 Okay, welcome back to stage A this lovely evening at the end of EMF camp. We're going to herald ourselves because we've been doing it all weekend anyway, so we've got a little bit of practice of doing it, and also we introduce ourselves in this talk, and we handle questions weirdly, so we might as well just not have to get other people to do things for us for a bit. Okay, let's do it. Let's go. Thank you. Welcome fellow humans, walkers, various infected and those in transitional states, emergent machine intelligences, and anyone I haven't mentioned. A quick note to start off with, we are both very good at talking, and we will talk for quite some time, so please use the Slido using code T176, and then come and see us afterward with any questions that you might have if we don't get to your question. So, it's time for introductions. Okay, so Dr. Tia Fothergill over here is an archaeological scientist who is currently a research fellow on the Human Brain Project, which is a ginormous European commission project creating an infrastructure for neuroscience and IT. She works on data ethics and governance and some intersectionality on the side. Dr. Catherine Flick is an applied philosopher with a readership at De Montfort University who researches and teaches on the ethics of emergent technology, citing staff like AI, increasing access and representation, and she also contributed to the Association for Computing Machinery Code of Ethics. She organizes things like EMF camp. Just a little bit. Just a little. Just help. I don't know. Yeah, okay. In different ways, both of us look at issues of responsible research and innovation. This may not seem so important right now, but it will be. Right, so what are we going to do today? Well, we're going to talk about what a zombie is, how they are depicted in video games, plus a quick disclosure about what we won't be talking about, mostly for the sake of time. Then we'll introduce you to some new zombie friends, including philosophical zombies and archaeological zombies. This will be followed by a quick jaunt through medical and scientific ethics with a quick stop-off at the zombie origins of biomedical ethics. We'll talk a little bit at the end about the Human Brain Project and responsible research and innovation. And finally, we'll strategize about how to prevent the zombie apocalypse. So what are zombies? They serve a really important function in video games, and according to ancient video game law, were first deployed to make games marketable in regions where it was illegal to depict shooting humans. So I saw a quote that summed it up really tidily. One of the last groups still politically correct to massacre. There's something pleasing about defending humanity from a horde of the undead. So apart from that specific feel-good function, what is a zombie? Why do they capture our imaginations? What unites all, or at least most, of zombie kind? And are they actually scary? So all zombies occupy a special position at an ontological threshold by definition, a condition of a state of being. In modern or recent historical frameworks, zombies are undead, having a sort of personal power or agency without possessing consciousness. And control is generally either misplaced or misaligned, which is very compelling for narratives and is an interesting twist on what Tia will say about the first zombie, the Tino concept of zemi in a little bit. Zombies are undead, they were once living, and now aren't quite that. There were a lot of grey areas, and grey matter when it comes to zombies. If there were a formal scientific taxonomic classification and nomenclature for the undead, zombies would be extremely varied, but not terribly complex, a state of being. There are many types of zombies within that state of being concept, and in video games we often see shambling hordes, special zombies that take a lot of damage or wear a hat or ride you off a building. And sometimes zombies are zombie-like heroes, a few of which are revenants. Now those guys have consciousness, so are they still zombies? Well, they still occupy that threshold between life and death, a state of being, so maybe we're not really sure. But zombies are excellent allegories for all kinds of things going wrong, bigly. So are they actually scary? Only in the many and infinite ways in which humanity is. So we're also going to talk about the things that we're not going to talk about, which is very scientific and also philosophical, so a twofer. One elephant in the room, of course, is George Romero. He was a total legend. His work and his creations were incredibly important to the modern idea of what a zombie is. He's the father of the zombie movie, and his zombies have inspired a vast and varied universe of zombies, including many video game zombies, but neither of us is a Romero expert, so we'd want to really kind of do him justice, so we're not going to talk about his zombies today. The other extremely important thing that we will not be talking about is Haitian Vaudu religious practices. We are neither qualified to speak about this, nor do we think it's appropriate or reasonable to attempt to describe the influence of a religion, which has historically been misinterpreted and misappropriated in a connection to some investigation of zombie origins of it in a racist way. I think it's time for some graphs. Who likes graphs? Yay! I don't get