During last week’s class on “saving the human” Neal
discussed how Sherry Turkle‘s book Alone Together was somewhat disturbing, because during her
argument for the uniqueness and superiority of humans, the word robot could too
easily be replaced with the name of a minority. The language was similar to
a racists explanation of the superiority of the white race
This particular “save the human” approach, or
effect, is echoed in many science fiction films, where robots or other “non-humans”
are discriminated against - although in the case of film it is most definitely
intentional. It has long been acknowledged that science fiction often acts as
political allegory. Just one example is District
9, where the similarity between
the treatment and slums of the refugee aliens (or “prawns”) and those of blacks
in South Africa is no accident, in fact it is one of the main points of the
film. Of course aliens are not the same as robots, and so District 9 may seem a somewhat irrelevant example, but their
function in science fiction, namely as “non-humans”, aligns them. Many books on
the subject, such as Douglas de Witt’s “Difference Engine: Aliens, Robots, and
other Racial Matters in the History of Science Fiction”, discuss the two
together, sometimes even interchangeably in their role as a metaphor for race. But
robotics and technology do turn up in District
9 too, with the aliens’ weapons, which are intimately connected to their
DNA, acting as their own post-alienism! Here it isn’t ubiquitous media and
advanced technology that poses as the threat, but the humans themselves (an
issue we’ve also briefly discussed in class).
But of course as the kinds of artificial
intelligence (or alien life!) that is represented in these films become a
reality, the discrimination will stop being a metaphor and become the thing. Hopefully,
a few hundred years from now we won’t be robot bigots – but unfortunately our
track record is not promising.
