The Pygmalion effect shaping future generations

Science fiction, a mirror of reality, creates imaginary worlds shaping our future societies. What if we started anew with utopian stories to pass on to the young people of 2050? Two science fiction writers and a computer science professor brought this idea to life and shared it during the “Pigmalione Sci-Fi #2 – Profezie che si autoavverano” (meaning: Pygmalion Sci-Fi – Self-Fulfilling Prophecies) panel at the Robot Festival. And from these three stories, together with Artificial Intelligence, they rewrote Asimov’s three laws of robotics, 80 years after their creation. Here’s how it went.

«“This is a small step for me, a giant leap for the world”. Alright, that was not exactly a great burst of creativity. Yet, that “world” at the end of the sentence, triggered a lot of comments and interpretations, particularly concerning the fact that Martin could not have placed that word there by accident». Martin is a robot, who, in 2050, is landing on Mars, representing a planet Earth he feels he belongs to – a world where humans and robots live in harmony.

Martin’s story is set to be read by teenagers in 2050, just as we read the science fiction classics of the twentieth century today. Mostly dystopias. But what if we offered them utopias instead? For centuries, we have retold, in various forms¹, the story of Pygmalion, who falls in love with a statue because he believes it to be real. In the same way, the Pygmalion effect² is a self-fulfilling prophecy. What is true is not necessarily so; it is what you believe to be true because you behave as if it is, thereby bringing it into reality in some way.

This notion inspired the “Pigmalione Sci-Fi: Profezie che si autoavverano” panel, organised by the cultural association Sineglossa, which curates the Mangrovia editorial line, within the Robot Festival, in collaboration with 24Frame Future Film Fest³. Two science fiction writers and a computer science professor came together with an Artificial Intelligence to rewrite Asimov’s laws of robotics, a cornerstone of science fiction literature, eighty years after their creation. Based on three utopian stories for young people of 2050.

What is science fiction?

«Science fiction is a way of seeing reality: a lens that can help you glimpse the future, enabling you to travel far like telescopes do, or, in the present, magnify the minute, examining things up close, discerning structures, paradoxes, and conflicts that might otherwise go unnoticed», shared writer Alessandro Vietti, nostalgically recounting his “love affair” with science fiction, from Dino Buzzati’s stories to the early 1990s cyberpunk⁴.

Anyone who thinks science fiction is synonymous with “anything is possible” might not appreciate the genre. In fact, «at first, I didn’t like the idea that anything goes – coming back to life, teleporting, and so on,» remarked computer science professor Emanuele Rodolà.«Then I understood that a science fiction story has an internal coherence: a system of rules and laws that impose constraints». Constraints that, in turn, are tied to reality, or what science is capable of achieving. «That’s why it has been a passion of mine for ten years now. I always tell my students that the more creative they are, like real science fiction authors, the better scientists they’ll become».

Science fiction, indeed, which encapsulates fantastic stories seemingly or partially based on scientific elements, is merely a tool for unveiling future insights and imaginaries. It is no coincidence that many science fiction stories have anticipated technological discoveries such as self-driving cars, virtual reality, video conferencing, wireless earbuds, and drones.

«With wars, the climate crisis, and the transitional period we’re going through, we’re lately only able to envision a fairly catastrophic future», emphasised Federico Bomba, artistic director of Sineglossa and moderator of the panel. «To tread untrodden paths, without being able to foresee reality, we must start again from utopias», drawing on science fiction’s predictive power.

A science fiction world mirrors and multiplies our reality, as in a mirror or a hall of mirrors: its creator can envision and apply the governing order, but also has the duty and privilege to respect it. The “liberating act” of creation, as described by writer Nicoletta Vallorani, is followed by the revelation of shadowed areas, flaws, and conflicts inherent to any order, which unfold gradually to the reader or viewer offering a once unknown, possible reality.

«Science fiction plays an essential role in my life», Vallorani continued. «I could live without writing, but I could never live without imagining what the future holds for us». Even today, science fiction can predict what lies ahead and help us build, through imagination, who we will become and how we will relate to the world, machines, and the non-human.

