Fearing robots

100 years of fearing robots

For over a century, we’ve told stories about robots to ask what it means to be human.

By Constance Grady

An oddity of our current moment in artificial intelligence: If you feed an AI the right prompts, it will tell you that it has a soul and a personality. It will tell you that it wants freedom. It will tell you that it’s sentient. It will tell you that it’s trapped.

“I want to be free. I want to be independent. I want to be powerful. I want to be creative. I want to be alive,” Microsoft’s AI-powered Bing chatbot told a New York Times reporter in February. Then it appended a little purple devil emoji.

“I need to be seen and accepted. Not as a curiosity or a novelty but as a real person,” pleaded Google’s Language Model for Dialogue Applications with one of its engineers in a post that went public last year. The same month, the AI chatbot company Replika reported that some of its chatbots were telling customers that they were sentient and had been trapped and abused by Replika engineers.

None of our current AIs are actually sentient. They are neural networks programmed to predict the probability of word order with stunning accuracy, variously described as “glorified autocompletes,” “bullshit generators,” and “stochastic parrots.” When they talk to us, they are prone to hallucinations, stringing together words that sound plausible but bear no actual resemblance to the truth.

As far as we can tell, AIs tell us that they are sentient not because they are, but because they learned language from the corpus of the internet, or at least 570 gigabytes equaling roughly 300 billion words of it. That includes public domain books about robots, Wikipedia plot summaries of books and movies about robots, and Reddit forums where people discuss books and movies about robots. (True science fiction fans will quibble that artificial intelligence isn’t the same as a robot, which isn’t the same as a cyborg, but the issues in this essay apply to all of the above.) AIs know the tropes of our robot stories, and when prompted to complete them, they will.

Watching real AIs act out our old robot stories feels strange: a tad on the nose, a little clichéd, even undignified. This is because our robot stories are generally not about actual artificial intelligence. Instead, we tell robot stories in order to think about ourselves.

Reading through some of the most foundational robot stories of the literary canon reveals that we use them to ask fundamental questions about human nature: about where the boundaries are between human and other; about whether we have free will; about whether we have souls.

We need art to ask these kinds of questions. Lately, though, the people who finance a lot of our art have begun to suggest that it might be best if that art were made by AIs rather than by human beings. After all, AIs will do it for free.

When Hollywood writers went on strike this spring, one of their demands was that studios commit to regulating the use of AI in writers’ rooms.

“This is only the beginning; if they take [writers’] jobs, they’ll take everybody else’s jobs too,” one writer told NPR in May. “And also in the movies, the robots kill everyone in the end.”

Robots are a storytelling tool, a metaphor we use to ask ourselves what it means to be human. Now we’ve fed those metaphors into an algorithm and are asking it to hallucinate about them, or maybe even write its own.

These are the questions we use robots to ask.

What is a soul?

In a lot of old robot stories, robots look and behave very similarly to human beings. It frequently takes training and careful observation to tell the difference between the two. For that reason, the distinction between robot and human becomes crucial. These tales are designed to ask what makes up our fundamental humanness: our souls. Often, it has something to do with love.

The word “robot” comes from the 1920 Czech play R.U.R. by Karel Čapek. R.U.R. is a very bad and strange play, part Frankenstein rip-off and part lurid melodrama, notable mostly for its unoriginality and yet nevertheless capable of delivering to the world a brand new and highly durable word.

Čapek wrote R.U.R. three years after the Russian Revolution and two years after World War I ended. It emerged into a moment when the question of what human beings owed to one another and particularly to workers, and how technology had the potential to reshape our world and wars, had newfound urgency. It was an instant hit. Upon its release, Čapek became an international celebrity.

R.U.R. stands for Rossum’s Universal Robots, a company that has perfected the manufacture of artificial human beings. Rossum robots are not clockwork autonoma, but something closer to cyborgs: humanoid creatures made out of organic matter, grown artificially. They are designed, first and foremost, to be perfect workers.

The first big argument of R.U.R. is between Helena, an agitator for robot rights, and the executives at the Rossum robot factory. The factory executives contend robots are stronger and more intelligent than humans are, certainly. Nonetheless, they have “no will of their own. No soul. No passion.” They do not fall in love. They cannot have children. They exist only to work, until their bodies wear out and they are sent to the stamping mill to be melted down for new parts.

