Blog Post #2 Final Project Rough Draft Portion #1- Sara Sillik

"The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that men may become robots" (Erich Fromm). This specific quote uses the term robot in a negative connotation. Some may ask why would being a robot be equivalent of worse than being a slave? Our culture has always been fascinated with creating life of our own and using technology to save time to do other activities. Efficiency has always been one of our biggest concerns. Then why do some people consider making robots to be ending humanity? Why are they viewed negatively if all they are meant to do is help us? The issues of creating robots are that we design them to replace our efforts, we do are letting the distinction between human and robot diminish, and promoting more advanced technology that views the human nature as flawed or useless. 

All throughout films and literature robots take on the form to look, talk, and think like humans. We create them to essentially be us. A great example of this is in Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982). This film has robots that look just like an average human. In this film robots are referred to as “replicants.” The replicants are so human like that the humans had to create a test to differentiate between a human and a replicant. This test was called Voight-Kampff test. Replicants were made for combat and war. Why send humans when we could send robots to replace a human life. They were used for hard labor in the film. They were made to replace us in to do every deed that we as humans do not want to do. 

With this replacement of robots for our human work. We as humans begin to lose the capability to do things ourselves. We lose the appreciation that hard work can form within us. As humans, we learn what our strengths and weaknesses are through trial and error. If we have robots that do everything hard and difficult for us we are never further challenged. The robot then has the knowledge and experience that was meant for us. Our efforts are what helps form who we become as a person. When the robots have more data to use they can then soon out smart us as they do in almost every robot action movie. The robot then is smarter than its creator. We see this is Rossum’s Universal Robots (Karl Capek, 1920). In the end humanity ceases to exist because the robots outsmarted the humans and started to kill them all. They leave one alive, Alquist, who is forced to find a way to preserve these robots and how to make more. This is a common theme found in many films in the category of robot takeover. Creating robots to do everything we are naturally designed to do will have negative effects on humans. We increase the power that the robots are given and decrease our control over them. This in my mind is basically a nice way of saying that we as humans enjoy playing God but we realize too late that we are not capable of playing that role.