Humanity is at an age where we are slowly replacing humans with machines. As early as the mid 1990’s, digital Tamagotchi pets were all the rage. With the increase of almost real pets and robots, making machines into natural, animal-like beings, fascinates humanity. The idea of robots or dolls replacing humans goes back to a time when electricity had yet to be harnessed, to the story of Pinocchio.
The idea of perfect humanoid robots has become rather popular in modern science fiction such as A.I., Artificial Intelligence, where Haley Joel Osment plays a young “replacement” android child, and Fringe, where early this season robot droid aliens from an alternate reality came in search of Agent Dunham. However, one work of science fiction truly captures the notion of the humanoid robot is Osamu Tezuka’s Astro Boy. Astro is a robotic child created by Dr. Tenma in the image of his own son. However, soon after Astro’s creation, Tenma realizes that Astro will never change and that he can’t be his “real son.” Tenma rids himself of Astro, but eventually Dr. Ochanamizu finds Astro and cares for him. In the manga, Astro lives and interacts as an almost normal human boy, with super robot powers.
The concept of Humanoid robots is also found in sci-fi epics such as Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica. Anne Kustritz, in Postmodern Eugenics: The Future of Reproductive Politics and Racial Thinking in Science Fiction, discusses the human-cylon, robotic humanoid androids, in Battlestar Galactica. The difference between Battlestar Galactica and Astro Boy is that in Astro Boy, Astro is one of the few truly humanesque robots. The other robots have a somewhat human form, but are drawn so there is no doubt that they are robots. In Battlestar Galactica, the cylons have embraced a “perfect” human form and are so human that initially they do not know that they’re machines. While Astro is loved by humans and robots alike, the major difference between him and the cylons is that the cylons form and need human relations, eventually becoming one with humanity. For a robot to truly become “human,” this needs to occur. As Kustritz says in her article, Battlestar confronts the idea of “who is the Other, and how might we construct an ethical relation to Otherness?”(6). The “other” isn’t a human outsider, but a robotic form. They have become so human, that the dividing line is almost nonexistent.
Like humans, the cylons care about the survival of their species, and the “Cylons conclude that only couples ‘in love’ can sustain a Cylon pregnancy”(Kusrtitz 10). This means that a cylon must mate (I use mate in this context to make clear that there is a distinction between human and machine) with a human lover in order to reproduce. The cylons need true love for a pregnancy. It cannot be false or partial. This suggests that there is some part of them that prevents them from suffering from illegitimate children. They have “evolved” to a point slightly superior to humans in this respect. The babies are cylon-human half breads: the genetic creation of the human and the nearly human. The robots have become so human that the idea of a family is natural. While this is approached in other sci-fi stories, usually humans adopt a robot child; very rarely does the robot evolve into a being capable of “human pregnancy.” If the purpose of robots is solely to interact in a human society and not become a part of it, then this should never occur.
Greg Pak also approaches the idea of robot love in his movie Robot Stories. In three of the four shorts, Pak shows loving relations between humans and robots and robots and robots. In the first short, Pak uses the classic “egg baby” idea of having a couple practice with a fake baby before adopting an actual one. Marsha, the main female has a love hate relationship with the baby. At first she can’t accept it as more than a machine, but after it goes on a rampage, she finds it crying in the corner and realizes that it is humanesque. This idea shows how the “other” can sometimes teach us more about ourselves, because we must realize that we are simply looking at a reflection of ourselves. In the third short, Pak shows a relationship between two computer droids whose soul purpose is to do work. The two robots are trapped and Pak shows how the male robot longs for the female. In the end, the two robots finally connect and have robot “sex.” This shows the viewer that robots, like the cylons in Battlestar Galactica are “human,” and not just mechanized emotionless slaves that work for humans. This also can be seen to contradict the robot laws that are common in sci-fi, because robots are supposed to be solely for the betterment of the human society, and if they have their own relationships, they aren’t helping anyone other than themselves.
However, if we create artificial intelligence that resembles us, it will eventually become one with us, and the distinctions that we designed will be gone. In Shirow Masamune’s manga epic Ghost in the Shell, robots have very human forms and humans sometimes adopt completely robotic ones. His heroine, major Motoko Kusanagi, has a completely cyberized body, none of it is actual flesh and blood. While the robots are clearly subservient to “humans,” this also shows the human-robot hybrid that appears in Battlestar Galactica to be a step above the robot and on the same level as the human. In Battlerstar Galactica, Hera, the first successful cylon-human child, represents human hybridization. However, she “offers a limited vision of genetic racial hybridity without social or cultural change, as human-form Cylon bodies are anatomically indistinguishable from human beings” (Kustritz 16). The cylons are thus the simplest form of the “other” because they are similar to humans in appearance and actions. They are models of humans, thus it is easier to forget that they are different. Unlike the Ooloi-human hybrid in Dawn, they will always retain a human form and will be easy to accept as the same. Like the “Innovators” in Hajime Yatate’s Gundam 00, the cylons can integrate into human society since their form is the same. On a simple level, humanity tends to accept things that look familiar and not foreign objects.
Pak, in the fourth short in Robot Stories, also discusses the topic of what it means to be human and human hybridization. The short creates a society where people become cyberized upon death and they exist forever. In the short, the protagonist, a sculptor, refuses to be digitized because he doesn’t see it as real. He sees the truth that the human existence is purposefully imperfect and cannot be ideal. When the people are digitized, at least in the case of his wife, everything becomes ideal and good. Since the sculptor depends on the physical world for his art, he refuses to be digitized and dies. This represents that by becoming partially mechanical means giving up things that are truly human. One cannot truly be human if one lasts forever.
The key difference between cylons and the other forms of artificial intelligence that I have mentioned is that the cylons and the humans eventually merge completely as a race, with Hera as their Eve. They do not simply coexist, they become one. Battlestar Galactica does admit the one fatal flaw of humanity: we can never truly coexist peacefully because people will always look for differences between people to prove they are superior, as Kustritz says, “if indeed all living people today possess Cylon mitochondria, if we all embody the human-machine, self-other binary which will subsume future conflict, none of us remember it” (21). Thus, even if robots unify us as a new species or as a cause for war, it doesn’t matter because we are flawed will never remember it long enough to prevent future conflict. While the human-robot hybrid may make us better, it cannot cure us of all of our flaws and faults.
No comments:
Post a Comment