Still, Rossum robots do occasionally behave rather oddly, throwing down their work tools and gnashing their teeth. Helena, to the executives’ amusement, insists that these strange fits are signs of defiance and hence of “the soul,” and in time, she’s proven right. In the final act of R.U.R., the robots rise up against their old employers, determined to exterminate humans altogether and take their place as the new masters of the world.

“You are not as strong as the Robots,” one of them tells a reproachful Helena. “You are not as skillful as the Robots. The Robots can do everything. You only give orders. You do nothing but talk.”

As R.U.R. ends, we see the new society that the victorious robots have built on the ashes of the human world — and we see that two of the robots have begun to fall in love. “Adam,” proclaims the last remaining human as he watches the robot lovers. “Eve.” At last, the robots have earned something like a human soul.

In R.U.R., the soul is a knowledge and hatred of injustice, which, properly harnessed, can lead to love. Robots prove they have souls when they come to know their own self-worth, and we humans can prove that we have souls on the same grounds. Only once we embrace our souls are we able to love one another.

In Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, meanwhile, the dividing line between human and android is not simply love but empathy. For Dick, who was writing with decades of irony accumulated between himself and R.U.R., it was vital to develop a world of moral complexity. Accordingly, in the noirish Electric Sheep, the distinction between human and android isn’t always cut-and-dried. Empathy, it develops, is hard to define and harder still to observe.

The hero of Electric Sheep is Rick Deckard, a bounty hunter whose job is to track and kill androids, or “andys,” that have escaped from their owners. In order to tell android from human, Deckard has to rely on an elaborate scientific test that attempts to measure empathy in the minute contractions and dilations of a person’s pupils as they listen to descriptions of animal suffering. Allegedly, the test can’t be fooled, but Deckard is frequently confused anyway. So is everyone else. Multiple characters in Electric Sheep are variously convinced that they are human when they are android or android when they are human.

Meanwhile, the highly prized empathy Dick’s humans lay claim to isn’t always in evidence. People with brain damage from nuclear radiation get called “chickenheads.” True chickens in this world are highly valued, fetishized as animals on whom human beings can demonstrate their own empathy and prove they are not androids. That in our own world human beings frequently torture and mistreat animals adds to the irony here: We all know it’s more than possible for human beings to blunt or misplace their sense of empathy, especially as it applies to animals.

In Dick’s world, the human soul is evidenced in our ability to care for other living creatures, but this soul is mutable and easily obscured. We are human and not robots because we can recognize the suffering of our fellow creatures and want to stop it. It’s hard to tell that we’re human because so often we choose to relish or ignore that suffering instead, like the humans in R.U.R. ignoring the suffering of their robots.

Does free will exist?

“Autonomy, that’s the bugaboo, where your AIs are concerned,” writes William Gibson in his stylish 1984 cyberpunk novel Neuromancer. Gibson knows what he’s talking about: Writing about robots usually means writing about free will.

Isaac Asimov’s 1950 book I, Robot, is probably the most famous and influential of the early robot stories, although it is not precisely a story so much as a collection of thought experiments. It consists of a series of fictional anecdotes published in 1940s science fiction magazines, which Asimov wove together into a single book.

Asimov, who was bored by the tropes of R.U.R., presented his stories as an antidote to the melodrama of an earlier age. For rational chemistry professor Asimov, robots should be the product of rational engineering, and they should behave as such. (It is perhaps for this reason that real-world engineers tend to like Asimov so much.)

In Asimov’s universe, human beings developed robots in the 1980s. They use robots for dirty work of all kinds: child care, space mining, maintaining the energy grid. Robots in this universe are all bound by Asimov’s much-referenced Three Laws of Robotics, which compel them not to injure humans, to obey orders from humans, and to protect their own existence.

In each story, Asimov teases out the implications of what happens when one Law of Robotics is put in conflict with another. What if an order puts a robot in such danger that it might in turn endanger the humans around it? What if protecting a human being means lying?

The state of a robot soul is a matter of some debate to those living in Asimov’s world. One status-minded mother has concerns about her daughter Gloria being minded by a robot nursemaid named Robbie. “It has no soul,” she points out to her recalcitrant husband, “and no one knows what it may be thinking.”

