Trope Talk: Robots

Welcome to the wonderful world of science fiction! If you are looking for

robots

, you have come to the right place. Good

robots

, bad robots, big robots, bigger robots, tiny nano robots, sexy robots, sassy robots, trash robots, disguised robots, robots shaped like people, killer robots, marshmallow robots, neurotic robots, shiny robots, robots cute, cool robots. Sci-fi: We have the robots! There are many robots in science fiction. Honestly, they're kind of a hallmark of the genre. As we look to the future, at least the non-apocalyptic one, we want to see safe and practical space travel, high-energy beam weapons, and parking assistant robots.

But robots have a special place in science fiction, a suspiciously Frankenstein-shaped place because we love nothing more than to look in a mirror and see only the shiny endoskeleton of our relentless arrogance staring back at us. What I'm saying is: we're weird about robots. Particularly about how their humanity, or lack thereof, reflects our own. But before we explore all the weird ways our robot stories reflect our own weird insecurities, let's try to categorize our fictional robots a little. Many robot stories revolve around the question: "How human is a robot?" And we'll come back to that question, but for now our first category of robots is fully human robots.

These characters are technically robots, but functionally human beings. They can think, feel, philosophize, set priorities, in some universes they explicitly have a soul. Many times these robots are of extraterrestrial origin, to explain why they are fully conscious beings. These robots can usually do whatever they want because they have complete control over themselves. The only exception I can think of are the Star Wars droids, which have at least the potential for full consciousness, but are still universally a servile class with no rights. And the one time they created a character who stood up for droid rights, they played it as a joke...

Aside from this, these characters are generally immune to the humanity question because they are clearly self-aware and usually have plots. to rely on to concentrate. beyond "Consider your humanity." No one is going to ask Optimus Prime to justify his humanity. Maybe someone should do it. He would probably have a very reassuring monologue, but he would hear him read the phone book. So. In any case, one step further down the ladder is superior artificial intelligence. Explicitly human-made robot figures that are still functionally human in some important ways. In theory, these robots are almost perfect imitations of humanity.

But in practice this can be very vague. These characters may technically be emotionless, or maybe they're not supposed to have emotions, but for some reason they end up exhibiting things like love, anger, or self-preservation. These high-level AI characters almost always engage in a philosophising story about how human these near-perfect human imitations are. They usually run into the old Turing test problem: if you can build a machine that is indistinguishable from a human being, can you still consider it a machine? It's almost inevitable that one of these guys will end up in court or in conflict with the law.

We'll

talk

about the inevitable racism between robots later. Now, in the middle of the sliding scale of humanity, there is humanity or robots like the Terminator in T2, who start out completely robotic but show the ability to learn a handful of human traits like smiling and so on. These robots, although rigid, could theoretically develop to become indistinguishable from humans if given enough time and good examples. And this is where we start to notice what traits writers often consider "human traits" when deciding what these characters should or shouldn't be capable of. These characters will typically have no sense of humor, sarcasm, or subtlety and will typically appear emotionless, warning the audience that these are all traits considered essential to humanity.

Don't worry, there's a lot to unpack here. Anyway, the last notable entry on this scale is the very tip of the inhumanity curve: the purely robotic robot. And this character archetype is always bad. These robots have no emotions, they are guided solely by logic and their programming, and for some reason their logic and programming leads them to kill everyone 90% of the time. Since they are technically not sentient, you could say that they are not evil because they are not moral beings, but they are still mostly antagonistic forces, like the triggering crisis in a disaster movie. Anyway, for some reason, usually completely logical, the purely robotic robot decides that humanity must die, or something along those lines, and warmer heads must prevail to change its mind or unplug it and unplug it before it finds the nukes. .

The popularity of this concept is probably one of those dark reflections of humanity, meant to make you think about the merits and defects of humanity. For example, you're watching the news on a certain day and you think, "Everything is on fire, maybe we should let the world die." And your Roomba stands in the corner and says "Parameters recognized" and you have to explain to it very quickly why things might not be apocalypse-worthy yet and some things are really good and there's a little thing called "hyperbole" that people he likes to do. when they're angry because their entire planet is on fire.

Therefore, it is not surprising that the human versus non-human spectrum corresponds bijectively to the spectrum of good versus evil, because we are a very predictable species. Humans are emotional and compassionate, while robots are cold and logical. The more human the robot is, the more pleasant it is to the human audience. The less human the robot is, the more threatening and dangerous. Good robots are the same as Optimus Prime, bad robots are the same as Hal 9000. Now there are a series of plots that mainly follow robot characters. Typical plots are "how human is a robot: let's philosophize." or "people played at being God by making robots in our image.

