Android Anxiety: Understanding Robot-Human Conflict In Contemporary Science Fiction

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ANDROID ANXIETY: UNDERSTANDING ROBOT-HUMAN CONFLICT IN

CONTEMPORARY SCIENCE FICTION

Kate CampbellCINE 392: Cinema and Psychoanalysis

2 May 2014



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I. Introduction

Cultural critic Vivian Sobchack defines science fiction film as a genre that “emphasizes

actual, extrapolative, or speculative science and the empirical method, interacting in a social

context with the lesser emphasized, but still present, transcendentalism of magic and religion, in

an attempt to reconcile man with the unknown.”1 Arguably, no unknown has captivated

humanity more than the workings of the mind — especially the nature of consciousness. Artificial

intelligence and the self-operating machine have maintained a dominant place in human mythos

since antiquity, reflected in the Greek tales of Pygmalion and Galatea and the Chinese Liezi.

Western intellectual history, following in the Cartesian tradition, has found its epistemological

roots in the mind-body problem. And in the twentieth century, the human simulacrum has

become codified in fiction as the robot, android, and cyborg.2 As modern science increasingly

converges upon actualizing this long-standing legend of artificial creation, literature and film

continues to reflect humanity’s preoccupation with this question of a man-made being possessing

all the capabilities of its maker.

Beginning in the 1970s and continuing into the early 2000s, science fiction film

demonstrated a heightened captivation with self-operating machines — no doubt a response to the

unparalleled technologies developed during the “golden years” of artificial intelligence, as well

as advancements such as neural prosthetics and the cloning of Dolly the sheep in 1996. Indeed,

several seminal works of this time focus on the robot as a sentient being, one that often lives

among the humans who created it. By this point, robot fiction had established a consistent set of

narrative conventions that defined the genre:

1. Vivian Sobchack, Screening Space, 2nd ed. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997), Ch. 1.

2. Pamela McCorduck, Machines Who Think , 2nd ed. (Natick: CRC Press, 1979), 5-7.



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The story is told again and again, almost unchanged. Robots are better than human or

worse than human. They are unfeeling but kind, or unfeeling but loyal, or unfeeling but

able to follow orders. They are supremely ethical or unable to judge right from wrong. Orthey are emotionally sensitive, shy, super-intelligent beings, whose physical difference is

represented as a debilitating deformity.3

Playing upon these generic conventions, science fiction films of the late twentieth and early

twenty-first century introduced the android, a being characterized by its remarkable likeness to

real humans, extraordinary physical capabilities, and, most importantly, murderous intent and

ethical apathy.

In forming my argument, I shall explore this theme of anxiety in two films: Blade Runner

(1982), dir. Ridley Scott, and AI: Artificial Intelligence (2001), dir. Steven Spielberg. Ostensibly,

Blade Runner embodies the antagonistic attitude towards artificial intelligence described above,

while AI provides an optimistic portrait of machines living among humans. Blade Runner , based

on Phillip K. Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, tells the story of Rick

Deckard (Harrison Ford), a retired special operative known as a “Blade Runner,” whose former

job was to hunt down replicants — genetically engineered robots created to be virtually

indistinguishable from humans — who return to Earth from off-world colonies in order to expand

their limited lifespans. Deckard, detained by his former supervisor, reluctantly agrees to leave

retirement to track down and kill a group of recently escaped Nexus-6 models hiding in Los

Angeles. AI focuses on David (Haley Joel Osment), a hyper-realistic “Mecha” child created with

the capacity to love the people who own him. David is purchased by Monica and Henry Swinton

(Frances O’Connor, Sam Robards), a couple whose terminally ill biological son has been

cryogenically frozen.

Despite its seemingly positive premise, AI ultimately encounters the inevitable opposition

between man and machine that comprises the central focus of Blade Runner . As David becomes

3. Victoria Nelson, The Secret Life of Puppets. (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2003), 261.



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increasingly aware of the limits of his artificiality, he sets out to become a “real boy” worthy of

Monica’s love. Despite the myriad robot films produced between 1970 and the early 2000s, I

have chosen to focus on these films for their depictions of antagonistic man-machine

relationships and, more importantly, their overarching reflections on the nature of the human

condition. Though both films explore robots as a threat to humanity, both Scott and Spielberg

find much to condemn in humanity itself.

