The Three Flavors of Robot Films

I love robots.  I also love golems and homunculi.  I like the concept of unliving things being assembled then acting as if they were alive.  If you think about it, you and I are pretty much the same thing; unliving mattered assembled and declared “alive”.  What then is the difference between a machine and human?  What is that dividing line between sentient and non-sentient?

Anthropologists and psychologists are still debating what aspects define sentience.  Is someone brain-dead still considered alive?  Do other higher order primates have sentience?  When does half-sentience quantify as full-sentience?  Is there such a thing as half-sentience?  Can some humans have more sentience than others?

Robot films can ask these questions, but they don’t always take advantage of the genre’s ability to ask them. Robot films are usually restricted to three flavors: immortal servants, doom of mankind, or just a tool.  The most popular of these flavors is doom of mankind (“Terminator”, “I, Robot”), followed by immortal servants (“AI: Artificial Intelligence”, “Wall-E”), and then just a tool (any anime featuring mecha).  Rarely do robot films really ask the above questions.  In “doom of mankind” scenario, people are too worried about killing the thing with bodies of steel and circuitry.  “Immortal servants” stories don’t really question that either; they’re more interested if the robots can or should transcend humans.  “Just a tool” stories don’t address the question at all.

The good news is that I feel like these questions are becoming more popular in films of today.  “Automata”, “Her”, “Lars and the Real Girl”, “Transcendence”, and “Ex Machina” feature the concept of inanimate objects bearing semblences of life. “Lars and the Real Girl” in particular, asks these questions (perhaps not overtly), because the main character imagines Bianca to be alive, and the supporting characters actually play along with this fiction.

While movies like “Big Hero 6”, “Wall-E”, and “Robot and Frank”, all have robots necessary to their storyline, I don’t think they ask these questions well, if indeed they ask them at all.  They all are under the heading of “immortal servants”, and their legitimacy as standards for “what makes someone alive” are not really questioned.  In some cases, the fact that they are machines is purely incidental.

If humans are complex machines, could we make a machine complex enough to be considered alive?  Would we have to expand our definition of “life”?  How would they judge the human race?  Will they, indeed, judge the human race unworthy?  Will they become another ally?  Will they supplant us?  Would that be a bad thing?

These are the questions I want to see asked, and I’d be interested in what people will have to say.