Artifice and Artistry: Can Robots be Creative?
In a 1973 short story called “Light Verse,” science fiction author Isaac Asimov describes a dinner party at a lavishly decorated home. The charming and wealthy hostess is renowned for her unparalleled expertise at the art of “light-sculpture”: “three-dimensional curves and solids in melting color, some pure and some fusing in startling, crystalline effects that bathed every guest in wonder.” At the story’s climax, it is revealed that the multicolored marvels were actually produced by a defective household robot. When a party guest repairs the robot’s broken brain, the hostess becomes furious. “It was he who created my light-sculptures,” she shrieks. “It was the maladjustment, the maladjustment, which you can never restore, that – that –.” She murders the guest.
continue reading