In the post Fighting Robots we looked at ways to best a robot. The goal, of course, being either to thwart the thing or kill it. I got a lot of great feedback on that post and have mentored plenty of authors in ways to kill various and sundry robots. But then I listened to a podcast that made me realize something. How to kill a robot is only part of the problem. The greater issue might be, would we?
If you don’t listen to Hidden Brain, you should. It’s an amazing podcast. This particular episode discussed what we learn about our humanity from machines. And it does examine the issues of “killing” a robot. To give it a listen, choose the pic.
It seems a silly, but part of the problem is a word used in the dilemma itself: kill. See, you can’t kill what isn’t alive. We can destroy the robot or abort its function. We can just turn the sucker off. But, the moment we use the word kill, we’ve anthropomorphized the thing. We’ve assigned human qualities to something that isn’t. And once we do that our behavior toward that non-human thing gets tangled up in our humanity.
So, what does all this have to do with us as writers? Well, if you are a sci fi writer andAnd what does that have to do with FightWriting? Your character may hesitate in fighting and killing a robot. Not because they feel the machine will overpower them, but for
the simple fact they see it as killing. Which begs the question, what if they don’t hesitate? What if your character has no issues killing an android or BB-8 or Wall-E? (Only a monster would kill Wall-E!) Well, that’s a whole other problem not so unlike someone who has no issues killing someone’s pet. And we will examine that problem in another post.
Until then, get blood on your pages! Or, whatever it is inside your robots!
Now, for your viewing pleasure, here are some of the best movie robots of all time. Yes, Mecha-Godzilla is in it!