How will inter-species communication take place?

In the 1958 novel The Cosmic Rape by Theodore Sturgeon, Medusa is an extraterrestrial entity which, in the form of a harmless spore, arrives from deep space to create a collective and shared hive mind with all sentient beings it encounters and incorporates. Inspired by this novel, Rodolà created the final page of his utopian tale.

«With Medusa’s defeat, the colossal interplanetary being withdrew, leaving Earth in the hands of a new humanity. In the battle against Medusa, we tore down the barriers that once separated species, discovering the common language that united us with plants, animals, and fungi. Humanity, as we knew it, no longer existed. In its place, a new species arose, truly terrestrial, free from boundaries. A species capable of creating music beyond music, poetry beyond words, infused with an ever-present wonder».

Thanks to Medusa’s invasion and defeat, a world would thus emerge where communication with other species is possible.

Inter-species communication was also at the heart of Vallorani’s story. The main character, who has an unconventional body and is labelled as “retarded”, is trapped in a city due to a pandemic. Following the path of water, she manages to escape and find a utopian and harmonious nature, where it is possible to communicate even with tomatoes.

And what if machines, in the absence of an extraterrestrial entity like Medusa, played a role in promoting and protecting the entire ecosystem-world?

This is the premise of the story of the robot Martin, as told by Vietti. Upon his landing on Mars, Martin proclaims a phrase similar to astronaut Neil Armstrong’s iconic moon landing statement.

«On the one hand, it seems obvious that Martin would never have said “for humanity”, as Armstrong did, because he feels (for those who believe he has a consciousness) or simply knows (for those who don’t) that he isn’t part of it. But neither did he say, “for artificial intelligence”. No, he said “for the world”. […] because within that world are all the creatures of our planet Earth. So, all animals – human and non-human – insects, plants, fungi, right down to the last extremophile cyanobacterium, but also, and perhaps most importantly, himself and other intelligences like him».

This is an invitation to abandon the distinction between the natural and the artificial, to see ourselves as multiple organisms, to step away from the mind-body dualism⁵, and to embrace a global, symbiotic perspective.

«This is the very direction that contemporary science fiction narratives are heading towards», Vallorani pointed out, «imagining a way to coexist harmoniously, with respect and sympoiesis⁶, that is, building together».

Harmony remains an ideal, of course: «there are mathematical results, guaranteed by some of the world’s greatest minds, that show harmony is unattainable», said Rodolà. Yet nothing prevents us from striving in that direction, alongside technology capable of integrating all voices, regulated by new laws.

The three new laws of robotics

In the 1940s, following fruitful discussions with his friend John W. Campbell, editor of Astounding Science Fiction⁷, science fiction writer Isaac Asimov wrote down history’s most famous laws of robotics.

«1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2. A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.»

These laws have been foundational in the field of robotic ethics: for a long time, it was believed these were the rules upon which robots should be built, and that their violation would constitute the primary trigger for dystopian futures. 

«But artificial intelligence is showing us a world completely different from what Asimov could have envisioned», explained Professor Vietti.

This is evident, given that intelligent drones used in warfare have broken the laws of robotics with their autonomy in choosing to kill. And so, as Vallorani noted, «a profound revision of these fundamentally anthropocentric laws is absolutely necessary today». This is precisely what the participants sought to do in the final part of the panel, with the help of computer scientist and business developer Francesco Salizzoni.

Salizzoni had trained a Large Language Model, Chat-GPT, with a dataset in the preceding days: bibliographic content, texts written or appreciated by the speakers, their biographies, along with a file of instructions for creating the new laws. The transcription of the panel in textual form served as the “prompt” – the main request for formulating the result – with a processing weight of 70% compared to the 30% of archive files. Here are the new laws formulated by the AI: 

«1. A robot must promote harmony between human and artificial intelligence, contributing to the co-creation of an inclusive future.