to work with quantitative data now very much, and I miss my previous life, so I had a look at zombie-related games listed on Steam. At the time, the total number of games in the sample was 19,550. Of these 497 games, are tagged zombie. Within that group, there are some very interesting patterns that tell us a bit about the core essence, or platonic ideal, of what it is to be a zombie video game. By comparing the set of all Steam games mentioned before to the set of zombie games, we can get an idea of the representation in games at a large scale. From least represented to over-represented, you have casual games all the way to action games. So whilst there are casual zombie games, they are far less represented than action zombie games. Of course, are there ever zombie games about surviving? These are hugely over-represented, like certain politicians. Usually games are about surviving zombies, so there you go. If we look at what other tags co-occur with zombie, these 497 games, so compared to this average game, what ideas align with zombies in the form of tags? On the left side are negative values. We went one too far. Yeah. Okay. Right. Left side, negative values. So if it's tagged zombie, it's five times less likely to be a sport game. So one of you needs to write me a zombie sport game. This is a nice hockey, please. This is a niche you can exploit, people. On the other hand, look at the apocalypse, everybody. A zombie game 10 and a half times more likely to be post-apocalyptic than the average game. What these two graphs have shown is that zombie games differ from the average scene game with regard to an over-representation of games that involve shooting, action, gore, horror, survival, and also multiplayer or co-op games. So this works really well with other depictions of zombies and media. So in this series, we are all in this together at the time of the apocalypse, defending humanity in the words of that IGN reviewer, plus as a bonus, zombies give something you can shoot without consequence. Finally, in terms of getting to grips with the overall zombie picture, I looked at 148 zombie video games dating from 1982 to current pre-release. Of these, I could determine the types of zombies featured in these games and what caused the zombies and what caused what caused the zombies in 68 cases. These will not add up to 100% like many things in life because some games feature multiple types of zombies like a classic shambling horde, plus some special types near the end or they're caused by both an evil ritual and irradiation or something like that. Anyway, thus we have Venn diagrams. Across 116 games, most of these, about 83%, featured some kind of zombie horde in the Romero vein. Many of which shambled at varying speeds. More than a quarter of games I looked at had special zombies with traits, abilities or attacks that differed and not just one type of zombie. 13% of zombie games I looked at featured a zombie hero or heroic companion. Only in a few cases do we get something special like a revenant or a zombie-like hero who's seeking revenge, redemption or something else post-mortem. There was one zombie villain and that's in Monkey Island 2, Little Chuck's Revenge. We'll assume that's meant to be ironic because undead villains and bosses are meant to be exceptional, like a vampire lord or a literature or something like that. And zombies are mostly unexceptional. They're everyone. A point that Catherine will speak on soon. So of the 148 games I looked at in more detail, I was able to find out what caused the zombies in about half of cases. So 46%, 68 games. But some games have multiple methods of zombification. More than two-thirds of the time it's a biological agent of some kind. A virus, a fungus, bacterium, a nonspecific infection or outbreak. More than a third of games have zombies caused directly by irresponsible science. This could be a biological agent, but it could also be a radiation, a chemical spill, reckless expansion or colonization. 23% of zombies in these games were caused by a supernatural force. A profane ritual, necromancy, what have you. At the bottom we have the aliens who caused a mere 6% of zombies in games that I looked at. They are slacking off big time. To reflect briefly on the issue of the biological agent, the medical category as the primary means of zombie production, frequent use of the words like zombies and infection and indeed the rarity with which zombification is actually curable, tap into fears of at least medieval origin around unstoppable contagion via miasma, which makes it a very effective narrative device. So Left 4 Dead, Left 4 Dead 2 is one of the classic standout icons of a zombie game. It has everything one expects from the tagging analysis. It's post-apocalyptic, you have to survive both hordes of zombies and special types of zombies. I tried playing it, had a pretty good time and I shot all my friends. I much prefer to axe them in the back with an axe. Actually, the sword is pretty good as well. But anyway, zombies are humans with their agency removed. I think we need to go to the next one. Thank you. Their agency is removed through death, but they still respond to stimuli and have energy intake requirements so they can detect sound or heat and they need to kind of eat brains usually. They exist primarily to satisfy their physical needs. They often have laws of physics unto