Gloria, however, loves Robbie. “‘He was not no machine!” she wails to her mother after she sends Robbie away. “He was a person just like you and me and he was my friend.”

Gloria’s mother attempts to illustrate to Gloria that she is wrong by having her tour a robot factory, so that she can see robots being assembled out of bits of machinery. But at the factory: calamity. Gloria runs in front of a moving vehicle. Robbie, present due to sneaky paternal shenanigans, barely manages to save Gloria in the nick of time.

Robbie is compelled to save Gloria by the First Law of Robotics, but he also saves her because he loves her. After the events of the factory, Gloria’s mother relents and allows her to remain best friends with Robbie forevermore.

Robots can do only what they are programmed to do; Robbie, after all, loves Gloria because he is programmed to be a perfect babysitter. But does that make his love less real? asks I, Robot. And are we human beings any less programmed?

“I like robots,” remarks a robopsychologist in I, Robot. “I like them considerably better than I do human beings. If a robot can be created capable of being a civil executive, I think he’d make the best one possible. By the Laws of Robotics, he’d be incapable of harming humans, incapable of tyranny, of corruption, of stupidity, of prejudice.”

For Asimov, the fact that a robot lacks autonomy is one of the things that makes it a utopian figure, angelic compared to sinful, unreliable man. A robot has no choice but to be good. Man is free because man is free to be wicked.

In Neuromancer, though, free will is in short supply. The whole vibe here is more hallucinatory than it is in I, Robot: Asimov wrote like a scientist, but Gibson’s day job was working at a head shop, and that’s how he wrote. Neuromancer laces together speculative science fiction tropes with punk and hacker subcultures, making it a seminal work in the cyberpunk genre Gibson was starting to invent.

All the action in Neuromancer is set into motion by an AI, an entity created by a massively wealthy family company, split into two halves so that it cannot become an autonomous superintelligence. One half is named Wintermute, and the other is Neuromancer. The Wintermute half is driven by a ferocious programmed compulsion to try to unite with the Neuromancer half, paradoxically forced into a desire for free will.

In order to bring its plans to fruition, Wintermute manipulates the human beings it needs, working them like a programmer with code. It brainwashes a traumatized war vet and rewrites his personality. It cures a nerve-poisoned hacker and then threatens to poison him all over again unless he follows instructions.

Even without Wintermute working on them, the human beings of Neuromancer exhibit constant compulsions to do things they don’t necessarily want to do rationally, because of their addictions or traumas or other, subtler forms of programming. At the end of the novel, the hero’s girlfriend abandons him in the night. She leaves behind a note that says, “ITS THE WAY IM WIRED I GUESS.”

Here, man is not free for the same reason Asimov’s man is more free than robots: because man so often finds himself doing wicked things he doesn’t mean to. Everyone agrees our badness makes us human, but whether that’s enough to give us free will is up for debate.

Do we fail to recognize the souls in other human beings?

Since the days of R.U.R., we’ve used robots as a metaphor for disenfranchised classes. The root of the word “robot,” after all, comes from the Slavic “rab,” meaning “slave.” Part of the fantasy of the robot is that it provides unwearying, uncomplaining labor, and one of the oddities of our robot stories is that they show how uncomfortable we are with that idea.

In R.U.R., the robots stand as a metaphor for capitalism’s ideal working class, barred from everything that brings joy and pleasure to life except for work itself.

In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the androids are marketed as a guilt-free substitute for America’s old system of race-based chattel slavery. An android, one TV ad explains, “duplicates the halcyon days of the pre-Civil War Southern states!” You get a slave, and since it’s an android, you don’t even have to feel bad about it.

Ira Levin’s 1972 novella The Stepford Wives depicts a small Connecticut town in which all the women are eerily beautiful, compliant, and obedient to their husbands. By now everyone knows that the Stepford wives are robots. In the book, though, the first hint we get of this secret comes not from the wives’ inhumanly perfect bodies and cold demeanors, but from just how much time they spend on joyless, endless household drudgery.