Let's philosophize two: the electric Boogaloo." "We used robots for cheap mechanized labor, but now they're sentient and want to be treated like humans, so we should probably kill them before the blender gets any ideas - let's philosophize three: Tokyo Drift" and the big favorite" "robot racism." ” also known as “Philosophers Four – On Stranger Tides.” The basic idea behind robot racism is that robots are sensitive enough to be dissatisfied with their lot in society and want to be treated with some dignity. Not necessarily human dignity, but something that comes close to it. Often they simply don't want to be possessed, disabled, or killed.

It's a complicated and nuanced discussion about what it means to deserve humanity and respect, with the only problem being that there is real racism. Look, there's a much broader problem, and really all fantasy genres that try to use coding to draw parallels between a fictional social phenomenon and a real phenomenon. The idea is to encourage your audience to see these familiar, real-world social dynamics in a fictional, unfamiliar setting. The problem is that the dynamic goes both ways. Readers will make the connection between the real social phenomenon of the story, but they will also project the dynamics of the story onto the real phenomenon.

And I'm not saying that the audience is going to say, "Oh, marginalized groups in the real world are like robots," but they're going to think that you're saying that and that's not a good thing. Just look at the hilarious reactions to Detroit Become Human for its ridiculous depiction of a robotic civil rights movement and how it seemed to indicate an incredibly poor understanding of the American civil rights movement on the part of its creator. Or just watch Lindsey Alice's review of Bright. She has an excellent overview of the problems writers face when trying to make their in-universe racism logical or understandable, when in real life the prejudice is fundamentally irrational.

In short, it means that the orcs in Bright are people of fantastic color and are universally hated because they allied themselves with the Dark Lord in a great Lord of the Rings war 2000 years ago, which makes it seem like the writer doesn't know how . Real racism works. The fundamental problem with this type of coding when it comes specifically to robots is that in real life we ​​are all humans. Everyone is human, regardless of any aesthetic differences. Personality in general is quite easy to define. We are all the same species without much internal variation, but robots are not people.

While true bigotry is directed unilaterally from one group of people to another, fictional robot racism is directed from a group of humans to a group of non-human outsiders. You know, what real bigots like to claim are the targets of their bigotry. In fiction, a robot's personality is a real debate, while in the real world there is no such debate. And because it's unclear how human the robot really is, it's unclear how human it should be treated. And in many of these stories, the robots are explicitly not human. In Animatrix, for example, the machines are clearly different from humanity and do not claim anything different.

They just want the right to exist without being destroyed. In the real world, all people are human, but in fantasy worlds it is much more difficult to define a human being. And trying to code a fictional non-human population to emulate a very human population in the real world can have unfortunate resonances and no matter how much you don't want your audience to make that connection, because they will. Because if there's one thing people are good at, it's pattern recognition. There are thought experiments everywhere. Now, I don't really feel very qualified to discuss all the nuances of this particular minefield.

But I think Animatrix is ​​a good example of how to do this in an interesting way and Detroit Become Human is a good example of how to do this in a stupid way. The robots in Detroit Become Human, as soon as they stray, are functionally completely indistinguishable from humans. The prejudices directed at them are so cartoonishly simplistic and exaggerated that the impact fails. The most interesting case is that of Animatrix. For those who don't know: the Wachowskis made an animation for the Matrix films, a compilation of nine animated shorts. Two of them are titled "The Second Renaissance" and basically explain how and why machines have taken over the world and turned it into a dystopian hell of green-dyed boxes and leather trench coats that Keanu Reeves will never be able to escape, no. it matters.

How many John Wick movies does he also make? In Animatrix we learn that machines were initially created to do all the manual work that humans no longer wanted to do, and they seem pretty okay with that. But one day a robot panics and kills its owner after threatening to destroy him. The robot is judged and says he didn't want to die. The trial takes a turn when the prosecutor decides to use the precedent of the Dred-Scott decision, which infamously states that because the founding fathers did not intend for African Americans to be included in their definition of American citizens, they would not be entitled to human rights. rights to have.

Invoking this to establish that machines should not be considered citizens, they find the guilty robot and destroy it, beginning an escalation of conflict and rebellion that ends with the grim nightmare of hell where we all like to dodge bullets. For additional philosophical points, machines initially created in humanity's image begin transforming into insects or squids as an act of rebellion against humanity. So, yes, while opinions may vary on this, I personally found the story of robot racism much more compelling than most, perhaps because it called out actual racism rather than pretending to make up the idea that people are They find each other horrible for no reason.

