Where Are All the Dead Robots?

One of the enduring elements of science fiction is the investigation of various forms of manufactured life. Whether they’re called “droids,” “replicants,” or plain old “robots,” these sometimes meritorious, sometimes maniacal metal men have cemented their place in the ongoing canon of speculative fiction. Sometimes writers become philosophical when it comes to artificial intelligence, musing on whether such created minds can become truly “alive” as humans understand life. (For the sake of convenience, I’ll use the term “sentient” to signify this sense of human-like “aliveness,” meaning ontologically equivalent to human beings in inner nature; this differs from the less philosophical self-awareness that “sentience” often represents.) One might expect the proposed answers to this question to run the whole gamut between the absolute “yes, sentient,” and “no, just machines,” but in practice fiction always seems to gravitate toward two distinct camps.

In the pure action context, robots or A.I. are generally shown as antagonists who are on course to wipe out humanity and must be stopped. Terminator and the original Battlestar Galactica are prime and recognizable examples, but of course there are countless others. Any artificial lifeforms functioning as protagonists or their allies are presented as definite exceptions to an otherwise unbreakable rule, deviants with altered programming. In this camp, the question of sentience was historically answered with “no,” but in recent decades writers have largely ignored the debate entirely: the robots are an existential threat and therefore cannot be allowed to exist, pure “us” vs. “them.” Conversely, stories seeking more thoughtful analysis seem invariably to answer the question with a full-throated “YES,” concluding that manufactured beings are fully alive, independent, and morally equivalent to organic beings with all rights and privileges pertaining thereto. These stories often invite the audience to agree with this stance in hypothetical reality, not merely within the bounds of the story being told. Bicentennial Man, the 2000s Battlestar Galactica, Bladerunner, this list could go on and on, down to individual episodes of virtually every sci-fi television show over the last half-century. Even Star Wars, while largely avoiding the philosophical issue per se, clearly invites us to think of its droids as more than simply machines with advanced programming.

I would be a fool to argue here for any position on this topic. These debates have been had endlessly by those far more knowledgeable than myself, and all without satisfactory consensus. Rather, as a storyteller, my interest is on the quandary of why these narrow camps exist and, in particular, why the “not sentient” side of the argument never seems to arise from the more cerebral or contemplative treatments of the subject matter.

Starting at, or at least very near, the beginning, we can see the seeds of this disparity within the history of computing. As early as 1950, no less a luminary than Alan Turing, seen by many as the father of artificial intelligence, argued for the position that a sufficiently advanced machine truly could “think,” and even supposed that any deity worthy of the name could give a soul to a machine if it wanted to. (Despite this statement, it must be said that Turing showed little interest in the theological arguments either way.) Turing’s conclusion has been repeated verbatim at least once in science fiction and has been expressed indirectly too many times to count. Early fiction authors who dealt with this concept were contemporaries of Turing, and at that time the assumption that machines were simply dumb constructs, and always would be, was a foregone conclusion for most. Expounding on what the audience already knows is rarely intriguing, regardless of whether it’s true, so to provide thought-provoking fiction required the suggestion that the machines might, indeed, become sentient. Early authors facing this necessity would become influences for later creators, leading eventually to the enshrining of the sentient machine as a standard in science fiction. (A brief aside, one a pure focus on the thesis would demand be cut, but, hey, it’s my website: It fascinates me to think the debates about artificial intelligence aren’t new, and weren’t new even at the point that such computing power became inevitable. The discussion goes back virtually to the beginning of meaningful mechanical computation itself. Regardless of the answer, there is something undeniably resonant about the question.)