their own, so somehow the body parts don't fall apart and their flesh still holds onto their bones enough for them to shamble at least. But for the most part, they are unrecognizable hordes, but sometimes they are loved ones that go through that changing process and often beg for death before they fully change over. The fact that you could become a zombie through some sort of process makes this idea kind of personal and shows this othering process from loved one to zombie. So a philosophical zombie is basically a human without consciousness. It behaves like a human. It has human-like experiences so it can process experiences such as sight and smell. It can have memories and it can process thoughts. However, it cannot consciously experience what it is like to smell coffee beans roasting. It can process the smell and identify it as being coffee but it can't experience it consciously. This basically illustrates the problem of what it is to be human, what it is to be conscious and how can we know if other minds are conscious or not. Are you conscious, Tia? And a VMF camp, maybe not. No. This basically is so yes, we can only know that we are conscious because we have our own experiences that we can experience. So we can only know our own consciousness through our own experiences. This basically is used as a counter-argument against philosophical positions such as physicalism which states that human nature can be explained through physical characteristics, i.e. neurobiologically or the nature side of the nature-nurture debate. David Chalmers, who came up with the idea of philosophical zombies, argues that since philosophical zombies are physiologically identical to humans, even the logical possibility of them existing is an argument against physicalism or this nature side of things. Of course Daniel Dennett says that they are logically incoherent and impossible to see on the side of the zombies. So Soma is probably the best example out there of a philosophical zombie video game. It has a lot of zombie elements in the classic sense horror aspects and lighting, etc. But it asks a lot of tough questions about quite deep philosophical issues and confronts the player with uncomfortable scenarios that may well be possible in the future. In Soma you play as Simon II, a reanimated corpse with Simon's memories, experiences, thoughts, etc. All on a chip. Simon II is a direct copy of Simon's brain who died in car accident. It behaves like Simon, has all of Simon's experiences and memories, thinks like Simon, so basically this makes it a human without consciousness or a philosophical zombie. Our understanding of zombies as a narrative device has everything to do with what they mean to us and what they symbolize. That in turn comes from our rich and varied experience over time as a species. So let's explore some archaeological evidence for how the dead were understood post-mortem in terms of not so physical remains as well as physical remains. This tells us a lot about perceptions of life after biological death about how the power of personhood linked to identity or a form of consciousness was perceived after death and perceptions of power and agency in specific corpses or portions of corpses. There are anatomical cremations from Bronze Age Europe, including what's now Germany. This means an anatomical cremation is when someone died, their cremated ashes were put into a ceramic vessel and that the ashes were in order so that in the ash, specialists could identify little bits of toe bones at the bottom than leg bones and all the way up to the cranial bones at the very top. So why is that interesting? Well, according to Katerina Rebe Salisbury who's a Bronze Age expert, it reflects a specific understanding of the cremated remains as a whole person after death. So whilst death is a transformation bodily aspects of personhood are unaffected. So this extension of personhood and personal power or agency outside of a corpse is evident from practices of post-mortem punishment. The Romans had Damnatio Memoriae literally the condemnation of memory a fate worse than death. These were memory sanctions erasing people from inscriptions, mosaics murals to facing statues removing their names from records and all evidence of their existence. This punishment was even used up to the late 9th century by Pope Stephen VI on his predecessor Pope Formosus after a trial involving Pope Formosus 11 month old corpse. True story. Look up the cadaver synod, if you're interested. A very famous instance of this is when Septimius Severus died his sons were supposed to rule jointly but Caracalo was not keen on this and murdered his brother Gator in AD 199 in quite a horrible way but since that was clearly not enough he enacted Damnatio Memoriae and everyone had to chisel him off various things. A much earlier Egyptian example of this is Queen Hatchbusset who's a female pharaoh of the 18th dynasty which is about 1500 BC whose statues were defaced and her name was removed from inscriptions in papyri by her successors because her memory alone was a threat to their legitimacy. Egyptian views on death what it consists of and how it works are an excellent example of how culturally specific these things are. The new areas in Guild Wars 2 Path of Fire are superficially influenced by the archaeology of Egypt and other parts of Africa. You have pyramids and a god king named Joko