store window. For that reason, it has often been said that half of the fashion photography of the past 50 years owes a debt to “Marienbad.”

The movie represented an effort to “determine if it is possible to represent, even roughly, the mechanics of thought, not in reality, but in the minds of the characters,” Mr. Resnais told a reporter at the time.

Attempts to discern a plot, discover a hidden message or make an emotional connection with the characters in “Marienbad” are doomed to failure. “Marienbad” is best followed as if it were a string quartet, a ballet or a mysteriously animated painting that changes ever so slightly as you watch.

“With ‘Marienbad,’ Resnais carried the cinema farther than it has ever gone before without worrying about whether or not audiences would follow,” Godard told the New York Times in 1962. “If he were a novelist or a poet, this wouldn’t matter — but in the cinema, you’re supposed to worry about your audience. Alain knows this and that’s why he seems so contradictory and mysterious. He’s trying to hide his obsession with his art.”

Alain Resnais was born on June 3, 1922, in Vannes, an ancient village in Brittany where his father ran a pharmacy. A fragile child, Mr. Resnais was educated mostly at home. On his 12th birthday, he was given an 8mm camera and began to make home movies, with his friends given starring roles.

His fascination with the visual arts dated to childhood, when Mr. Resnais had been a devoted reader of comic strips. He suggested that his interest in flashbacks and what he would dub “flashforwards” might have been inspired by his love of Milton Caniff’s long-running cartoon “Terry and the Pirates.”

“It was an impossible task to find that story in France because it would be published for two weeks and then disappear,” he told film scholar James Monaco. “Then I would find it in Italian and then that would disappear, too. And after that there was a war and so I had to read ‘Terry and the Pirates’ in complete discontinuity.

“Well,” he said, “I discovered that it gave the story a lot of emotion to know Terry when he was 14 and then when he was, say, 24, after which I would make up myself what had happened to him when he was 22 or 17.”
At 17, Mr. Resnais moved to Paris and studied acting before entering the French military toward the end of World War II.

Afterward, he began making short movies about artists such as Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh, the second of which won an Academy Award for best short film. He also directed a film about the Nazi bombing of the Basque city of Guernica and Pablo Picasso’s artistic response to it.

“Providence,” made in 1977, was Mr. Resnais’s first film in English. Despite a cast that included John Gielgud as a dying English novelist, it was savaged by most critics. The New Yorker film reviewer Pauline Kael was particularly hard on Mr. Resnais, reducing his technique to “beautiful diddles.”

“Providence” eventually found passionate admirers. And Monaco, in a riposte to Kael, believed he had found the key to Mr. Resnais’s work.

“Alain Resnais’ films, far from being the complicated and tortuous intellectual puzzles they are reputed to be, are rather simple, elegant, easily understood — and felt — investigations of the pervasive process of imagination,” he once wrote. “It doesn’t even take much imagination to enjoy them. All that is necessary is an understanding that we are watching not stories but the telling of stories.”

Among Mr. Resnais’s other most-celebrated films are “La Guerre Est Finie” (“The War Is Over”) (1966), a drama starring Yves Montand as an aging Communist Party revolutionary in Franco’s Spain, and “Stavisky” (1974), with an instrumental score by Stephen Sondheim.

Mr. Resnais’s works included “Muriel” (1963), a melancholy rumination on the Algerian war; “La Vie Est un Roman” (1983), an interweaving of three disparate tales spread across several centuries; “I Want to Go Home” (1989), an excursion into the world of comic books that was set in Cleveland to a script by cartoonist Jules Feiffer; and three settings of plays by the British author Alan Ayckbourn, including “Smoking/No Smoking” (1993).

Florence Malraux, the daughter of the French author and politician Andre Malraux, was an assistant director for most of Mr. Resnais’s films after and including “Marienbad.” They were married in 1969 and later divorced. His second wife was the actress Sabine Azéma, who appeared in many of his films from the early 1980s and whom he married in 1998.

A complete list of survivors could not be immediately confirmed.

The tall, formal, soft-spoken Mr. Resnais was generally liked personally by those he met, including critics who didn’t always admire his work.

“I make difficult films,” Mr. Resnais acknowledged in 1962, “but not on purpose.”

Alain Resnais [Wikipedia]

Hiroshima mon amour [Wikipedia]

Last Year at Marienbad [Wikipedia]

Sarah Chinski is selected essay winner and will go to NEAF

Her trip should be a lot of fun...congratulations.

"Astronomy selects 2014 Youth Essay Contest winner"

Seventeen-year-old Sarah Chinski of Marion, Iowa, wins a trip to the Northeast Astronomy Forum & Telescope Show with her entry for Astronomy’s 2014 Youth Essay Contest.

by

Karri Ferron

February 28th, 2014

Astronomy

The editors of Astronomy magazine have selected 17-year-old Sarah Chinski of Marion, Iowa, as the winner of Astronomy’s 2014 Youth Essay Contest. For her entry on what she loves best about astronomy, Sarah will receive an all-expenses-paid trip for her and a parent to the Northeast Astronomy Forum & Telescope Show (NEAF), one of the world's premier astronomy expos.