II. Playing God, Cheating Death: The Search for Organic Immortality

Though depictions of self-operating machines have existed within myth and legend since

ancient times, the term “robot” formally entered the public lexicon in 1920 by way of KarelČapek’s play Rossum’s Universal Robots ( R.U.R.). Replacing the anachronistic “automaton,”

Čapek derived robot from the Czech word robota, meaning enforced labor, which itself stems

from rab, or slave.4 We see this labor-driven motivation for robots’ conception in both Blade

Runner and AI , in which robots outwardly exist as economic resources: in AI , natural disaster has

eliminated a large portion of the human population, and robots serve to repopulate the earth in a

way that consumes no resources “beyond those of their first manufacturer;” in Blade Runner , the

Tyrell Corporation develops replicants to perform otherwise hazardous off-world slave labor.5

But behind this economic need lies an even greater, though not always consciously

recognized wish: human immortality and the survival of the human species. The implied end

goal of robots is not just a sustainable labor force unrestrained by the physical limits of the

human body, but total man-machine integration that will allow humans to sustain themselves

indefinitely in much the same way as robots. Neither film explicitly states this underlying

objection; however, the very fact that the robots depicted are created to be virtually

4. Nelson, The Secret Life of Puppets, 260.

5. Steven Spielberg, AI: Artificial Intelligence. (DreamWorks Pictures, 2001).



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indistinguishable from man provides deeper insight into the purpose of their existence.6 Indeed, I

will establish that the motivation for robotics as a field derives from man’s fundamental desire to

achieve immortality and combat the struggle between competing life and death drives as

described in psychoanalytic literature by Sigmund Freud and other psychoanalytic theorists.

Man’s search for immortality proceeds from the tension between the competing drives of

“Eros” and “Thanatos,” described at length by Freud in his 1920 work Beyond the Pleasure

Principle. In previous writing, Freud identified the existence of the sexual drive, Eros, which he

hypothesized as the source of all human behavior. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud

introduces his twin theory of the death instinct (Todestrieb), later called Thanatos by Willhelm

Stekel.7 This death instinct describes the tendency toward self-destruction and the return to an

inorganic state, while the life instinct pushes man toward survival and the creation of larger units

of organic material; these drives, present in all organisms, compete against each other within the

individual until mortality finally prevails and the organism expires.8 Nevertheless, Freud

observed some exceptions to this universal trend toward death: bacterial organisms, or “germ-

cells,” work against the death of their living substance, and succeed in achieving immortality

through reproduction. Additionally, he saw an apparent instinct toward perfection in human

beings, one that inspired man to continually strive toward self-improvement.9

6. Though the robots of AI do possess an unlimited lifespan, I find it necessary to note that most replicants

of Blade Runner canon do not — the Nexus-6 models are specifically stated to possess a lifespan of only four years. Nevertheless, the film contains references to several life-expanding experiments using human genetic material,

implying that efforts to prolong the replicants’ existence are motivated by a greater goal of human immortality.

7. Paul Roazen, Freud and His Followers. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975), 218.

8. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle. (New York: Liveright, 1950), 36.

9. Ibid., 42.



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Herbert Marcuse further explores this instinct toward improvement in Eros and

Civilization, discussing the social and metaphysical implications of Freud’s theory. Freud

hypothesized that man constructs civilization upon the inhibition of his primary instincts, and

that this inhibition in turn leads to societal progress; as Eros strives to preserve being on a larger

scale to satisfy the life instincts in its struggle against Thanatos, it creates culture.10

However,

progress eventually leads to increased sublimation and controlled aggression as man strives to

repress these drives. The growth of civilization facilitated by man sublimating his primary

impulses into the enhancement of power and productivity is “counteracted by the persistent

