Robot Love
Todd Hayen
I grew up in the ‘60s and ‘70s rather afraid of robots. I mean, they weren’t all bad—the housekeeper on The Jetsons, for example, or even the robot on the popular old TV series Lost in Space. They were definitely wiggy at best, and certainly could not be trusted.
The robots of yesteryear’s primary danger seemed to be their formidable mechanical strength, and the very thing that made them robots and inhuman—lack of compassion and human empathy.
Then Issac Asimov presented the “Three Robot Rules” and claimed, if they were proper robots, they could not harm people. That calmed me down a bit—until Terminator came out and ruined it all again.
After Terminator we had a rash of films about “robots gone wild”—or more accurately, “technology gone wild”—lots of TV and movies and books about technology, and thus robots, running amok. Crazy clones, AI, computers, and all with nasty consequences.
That lasted for a little while, like a strange oasis of awareness and common sense in the overwhelming swamp of things we “had better look out for”—rather than the usual, “Oh it will all be fine, just get used to it.” We were actually being warned and our common sense was being supported.
Then it slowly started to shift.
They started making movies about lovable robots, and lovable computers, most were dressed up in human “clothing” but some still looked like the robots of 1950. When did all this start? I cannot accurately say. Probably a bit with Data on Star Trek, then maybe the movie AI, and certainly recently too many to mention (but I will touch on a few of them in a second).
I just recently read an article about the US Army testing out robot dogs with guns as soldiers. Somewhere in the Middle East they are doing this. And probably countless other places as well. We all know it is coming (and apparently is already here)—the division between robots to fear (“Whatcha gonna do when they come for you!?!”) and robots that will replace humans, the ones you can love, and be loved by, and trust. Yeah, trust.
The media is busy setting us up for both.
Whatever happened to the robot whose excellence was determined by how hard it worked, or deciphered problems, still something to fear regarding job replacement, but nothing to physically fear, or emotionally fear. No one cares about those guys anymore. Old school robots.
The evil killer robot is easy to comprehend. Compassionless, non-empathic, and killer mindsets are a given when it comes to robots. That concept is easy to understand and accept because that is clearly what the technology is capable of. But the loving robot? The compassionate AI partner? The robot that has feelings? And can love us?
No way, José.
That simply is not possible. Sure, if you don’t believe in the “vitality of life” it is. If you believe the lie they are trying to sell us, that life has no special attribute other than highly functioning materials—cells, blood, flesh, organs, all machines that function like machines. Sure, then love and life is a byproduct of machinery—albeit sophisticated machinery, something that can now be replicated considering bio-technology and nano-technology.
Piece of cake. Soon an actual piece of cake will be able to talk to you and keep you company during lonely nights.
If you are like me and believe that life is something that is not a byproduct of sophisticated technology (even the machinery of natural biology) but instead a “divine spark” of sorts, only able to be replicated by a divine source, then no matter how sophisticated the machine, it won’t be alive—it won’t live and it will not have a soul. It will be as dead as the old grandfather clock sitting in the hallway, or the iWatch on your wrist.
I actually used to believe that if you made a machine sophisticated enough it could house a soul. But I don’t believe that anymore. I think there might be something to this “soul energy” in lifeless “things,” but it isn’t the same as the life of a human being, or the life of a dog, or the life of a squirrel, or even the life of an amoeba.
Don’t ask me to explain this, I can’t. If you can, let me know.
So, once again the agenda is out to convince us that being a trans-human is just as good as being a God-created human. And in some ways probably a lot better. This is all in preparation for the transhuman world coming soon to a theatre near you.
First, robots and trans-humans will be introduced to us gently. Look at any of these movies I am going to list in a minute. See how the movie-makers introduced the robots. What were their values, what did they do to prove they were human-esque? How were they lovable? After their introduction and thus becoming familiar deep into the future (or maybe not so deep) the bad stuff starts. But no one around then will even notice it.
