Blog 3 - I, Robot

I am doing my blog on the movie I, Robot. I, Robot takes place in the year 2035 in Chicago. There is a tall building that belongs to the U.S. Robotics and this is where all of the robots are made. The robots are called Nexus 5’s and they are made to protect the people when they are in trouble. They have to abide by a three simple rules. The first rule is “a robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm”, the second rule is “a robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the first law”, and the third and final rule is “a robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the first or second law”. But there is always one flaw. One of these robots does not listen to the rules and starts to do evil things, like killing other people and putting people in harm. Will Smith who is a detective in the city tries to take down the robots and basically save the world. He never liked the idea of having a robot do everything for you, he was more of the “old fashioned” person and wanted to do everything on his own. He has always had a bad feeling about robots and tried to warn everyone around him but no one wanted to listen to him because they wanted a robot of their own since it was the hottest and new thing. But on the other hand the character the Will Smith played was part robot himself because he had gotten into a bad car accident and he had lost his arm and the Doctor that created the robots, Dr. Alfred Lanning, helped Wills character, detective Spooner, get his arm back by giving him a robotic arm but made it seem like it was real by putting skin over it.

To try and define humanity in the movie we can look at what Dr. Susan Calvin, whose job at U.S. Robotics was to make the robots seem more human like. She is not successful at that because they still look like robots and do not have real emotions that humans do and do not have names. To be a human you need a soul, a name, you need to show that you have some kind of emotion, you have to have thoughts, and they need to be individuals. There was one robot in particular who was more human like then the rest and his name was Sonny. He was a more advanced robot then the rest and could ask questions like “What am I?” This shows that he had a few thoughts going on his mind about what he really was and what was going to happen to him because he knew that he was different from others. He also had a different body then the rest in the way that he was set up because he had different parts. He was an individual and this is what is means to be human.

When you watch certain movies like this or read book about robots one question should pop in your mind. Are robots good or bad for society? In my opinion I think that they are good for society to a certain extent because for one we need to learn how to do things on our own and not always rely on technology to do things for us. In our world today children are growing up on using technology for everything and it’s sad to say but they are not learning a lot of information. Some kids are just dumb in school but once you put them in front of a computer or television they know exactly what to do with it. It is scary to think that we are coming to a point in time where we need technology to do just about everything. In the movie they felt like they needed to have a robot to fit in with everyone around them and to get extra help around the house with certain chores that they did not want to do. In just about every movie that has robots there will be a point in time when the robots will try and take over the world because they have started to realize that the humans are no longer capable of doing things on their own because they are lazy. The robots got smarter and the humans got dumber.

A few cons about the robots in the movie is that they take over important jobs like mailperson, trash man, police officer, and they are starting to do a lot of everyday chores for the humans. With the robots taking away jobs from the people, they no longer have a job so they are not getting any income in. With no income they cannot pay their bills or go food shopping and this could leave them homeless and living in the streets. This is not a healthy or preferred lifestyle of living.

To make a comparison to another book that we have read over the semester I want to bring up the book Feed. In the movie I, Robot they talk about having a feed that they call VIKI which stand for virtual interactive kinetic intelligence. When they are talking about using robots for everything they always bring up a sort of feed. The feed in the movie is different than the feed in the book whereas in the movie the feed sees just about everything that is going on and can come out and talk to you.