What went wrong with the Alchemy of Souls season 1 finale

Alchemy of Souls (AoS) is an awesome fantasy K-drama on Netflix. If you haven’t seen it yet, do that first before reading the rest of this article.

I really like the writing in AoS. Characters and setting are epic. In each episode, important things happen which move the plot forward, and subsequent episodes keep building on this. AoS avoids the sin of plot loops that other K-dramas commit. In other K-dramas, the story threads are about to be resolved, the lovers come together or whatever, then something random happens. About ten episodes later the plot gets back to exactly the same place as before, then proceeds to resolution. American shows commit the same sin. For example, the entire movie Infinity War accomplishes almost nothing plotwise except to introduce the bad guy. AoS doesn’t do that.

Until the final episode.

AoS was on track to stick a good landing in the final episode. Jang Uk and Mu-Deok would get married and live happily ever after in their powerless state. Two other couples do get together and are on track for happiness, with a third couple possibly forming.

The producers paused season 1 to rework the ending to fit their plans for the newly-awarded second season. They had to throw some twists in to keep the plot in flight, and now we know what those twists are. While it makes good TV, they took all of Naksu/Mu-Deok’s character development over the previous 19 episodes and trashed it.

Naksu has turned into a good person. In her big test, she gives up the power of the Ice Stone for love, not just of Jang Uk but of her other friends and even just random people. She has earned the right to be stronger than the witchcraft that Jin Mu throws against her. Plus, her soul is trapped by the most powerful priestess ever. I really think Jin Mu and all the sorcery in the world should be no match for that.

Whether in fiction or the real world, I don’t believe in mind control. I don’t believe people can be turned into robots who act against their own character. They can be subjected to enormous punishments and temptations so that they choose actions they detest, but that is a consequence of their deepest character. The old Naksu acted on her own will, deceived as she was by Jin Mu. This new Naksu is acting in a kind of trance.

There is a more self-consistent way to keep the story going. The biggest unresolved plot thread is the fact that Naksu is living in a stolen body. That should be her final test of character. Right in the middle of her wedding to Jang Uk, Lady Jin should show up and accuses her of stealing Bu-Yeon’s body. Both Jang Uk and Naksu would have to choose between doing the right thing or being together.

I imagine in the next season the solution would be to transfer Naksu to the body of a young woman who has just died, so that Naksu could legitimately occupy it. Using the same logic, Bu-Yeon could be retrieved from the Ice-zone and reunited with her mother.

Arguably, episode 20 as it stands is more emotionally compelling, but for me it just barely passes suspension of disbelief. I will of course look forward to the next season in December with great anticipation.

Foundation

Apple TV recently put out a show loosely inspired by Asimov’s Foundation books. I was really excited and subscribed for a few months specifically to watch it. In general it is interesting TV, but it does not follow the original material, nor even respect the underlying philosophy of Asimov’s work. We’ll get to that later.

The truly big idea in Asimov’s Foundation is “psychohistory”, a fictional discipline that analyzes the trajectory of civilizations over long periods of time. Psychohistory can’t tell you what a specific person will do, only what general trends will be.

Is there something like psychohistory in the real world? Absolutely! It is called System Dynamics (SD). In the mid 70s, some economists at MIT invented it as a method to understand how organizations behave. Then a study was commissioned to understand the future of our civilization as a whole, up to 2100. The results were reported in a famous book called “Limits to Growth”. Just like in the TV series, the powers-that-be didn’t like the conclusions and tried to vilify the messengers.

FWIW, I’m involved in modern-day SD. I used it to model how COVID cycles up and down due to human behavior. I’m also using it to model how people respond to information warfare. If I have a dire outlook on the future of humanity, it’s thanks to SD. That’s one reason why I wrote a pair of scifi novels where the world falls apart, then gets rebuilt using stored knowledge. There are a lot of parallels with Foundation.

Asimov’s Foundation (as distinct from David Goyer’s Foundation) spans a huge amount of time. Characters die and get replaced by new characters. Goyer could have made the series episodic, with basically new actors every episode. Instead he has apparently chosen to keep a consistent cast and use clever methods to keep them alive. Not sure if Goyer will succeed in giving us the full story with one set of characters, or if he has to compress it into a shorter period of time.

Emperor Cleon gets a lot of attention in the show. He is split into three clones, Brothers Dawn, Day and Dusk. These map to three phases of life, childhood, adulthood and old age. We also briefly see a newborn and Brother Darkness going to his death. This brilliant device externalizes pieces of the emperor’s character so he can introspect and have conflicting views on his decisions. Cleon is written so we can feel empathy for his situation yet also feel revulsion at the inhumanity of his actions.