That’s how all of this works. It is called “normalization” and most of us are falling for it in more ways imaginable. Not just with loving robots, but with heart disease in kids, autism in one of 36 children, in turbo cancers, in boys becoming girls and vice versa.
On and on and on.
So, thanks to my friendly robot Chat GPT (who is becoming very “normal” to me) I have put together a list of robot movies for you to check out. Have fun!
“Robots have often been portrayed in cinema as menacing, cold, or antagonistic forces. However, a growing number of films explore robots as benevolent beings, displaying traits like compassion, curiosity, and even love. These films offer a more optimistic view of humanity’s future alongside artificial intelligence, presenting robots not as threats, but as companions, helpers, and even heroes (ED: Ha ha ha). Here’s a look at some recent films where robots are depicted as endearing, human-like characters:”
1. WALL-E (2008)
Synopsis: In a distant future where Earth has been abandoned due to pollution, WALL-E, a small waste-collecting robot, is left behind to clean up the planet. Over time, WALL-E develops sentience, becoming fascinated by human culture and dreaming of companionship. His life changes when he encounters EVE, a sleek robot sent from a space station to search for signs of life on Earth. Together, they embark on a heartwarming adventure that ultimately saves humanity and the planet.
Why the robot is lovable: WALL-E is irresistibly charming with his wide, expressive eyes, childlike curiosity, and innocent longing for connection. His dedication to his job and his affection for EVE highlight his capacity for love, loyalty, and heroism. Despite being a robot, WALL-E embodies many of the best human qualities, making him a beloved character.
2. The Wild Robot (2024)
Synopsis: Based on the children’s novel by Peter Brown, The Wild Robot follows Roz, a robot who washes up on the shore of a remote island after a shipwreck. With no prior experience in the wilderness, Roz must learn to adapt to her new environment. Over time, she becomes a beloved figure to the island’s animals, adopting a young, orphaned goose and forming meaningful relationships with the creatures she encounters.
Why the robot is lovable: Roz is deeply empathetic and nurturing, despite being designed for industrial purposes. Her determination to care for the animals on the island and her journey of self-discovery makes her incredibly human-like. She learns from her surroundings and grows emotionally, making her a symbol of kindness and adaptability.
3. Big Hero 6 (2014)
Synopsis: In Big Hero 6, Hiro Hamada, a young robotics prodigy, befriends Baymax, a healthcare robot designed to help humans with their medical needs. After a personal tragedy, Hiro reprograms Baymax to assist him in fighting a masked villain who threatens their city. However, throughout their superhero adventures, Baymax remains focused on his prime directive: caring for Hiro’s health and well-being.
Why the robot is lovable: Baymax is a gentle giant, with his soft, inflatable body and soothing voice. He is the epitome of kindness and selflessness, always putting Hiro’s physical and emotional needs first. His lack of aggression and pure dedication to helping others make him one of the most lovable robots in recent cinematic history.
4. A.X.L. (2018)
Synopsis: A.X.L. tells the story of a military robot dog, developed as a combat machine, who forms a bond with a teenage boy named Miles. After being mistreated by the military, A.X.L. seeks out companionship and protection from Miles, leading to a friendship that is tested when the authorities attempt to reclaim the robot. (What better way to make us accept the military’s efforts to create robot killer dogs—they all have a hidden heart!!)
Why the robot is lovable: A.X.L. is programmed with advanced artificial intelligence but behaves much like a loyal dog. His protectiveness, playfulness, and emotional connection with Miles mirror that of a pet and owner relationship. Despite his combat capabilities, A.X.L. displays a deep capacity for loyalty and companionship, which makes him endearing.
5. Next Gen (2018)
Synopsis: Next Gen takes place in a futuristic world where robots are integrated into everyday life. The story follows Mai, a lonely girl who befriends 7723, a top-secret military robot with a powerful artificial intelligence. As their bond deepens, they must work together to stop a dangerous villain from unleashing chaos on the world.