(though repressed) impulse to come to rest in final gratif ication.” Ultimately, Eros weakens and

the destructive forces of Thanatos are released.11

Man, therefore, creates robots — specifically robots in his own image — in order to

displace this continued conflict between Eros and Thanatos onto an external object, a defense

mechanism meant to prevent this struggle from leading to self-destruction or outward acts of

harm against other humans. By alleviating, however imperfectly, the tension created by these

competing drives, humanoid robots prevent the limiting of human progress that would otherwise

occur if repression were permitted to increase any further. Not only do robots serve to displace

this conflict, but they also satisfy the fundamental conscious and unconscious will to assert

power over nature that Marcuse describes as the precedent to all modern technology.12

Man is

thus permitted to “play God,” satisfying the ego’s desire for dominance, while relieving the

tension between Eros and Thantos and seeking a repository for desires of immortality.

10. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents. (London: The Hogarth Press), 59.

11. Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), 107-109.

12. Ibid., 110.



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Spielberg alludes to this phenomenon in the opening sequence of AI , in which Professor

Hobby (William Hurt), director of robot manufacturing company Cybertronics of New Jersey,

introduces his plans to create a robot capable of love. A skeptical team member voices her

concerns: “If a robot could genuinely love a person, what responsibility does that person hold

toward that Mecha in return?” The director in turn replies, “But in the beginning, didn’t God

create Adam to love him?”13 The implications of this exchange become profound when

juxtaposed against Freud’s writings on the death drive and civilization:

Long ago [man] formed an ideal conception of omnipotence and omniscience, which he

embodied in his gods. To these gods, he attributed everything that seemed unattainable to

his wishes, or that was forbidden to him…Today he has come very close to theattainment of this ideal, he has almost become a god himself…Man, has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic god.

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In this, we see the underlying dynamic of domination and submission that motivates robots’

creation at play, continuing the “slave” aspect inherent in Čapek’s coining of the word “robot.”

Robots will help man achieve immortality, indeed, but just as God created Adam as obedient to

him, humans create robots to be obedient to them.

III. “If You Meet Your Double, You Must Kill Him”: The Robotic Uncanny15

Despite the necessary role of robots in displacing the fundamental tension between Eros

and Thanatos, robot fiction demonstrates time and time again that the relationship between man

and machine cannot remain true to the model of a loving God and his creation: this connection

invariably turns antagonistic, resulting in humans desiring (and acting upon) aggression or

impulses toward destruction against their robotic counterparts. In order to determine the roots of

13. Spielberg, AI .

14. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 28-29.

15. Johan Grimonprez, Double Take. (Brussels: Zap-o-Matik, 2009). This essay film deals specifically with

the uncanniness of the doppelgänger through the lens of the rise of domestic television and the Cold War’scommodification of fear, depicting the paranoia that ensues when Alfred Hitchcock meets his double.



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this aggression, we must once again turn to psychoanalysis, specifically writings on the uncanny.

Introduced by Ernst Jentsch in 1906, we might understand the uncanny as something unknown or

frightening that was once familiar; indeed, the German word for uncanny, Unheimlich, reveals

this. Its antonym Heimlich contains a dual meaning: it refers both to what is “secret” and to what

is “familiar.”16 Thus, Unheimlich implies that which was intended to remain secret has come into

the open, originating from something familiar and now obscured by its revelation. Jentsch

originally hypothesized that this feeling of strangeness or repulsion arose from the intellectual

ambiguity caused by not knowing whether something was animate or inanimate.17

Freud later

adapted this concept in his own essay “The Uncanny,” expanding Jentsch’s definition to say that

the uncanny encompasses anything we experience in adulthood that reminds us of earlier states

of psychic development, of aspects of our unconscious life, or of the primitive experience of the

human species (i.e. the castration complex and Oedipal narrative).18

Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori adapted this notion of the uncanny for modern

technology, and his 1970 essay “The Uncanny Valley” has become crucial to conceptualizing the

intersection of robots and aesthetics. According to Mori, as robots become increasingly

humanlike in appearance and movement, human empathy towards robots increases; however,

once robots too closely resemble humans, their verisimilitude causes this empathy to suddenly

transform into revulsion and fear. He specifically uses the example of a severed prosthetic hand

to illustrate this emotional reaction:

Some prosthetic hands attempt to simulate veins, muscles, tendons, finger nails, and

finger prints, and their color resembles human pigmentation…But this kind of prosthetic

16. Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny.” (London: Penguin Classics, 2003), 132.