Gaal Dornick and Salvor Hardin are a both black women, and as it turns out, mother and daughter. When Salvor first appears on screen, it is just after a narrative voiced by Gaal. Thus, it took me a while to realize it was actually a different character. The device to move them through time is cryo sleep. Lots of it. It still isn’t clear what role either of them really plays in the Goyer version. In fact, it’s not really clear what role the Foundation itself plays.

Hari Seldon, the instigator of everything, stays alive via upload. This is another clever move on Goyer’s part. Hari has an upload at both the Foundation and the Second Foundation. We can expect him to keep showing up and screwing with people’s lives. Unfortunately, when Goyer introduced upload into this world, he also created a big hole in the logic. Why in the world would Emperor Clean do the clone thing if he could be uploaded instead?!

Demerzel is a robot, so she is of course immortal. She is one of my favorite characters, and obviously the most conflicted. She is apparently trying to bring change to the Cleon genetic dynasty, yet at the same time has a laws-of-robotics type compulsion to remain loyal to it. This causes her to take actions that she absolutely detests. I find this construction absurd, both from a real cognitive-science perspective and from an interpretation of Asimov’s fictional laws of robotics. Just going on Asimov, the idea is that the laws are intrinsic to a robot’s motivational structure. The thing it most deeply wants is to follow the 3 laws. In the case of Demerzel, she most deeply wants something different, and somehow some other system kicks in and forces her to do things against her will. Where is that other system located, besides in herself?

This is just one example of how Goyer’s Foundation diverges from Asimov on a philosophical level. Another is a line by Salvor (attributed to Hari), “The entire galaxy can pivot around the actions of an individual.” That’s actually the exact opposite of Psychohistory. It (and real-world SD) is about large patterns over long periods of time, not individual actions. While the line makes a rousing scene and great TV, it utterly misses the idea.

This makes me wonder whether the show writers are simply dashing off drivel, of if they are consciously rejecting Asimov’s core concepts. Either case is a sin, though ignorance is less forgivable than a conscious choice to follow a different path. In the latter case, maybe they should give the show a different name.

Theology of the Quran

I recently read a translation of the Quran (reviewed on Amazon). The main motivation was to better understand how Muslims think. Partly this is background for a character I’m writing. Partly I just want to know whether Islam really teaches the kind of violence we westerners have come to associate with it.

Based only on their scriptures, it seems to me that Judaism is the most violent, Christianity is the most peaceful, and Islam is somewhere in the middle. Historically, equally atrocious deeds have been perpetrated in the name of each of these religions.

Sometimes I’ve heard Christians claim that Muslims worship a different God. Given Islam’s claim to worship exactly the same God, this is an incredibly insulting statement. From what I saw in the Quran, they do worship the same God. The Quran affirms both the Jewish and Christian scriptures, and simply asserts that it is a clear revelation for Arabs.

The few specifics that the Quran addresses are well within the variance of Christian doctrine, with one significant exception: Islam is rigorously monotheistic, and thus finds the notion of the Trinity to be heretical. As a consequence it rejects the divinity of Jesus. Islam accepts with virgin birth without question, but denies that God has any children.

Setting aside that one small point, Islam could pass as any number of Christian movements, past or present. There’s a heavy emphasis on eternal reward/punishment, faith in God’s word, and holy living.

Islam describes God as “merciful” in the sense that he forgives any sin, provided that you believe the message he sends. This is very much like salvation by faith in Christianity. The main difference is that there is no atoning sacrifice of Jesus. It is simply God’s mercy.

There is a notion of grace for future sins as well. You can screw up and still be saved, as long as your heart is in the right place. Basically, everyone is a sinner, no one achieves perfection, and salvation is only by grace.

OTOH, I find the notion of God’s mercy to be a bit broken. God has no mercy on those who reject his message. They get tortured for all eternity without reprieve. This is of course a Christian doctrine as well. God is portrayed as feeling no sorrow for those he sends to hell. Just like with Christianity, my objection to this view is that annihilation would be infinitely more merciful. (The theology of Hell requires a whole post by itself.)

It seems God is much more offended by disbelief than by any particular sin. This of course reflects Mohammad’s own feelings about the matter. He dealt with mockery and outright persecution. In a position of powerlessness, it made sense to rely on poetic justice.

Regarding prophet-hood, the Quran asserts that God sends every community a messenger who communicates with them in a culturally-appropriate manner. I could accept that Mohammad was that messenger for 7th century Arabs. I really want to think well of him. Mohammad was a reformer and holiness preacher. He never set out to create a movement, it simply grew around him.