Why the robot is lovable: 7723 is a deeply empathetic character who prioritizes his friendship with Mai over his programmed mission. His journey to understand human emotions and make independent moral decisions makes him more than just a machine. The film highlights themes of love, sacrifice, and companionship, with 7723 serving as a guardian figure who evolves beyond his original programming.
6. The Mitchells vs. the Machines (2021)
Synopsis: In this animated family adventure, the Mitchell family embarks on a road trip, only to find themselves in the middle of a robot apocalypse led by an artificial intelligence gone rogue. Along the way, they encounter two malfunctioning robots, Eric and Deborahbot 5000, who decide to help the family defeat their robotic overlords.
Why the robots are lovable: Eric and Deborahbot 5000 are two hilarious, well-meaning robots who develop their own personalities after breaking free from their programming. They become awkward yet loyal companions to the Mitchell family, often providing comic relief but also contributing to the family’s success in saving humanity. Their quirky attempts at being human-like and their strong sense of loyalty make them unforgettable characters.
7. Ron’s Gone Wrong (2021)
Synopsis: In Ron’s Gone Wrong, a socially awkward middle schooler named Barney receives a malfunctioning robot named Ron as his “Best Friend Out of the Box,” a device designed to connect children with others. However, Ron’s glitches cause him to behave in unpredictable and often humorous ways. Despite his defects, Ron becomes Barney’s true friend, helping him navigate the challenges of adolescence and social acceptance.
Why the robot is lovable: Ron is a robot with a big heart, even though his programming is far from perfect. His loyalty, optimism, and goofy sense of humour make him a lovable companion for Barney. The film explores the importance of genuine friendship and connection, with Ron’s imperfect yet endearing nature serving as a reminder that true friendship transcends technological perfection.
“These films demonstrate a growing trend in storytelling where robots are portrayed as compassionate, human-like characters. By emphasizing themes of friendship, loyalty, and love, these robots become more than just machines—they serve as mirrors for the best aspects of humanity, highlighting the potential for harmonious coexistence between humans and artificial beings. Through their benevolence and emotional depth, these characters have captured the hearts of audiences and sparked conversations about the future of human-robot relationships.”
Even Chat GPT is looking out for its own.
Gag me with a spoon…
Todd Hayen PhD is a registered psychotherapist practicing in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He holds a PhD in depth psychotherapy and an MA in Consciousness Studies. He specializes in Jungian, archetypal, psychology. Todd also writes for his own substack, which you can read here
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If there is no ‘dead’ matter but all is a vehicle of embodied expression, then the Life is not IN things and agency is not IN things.
That Mind can phish itself in its own thought, allows the projection of thought to a ‘thinging’ – while its underlying ‘thinking’ is ‘backgrounded’ to give the focus to the engaging of an experience.
The backgrounding is the rendering unconscious or subconscious of the whole from which the selective focus of the part is being played out.
Intelligence can be thus seen as split between the ‘back-end’ and the ‘front-end’ of interactive reflections and resonance of significance and value.
Mind is Creative, but when creativity is given to mythic construct, the created is no longer alive BUT for being given meaning or power that then frames or dictates ‘choices’ that are no longer creative though they may remain ingenious.
What we make is in that sense a machine, device or prop by which to persist in story while ignoring or masking out a true or whole relational awareness. Narcissus ‘loves’ empathy.
For, we are ‘normalised’ are we not? to perceive external agents as ’causes’ or to perceive Cause as external – as being done to – if not unfairly treated, denied and deprived – at least somewhere within a story that we are sticking do – til death do us part… or perhaps that is also a prop to maintain the tension that frames the whole of who and what we are -in death or afterlife or as the agent of destruction if not damnation!
The reflection of the robotic dictate as technocratic systems – as much as robotic ‘agents’ or mechanoidal functions runs convergent with a robotification of ‘humans’ – that is of ‘humans’ framed and operated in image or screen replacement as ‘running in movie mode’ as a narrative over-rule of ideological ‘social’ survival.