who exists on the boundary between life and death and has undead servitors. The situation is intended to evoke the classic mummy myth but for reasons I am happy to discuss somewhere else the vast majority of the so-called awakened are actually just another type of zombie. It's interesting to note that these archaeologically inspired zombies both acknowledge the typical zombie tropes that we see in the steam data but also turn some ideas on their head. So for example sorry my voice is going after all these days we're both very tired and have very no voices. You arrive to find everything literally on fire with the apocalypse totally happening all around you thanks to the supernatural hissy fits of the Edgelord and all-round massive jerk god Balthazar and there's a couple of typical zombie bingo squares you can check off right there and points for current political relevance. The local people have been forced to flee to refugee camps they're both preserving a sense of normalcy so queuing for donated supplies and also sometimes being radicalized by followers of Balthazar to become fiery apocalyptic servitors to his will. But some folks in the crystal desert area worship the god king Joko and to them it is the highest honour to be raised after death to become awakened and often but not always mindless undead servant of Joko. Relatives pray and argue fervently for their beloved recently deceased family family members to become awakened. So I do hope this loads from a responsible research and innovation perspective what happens next is very interesting one of your main story tasks involves rounding up some of these brand new zombies and using them to invade one of Balthazar's strongholds. In fact using something conventionally viewed as morally wrong for good. Now it may or may not be the time to mention that ArenaNet have recently owned themselves a slightly different mark in the moral judgment book but nonetheless deploying zombies against the apocalypse. Super. We love it. Yep. But what about the first zombie? Where did these concepts and tropes come from, Tia? I am so glad you asked. The Tino Simi is a good candidate for an idea that may have shaped the broad uber zombie category of animate unliving things along a continuum of power agency or control. This is a sensitive thing. There are reasons why I don't use certain images in this talk. It's not my story but it is relevant and it is overlooked. History is written by the conquerors and the colonizers and in looking at the archaeology this cannot be forgotten. So the Tino are indigenous peoples of the Caribbean. They're semi or zemi. How are many things at once? They're considered by some to be spirits, icons or idols with a lot of most classifications kind of smacking of colonial attitudes and ethical imperialism. What are they? Well, first the linguistic angle. As researched by the anthropologist Neil Whitehead the word semi-iba or spirit and flesh material is a potential origin word for zombie. At least no less likey than the Congo words for a potential powerful object or deity zombie or zombie. So what is a semi? To quote Jose Oliver who studied them for decades the Tino language term semi refers not to an artifact or object but to an immaterial, numinous and vital force. Under particular conditions, beings, things and other phenomena and nature can be imbued with semi. Semi therefore is a condition of being not a thing. It is a numinous power a driving or vital force that compels action. It is the power to cause to affect and also denotes a condition or a state of being. So again, state of being as a central feature. I'll tell you about two examples classed as semi. In 1498 a Spanish friar named Ramon Panay was dropped off on one of the many islands of the Caribbean to make observations on the local cultures in order to facilitate conquest. In one of his writings on the Tinos of the West Indies he describes observing a practice wherein a recently dead person was reanimated to answer questions about what killed them. We don't know what Fray Panay was thinking or explicitly trying to accomplish through these writings though, so grains of salt at the ready. Another example which is conventionally referred to as a reliquary is the semi de algodon or the cotton semi. This ended up in a museum in Turin and survived the way that others did. Excavated from archaeological sites, stolen, purchased, taken to Europe as curios, this type of semi is beautifully made. In this case embroidered cotton figures formed around the bones of the dead. They occupy a very special potent state of being wherein they can be consulted by the living and take action. Both of these semi sorry. Both of these semi have power and agency which are not aligned in a conventionally expected manner. Whilst it's clear that the nature of someone's personhood and agency changes after death and current medical debates on when death is continued to evolve, how long death takes is a cultural matter. Attitudes on the duration of death vary enormously across human belief systems with Bronze Age tombs into Sardinia incorporating living and sleeping areas so that the dead could be visited in an up close and personal way and practices such as the Malagasy Famadihana, a funerary practice where every five to seven years the dead are lovingly brought out, rewrapped and danced with to live music. Personally I think it's