17. Ernst Jentsch, “On the Psychology of the Uncanny,” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 2

(1996): 8.

18. Freud, “The Uncanny,” 154-155.



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hand is too real, and when we notice it is prosthetic, we have a sense of strangeness. So if

we shake the hand, we are surprised by the lack of soft tissue and cold temperature. In

this case, there is no longer a sense of familiarity. It is uncanny.19

Mori represents this phenomenon with a graph that plots hypothetical human emotional response

against various iterations of the anthropomorphic robot (Figure 1). Two extremes lie at either end

of the graph: the industrial robot, at its origin, and a healthy human being at its rightmost point.

Mori measures emotional response toward both moving and still objects, positing that motion

(generally considered a sign of life) amplifies this reaction. He describes the sudden drop

between the two highest points of empathy “the uncanny valley.”20

Figure 1. Masahiro Mori, “The Uncanny Valley,” 1970. Reproduced in Dartmouth

Undergraduate Journal of Science (2009), http://bit.ly/QJg5d6.

19. Masahiro Mori, “The Uncanny Valley,” IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine 19 (2012): 34.

20. Ibid., 36.



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It is critical to note that at the bottom of each uncanny valley is a figure associated with

death (a corpse and a zombie), which indeed reflects Freud’s original writings on the subject:

“To many people the acme of the uncanny is represented by anything to do with death,” he

writes, “…the primitive fear of the dead is still so potent in us and ready to manifest itself if

given any encouragement.”21 Though Mori himself claims not to know why these feelings of

strangeness arise, he hypothesizes that they may be crucial to humans’ self -preservation.22

This aggressive response to the robot as a simulacrum of a living human being plays out

quite gruesomely in AI . When David’s human brother Martin (Jake Thomas) returns home,

miraculously cured of his illness, tension begins to build between the siblings as both fight for

their parents’ attention and care. The beginnings of this uncanny reaction become apparent as

Martin convinces David to cut off a lock of Monica’s hair while she sleeps; their parents, startled

by David standing over their bed with a pair of scissors, start to fear that their artificial son has

begun to develop the ability to hate. Upon Martin’s return, the Swinton family can no longer

ignore the uncanny feelings evoked by David’s presence, projecting onto him their fear of his

understated, yet highly disturbing, otherness. Monica soon abandons David in the woods to live

as an unregistered Mecha — unable to destroy him for his human likeness, but unable to accept

his eerie, almost but not-quite-natural, differences.

Monica’s abandonment in turn facilitates perhaps the most extreme example of the

uncanny valley effect in both AI and Blade Runner . Eventually, the forsaken David is captured

and taken to a Flesh Fair, where humans stockpile old or obsolete Mecha for destruction. This

premise seems innocuous enough at first — after all, we destroy cars, computers, and other

outdated machinery in much the same way when they no longer serve our purposes — but closer

21. Freud, “The Uncanny,” 149.

22. Mori, “The Uncanny Valley,” 35.



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analysis reveals the truly sinister nature of this event. Flesh Fairs exist not just as factories for

destruction, but as public spectacles —what David Sterritt calls “iconoclastic orga-orgies”—

where crowds gather to watch robots melted by acid, fired out of canons, and torn limb from

limb in celebration of “paranoid hate’s ability to make the superannuated, annihilated icon into

the transmuted, invigorating icon through the very act of its obliteration” (Figure 2).23

Figure 2. Crowds gather at the circus-like Flesh Fair to watch the destruction of Mecha.