Sarah caught the Astronomy staff’s attention with a thoughtful essay about her appreciation of the vast wonder astronomy evokes in people. “We as humans are quite curious creatures. … The study of astronomy gives us a chance to indulge that curiosity, to learn about something bigger than this isolated world in which we exist,” she wrote. “Not only is our curiosity satisfied, but we all gain a broader realization of what is important in the world by studying astronomy. As the beloved rascal Calvin (from the Calvin and Hobbes comics) once said, ‘When you look into infinity, you realize that there are more important things than what people do all day.’”
Sarah became interested in astronomy in a way that probably isn’t all that surprising for her generation: through a science-fiction video game, where she could drive around on fictional foreign planets and make observations. Soon she was reading up on black holes, comets, and nebulae. And because passive experience wasn’t enough for her, she invested in her first telescope last year, and her favorite object to study at the moment is the Moon.

But Sarah hopes lunar study won’t end in her backyard. After exploring fictional planets in a video game and our lone natural satellite with her backyard, she has discovered what she is meant to do: add to the ever-changing and expanding knowledge of the infinite universe.

And Astronomy’s editors think NEAF will be a perfect place to continue to cultivate Sarah’s ambitions. For her hobby enjoyment, NEAF features more than 115 vendors selling all kinds of astro-equipment. But it’s the speakers that her family and the staff think will leave Sarah inspired. This year’s lineup includes Alan Stern, principal investigator with the New Horizons mission to Pluto; Matt Greenhouse, NASA project scientist with the James Webb Space Telescope; Ken Kremer, NASA/JPL planetary ambassador; David J. Eicher, Astronomy editor; and many others. Astronomy workshops, daily solar observing, STARLAB planetarium shows, classes for beginners getting into astronomy, and astronomy events for kids will round out the schedule.

“NEAF is just the type of event an amateur astronomer and budding scientist like Sarah should attend,” says Eicher. “Astronomy is excited to provide her with this opportunity, and I hope it inspires her pursue her passion for exploring the wonders our universe has to offer.”

Astronomy [website]

The Rockland Astronomy Club, Inc.

Knowledge of your demise...wanna know?

"A blood test to predict imminent death? Would you want to take it?"

by

Melissa Healy

February 28th, 2014

Los Angeles Times

Here are some findings that could scare you to death: In a study published this week, Finnish and Estonian researchers report that they have identified specific levels of four chemicals circulating in the blood that offer a reliable signal that death is near. The four harbingers of death can be readily detected in a blood sample, and are even predictive when seen in apparently healthy people, their new study shows.

It's not just a life insurance saleman's dream. The study, released this week in the journal PLOS Medicine, suggests that several potentially deadly conditions -- cancer, cardiovascular disease and a welter of non-vascular causes of death -- may share signs, and even origins, that have been hidden in plain sight. If readily detectable physiological clues--called "biomarkers"--could give warning of many dangerous conditions at once, a single blood test might provide a person early warning of a deadly threat, while it could still be averted (or at least delayed).

That said, a blood test to predict death is far from ready for prime time. This is an early effort to glean better ways to screen for and diagnose diseases, not to give notice that the Grim Reaper is stalking you.

For now, however, the "death biomarkers" might make you think twice before giving up a vial of your blood. The four horseman of an individual's apocalypse were narrowed down from a list of 106 candidate biomarkers--all lipids, proteins and metabolites circulating in the blood. They are: alpha-1-acid glycoprotein, albumin, very low-density lipoprotein (VLDL) particle size, and citrate.

How did the researchers glean the possible significance of these four? They ran the carefully collected blood samples of 9,482 Estonians between the age of 18 and 101 through a scan that used nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, to make measurements of the 106 biomarker candidates in each. Over a median follow-up period of just over five years, 508 of the randomly chosen Estonian subjects died of various causes. The study's authors compared the biomarker levels of both groups in an effort to identify those that were more common in the dead and less common in the living.

The four biomarkers stood out as unusually common among the dead, and less common in those that survived the five years of follow-up. The researchers created an index of the four measures. They found that compared to a person whose index fell in the bottom 20% of the observed range, the individual whose biomarker index was in the top 20% was 19 times more likely to die in the five years after his or her blood sample was drawn.

Even when the researchers stripped out all participants who had diabetes, cancer or cardiovascular disease, they found that the biomarkers predicted death over the five-year period in apparently healthy people as well. The researchers then repeated their test of biomarkers on a separate population--8,444 Finnish men and women between 24 and 74. The biomarkers were equally predictive of death in this  "validation group."

All of which makes you wonder: Would you want to know?