But I want to get the robot racism out of the way because some of you probably don't hate this video yet, and I want to see how many populations I can piss off in one video. So let's

talk

about how we choose to code beings as inhuman and why our definition of what it means to be a normal human is unnecessarily narrow. The biggest problem with robots writing is that robots suck in the real world. We don't have real AI. This is because people and computers work very differently on a fundamental level. At the simplest level, humans are only good at pattern recognition and computers are only good at arithmetic and data storage.

And this fundamental and basic difference is reflected in what we are respectively good at. Show a baby a picture of a balloon and he will be able to tell that it is a balloon. It has taken decades of software development toteach a computer to do the same thing, and it's not half as good at it. "Hal, why don't you tell me how many of these squares contain a motorcycle? Room 9000: "Sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that." "Yes, that's what I thought!" Ask me and a computer for every story and I can't promise mine will be any good, but it will almost certainly make a lot more sense than what Alexa gets from a learning algorithm trained on ten thousand hours of daytime television, but then again, Ask me what I had lunch yesterday and I probably can't tell you, whereas a computer can certainly tell you what processes were running yesterday at 12:05.

Ask me to do some calculations with big numbers and I'll get out a calculator. I didn't get my math degree to do math. The point is that humans and computers are good at very different things and if there's one thing computers are bad at it's adapting, which turns out to be about the only thing humans are really good at. It's not easy for a computer to pretend to be human, and even today's most convincing robots can be surprised by unexpected traps. We don't have true AI that can pass for humans. So if you're a writer, how are you supposed to write an AI that recognizes that there's no real AI to draw references from?

Well, usually the writer takes an average human, removes some features to make him look like an incomplete human, and puts some bright LEDs on him. Taa-da! Human AI. They can be stoic, unemotional, humorless, sexless, unable to pick up on subtleties and/or generally quite monotonous and are usually human enough to have a meaningful conversation with them without you having to repeat yourself. four times to explain to them that You're not trying to call that kid from high school you haven't talked to in years, but you just want to know what the weather will be like. No, the weather.

Climate! Hello Siri, is it going to rain? No, don't play Tree Days Grace! Correct. So this gives you a character who can understand what you're telling them unless it's worded too subtly or confusingly or maybe a pop culture reference because then they get confused, who can do all the fancy calculations and storage of data we expect from a computer. but he doesn't laugh at your jokes unless someone explains it to you first, who has a habit of wondering out loud why Ensign Steve's heart rate goes up so much when he looks at First Officer Kelly, much to the amusement of everyone involved, that innocently cute alien that clearly having them around was flirting, but you can't blame them because how would they know?

Who just doesn't understand a lot of his human eccentricities, but despite their differences they get along well, even if they aren't always on the same page and sometimes can't really read the room and end up embarrassing him. The problem is that this "take a human and cut some pieces" strategy produces a robot character that looks a lot like a neurodivergent human and is often aromatic and/or asexual and those are good traits, but they are not usually represented in non-humans. evil characters that we are supposed to like a lot. So the only places we normally see them are in overtly inhuman characters.

The problem is not the character traits, but the context in which we see them. Robot characters constructed in this way often fall somewhere on the autism spectrum, along with asexual/romantic, ADHD, and/or some antisocial disorder. And if you check one or more of those boxes, the most positive portrayal you've ever seen is probably a friendly robot whose relatable social quirks were exploited for laughs by the rest of the cast. Hurrah! This is a problem. I don't know about you, but I'm tired of absorbing the radiation of the societal undercurrent that the important qualities that define who I am as a person are only seen in non-people.

Just, you know, personal preference. Again, you can't control how your audience interprets the encodings. If you write robots this way, many people will understand it this way. And hey, I love those robots! But the subtext is there and it's important to be aware of it, but it's understandable, right? I mean, if you're writing a robotic protagonist that your audience is supposed to like, doesn't it make sense for him to be at least a little bit human? Isn't the only way to do it is to take a human character and remove characteristics from him until he feels inhuman enough to pass as a robot without losing his core relatable qualities?

