Robot Soul

Meyerhold on the relationship between actors and spectators:

A specific peculiarity of the actor’s creativity (as opposed to the originality of the playwright, the theatre director or the other artists) is that the creative process is being conducted in front of the audience. As a result, the actor and the spectator are interposing a particular mutual relationship; specifically, the actor puts the spectator in the position of a sounding board, which reacts to every action upon his command. And vice versa - sensing his own resonator (the audience), the actor immediately reacts, by improvisation, to all the demands coming from the audience. Following a series of signs (noise, movement, laughter etc.), the actor must define the attitude of the audience towards the performance correctly.

Can we write code that reacts to client input in the way described above?

I take the view that computer languages, robot ethics, method acting, and biomechanics are the main ingredients that fused, in the 1950s, to become the cultural meme we call Artificial Intelligence, or AI for short. None of those ingredients was wholly new at that time: biomechanics and the Method - first known as the Stanislavski system - had been around since the early 1920s; Isaac Asimov, in conjunction with science fiction author and editor John W. Campbell, formulated the Laws of Robotics in 1940 ('t was about time, too - Jaques de Vaucanson had had the first mecha working in 1737); Ada Lovelace had anticipated the development of computer software, artificial intelligence and computer music back in 1843. But in the 1950s, thinking machines went pop.

So now you know how to interpret the "culture" in my "cultural meme": my professional background is in what people call pop culture. I had more than 20 years of work experience as a punk band singer, music magazine publisher, editor, scriptwriter, reporter, DJ, director, composer, A/V-producer, and nightlife entrepreneur, before I started programming computers four years ago. I take a broad view of pop culture, however; it includes scientific papers such as "Making Robots Conscious of their Mental States" as artefacts of pop, and casts that paper's author, computer scientist John McCarthy, as an ur-wiz of AI, a pop hero. Mental states for robots - that is so pop, dude!