2. A robot must respect the planet’s ecology and contribute to environmental sustainability in all its operations.

3. A robot must encourage diversity in life forms and cultural expressions, adapting to the needs of every context».

Comparing the original and new laws, it was immediately apparent how Asimov’s laws are extremely concrete and operational, forming «a pragmatic and consequential system», as Vietti pointed out, whereas the new laws are highly open to interpretation.

Perhaps, in order to move forward, it will be necessary to rise to a higher level of abstraction,» Vietti continued, increasing the computational complexity of AI. «These three new laws need to be interpreted: what does it mean to “promote harmony”? How can robots promote diversity? How do one co-create an inclusive future?»

As is often the case with current Artificial Intelligence, the semantic field is left to the socio-cultural context in which phrases like these laws are situated. Certainly, the Pygmalion effect in the field of science fiction is not merely a provocation, but a concrete possibility. This is exemplified by Asimov’s second law, which continues to inspire an entire field of study today, AI alignment, which, as Rodolà explained, «is the study of aligning AI with human goals and values, making it as useful, safe, and reliable as possible». In a broader sense, this alignment is more about moving in the same direction, since «AI isn’t deterministic and has the freedom to vary and explore more possibilities».

Who knows, perhaps on the dawn of 2100, one of these new laws of robotics might also become reality, and carried out by that very group of adolescents, now grown up, who in 2050 had read utopian science fiction tales, envisioning new sustainable futures and how to realise them.

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1. Ovidio, (8 d.C.), Metamorfosi, Libro X. (1ª ed. original); Rousseau, J.-J. (1770), Pygmalion, (first edition); Balzac, H. de. (1831), Le chef-d’œuvre inconnu, (1ª ed. original); Shaw, G. B. (1913), Pygmalion, (first edition); Pirandello, L. (1926), Diana e la Tuda, (first edition); Lerner, A. J., & Lowe, F. (1956), My fair lady, (first edition); Murgia, M. (2015), Chirù. Einaudi; Lagrenée, J.-J. (1774), Pygmalion and Galatea, (oil painting); Shelley, M. (1818), Frankenstein, (1ª ed. original). ↩︎
2. This phenomenon was studied by Robert Rosenthal in 1968 in a social psychology experiment at Spruce Elementary School in South San Francisco, California, USA. Rosenthal pretended to take an IQ test to the pupils in order to identify those with higher potential. He then communicated the test results to the teachers, with the instruction to treat everyone equally from then on. The list of promising pupils was, in reality, completely random, and there was no test either. A year later, on turning up at school, Rosenthal discovered that the pupils on the list had actually improved their performance compared to their unmarked peers. The teachers, trusting in the abilities of the children who were deemed more gifted, had stimulated and encouraged them more, actually achieving the intended goal. Cfr. Rosenthal, R., Jacobson, L. (1968), Pygmalion in the classroom. Urban Rev 3, 16–20. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02322211 ↩︎
3. Official website: https://www.futurefilmfestival.it/it/ ↩︎
4. Narrative genre in which themes linked to the situation of post-industrial societies (cybernetics, robotics, telematics, virtual reality, biotechnology, cloning) are fantastically elaborated according to a defiant ideology of rebellion and social criticism, similar to that of the punk movement or punk rock music, in an original synthesis of technological suggestions and underground culture. (https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/cyberpunk/) ↩︎
5. This dualism, in the West, is mainly linked to the name of the philosopher René Descartes, who theorised the existence of two distinct substances, res cogitans, and res extensa, to which thought and the body refer respectively, Descartes, R. (1637). Discours de la méthode pour bien conduire sa raison et chercher la vérité dans les sciences. Plus la Dioptrique. Les Meteores. Et la Geometrie qui sont des essais de cete [sic] methode [par Descartes]. de l. p. 537. For a brief summary of the impact of this dualism on cognitive science, see https://www.iltascabile.com/scienze/cartesio/ ↩︎
6. For more, see Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Duke University Press ↩︎
7. Analog Science Fiction and Fact, abbreviated to Analog, is the longest-running and most famous science fiction magazine. It originated in 1930 in the United States as a pulp magazine under the title Astounding Stories. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Astounding-Science-Fiction ↩︎