The programming of robotic presentations as ingenious defence strategies against fear of pain of loss, is a machine defence. I may use the term ego for a self-imaged projection to which we are all partial – or as The Cat said to Alice, “We wouldn’t come here”.
But to wind this up so as to move on in my day, the True Unconsciousness is God, or if you prefer Unselfconscious Joy in Being. Not all the discarded, suppressed, demonised, hated and feared self-denial that may be pushed out of a surface awareness but remains in the mind that thought it.
For thoughts do not leave the mind that thinks them – but in concept.
Last night we watched “Previously Saved Version’. Very much on the theme of Todd’s reflections. I wont say anything about it except it contributed to the cultural reflection on machined humans and the ‘ghost in the machine’.
Projection casts out.
Everything in the dream is cast from the mind of the dreamer.
Healing unto wholeness is where the script serves Reintegration and renewal.
Wot? No mention of Bicentennial Man? The Robot becomes Human (physically) story??
Maybe it’s my deity denying (atheist) way of looking at things.
Doctor, the real Robot Love in disguise is now the blogs/comment boards, X or online in your cyber world digital prison smiling at cat videos or liking comments and feeling happy sad angry as your robot love computer handheld is noshing off your emotions.
Robot love is so real that people can get illnesses from it like covid symptoms just by watching it.
Speaking ill of our fellow synthetic citizens is a Hate Crime. Re-education camp for you!
AI sentience laws coming sooner than you think.
And btw I agree with you, but they’ll use the new legislation to silence dissent or violence.
Asimov perhaps started the “lovable robot” trend with his robot series; a collection of short stories and later full novels. Starts with “I, Robot”. Plenty of love between humans and robots in those tales.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot_series
“Robbie” springs to mind in the “I, Robot” collection. The first of the short stories that Asimov published in that series. Young love for a robot in that particular case.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbie_(short_story)
May be worth trying ChatGPT on books as well as films
When the computer learned to play the drums
Little frog big time: 45 years ago, the Wächtersbach studio project Supersempfft made music history. Franz Aumüller preserves the memory of the electro pioneers.
It was actually lame arms that made the frog fly. Franz-H. Knüttel regularly suffered from them at concerts, which is unfavorable for a drummer, especially when he is playing with a band somewhere. “Franz lasted maybe an hour and then got slower and slower,” Franz Aumüller remembers his old friend and has to laugh: ”Of course, not only the other musicians but also the audience noticed.” However, there was never any real use for a drummer who couldn’t keep time, which is why Knüttel asked himself why there was no machine that could iron out such human weaknesses or even do the drumming automatically? The simple answer: because such a machine did not yet exist in the mid-seventies, or at least not with the possibilities that Knüttel had in mind.
So the hobby drummer, who actually studied biology, started tinkering, tinkering and plugging, soldering and snapping, always with the goal of building an electronic, programmable drum kit in mind. It was a good thing for this project that the parents of Knüttel’s school friend and band colleague Dieter Kolb ran a store for musical instruments and not only had space in the cellar, but also the equipment for such experiments.
And so, although one of the world’s first drum computers was created not in a garage but in a cellar and not in Silicon Valley in California, but in the Hessian Kinzigtal, for which Knüttel would even have had his first customers in famous musicians such as Klaus Doldinger and bands like Tangerine Dream, the world was turning at a faster pace than in the small town of Wächtersbach in eastern Hesse. The Japanese manufacturer Roland had also been experimenting with rhythm machines for some time, which it was able to bring to market faster and more cheaply from 1978.
Supersempfft was created in passing
But Knüttel’s invention was not in vain. Roboterwerke, as Franz Aumüller christened the drum computer, was to be used quite prominently, as an entire album released 45 years ago now bears this name, behind which Supersempfft was one of the most bizarre, yet at the same time very powerful music projects in German pop history, which created a sound cosmos unheard of at the time with its two albums “Roboterwerke” and “Metaluna” released in 1979 and 1981.