Adding to this influence from the world of computing we see a potential effect from the pop culture representations that would follow. While serious authors, I’ll call them the “Asimov crowd,” for the sake of shorthand, were creating thoughtful work regarding the deeper nature of thinking machines and how such inventions might, one day, be integrated into a human society, popular film frequently used robots as the “monster” in formulaic, B-movie plot lines of the 1950s and ‘60s. These are the representations of artificial life a typical Westerner was much more likely to encounter in their daily routines. This media, too, influenced later writers and filmmakers, bolstering the camp of artificial intelligence as pure antagonist. Contemplating sentience in these early “killer robot” stories simply wasn’t the point. Occasionally the quandary would be posed briefly, but the debate was always rendered moot by the robot going on a rampage or by being reserved for some ominous or philosophical statement at the very end of the film. In this culture, pushback by the more introspective or contrarian writer was certain, leading to greater polarization. Further, in the Cold War era of their creation, the robots in these films, intentionally or not, became symbolic of key fears in their creators and audience. At first the metaphor largely addressed anxiety over unrestrained science and the rush of invention ushering the world into the atomic age; however, as years passed and NATO and the Warsaw Pact continued to ideologically entrench, the fear of the technological movie monster increasingly identified not with the idea of change in general but with the Soviets in particular. Once this trend began, the pushback against the purely villainous robot took on a more allegorical motivation, seeking to humanize not the android itself but the actual human on the other side of a philosophical gulf, inviting people to think of their supposed enemies as being more like themselves and less alien. As these works influenced others and mutated through the infinite game of “Telephone” that is the human creative endeavor, eventually the metaphor became undetectably subtle or was left completely behind, resulting in a sci-fi tradition that espouses a conclusion on the sentience of artificial life without meaningful interest in whether or not the conclusion is true.

Finally, many writers may have gravitated toward the position of sentient robots simply because they (ironically) offer more meat on the literary bone. Stories need characters, and characters need the ability to make choices. In the right context, even a microbe could be a character, but a blender could not. Even a character that can’t take any physical action, for whatever reason, retains the privilege to choose what to believe and how to feel, and even these decisions can drive a story. A mere calculator, however advanced, cannot do that unless it has agency of its own. If a robot makes a grand sacrifice in the spirit of Asimov’s First Law, the sacrifice lacks emotional or moral value, the foundation of drama, if the being could only follow its programming. The audience needs to see that the machine had a choice, to see that it was motivated by some loyalty to cause or kin, in order to empathize with its action. In response to such a sacrifice, an author will typically want to mine the drama of the surviving characters’ mourning, and grief requires relationship. The hero forms relationships with his allies, not his tools.

What we are left with, however justified, is a fictional landscape in which the “A.I. is not sentient” position is never analyzed or explored, so its truth or falsehood has become, in some sense, irrelevant to the storyteller. After three quarters of a century, however, times have changed. The belief that “machines will always be dumb constructs” is no longer the foregone conclusion it once was, and the sentient robot supposition has been thoroughly explored. Contrary interpretations, at this point, would actually be refreshing. Of course, for the literary reasons noted, we shouldn’t expect to see stories primarily focused on arguing that artificial lifeforms can’t be sentient. It remains a premise difficult to structure a whole narrative around. Nevertheless, what we might expect to see after all this time, that I still do not, is science fiction in which artificial intelligence exists, is sometimes embodied in useful constructs like ships or androids, but is still seen as a tool rather than a living thing, stories in which, for example, the hero orders the robot to sacrifice itself for the survival of innocent lives and is praised for a clever use of resources rather than condemned as callous or shown mourning the loss as of a human friend. This may appear, at first, as a minor element of plot or characterization, but with consistent writing it would shift the tone of all interactions between the artificial intelligence and the characters, not to mention drive additional questions for building the setting. How would humans respond to constantly interacting with machines that talk like humans but aren’t really alive? Would designers intentionally limit the parity of their creations to avoid cognitive dissonance? These questions are right around the corner of our future, to the extent they aren’t already here, and provide excellent seeds for atmospheric storytelling. Alas, so far, the canon of speculative fiction appears to be limited by the very trails it has blazed.

But what do you think? Am I correct in my survey of the genre as it exists? Do you think there are other reasons for the creative ruts that I haven’t covered? Are there stories I’ve overlooked that already present non-sentient androids without caricaturizing them as murderous juggernauts? Leave a comment below, and I look forward to the discussion!