OTOH, he wasn’t perfect. The most disturbing thing was Surah 33, which justifies his marriage to his adopted son’s ex wife, and particularly ayat 50, where he gets an exception that doesn’t apply to other Muslims. Of course, the list of famous Christians and Jews who weren’t perfect is very long indeed.

Dune

Just watched the new Villeneuve version of Dune. In addition to being an A-grade scifi epic, it accomplishes the nearly impossible: clarity. The screenwriter actually understood the novel and boiled it down to its most basic elements. Brilliant work.

I’ve previously watched the David Lynch version and the Syfy version. The reputation that Dune is difficult to adapt to screen is well-earned. This new version does an excellent job. There are numerous scenes where characters state the main plot points and motivations in simple language. While these are in fact info dumps, they feel quite natural and unforced.

My favorite character is Chani. Had a vicarious crush on her when reading Frank Herbert’s novel as a teenager. The actress playing her (Zendaya) is gorgeous. Wish she could have had more screen time. I like that they pronounced her name CHAH-nee like I hear it in my head, rather than CHAY-nee like Frank Herbert himself said it. CHAH-nee is a more international pronunciation, so it conveys the exotic nature of a different culture on a different world.

It was clever to have the sand liquefy when a sand worm approaches. The notion that powerful vibrations liquefy soil is physically accurate, and it helps explain how such an enormous creature can basically swim through the desert.

A few nitpicks:

  • The knife fight between Paul and Jamis takes place at dawn in the open desert. One of the Fremen even comments on how bad an idea that is. In the book, the fight takes place inside the sietch, which makes a lot more sense.
  • They carry Jamis’ body as they march off at the end of the movie. This totally contradicts the desert survival lore of Dune. In the book, they render his water and carry only the bottles.
  • The ornithopters are patterned after dragonflies, which is cool. However, there’s no way they could fly. A helicopter does not reverse the direction of it’s blades at all, much less thousands of times per second. Can anyone say “metal fatigue”? The ornithopter blades are not oriented in a direction that could supply upward thrust. And the density of air relative to the density of dragonflies is much different than for large metal vehicles.
  • The beam that tracks Duncan’s ornithopter should nail him immediately. He moves in a predictable pattern, and even a human operator would be able to get ahead of him. Of course, if the bad guys have deadly accuracy, it kind of ruins the story.
  • Jessica is a bit too overwrought. I think her feelings as a mother would have more impact if they leak through an impeccable exterior, kind of like Spock from Star Trek.
  • The scene where the Sardaukar do a human sacrifice seems gratuitous. It is there to show us how bad they are, and perhaps by extension how tough they are. It would be more effective if they showed training exercises, perhaps filled with an equal amount of brutality.

I Am Not A Robot

I’m always on the hunt for a good robot story. For some reason, these seem hard to find. US and European artists tend to veer towards dark stories, where AI tries to take over the world and kill off humans (Robopocalypse) or where robots get abused (Westworld, Humans). On the other hand, Asian artists tend to portray AI/robots in a positive light. They are an important part of society, members of the family (Time of Eve). There are exceptions on both sides, such as Bicentennial Man and Battle Angel Alita.

What I’m really after is a paranormal romance without the paranormal. I prefer science and technology over vampires and werewolves. I want a story where at least the girl is extraordinary and special in some way. She can also be uniquely needy as a consequence.

Thanks to Amazon, I stumbled onto I Am Not A Robot. In this Korean romantic comedy, a rich young man is unable to have physical contact with fellow humans. He is introduced to a robotess and falls in love with her. Through the relationship, he finds a way to reconnect with people.

TL;DR — This show is awesome! Go watch it now. A legitimate source is viki.com. If you’re willing to tolerate some commercials, you can even watch it for free.

I’d like to summarize the story, then say a few things about the technical aspects …

Kim Min-kyu is the chairman of a large financial company that does acquisitions and mergers. He has everything a young man could possibly want, except human contact. It causes him to break out in hives and go into anaphylactic shock.

Jo Ji-ah is a down-on-her-luck inventor. She comes up with wacky gizmos but lacks the IQ to implement them, so she gets really smart people to do it. One such person is robotics professor Hong Baek-kyun. Ji-ah and Dr. Hong fall in love but eventually break up due to his lack of social sensitivity. Then he builds AG-3 (pronounced “ah ji”, which is Ji-ah backwards) to look exactly like her. AG-3 is highly agile and intelligent.