Within the context of the uncanny, it is clear that robots elicit an uncanny response from

humans due to their function as Doppelgängers, or doubles. Freud describes the double as a

figure originally created as insurance against the “extinction of the self ,” or “an energetic denial

of the power of death” resulting from the primary narcissistic phase experienced by all humans

in early life. Once man surmounts this narcissistic phase, however, the double instead becomes a

23. David Sterritt, “Spielberg, Iconophobia, and the Mimetic Uncanny,” New Review of Television and

Film Studies (2009), 5.



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harbinger of death and a primary source of the uncanny.24

We see a similar phenomenon

reflected in the creation of humanoid machines: the robot, once constructed in pursuit of

immortality, thus becomes an uncanny reminder of man’s inevitable path toward death. In its

mildest form, this feeling of uncanny manifests itself as mere repulsion (such as Martin’s

rivalrous attitude toward David); in its most extreme, however, the uncanny becomes a source of

violence and destruction, actualized in the response we see depicted in robot films. Victoria

Nelson describes the robotic simulacrum as an “evil twin,” or “the repository of all that humans

refuse to acknowledge in themselves.”25 In an enthusiastic denial of death’s inevitability, man

projects this unpleasant quality onto his artificial double, thus fostering aggression and distrust.

IV. More Than Flesh and Blood: Man’s Emotional Condition

The Flesh Fair of AI plays a critical role in helping us understand this fear of robots, not

just for its celebration of humanity’s eagerness to destroy and torture Mecha, but for its

consideration of what separates humans from machines. Spielberg emphasizes the similarity

between man and machine when a little girl sees David stuck in the holding pen and believes him

to be human. Others around her think so as well — indeed, an x-ray scan must be performed to

conclusively decide that he is artificial, not flesh and blood. When the crowd sees David brought

into the ring, his lifelike appearance and childish image stuns its members into silence. Though

the Flesh Fair’s ringleader (Brendan Gleeson) attempts to convince them of his purported

hostility —“We know why they made him…to steal your hearts, replace your children”— they

nevertheless become visibly disturbed when David cries out for help, arguing that Mecha don’t

24. Freud, “The Uncanny,” 142.




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plead for their lives (Fig. 3).26

Through the crowd’s disturbance, Spielberg questions the belief

that humans are differentiated from robots by their ability to show genuine emotion. Unable to

fathom that such an emotional display could be the result of artificial creation, the crowd

redirects its fury back toward the ringleader, rushing into the ring to attack him and let David go.

Figure 3. The Flesh Fair’s previously ferocious crowd shows visible distress upon hearing

David’s pleas for help, interpreting his self -protection programming as a mark of his humanity.

This scene demonstrates an especially salient aspect of Freud’s writing on the uncanny—

what he describes as a “fear of the evil eye.” Freud writes that anyone who possesses something

precious fears the envy of others; in turn, they project the envy they would have felt in another’s

place onto the other person.27

What is feared in others is thus a covert intention to harm, which

we see in AI ’s depiction of Flesh Fairs as a primary motivation for human hostility against

26. Spielberg, AI .

27. Freud, “The Uncanny,” 146-147.



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robots. Drawing upon this fear of harm, both AI and Blade Runner manipulate Freud’s argument

to reflect upon the emotional condition of humanity in the wake of robotic creation.

The anxieties depicted in AI and Blade Runner specifically center on the machines’

alleged lack of humanlike emotional capabilities. In Blade Runner , humans distinguish the

otherwise identical replicants (derogatorily known as “Skinjobs”) from themselves through the

use of a Voight-Kampff test, an advanced form of the polygraph machine that bases its human

diagnosis on the ability of the test subject to produce an empathetic response (Fig. 4). Scott

demonstrates the Voight-Kampff test at work in the film’s opening sequence, wherein a test

administrator questions a man on such things as where he lives, if he likes his apartment, and

other seemingly banal details of everyday life. Once the test reaches a question about his mother,

however, the test-taker immediately becomes violent, drawing his gun and shooting the

administrator. Through this scene, Scott establishes that replicants, lacking memories and

emotions, are (seemingly) unable to produce humanlike empathetic responses.



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Figure 4. The Voight-Kampff test measures empathy through physiological responses such as pupil dilation.

