More recently, Matt Groening’s sc-fi cartoon Futurama featured Bender, a robot who smokes and drinks, is a liar, an egomaniac and a thief. Just before Marvin came along, the original Star Wars in 1977 had imagined two kinds of robot – a mobile computer, R2-D2, and his much more humanoid interpreter C-3PO whose attitude shares some of Marvin’s wounded passive aggression. Would we really want to replicate melancholy in a machine? Perhaps we would, if robots are ever to genuinely relate to human beings. “Brain the size of a planet and you want me to clean this spaceship.” Instead of being either loyal servant or sinister would-be overlord, Marvin shares our unenviable human capacity for self-pity and despair. When Douglas Adams unleashed Marvin the Paranoid Android in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy on Radio 4 in 1978, the idea of a robot with a human-like personality was already enough of a cliche for Adams to have fun subverting it. Its programmed persona (which in later films becomes much more helpful and supportive) is just one of those frightening, funny or touching personalities that science fiction has imagined for robots.įacebook Twitter Remorseless malevolence … Terminator Salvation (2009). For this is a bad robot, a scary robot, a robot of remorseless malevolence. That’s why, although the robotic toddler sleeping in the store room is an impressive piece of tech, my heart leaps in another way at the sight of the Terminator. Today, the real age of robots is coming, and yet even as these machines promise to transform work or make it obsolete, few possess anything like the charisma of the androids of our dreams and nightmares. We think of robots as artificial humans that can not only walk and talk but possess digital personalities, even a moral code. It is the Terminator, sent back in time by the machines who will rule the future to ensure humanity’s doom.īackstage at the Science Museum, London, where these real experiments and a full-scale model from the Terminator films are gathered to be installed in the exhibition Robots, it occurs to me that our fascination with mechanical replacements for ourselves is so intense that science struggles to match it. Its plastic skin has been burned off to reveal a metal skeleton with pistons and plates of merciless strength. This store room is an eerie place, then it gets more creepy, as I glimpse behind the anatomical robot a hulking thing staring at me with glowing red eyes. It has no lower body, and a single Cyclopean eye. On a shelf rests a much more grisly creation that mixes imitation human bones and muscles, with wires instead of arteries and microchips in place of organs. An android toddler lies on a pallet, its doll-like face staring at the ceiling.
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