Robot/Alien Bigotry

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.