The Voight-Kampff test reappears when Deckard performs it on a Tyrell Corporation

employee named Rachael (Sean Young). While Deckard eventually concludes that Rachael is

indeed a replicants, it takes him well over one hundred questions to do so — even though a

normal test only takes twenty or thirty. It is then revealed that Rachael in fact does not know of

her status as a replicants because the Tyrell Corporation has invented a way to implant artificial

memories into new replicant models in order to suppress their violent responses; Rachael herself

has the implanted memories of Dr. Tyrell’s niece. Rachael later appears visibly distressed when

Deckard implies that she possesses false memories — she honestly cannot determine that she has

been artificially manufactured. Here, we see that Rachael exists as a prototype of a new effort to

bridge the gap between robot and human: by implanting replicants with false memories, Tyrell

Corporation grants them an emotional capacity disallowed by their previous design. What was



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once considered the ultimate dividing line between man and machine crumbles in this face of

this new potential for feeling.

From this we see that man fears the robot not just as a harbinger of organic death and a

reminder of the limits of mortality, but as a threat to his ability to assert his will over nature and

maintain the ego’s desire for subject/object domination and submission that forms the basis of

human behavior. What once decidedly separated man from machine — the ability to produce

emotions — breaks down in both films as the artificial beings show emotional displays just as, if

not more, potent than those of humans. In AI , Professor Hobby specifically grants David the

capacity to love; when juxtaposed against Spielberg’s depictions of human relationshipsthroughout the film, we understand that Hobby’s creation is meant to remedy the deficit of love

that exists among human beings —what Sterritt describes as “a technologized future that has

preserved its physical existence at the expense of its spiritual strength.”28 Representations of love

in AI epitomize this spiritual weakness: when Professor Hobby introduces his proposal for a

loving robot, members of the audience argue that such creations already exist — referring, of

course, to sex robots such as David’s eventual companion Gigolo Joe (Jude Law).

Spielberg even calls into question the strength of a mother's affection for her child —

recall that when the Swintons' biological son returns home, Monica finds herself unable to accept

both sons equally. She wholly redirects her maternal affections toward her organic child and

rejects his now superfluous surrogate. Following his expulsion from the Swintons' home, David

devotes his existence to searching for the Blue Fairy of The Adventures of Pinocchio, convinced

that she will transform him, like Pinocchio, into a real boy worthy of Monica's love. Blade

Runner also depicts the weakening of the man-machine divide. Tyrell states that replicants,

though not originally created with emotional abilities, could very well develop such capacities

28. Sterritt, “Spielberg, Iconophobia, and the Mimetic Uncanny,” 6.



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over time, thus necessitating their limited lifespan as a "failsafe device" against such mental

maturation.29

Even in instances where replicants have been created with emotions (such as

Rachael and her implanted memories), the process is strictly controlled so that replicants remain

placated and willing to submit to human authority. Later, however, Tyrell’s promise against

emotional development in Nexus-6 models proves incorrect, as the rogue replicants show

genuine caring for one another and, eventually, humans. Scott demonstrates this phenomenon

most prominently in the final fight between Nexus-6 leader Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) and

Deckard. Upon finding the lifeless body of fellow replicant Pris, Roy appears visibly

distressed — he cries over her corpse, smearing her blood onto his face and howling in mourning

(Fig. 5). In his last moments, Roy extends this compassion toward his human enemy, sparing

Deckard’s life before his own runs out. Before dying, he reflects upon the memories and

experiences that have shaped his brief existence in what philosopher Mark Rowlands calls

“perhaps the most moving death soliloquy in cinematic history,” displaying the humanlike

characteristics that have developed in spite of his artificial roots.30

29. Scott, Blade Runner .

30. Mark Rowlands, The Philosopher at the End of the Universe. (London: Ebury Publishing, 2005), 234.



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Figure 5. Roy mourns the death of fellow replicant Pris, showing that he has developed

emotional capacities faster than Tyrell anticipated.

