coupleofdays:

I have recently been thinking about the term “Artificial Intelligence”, and how it might be defined in the Tron universe. What I find interesting is that most of the conscious entities in the digital world in Tron weren’t intentionally created by humans to be conscious. They didn’t intend for actuarial programs and security software to have thoughts and feelings. And yet, what can be called “intelligent life” somehow grew inside the ENCOM computers, unbeknownst to the humans. The same can of course be said about the ISOs, who weren’t intentionally created by Kevin, but just showed up one day, again having grown out of the Grid somehow.

What’s really interesting about this is that as far as I know, there are only two digital entities in the Tron universe who were created intentionally by humans to be “intelligent”: The Master Control Program (created by Dillinger) and Clu (created by Flynn). And what do these two creations have in common? They’re the antagonists. The bad guys. The main villains that have to be defeated, by the humans and by the unintentionally conscious programs.

I don’t have any well thought out thesis about this, just some random thoughts. Is the message of Tron that life is only good if it “grows naturally” instead of being intentionally created? Are there some other interesting commonalities between the MCP and Clu that are relevant to this idea, such as the fact that they consider themselves better than their creators? Or that both Dillinger and Flynn intended for their creations to “run things” better than a human would? Is there some kind of reading to be made that could be a criticism agains the current “AI” trend?

It also makes me genuinely curious about how the upcoming third Tron film will handle the subject. Because I can’t imagine that it won’t be dealing with AI in some regard. Will there be an intentionally created AI in it, and if so, will it be a good guy or a bad guy?

Ohhh this is a VERY fascinating thought! … WOW

…yeah. That’s true, Clu and MCP were the only intelligences that were “artificial” in that sense, as opposed to “natural.” …As far as we know, anyway…

I mean, we see lots of other programs in Flynn’s Grid that seem to have conscious intelligence, and seem to have been created artificially (Zuse, Jarvis, the Sirens, the other combatants in the Games, most of the Uprising characters…). But yeah there is nothing to indicate for certain whether Flynn actually did something to give them true consciousness, or if they just manifested it spontaneously, in the same way as programs at Encom.

Clu, though, definitely seems to be shown receiving his consciousness in a deliberate way from Flynn… even copying aspects of his own mind. Which mirrors the MCP’s dynamic in a lot of ways.

One of the most biting parallels, for me, though, is how Kevin himself mirrored the MCP.

i.e. “appropriated” a program he did not write… took that program away from its original system… and used it for his own purposes…

…I mean. We don’t know Tron’s side of this, how and why exactly he was brought over, and how much say he had in it (or felt he had). But I can imagine he had some uncomfortable moments of deja vu.