Critical Thinking Blog Post #4

The Promise and Peril of Robots in Film, TV and Real Life: Friends or Foes?

        What seems appealing to me of the clip from the movie, “Al” is the artificial intelligent who is designed to look like a sweet little boy, searching for his “biological” mother who just “throws him away” basically. “His love is real but he is not… He is the first robotic child programmed to love and co-exist as the member of the family”. The words love, child and family all just sound every appealing and pleasant, non-threatening; as Helen didn’t seem dangerous at all in the novel, Galatea 2.2 by Richard Powers. She was just a computer software and didn’t have a body to move around with but had a mind of a child and thought like a child who seemed to fall in love with her co-creator as the little boy did in “AI”. In contrast, the clip from the movie, “I, Robot”, shows how robots are created to improve human life, “we trust them in our homes, we trust them with our children, we trust them with our lives, but can they be trusted?”. The clip shows Will Smith, the hero of the movie, interviewing a robot who is accused of murdering a human being and Smith goes around investigating the all whole system of how the robots are build and how they are programmed. In which, the scientist who built these robots tell him that the robots “cannot harm a human being, the first law of robotics” but then shows that the robots get out of control and start destroying civilization as we know it. Though, the robots might not seem dangerous, I feel as though they have the ability to harm and be threatening to the human society. Not just the movie, “I, Robot” but a lot of movies out there have the plot of their movies to be: first robots are made to improve and help the human race but somehow in the end the robots turn on them and become “evil” and harm us and so we need a human “hero” to come and rescue all of us from getting hurt from these “evil” robots.

         I believe that the threatening aspect of robots were that we as humans have a hard time adjusting to things that are unfamiliar and that is why people fear or feel threatened by robots but as we introduced ‘bots’ and/or software agents as we use the internet now, we’ve gotten used to non-human contact. Whether it be playing a chess game with a computer as your opponent or talking to “live” bots online. Nevertheless, I feel as robots have become accepted to most people in real life because all these crazy robots turning on us can only be in the movies, right? Robots are created now to be small and cute. I think people accept them more because it’s something new and exciting.

        I feel as though the vision of the future holds promise of advanced technology for human life because electrically engineered robots will be capable of doing things that humans can only image doing like fixing a car in record time or performing surgery with really steady “hands” but with all these amazing features that these robots might offer us, I sense that peril might come with that promise. Yes, advanced computer programmed bots seem to be helpful but those robots can’t last forever. It’ll probably last as long as the programmer will live. It can’t be perfect all the time; it might have a malfunction, say during an operation or something and kill the patient. The key is that you will never really know for sure what will happen with robots.