Scott contrasts the overwhelming empathy displayed by Roy Batty against the sinister

neo-noir cityscape of future Los Angeles, where humans lead a cold and impersonal existence

(Fig. 6). Rick Deckard embodies perhaps the most extreme example of this man-machine

disparity, as Scott suggests that Deckard could be either human or replicant himself. The film

provides several clues that Deckard may not be what he appears: most notably, Deckard’s

apartment contains only outdated or discolored photographs (suggesting artificial memory

implantation), and when Rachael asks Deckard whether he has passed the Voight-Kampff test

himself, she receives no answer. By causing audiences to question the true origins of Deckard's

existence, Scott prompts viewers to reconsider what it means to be human. Both Blade Runner

and AI display that the anxieties of death that motivate human hostility towards robots centers

not just on loss of organic life, but fear that robots will ultimately overpower man’s emotional

abilities and supersede humanity both physically and emotionally.



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Figure 6. The Los Angeles cityscape remains dark throughout the film, lit only by neonadvertisements and spotlights. Through its neo-noir aesthetic, the city reflects the misanthropic

nature of its inhabitants.

V. Beyond Science Fiction: Redefining the Human

My discussion thus far has largely dealt with the realm of fiction alone, but I believe it is

just as, if not more, critical to consider the issues explored through AI , Blade Runner , and

numerous other robot films within the domain of real world possibility. Having illuminated the

primal anxieties surrounding organic and symbolic death that motivate man’s fear of and

aggression toward humanoid robots shown in the science fiction films of the late twentieth and

early twenty-first century, I wish to return once more to the question of what these films

represent: if science fiction can be understood as a litmus of public response towards scientific

advancement, how does the fear depicted in android films implicate the rapidly growing field of

real world robotics?



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First, we must acknowledge that this fear exists not only in fiction, but in reality as well:

several experiments have demonstrated that the uncanny valley hypothesis introduced by Mori in

the 1970s does indeed hold true when actual humans are faced with artificial simulacra. Ongoing

research at the University of California San Diego and California Institute for

Telecommunications and Information Technology shows that uncanny robots produce a reaction

of perceptual conflict between the brain’s visual and motor cortices — when expectations for the

robot’s appearance and motion seem incongruent, the human mind exhibits a negative response

to the machines.31

In an attempt to avoid the uncanny valley in robot design, some

neuroscientists have suggested that we avoid making machines so clearly in our own image at

all, but I argue that this proposition overlooks both the inevitability of continued simulacra

production and the already pervasive reliance on humanoid robots within fields such as

biomechanics, service, and entertainment.32

Instead, we must focus on finding ways to remedy

this uncanny response and overcome its fear-driven origins.

Though creative visionaries of the mid-twentieth century such as Arthur C. Clarke and

Stanley Kubrick predicted the appearance of machines with intellectual capabilities comparable

to, or even exceeding, those of humans by 2001, the science of robotics and artificial intelligence

clearly has not advanced rapidly enough to realize these prophecies. Nevertheless, scientists gain

deeper understanding of the workings of the human mind at an unprecedented rate, and it is

hardly unreasonable to think that a robot similar to the replicants of Blade Runner or the Mechas

of AI could exist within the next fifty years — in fact, scientist Ray Kurzweil argues that human-

31. Mark Brown, “Exploring the uncanny valley of how brains react to humanoids,” Wired UK , July 19,

2011, http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-07/19/uncanny-valley-tested.

32. Chris Gaylord, “Uncanny Valley: Will humans ever learn to live with artificial humans?” The Christian

Science Monitor , September 14, 2011, bit.ly/1pUY0sg.

http://bit.ly/1pUY0sg




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level machine intelligence will become a reality by 2029.33

Given these possibilities, science

fiction becomes an invaluable tool for measuring how fictional fears of robots might materialize

in the future and how we can best circumvent these fears when the fabrications of today become

a reality of tomorrow.