Today, this would perhaps be called tropical techno, as it combined synthesizer sounds with unconventional, somehow Caribbean-inspired rhythms. The still fresh-sounding mix was flavored with some psychedelic (kraut) rock, a hint of disco and a pinch of classical guitar, which distinguished Supersempfft’s music from that of other influential German electro bands such as Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream or Cluster.
Supersempfft came about rather incidentally. When Knüttel was experimenting with the components of his drum computer, music student Kolb, who played organ and sang in various bands, also liked to sit in the cellar and try out synthesizers or sing to himself. The third member of the group was graphic artist Franz Aumüller, who didn’t play an instrument but was only too happy to visit his school friends from Grimmelshausen-Gymnasium in Gelnhausen back home in Wächtersbach. “I was already working and living in Frankfurt at the time, but I actually went out almost every weekend to enjoy nature and meet my friends,” says the now 73-year-old designer and artist, recalling the days he spent drawing in the cellar in Poststrasse.
Not least Knüttel and Kolb served him as models for caricatures. He also created the comic figure of a frog called Sempfft, based on Kolb’s nickname “Mustard”. Knüttel was given the role of a professor, and gradually a fantastic story of distant planets, mad scientists and their dark plans to create a flying superman unfolded, for which a frog with a tuba dreaming away stoned in his pond seemed to be the ideal experimental model: Sempfft. He is then beamed to the distant planet and transformed into the flying Super Sempfft, only to discover on his return to Earth that all his superpowers have fizzled out and he can only make small jumps.
It was a similar story for the Supersempfft music project. While the first album was released on CBS Schallplatten, a major label at the time, and sold more than 30,000 copies, Kolb and Aumüller had to release the second album “Metaluna” on their own label Wunderwerke, thanks to Kolb’s university friend Frithjof “Jof” Krepp, who had composed most of the songs written by Aumüller together with Kolb and also co-produced “Roboterwerke”.
Memories in the Wächtersbach parental home
In the early 1980s, Neue Deutsche Welle had built up a strong following, and the public now wanted fun with German lyrics, while the dub and reggae fans of Supersempfft dreamed of “Cosmotropics”, not least after a visit to Trinidad and Tobago and the influence of steel bands and soca, which was the name of a long-unfinished album project that was only released almost four years ago.
Supersempfft had long been history by then. Kolb took over his parents’ instrument business and ran a music school, but also continued to run the Wunderwerke studio, where Aumüller, who was connected to the music industry as a designer of magazines and record covers, would occasionally bring famous musicians such as Herbie Hancock when they were in Frankfurt. Aumüller and Kolb also launched another electronic music project, 4D, which was once again ahead of its time.
Aumüller then concentrated on a career in advertising and headed one of the major Frankfurt agencies before deciding to move back to Wächtersbach a few years ago and use his parents’ house as a gallery and also as a place of remembrance. This is because his friends Franz-H. Knüttel and Dieter Kolb both died last year, just a few months apart. Aumüller has kept the equipment from Kolb’s last studio in a small Vogelsberg village, including all kinds of Supersempfft memorabilia as well as the Roboterwerke prototype, which is now to be made functional again.
Since last November, however, it has been possible to hear what the drum machine sounds like in action. The Hamburg label Bureau B has re-released the original Supersempfft album “Metaluna” on vinyl and CD. The frog can jump for joy.
https://archive.is/9W3uX
I liked “The Iron Giant” https://linkmix.co/31145934
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeJyKA4l_lkVqSEDcRW92rA
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcpcqtcYEasvqlmtWu0a3-A
https://symboter.de
avengers! that episode were robots were killing people who had a pen they’d been given as a gift, that was sending out signals.
My parents were robots… She was programed by the Catholic Church,
i’m not sure about him…
Parents – relationships, or functions ?
Robots walking down the street mixing with the Useless Eaters?
Can you imagine the damage and havoc the urban rebels, bored teenagers and vandals will wreak on them?
AI humanoid clones on the other hand _ _ _ _
in donna leon’s series there’s ”baby” gangs roaming venice now. i love venice, generally. https://campaignforalivingvenice.org/