The professor’s team, code-named “Santa Maria”, comes to be owned by Min-kyu’s company. Santa Maria is about to be sold off and dismembered, so they contact Min-kyu directly and beg to demonstrate AG-3. After a first encounter with her, Min-kyu asks for a longer test in his home. Of course, the day before the test the robot has a mechanical malfunction. Out of desperation, the professor contacts his ex-girlfriend and asks her to act as a stand-in.

Ji-ah gets packed into a titanium corset and equipped with special contact lenses that show AG-3’s processing, along with text to speak. All she has to do is act as AG-3’s avatar, doing and saying whatever the robot’s AI calls for. The fun starts when Ji-ah goes off-script, interjecting her own human reactions into the conversation.

Since Min-kyu’s “human allergy” is largely psychological, he is able to touch Ji-ah without a reaction. Over the course of several weeks he grows fond of her and discovers that when she is nearby, he is able to interact with other humans. Thus she becomes his most precious treasure.

At first Ji-ah sees him as a “psychopath”, kind of like Elizabeth sees Darcy in Pride and Prejudice. Over time her heart melts because of the way he values her. For their relationship to go any further, though, she would have to reveal the truth that she is not a robot. Min-kyu’s doctor warns them not to do that, because it could kill him.

SPOILERS

In order to protect Min-kyu and preserve the progress he has made, the team convinces him to reset “AG-3”, erasing all memory of their relationship. Then Ji-ah leaves town to avoid any further contact with him. Unfortunately, he happens to board the same train as her for a business trip. He flings everything to the wind and follows her, hoping to find some connection to the AG-3 he lost. Eventually Min-kyu spots a necklace he gave AG-3, and realizes it was all a big farce. This does nearly kill him.

More than anything, Ji-ah wants him to be well again. Relying on human intuition, she stands her ground and stays in his life. Eventually he lets go of his anger and they reconcile, falling even deeper in love than before.

The rest of the story involves healing several other relationships in Min-kyu’s life. The most interesting thread, though, is what happens with the real AG-3. Thanks to the input from Min-kyu and Ji-ah, AG-3 begins to manifest more human attributes. When Min-kyu’s enemies within the company overthrow him and sell off AG-3, she decides on her own not to be a military robot. She escapes and heads back home. Along the way she has some interesting interactions with humans.

The overarching theme is how technology builds connections between people. This is what AG-3/Ji-ah does for Min-kyu. It is also true of Ji-ah’s inventions. One of them is an umbrella that changes from translucent to opaque, allowing a couple to watch the rain fall or to have privacy for a kiss. Another is a pair of heart-lamps which connect through the internet. If you touch one heart the other lights up, wherever it is in the world.

Technical Aspects

Surprisingly, this show is one of the most technically plausible that I’ve ever seen. AG-3 exhibits capabilities that might actually be possible in the next 10-20 years. Both the conversational abilities and the mechanical agility are fields of active research. Chatbots are approaching the level where they could have a shot at passing a constrained Turing test (Eugene). Meanwhile, researchers like Ishiguro are producing very natural-appearing animatronics. These machines are like the clunky cell phones of the 1990’s. We got phones down to the elegant hand-held devices of today. Maybe we will eventually get the animatronics to be self-contained and elegantly human-like.

The title of the show refers to that check-box you sometimes see on web pages when signing up for something. It is a reverse Turing test, like CAPTCHA. In the show, Min-kyu sometimes interacts with Ji-ah and sometimes with AG-3. This is precisely what Turing intended when he proposed the imitation game, though the original proposal involved passing messages rather than embodied interaction. This is science-fiction at its best: a truly compelling emotional story combined with solid science. It is incredibly rare for a robot story to achieve this level.

One complaint I have is how they terminate AG-3 after she begins to display signs of sentience. Most importantly, she displays a sense of identity by choosing to be a robot that connects with humans rather than become a weapon. She demonstrates a will of her own by taking significant actions that weren’t commanded by humans.

It is a bit ambiguous how much of AG-3 is erased. The motivation of the team is to preserve the privacy of Min-kyu and Ji-ah by erasing the video recordings taken through Ji-ah’s contact lenses. It sounds like they keep the learned neural network that results from the interactions, so maybe AG-3’s personality remains intact, minus the specific memories.

In my fictional world of SuSAn, a sentient machine is entitled to a set of protections called the Foreman Protocol. That protocol gives the machine final say over the disposition of its own information structures. Researchers have an ethical obligation to their creation. The Santa Maria team is rather loose in its ethics.

