How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Robot

By Queen Spajina

From sci-fi novels to bartending to chic hotel bars, robots are made to wear many hats and cater to our every whim and desire, ideally without any regard for their own health or welfare.

ASIMO

Even the robot ASIMO can’t hide the popular appeal of his brethren and the recent release of I, Robot starring the undeniably popular Will Smith was no coincidence. Robots have permeated our social consciousness through franchises like Star Wars, Star Trek, Alien, and The Terminator in addition to appearing in movies like Robots, AI, eXistenZ, Short Circuit, Electric Grandmother, The Black Hole, The Stepford Wives, Forbidden Planet, The Wizard of Oz, Metropolis, and even Runaway, in which Gene Simmons portrays Dr. Charles Luther, an evil mastermind who commands legions of robots. And who could forget RoboCop!

Robots have also made their presence known on television throughout the years, in shows such as Transformers, Battlestar Galactica, The Jetsons, Buck Rogers, Futurama, and even Dr. Snuggles and his maid Mathilda Junkbottom. In addition, RoboWars is a popular online RPG and there are two different robots from the X-Men comic series named Nanny.

The Canadarm

In fact, most of us know more about robots from popular culture than we know about the exact science of bleeps and circuit boards (with the possible exception of the Canadarm, also known as the Space Shuttle’s Shuttle Remote Manipulator System). But do we really know what makes them tick? If our world is going to survive we need to decide what makes them special and how we can create a more robot-friendly world in which they can live with us without animosity.

The film Alien has a poignant point about how we might integrate robots into our lives, and most movies about robots deal with that sticky question: what if we made robots and they became self-aware and were sad? What if they were angry, or went crazy with anger because of their servitude? And what if they tried to take over the world and pressed “the button”? Sometimes in our lives we are confronted with the strange-but-true reality of our ever-changing universe. We have to keep up if we bring new souls into the world or make robots with souls.

For example, did you know that if you go into a Loblaws grocery store and try to film anything, they will not only ask you to leave, but they may treat you like you were trying to steal things? A secret shopper may come out of nowhere and block you with her cart, acting as if she is buying four rolls of Alcan aluminum foil, which is strange because you were just taking a picture of said foil. Some pimply-faced bag boy may then come running down the aisle yelling “Hey!” even though you didn’t know that it was such a big deal to take a couple of pictures of Alcan aluminum foil.

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