Ultron, from Marvel’s The Avengers: Age of Ultron.
If it wasn’t for writers like Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury, robot movies as we know them would not exist.
Much is made of Hollywood’s fascination with technology, but today’s audience tends to forget that literary giants like Asimov and Bradbury were pioneers of extrapolating our technological advances and analyzing the effects such advances could have on society. Asimov is the man who coined “The Three Laws of Robotics”, which govern the use and behavior of robots in relation to humans. Robots are today’s hot technophobia. Major films with plots revolving around the use of robots set to release in 2015 are Chappie, Ex Machina, The Avengers: Age of Ultron, and Terminator: Genisys. Viewers of these movies should keep Asimov’s three laws in mind as they decide if they should apply to our real-world use of robots.
The Three Laws of Robotics
Here are the Three Laws of Robotics as they appear in Asimov’s story “Runaround” in his I, Robot anthology.
- A robot can’t harm a human or allow a human to be harmed.
- A robot must follow a human’s orders, unless the order is to hurt other humans.
- A robot must preserve itself at all costs, except if sacrificing itself would save a human.
All of the robots in these upcoming movies violate one of these three laws. In Terminator: Genisys the violation of the first law is obvious as the villains of the plot are terminator robots specifically out to kill humans. Ultron in The Avengers: Age of Ultron violates the first and second law when Ultron turns on his creators and sees the Avengers as a threat to the planet. If anything these movies show us that the laws serve as a good starting point for a plot twist.
The plot of Asimov’s short story “Runaround” contains a robot on a mission in space with two humans. The robot is sent to collect resources on mercury, but he is conflicted because the third law of robotics is telling him to avoid getting the resource because it is too dangerous while the second law is telling him he must obey orders. The problem is solved when one of the humans risks his life and the first law of making sure humans aren’t harmed trumps the other two. The reality is, as fiction has shown us, laws of robotics would be irrelevant in the real world because they would inevitably be broken by a person with malicious intent.
Robots and the Theory of the Uncanny
Chappie, from the movie by the same name.
Chappie and Ex Machina also have elements concerning the three laws, but what’s more prominent is the relationship between the humans and the human-like robots.. In Chappie you have a robot that is clearly robotic in looks but has the personality of a naive child. Chappie is more cutesy than uncanny. We have empathy for a robot like Chappie who looks robotic but has the emotions of a human, especially since his personality is child-like. Bradbury famously said ” I don’t fear robots. I fear people“. In Chappie‘s case our fear is not of the technology itself, but the malicious use of the technology by humans.
On the other hand. The intelligence in Ex Machina, a fascinating collaboration between A24 Films and DirecTV, is more likely to repulse audiences since it has human facial features, human behavior, but a clearly robotic body. The AI in this movie occupy ” the uncanny valley” and therefore activate the audience’s technophobia.
Asimov altered the course of pop culture forever when he coined his “Three Laws of Robotics.” He brought the subject of robots to the spotlight, and they have re-taken it today in the form of blockbuster films. Maybe we are just around the corner from a world where the next rebel terrorist group will be robots hell-bent on destroying the human race. Wouldn’t that make a great movie?
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