quite beautiful and touching but the tradition seems to be on its way out. So we mentioned the issue of zombies and their connection to unexpected power or agency after death. The hand of glory concept is also a manifestation of this. So let's start with the rather mediocre so called wondrous item from Dungeons and Dragons. And if you played D&D with me last night, thanks for coming. According to the Dungeon Master's Guide, the hand of glory is as follows. This mummified human hand hangs by a leather cord around a character's neck, taking up space as a magic necklace would. If a magic ring is placed on one of the fingers of the hand, the wearer benefits from the ring as if wearing it herself and it does not count against her two ring limit. The hand can wear only one ring at a time. Even without a ring, the hand itself allows its wearer to use daylight and see invisibility each once per day. Oh boy, another ring slot. Daylight and see invisibility? Yeah, not so great. Anyway, the real hand of glory is so much cooler. There are actually hands of glory because they were known across northern and western Europe. They're super creepy and steeped in folklore. The example here is from the last known hand to survive. It was donated to the Whitby Museum in 1935 because that seems like the most appropriate place for it to be. Go to the goth festivals. Anyway, there are many stories about the hands of glory, but a few common elements. One, the hand is always a right hand, often taken from a newly dead criminal. Two, the hand is prepared in a special ritual manner, described as mummified or preserved. Three, the fatty tissue of the hand is lit. Sometimes the fingers of the hand, sometimes human fat is rendered to make a candle, which the hand then supports, to produce a combination of supernatural effects. Four, these include inducing a deep slumber in all those around it, apart from the person who lit it, enhance detection abilities, so being able to tell when people are finding hidden people, and so on, designed to assist with burglary, theft and murder. And five, the flame of the fingers, or the candle of the hand of glory, can only be extinguished with blood or cow's milk. So back to the D&D hand of glory for a sec. Has anyone noticed how it looks pretty much like the proper hand of glory? It's a right hand with fingers disfigured. The effect of daylight makes sense because of the hand with shed light and seeing visible could actually do all those supernatural effects as well. But, hmm, we would like most of us, maybe not all of us, but we would like to have a nice peaceful death, yeah? I mean, that's why we say rip. Sometimes we say it sarcastically and sometimes in reference to one's meal, mobile phone or career hopes. But notwithstanding current usage of the term, the fact that you have to wish for someone's remains to not be disturbed is important. How one dies and the social and cultural context of death can have an impact upon how your remains are perceived in terms of risk of your corpse becoming reanimated. It's fair to say that people have feared death in part because it leaves their bodies and to some extent identities and legacies vulnerable to outside control and potential misuse. In the UK and Ireland people used what would now be called apotropaic magic, protective coffins and other means to arrange protection for their future corpses, including protecting them from resurrection men employed to seal bodies for medical research. One example of this is shown on the left here. This is a type of post-medieval pot called a boleramine jug which is often used as a witch bottle meant to prevent supernatural harm. These were buried with people but also beneath housing foundations, beneath hearths and so on. And that's not even getting into immaterial practices that we can't detect in the archeological record like prayer, spells, curses and things. The wealthy invested in protective and alarmed coffins for many reasons. Secure or multi-shelled coffins protected your burial goods from being robbed, your corpse against theft for compensation and some even had a mechanism within the coffin to signal for help which increased peace of mind as one faced the ultimate awfully big adventure. And of course it's all about the adventure. Zombie games are, as we saw adventure, action, survival against the worst odds sometimes not with a plasma rifle but with a brick or a sword and there's more to this as the archeology demonstrates people's relationships with their afterlife are really really complicated. Beyond this there are issues to negotiate with your community, your family and your friends. We chose Last of Us as another best of zombie game not because it's just an incredible game, some review we read called it an injustice to call it a zombie game perhaps because zombies are low quality entertainment but because it presents a compelling narrative that we see elsewhere in classic zombie stories. Infection by a biological agent that seems unstoppable by medical science, bravery, love, loyalty and the possibility of redemption in the face of certain doom and ample demonstration that humans can totally be the worst. Speaking of humans being both pretty amazing and really crap, anatomization or post-mortem dissection right sorry, post-mortem dissection of remains was one of the primary means by which surgeons and medical