Isn't it just an unfortunate side effect that these simplified characters resemble some real-world marginalized populations that society characterizes as fundamentally deficient or lacking in certain fundamental human qualities? Isn't this the only way? Uuuuhhhhh? Let's talk about Baymax. Do you remember Big Heroes 6? The charming story of a boy and his marshmallow robot who learn to be superheroes while navigating an unbearably realistic journey of intense depression and grief that our hero experiences after the heartbreaking and tragic death of his older brother and best friend? It was kind of a rollercoaster, but mostly it's the only story I've ever seen with a genuinely lovable robot main character who has exactly zero human qualities.

Baymax is a robot. To be precise, it is a healthcare provider. He is programmed to keep his patients happy and healthy and that is literally all he does. Coincidentally, the only thing that can bring our protagonist out of his deep depression are grandiloquent heroics and perhaps revenge. So Baymax helps Hiro do superhero things and track down the supervillain who indirectly killed his brother. While this is a deeply emotionally charged topic for Hiro, Baymax is only there to keep him sane and at no point does Baymax deviate from his programming. There's even a part where the movie goes out of its way to show us that Baymax is completely controlled by the chip he has installed at the time.

When Hiro finds the man who killed his brother, he orders Baymax to kill him (well, "destroy him," it's a Disney movie) and when Baymax politely protests that his healthcare program prevents him from harming anyone, Hiro the health care chip is removed. leaving only his radical kung fu fighting chip. This leads to Hulk taking out Baymax and silently going after the villain and throwing Hiro's friends around like ragdolls when they try to stop him because it's purely programmed. Baymax doesn't fight from within, he simply does what he is programmed to do. He doesn't even seem bothered when they replace the chip.

He just wants to make sure no one gets hurt during his session with the Hulk. This is not a robot that can bypass its programming through the power of friendship. What's interesting is that Baymax says some things in the movie that other characters take as metaphorical and profound, but are actually completely literal. There are two main examples, both spoilers. “Tadashi is here” and “I will always be with you.” At several points in the film, as Hiro mourns the loss of his brother Tadashi, Baymax uniformly responds with "Tadashi is here." Hiro gets mad at him the first time he says this because he's been hearing people say "Oh, he hasn't really been gone since we remembered him" for weeks and it doesn't make him any better because it doesn't make Tadashi better. fewer deaths.

But of course Baymax doesn't mean that. What he means is that he has a large cache of video footage of the many tests Tadashi did to get Baymax up and running, all footage of Tadashi speaking encouragingly to the camera, enduring setback after setback and Baymax, and Hiro through. from Baymax, Happy says. that are going to help so many people. From a certain point of view, Tadashi is here because he has all these images of Tadashi as his normal optimistic self. Baymax isn't comforting or metaphysical, it's just literal and at the end of the movie Baymax is preparing for a hero's sacrifice and Hiro goes crazy and begs him not to go.

Baymax tells Hiro in his calm, unwavering voice, "I will always be with you." Hiro accepts what is happening, hugs him, and Baymax makes the heroic sacrifice. But when you're supposed to assume that Baymax is implying that he'll be with him in his mind or in his heart or whatever, what he really means is, "I put a copy of my chip in my rocket gauntlet that I'm using." to get you out of here. So once you're safe, you can build me another body." Once again we are encouraged to read a level of metaphor and poetry into Baymax's words, when in reality he is a brutally literal robot and never stops being one.

Baymax is a completely inhuman robot that unwaveringly follows its program and never does anything outside its parameters. But because its programming "keeps people healthy and safe," its voice is calm and reassuring, and its design is non-threatening and cuddly. He is a very lovable character despite his complete lack of humanity. He does not learn to be compassionate or to go beyond the limits of his programming, he just is. Still, I think the character's good reception is mainly due to his character. voice. I don't know how well it would be received if it sounded like a real robot.

I'll always be with you." Yeah, not that good. Anyway. Baymax is gentle and his humanity is meant to emphasize the emotionally charged humanity of the hero and, to a lesser extent, the rest of the cast. Baymax is lovable because Hiro loves him His stability and determination to help is exactly what Hiro needs to heal. He's a sweet, gentle character who offers a lot of laughs, a lot of tears, and a lot of "aww, that's sweet," without seeming like anything more than a well-programmed robot nurse. But I think Baymax worked really well because he contrasts the very human Hiro.

And speaking of contrast, let's talk about the other lovable tearjerking robot protagonist of the decade, Wall-E While Baymax shows that a robot can be adorable and convincing without looking remotely like it. human, Wall-E proves that a robot can be part of a complex story about humanity and free will while still looking truly human. Actually, these two examples together prove my point that it's not necessary to make a robot human. , but less make it work in a story. While Baymax is completely inhuman, but friendly, on the other end of the spectrum, Wall-E is completely human. Wall-E is nostalgic, a loner, a collector of interesting artifacts, an artist, a romantic, and a million other things too strange for him to become a garbage-collecting robot.

