Why is nobody really fearful of robots anymore? It seems like only yesteryear that we’d go to the cinema to watch seemingly to us, horror films, about robots like the Terminator. On the written writ, Isaac Asimov was spending a very sizable amount of time wondering about the line between man and machine, both where and whether it could be drawn. The whole percepted concept of the uncanny supposedly pinning much of hominid phobia, was described—at the term’s tracing in 1906 by psychologist Ernst Jentsch—as “doubts whether an apparently animate being is really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object might be, in fact, animate.”
But that already irrational fear of robots has suddenly dispersed from our mind’s gaze. Robots in movies are now too concentrated on looking for love or overcoming their downfalls in a much exaggerated robotic world. Great bearded intellectuals are no longer tracing up and down on an animatronic display for days looking for some reason for being. Even the average layman isn’t contemplating robots taking up his current job, or surely not anytime soon, for he’s presently more worried about outsourcing to countries like Bangladesh and Beirut
We’re reading and listening with a new verbosity towards reports of the EATR (Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot), which can live unaided on a battlefield by the seeking and eating of organic material, particularly when Robert Finkelstein, the president of Robotic Technology, assures the public the EATR is mostly vegetarian. We have robot vacuum cleaners lounging around our homes whilst never thinking of them as eavesdroppers or fidelities. Most intriguing, we wonder and drool at the inventions of robotics mastermind David Hanson, with his cyborgs that excrete confusion of whether what we are seeing belongs to us or to them, is a “you” or an “it”?
Hanson has repeatedly croaked that the shocking verisimilitude of his creations is in the service of allowing us to relate to them. The balm applied to this irrational position is to make really emotive robots. If his robots share a defining feature, it may be likability. Hanson’s robots add weight to the argument that to let robots become part of society is to make them real looking, non-animatronic, non-freaky.
One wonders, though. If your goal is not freaking people out, why would one refer to the substance coating your robots as “flesh rubber” and then abbreviate it to the even more sinister Frubber? If your goal is not freaking people out, why would one circulate footage of your humanoid creations in labs programmed with quasi-medicated serenity, such creepily upbeat robo-sentiments as “I’m having a very pleasant day” or “While I’m primitive now, I am evolving.” If Freudian concepts are the discourse of choice, one wonders if the uncanny might be less of a choice for the conscious level of interpretational advances. For a Hanson, who is answerably on a mission to keep people calm around robots sure seems as though he's unconsciously trying to creep people out.
But it is not working; we still are reverent towards the robots. The ever so delusional Churchmen aren’t defacing and denouncing Hanson as a heretic and a god-playing villain destined for an eternity in hellfire. Villagers aren’t picketing his house. H’m, but why not? What became of that robotic phobia? You could argue that the tremendous technological leaps forward of the last few decades, coupled with the gargantuan advancements in convenience coming from the constant increasing fluxes in technology, took away our technologically inspired fear and left us with a taste for more. Speaking of more, I doubt even Moore
