Robot

Author and journalist Mike Sauve writes that "filmic language [is the] last lone ontological system available to all after the death of God." In other words, the shared memes, images, and quotations from the world of cinema are the last common experiences that the general public can all relate to. In this short essay, I want to explore depictions of the robot in TV and cinema, corresponding to an archetype present in ancient Greek and Jewish myth.

In modern TV and cinema, we are often presented with the science fiction trope of the robot. Two of the most famous depictions are Star Trek's Lieutenant Commander Data, who is capable of fantastic feats of computation and memorization but is incredibly socially awkward, and Schwarzenegger's Terminator, a relentless killing machine of immense strength that is nonetheless undermined by humanity's ability to care for one another and work as a team. These mechanical characters represent the twin poles of the robot archetype: the naïve, childlike yet precocious assistant to mankind, and the malevolent destroyer of mankind springing from humanity's hubristic attempts to play God.

While these robotic archetypes are often seen as creations of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, echoes of them can be found in the past that meet many of the modern criteria we see on screen today. The first of these concerns the ancient Greek character Talos, first mentioned in 700 B.C. by Hesiod. In this myth, Talos is a giant bronze man built by Hephaestus, the Greek god of blacksmithing. Talos was commissioned by Zeus to protect the island of Crete from invaders. He marched around the island three times a day, throwing boulders at enemy ships.

Another historical example is the Golem of Jewish folklore. One of the most prominent manifestations of the Golem narrative involves the 16th-century Rabbi of Prague, Rabbi Loew, who created a golem out of mud from the banks of the Vltava River (think of one of Anthony Gormley's clay figurines from Field for the British Isles scaled up), bringing it to life through Hebrew incantations to protect the Prague ghetto from anti-Semitic pogroms. Both of these manifestations share a tendency to be somewhat unruly or a liability to their creators, often by carrying out their orders all too literally. Here, one is reminded of Asimov's failure of the Three Laws of Robotics or, indeed, a recent report that an AI-operated U.S. military drone attempted to kill its operator when commanders pulled the plug on a simulated mission.

To conclude, while Data and the Terminator may occupy opposite poles of the robot archetype, both characters in their respective franchises share the same story arc of becoming more human over time. Indeed, with today's growing concerns over the dangers of artificial general intelligence and brain-computer interfaces, it appears that as robots become more human and humans become more robotic, we may one day meet in the middle as cyborgs.