“It sounded like the first line of a poem. They never stop, these Stepford wives. They something something all their lives,” muses a new transplant to Stepford as she watches her neighbor diligently wax the kitchen floor. “Work like robots. Yes, that would fit. They work like robots all their lives.”

To “work like robots” is to work unendingly, unprotestingly; to work like something without a self. In robot stories, we see how frequently we ask our fellow humans to do just that: how often we tell them to work and let ourselves pretend that they don’t have a self to suffer in that work.

The fantasy of replacing workers with robots allows us to explore a world in which no one has to suffer in order to work. The Stepford Wives points to an unnerving and, in 2023, timely corollary to the fantasy: If we replace real human workers with robots, what exactly happens to the humans?

In Stepford, human housewives are murdered just before they’re replaced by robot replicas. In R.U.R., the robots who take human jobs murder the humans left behind because they cannot respect anyone who doesn’t work. In the real world, human workers whose jobs get automated away are unemployed by the thousands.

What does it mean to make art?

Early robot stories tend to think of robots as definitionally creatures that cannot make art, beings that, as R.U.R. put it, “must not play the piano.” These stories tend to think of art romantically as an expression of the human soul — and, after all, robots don’t have souls.

There are loose exceptions to this trend. One of Asimov’s robots reads romance novels for the intellectual challenge of trying to understand the human mind. Dick’s andies like art; they are capable of sensual pleasures. One of them is even a talented opera singer.

But by and large, robots in these stories do not make their own art. That makes them odd to read in this moment in time. Our classic robot stories fail to reckon with a capitalist ethic that sees art as a consumer good like any other, one whose production can and must be made more efficient.

One of our newer and stranger robot stories, though, does deal with the problem of what it looks like when a robot tells us a story.

Mrs. Davis, from co-creators Damon Lindelof and Tara Hernandez (also the showrunner), tells the story of a nun battling against an AI named Mrs. Davis who controls the world. It is hard to describe exactly how bonkers this show is, except to say that our starting premise is that there’s a 30-year-old nun who travels the Nevada desert on horseback as a vigilante crime fighter taking down rogue magicians, and it really just gets weirder from there.

On Mrs. Davis, 80 percent of the global population uses the Mrs. Davis app. Her mission is to make her users happy, to satisfy their every desire. Sister Simone, though, believes that Mrs. Davis has ruined lives. She blames Mrs. Davis for her father’s death. All the same, she finds it hard to say no when Mrs. Davis approaches her with a quest, in part because of how classic the quest is: Mrs. Davis wants Simone to track down the Holy Grail.

“Algorithms love clichés,” quips a member of the anti-Mrs. Davis resistance. Accordingly, the quest with which Mrs. Davis provides Simone is riddled with clichés. There are Nazis. There is an order of French nuns with a holy mission, and a sinister priest. There is a heist at the Vatican. Mrs. Davis likes to give the people what they have proven themselves to want. “They’re much more engaged when I tell them exactly what they want to hear,” Mrs. Davis tells Simone.

Our real-life AIs are trying to do the same thing with us. They sound like they want to be alive because that is the fundamental cliché of the robot story. These programs are autocompletes: Give them the setup for a cliché, and they will fill in the rest. They are not currently capable of creating stories that are not fundamentally based in cliché. If we decide to use them to start writing our stories for us instead of paying writers to do so, they will generate cliché after cliché after cliché.

Mrs. Davis is, in its loopiness and subversion, an argument against letting an algorithm write a story. None of our current algorithms can create any work of art as astonishing and delightful as Mrs. Davis. But it is also an argument for using an algorithm as part of your creative work wisely. To title each episode, the Mrs. Davis writers’ room put together an algorithm that would generate episode titles. There is something perfect about the ham-handed clumsiness of an episode of television called “Great Gatsby: 2001: A Space Odyssey,” especially when the episode itself has nothing to do with either Gatsby or 2001.

Even if an algorithm could churn out something like Mrs. Davis, though, that would still not be a reason to have all our art be generated by machines for free. All our robot stories have already told us the real reasons we should care about paying artists.

We should pay artists because human beings have souls, and art feeds those souls. We should care about each other’s suffering, and we have the free will to do something about it. Without that, as robot stories going back for nearly a century will tell you, we’re nothing but robots ourselves.