[ As with the best science fiction, Lem’s novel “The
Invincible” has as much to teach us about our present situations as
any futures we may face.]
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STANISŁAW LEM’S PRESCIENT VISION OF ARTIFICIAL LIFE  
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N. Katherine Hayles
November 2, 2023
The MIT Press Reader
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_ As with the best science fiction, Lem’s novel “The
Invincible” has as much to teach us about our present situations as
any futures we may face. _

This foreword first appeared in the 2020 English edition of
Stanisław Lem’s novel “The Invincible.,

 

_In the grand tradition of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, Stanisław
Lem’s “The Invincible” tells the story of a space cruiser sent
to an obscure planet to determine the fate of a sister spaceship whose
communication with Earth has abruptly ceased. Landing on the planet
Regis III, navigator Rohan and his crew discover a form of life that
has apparently evolved from autonomous, self-replicating machines —
perhaps the survivors of a “robot war.” Rohan and his men are
forced to confront the classic quandary: What course of action can
humanity take once it has reached the limits of its knowledge? In
“The Invincible,” Lem has his characters confront the inexplicable
and the bizarre: the problem that lies just beyond analytical reach. _

_The following is literary critic and theorist N. Katherine Hayles’
foreword to the 2020 edition of Lem’s classic novel
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originally published in Polish in 1964. _

Science fiction has famously predicted many of the important
technologies of the 20th century: space travel, satellites, the atomic
bomb, television, the internet, and virtual reality, to name a few. In
“The Invincible,” Stanisław Lem predicts another: artificial
life. Although speculations about self-reproducing artificial systems
date from the 1940s, the scientific field received its name from
Christopher Langton only in 1986, more than two decades after the
original publication of “The Invincible” (1964). One of the
central controversies in artificial life is whether evolutionary
programs and devices are actually alive (the strong version), or
whether they merely simulate life (the weak version). Researchers who
follow the strong version argue that the processes embedded in
software programs such as genetic algorithms are as “natural” as
life itself; what is artificial is the medium in which these processes
take place.

The issue prompted Robert Rosen, among others, to speculate about the
essential characteristics of “life itself,” not only as it evolved
on Earth in carbon-based life forms but also about the possibility of
life-as-it-could-be in exoplanetary systems, arguing that
silicon-based artificial life forms may provide insight into these
theoretical speculations.

“The Invincible” presents a fascinating hybridization of these
different views. Dr. Lauda’s hypothesis proposes that a space ship
from the Lycran system landed on Regis III millions of years ago;
while the biological visitors perished, the automata did not. There
then followed an evolutionary struggle between the automata and the
planet’s indigenous life forms, on the one hand, and between the
different kinds of automata, on the other. Such a scenario requires
that the “survive and reproduce” mandate that governs life on
Earth could also operate on this planet. Lem minimally fulfills the
requirement by postulating that the automata could manufacture
themselves with modifications dictated by evolutionary processes.
Clearly his interest is not in filling out how this might take place
(John von Neumann, encountering a similar problem, imagined metal
parts floating on a lake that could self-assemble). Rather, Lem’s
focus is on envisioning an artificial life form that won the
evolutionary competition on Regis III for profoundly different reasons
than did _Homo sapiens_ on Earth.

The effect is achieved by introducing a significant factor that has a
monumental impact on evolutionary trajectories: rather than fulfilling
their energy needs through ingesting food, the automata on Regis III
evolve to use solar power. The smaller the artificial organism, the
less energy it needs. Hence the evolutionary driver is toward smaller
forms, which overcome not through superior intellect but through swarm
intelligence. Lem added to this the ability of the swarm of
“flies” to generate immensely powerful electromagnetic fields,
which meant that the tiny automata are not only the evolutionary
winners on their planet but a powerful force against the invading
humans. Their tiny size notwithstanding, their awesome potential
illuminates the profound ambiguity of the work’s title, which can be
taken to refer either to the spaceship’s proud name or to the swarms
of alien automata that threaten it.

Contemporary research in artificial life has validated Lem’s insight
that swarms of artificial beings require only a few simple rules to
manifest complex behaviors and hence each member needs to carry only a
little cognitive power onboard. Computer simulations that have
accurately depicted swarm behaviors in fish, birds, bees, and other
biota demonstrate that each individual responds only to the four or
five closest to it, with rule sets that take up only a few lines of
code. For example, a school of fish swimming to evade a predator is
guided by the fish closest to the predator. The direction this most
imperiled individual follows determines how the entire school will run
as it flashes back and forth, a simple strategy that makes excellent
sense, since the fish that has the most to lose will try hardest to
escape. Although each fish’s behaviors are simple, the collective
result nevertheless generates swarm intelligence of considerable
complexity.

Decades before these ideas became disseminated within the scientific
community, Lem intuited that different environmental constraints might
lead to radically different evolutionary results in automata compared
to biological life forms. Although on Earth the most intelligent
species (i.e., humans) has tended to fare the best, their superior
intelligence comes with considerable costs: a long period of
maturation; a lot of resources invested in each individual;
socialization patterns that emphasize pair bonding and community
support; and a premium on individual achievement. But these are not
cosmic universals, and different planetary histories might result in
the triumph of very different kinds of qualities.

The contrasts between humans and the automata swarm are brought out
most poignantly in the scene between Captain Horpach and First Officer
Rohan, in which the captain delegates to Rohan the decision whether to
put another crew member in grave danger to determine if the missing
four men have indeed perished, as seems all but certain, or whether
one or more might still be alive. The assumptions that make this
gamble even remotely worth taking are revealing: human life is
precious; human solidarity depends on the crew’s belief that
everything possible will be done to save them if they are in peril;
and every human is unique and therefore uniquely valuable. None of
these, of course, holds true for the swarm, whose individual members
are virtually identical to one another, with each tiny automaton
easily replaced and therefore disposable. Consequently, none is
valuable in itself; only the swarm has evolutionary survival value.
The contest, then, is not only between different life forms but also
between the different values that have resulted from the divergent
evolutionary pathways of humans on Earth and the “flies” on this
strange planet. As with “Solaris,” Lem suggests that assumptions
born and bred of Earth may appear hopelessly provincial in light of
human encounters with radically different life forms. From a broader
cosmic perspective, the best of human science, engineering, and
weaponry may reveal humans to be completely out of our depth, mere
kindergarteners bidding for a place in the universe’s adult
civilizations. The reduction of crew members to infancy when attacked
by the “flies” may be a metaphor for this realization.

Of all the human characters, Rohan has the strongest claim to have
encountered the planet on its own terms. He has traversed its terrain
with his own feet; he has mixed his sweat with its crevices, valleys,
and hills; he has breathed its native atmosphere into his lungs. The
insight he gains from his heroic trek therefore commands our respect.
When he concludes that “not everything everywhere is for us
[humans],” we are right to hear in this pronouncement Lem’s own
challenge to the anthropocentric assumptions that continue to dominate
human ethical frameworks as well as human exploitations of planet
Earth. As with the best science fiction, “The Invincible” has as
much to teach us about our present situations as any futures we may
face.

_N. KATHERINE HAYLES is Distinguished Research Professor of English at
the University of California, Los Angeles. _

* artificial intelligence
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* Stanislaw Lem
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