practitioners learned their art and advanced scientific knowledge. It was very important for innovation but let's just consider just how happy people in the late medieval and early post-medieval eras might have been to have their corpses stolen and taken apart by some wealthy eccentric bloke in London if they were at all in tune with these quite pervasive ideas about post-mortem punishment to say nothing of ideas about dignity, privacy and bodily protection. This resistance was partly rooted in cultural ideas about how dead people should be treated and how long death actually takes. If you're from a culture that practices excarnation your reaction will be different than if you are from one that lovingly curates the remains of the dead. Tia forgets we didn't all spend time on a body farm so excarnation is where the body is kind of left outside and gets nommed by various creatures. Thank you. So the moral good of anatomical learning and medical innovation must in least some ways outweigh the potential social evil or how that advancement was accomplished that's vital to obtaining public trust in steps medical ethics. Many people trust doctors and scientists now and that's changing right there's a lot of conversations that we've had at EMF camp about how the nature of our experts trusted any more well known not really but for quite a long time they were and the reason that they were trusted is you know systems of practice were set up around integrity and ethics. Medical ethics is the field where the rubber met the road historically and the trajectory of public opinion how that has shifted from the medieval period onward can tell us a lot about our video game zombies and vice versa. Our video game zombies are irresponsible science they are skevy resurrection men who steal corpses they present that nightmarish contingent and the next great global pandemic from which science may not be able to save us so what do we have in place for technology and neuroscience initiatives these projects at the bleeding edge of research with the potential to accomplish amazing incredibly worrying things. In the EU here for now we have responsible research and innovation which is what we use as the applied ethical framework in the human brain project. The human brain project which Catherine mentioned I'm now a part of is a huge enormous scientific endeavor it began in 2013 and all going well will run through to 2023 it's a neuroscience infrastructure project with 12 sub projects and over 120 partners across the European Union and beyond it's funded by the European Commission as a future in emerging technologies horizon 2020 flagship. What's that mean really it means we do all the things no? Okay we look at machine intelligence robotics brain simulation and modeling neuromorphic computing and so on but we also dedicate a large amount of resources to creating data platforms and policies to deal with data that comes out of the sciencey bits and other people sciencey bits in the future and that's the hope we're trying to anticipate the directions that we need to go in the future and to try to do this well. For that reason one of the 12 sub projects is called ethics and society we have a DPO and some of us deal with ethics compliance to ensure that everything is done ethically and legally and data security is good these things but all of us in ethics and society spend our time focusing on ways to support innovation and improve research results through our own disciplinary perspectives. The human brain project also opens up new questions about what it is to be human and the essence of consciousness for example for all both philosophical zombies and not philosophical zombies at the same time where does that leave potential AI development beyond narrow workhorse AI? Is AI a form of zombie perhaps? If an entity existed that was an artificial intelligence that was functionally equivalent or even better than a human being then we all have a great deal of thinking to do about zombies and we should start thinking about it sooner rather than later. They are super fun to shoot and much harder to hit than our teammates and left for dead but depictions of zombies and video games show us just how vitally important that it is that we innovate and do it well. In looking at ethical neuroscience innovation we want to take the past into account what's been done before, what went wrong, what succeeded and think about the future and where we want to go as a global tech aware, tech driven, socially conscious society all humans on research projects like the HPP or otherwise need to engage have some conversations and research responsibly. Thank you very much for sharing our adventure. You're welcome to ask us questions on the Slido number T176 so we can answer them either here. No, no time. No time. We can't answer them here. We have a podcast where we actually answer a lot of questions that we've got from this previous talk and you're welcome to come and talk to us afterwards. We will go through your Slido and add more answers to our podcast stuff too. Thank you so much for listening to us. I'm going to put my Herald hat on now so my Herald hat please go volunteer for things. Please don't play music after 11 and please enjoy the rest of EMF camp. Please come back in how long is it until the next until half an hour and for the closing ceremony which is a highlight of EMF camp.