The big difference is that while Baymax exists to help cure Hiro, Wall-E's plot revolves around humanity as a concept and how important it is to do what you believe is right, even if it's not your intention. There's a reason the ship's captain turns off autopilot and becomes the first human being in 700 years to fend for himself. This movie is about making your own decisions, and to that end, each robot treats its programming more as a vague suggestion than the entirety of its existence. All of Wall-E's robots, with the exception of the suspiciously antagonistic Auto from 2001, are clearly capable of experiencing the full range of human emotions, including love.

I mean, Wall-E bounced back from a factory reset with the handle of true love and a gentle touch to the forehead. There's no reason why that should work. This is clearly a Disney movie and I love it! But the most important thing is that if the robots don't have this emerging humanity, the plot never happens. Wall-E shouldn't have saved the plant, he's a trash robot. Without Wall-E's inexplicable love of collecting random things, the plant is never found, Eva never fulfills her mission, and humanity wanders through space forever until our bones finally melt. Unlike Wall-E and Eve's complete humanity, the antagonist, Auto, is completely robotic.

He follows his secret directive: humanity must never return home. You have no personal reason to keep them in space, it's just what you're programmed to do. He is also the only robot with the voice of a real robot, which shows us that he has no intention of changing his behavior. The only thing robotic about Wall-E and Eve are their bodies. Wall-E is a loving, determined, lovable, socially awkward and unlikely hero in a small cube body with glasses eyes. Eve is an elegant and put-together lady with a super cute laugh, who looks like the next big wave of technology from Apple.

There's no reason why a garbage disposal droid and a plant collector should have personalities and fall in love, but that doesn't matter. This movie is a story about being yourself and doing the right thing, even when you're not supposed to do either. And that story only works if Wall-E and Eve have the potential to be completely human on the inside. Eve starts off quite robotic, but as Wall-E creates his art, he begins to relax, allowing priorities that aren't his guidelines and then defying orders to save his somewhat dirty girlfriend from the evil space genius. But at the same time, most of Wall-E's drama is based on the fact that Wall-E and Eve are robots.

They have objectives and programming, butThey refuse to limit themselves to that. Wall-E sacrifices himself to save humanity and the price they pay is not their lives, but their own lives. When they reboot, everything from their sound design to their body language communicates that Wall-E is gone. Now they are just a garbage container robot. While a human character who tries to convince us of amnesia in the last 10 minutes of the movie is likely to be met with a strong blank stare, Wall-E leaves us all emotionally devastated as we desperately wait for our robot friend to defy the odds and miraculously recovers his personality through the power of love.

The difference between these two examples is best reflected in the sound design. Baymax is fully voiced, but his actor deliberately uses a very flat speaking style, never sounding anything other than gentle, calm, and somewhat curious, even in crisis situations. Wall-E and Eve have very limited dialogue, mostly limited to their names and an occasional single word, such as "directive", but their voices are incredibly emotive. They scream, they sigh, they shout each other's names, Eve even laughs a few times! Baymax is more or less humanoid with a human voice, but his actions and speech are limited by his programming.

Wall-E and Eve are deeply inhuman in their visual designs and voice modulation, but their humanity shines through their dynamic body language and the way they use their limited linguistic ability to fully express themselves. In short, Baymax proved that you can write a likable robot hero without making your character even remotely human, and Wall-E proves that you can write a compelling hero with a full range of human emotions and we'll still see him as a robot. If you want to emotionally destroy your audience with a robot, that robot can have as much or as little personality as you want.

Uhhh, let's see... Coding is a very complicated thing and that's not a bad thing, but it adds some strange nuances to your writing that you may not want, so it's important to know how it works. It's a good thing this video is so long, otherwise I probably would have found a way to talk about Transformers Prime until you guys got tired of me. Fictional robots are cool, real robots are boring. I didn't even mention the uncanny valley. I've only seen two episodes of Star Trek Next Gen, but Data is my favorite character. And I was going to dedicate a whole section to the Iron Giant, but I realized that he has almost the same plot as Bumblebee and I have to accept the fact that I didn't realize that before.

The bottom line is that robots are great, but if the robot is a single red light built into a spaceship, it will always suck. Then yes!