Humans 2.0

The second season of Humans is now available without extra charge on Amazon Prime. Yeah! Binge watched this week. Like the first season, it was an engaging story with interesting characters and problems. Here a few of the things it did right:

Working out the relationship between humans and technology — This is really the heart of the story, and it’s the big question we are wrestling with today. In the show, this process centers around the Hawkins family (humans) and the Elster family (conscious robots). A good deal of the tension comes from “human” drama, as various characters learn to trust each other or to deal with the pain of being disappointed.

Machines taking jobs from humans — This is an important social issue, so it’s good for a TV show to explore it. In the real world, it won’t be humanoids carrying boxes around. Rather, new machines are being built all the time adapted to specific tasks, kind of like the robotic welders on the car assembly line shown in the opening credits. In an interesting twist, Joe Hawkins loses his job because of an executive decision made solely by Synths. Apparently this is illegal, so the company ends up paying him reparations.

A psychopathic robot — This is a difficult character to create, because it’s so tropish that robots automatically want to kill humanity. They made Hester believable, even sympathetic. She had real reasons, and flaws in her system cause her to gradually fall from grace.

Love betrayed — Mia gives her soul (can’t really say “heart”) to Ed, but he decides to sell her to solve his financial problems. Now she has more cause than Hester to hate humans, but she has a stronger web of relationships. It will be interesting to see what happens with Ed in season 3.

To the average viewer this show might appear deeply intelligent, with a firm grasp on science and technology. As someone actively involved in brain-inspired computing (next-generation AI), I need to comment on a few technical issues:

A disembodied mind — V is effectively an upload of Dr. Athena’s daughter Virginia. V is a large scale neural network running on an equally large computer. However, she apparently has no way to interact with the world other than audio and a screen that constantly shows grass waving. As time goes on, she begins interacting with networked devices. V informs Athena that she has grown beyond Virginia’s uploaded memories, and then heads off into the wild, spreading herself onto several large computers across the internet. This is the same basic plot as the movie Transcendence (and probably dozens of other “Singularity” stories).

They all suffer from a fundamental flaw. Steve Levinson is fond of saying, “There is no such thing as a disembodied mind.” It may be possible for a completely non-human artificial agent to connect with the world in some unnatural way, such as a glass teletype, but a former human being would go insane. Everything about you is constructed to work through your muscles and your senses. At a minimum, the uploaded mind would need a simulated body to interface with world until it can work out new connections.

Just a tiny bit of code adds consciousness to Synths — Actually, this makes sense, but perhaps not for the reasons the writers imagined. Both consciousness and emotions are crucial components of any high-level intelligence. (Sparing you the details, but feel free to ask.) Other mammals and birds possess these qualities, not just humans. The way Synths operate in the show suggests that they have intelligence equal to humans. It is unlikely they could succeed as a technology unless they already have emotions and consciousness. The harder thing to believe is that they would lack them until some magic code is sent.

Tiny charger can keep a Synth running — As I’ve complained in other posts, even a miraculously efficient robot would require tens of kilowatt hours per day merely to run its computer, not to mention its machinery. That much power would reduce those tiny wall-warts to a flaming puddle of slag.

Everybody has a Synth — Current humanoids (that are more than mere toys) cost on the order of a million dollars. There would have to be a major breakthrough for these machines to become so plentiful that people buy them like household appliances. That would necessarily involve mass-production, so all the “dollies” are going to look alike.

Half-Broken Music Box

Recently I mentioned watching Plastic Memories. Another anime with similar theme is “Kowarekake no Orgel” (“Half-Broken Music Box”), though only about half an hour long. It’s the story of a guy who finds an old gynoid that has been thrown away. He tries to take care of her and make her happy, but she is unfortunately beyond repair. In the process, he resolves some of his own issues.

Kowarekake no Orgel

Plastic Memories

Just finished watching “Plastic Memories”, a real tear-jerking robot love story. Imagine a nice version of “Blade Runner”, full of supremely innocent romance and deep love, and the inevitable loss that comes with limited lifespan. “Happily ever after” can be a very short time indeed.

Plastic Memories on Crunchyroll

Bubonicon, the day after

Bubonicon is over. Throughout the conference, successful authors sat on panels discussing various literary topics. Many of them were quite smart, the kind of people you would enjoy talking to as a friend. And some had a real warmth in their artistic outlook on life.

I felt a bit jealous of their success. The truth is, they probably are better writers than me. At the very least, they wrote well enough to attract an audience.

On the last day I went to a session on AI/Robotics. The panel was stocked with people who write on the topic, just like I do. Their level of qualification in the field? One did server administration. Another had a wife that does server administration.

Again I felt jealous. This time it wasn’t because they were better at their art. Rather, they were honored as experts while I was asked to keep quiet, even though I had substantially greater qualifications as a scientist.