By now it should be well understood that robots have an undeniable effect on the human

psyche, forcing us to consider the physical and emotional limits of humanity and calling into

question the very definition of what it means to be human. Indeed, the trends that have continued

to emerge within science fiction since the 1970s provide evidence of these existential

considerations. In her 1997 addendum to Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film,

Sobchack considers our evolving conceptions of humanness as reflected within the science

fiction film, tracing its development as a referential genre in conjunction with the evolving

technological and cultural landscape of the 1980s and 1990s. Most prominently, our relationship

with technology has fundamentally changed: devices such as cell phones, televisions, and

computers — once elite objects limited to financially privileged members of society — have

become popular commodities that comprise an almost overwhelming aspect of our daily lives.

National identity concedes to a new consumer identity, one that increasingly defines man by his

relationship to electronics. And previously held ideas of hierarchical distinctions between

“surface/depth, here/there, center/margin, organic/inorganic, and self/other” begin to break

down.34

Sobchack argues that an especially salient ramification of our changing technological

atmosphere is a reframing of how we understand the human body:

33. Susan Schneider, Science Fiction and Philosophy. (West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 203.

34. Sobchack, Screening Space, Ch. 4. Because this book is a Kindle edition and lacks pagination, I have

provided chapter numbers in lieu of page numbers.



21

Throughout the last decade, even our bodies have become pervasively recognized as

cultural, commodified, and technologized objects. This is a phenomenon women and

advertising agencies have long been aware of, but it now more globally informs a societyobsessed with physical fitness. In the last decade we have come to idealize the human

organism as a "lean machine" — sometimes murderously "mean," sometimes aerobically

"perfect," and nearly (and yet never) impervious to that temporal bodily "terminator":death.35

Inundated by technology in every aspect of our existence, we have come to conceive of our

bodies not as natural or of the earth, but as artificially created — after all, if a mechanically

engineered limb can seamlessly integrate itself into the organic body’s electric feedback system,

how different can the two really be? In identifying the underlying physical similarities between

our machines and ourselves, we create a new conception of the human body that invariably

influences our relationship with our artificial simulacra.

The scope of this re-imagining of humanity exceeds just the physical realm.

Contemporary science fiction demonstrates a previously unprecedented trend of robot figures

seeking emotional fulfillment —recall David’s quest for his mother’s love or Rachael’s visible

distress at the notion that her memories and feelings might be fabricated — and a dedication to

depicting these machines as figures that embody Tyrell Corporation’s motto of “more human

than human.”36 Through these narratives, filmmakers challenge emotions as a uniquely human

quality, questioning the assertion that possession of emotional capacities provides the ultimate

delineation between man and machine.

As a result of this evolving definition of humanity, a new mode of representation has

materialized alongside the android: that of the cyborg, a figure that epitomizes the unification of

35. Ibid. Sobchack devotes a significant portion of this chapter to discussing the interactions between

science fiction and capitalism, primarily within the frame of Frederic Jameson’s writings on postmodernism;unfortunately, she fails to lend the same credence to gender. For further reading on female bodies, capitalism, and

technology, see Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto.”

36. Scott, Blade Runner .



22

man and machine in one being. Nelson describes this trend as the “subjectivization of the

simulacrum,” or the literal merging of the human and non-human within the autonomous

simulacrum itself. Quoting N. Katherine Hayles, Nelson identifies a novel conception of the

human body much like the one Sobchack details in her own writing, one that:

…privileges informational pattern over material instantiation, so that embodiment in a

biological substrate is seen as an accident of history rather than an inevitability oflife…considers consciousness…as an epiphenomenon…thinks of the body as the original prosthesis we all learn to manipulate…[and sees] no essential differences or absolute

demarcations between bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism

and biological organism.37

In recent years, the cyborg has become a viable social and political identity outside of science

fiction — organizations such as the Cyborg Foundation seek to promote the use of cybernetic

devices as a fully integrated part of the human body and establish legal rights for those who

identify as cyborgs.38

However, the cyborgs envisioned by science fiction display a level of man-

machine integration beyond just possessing one mechanical body part. While Sobchack’s model

of the reimagined human suggests a blurring of the boundaries between organic/inorganic and

man/machine, the cyborg obliterates these hierarchical distinctions completely, personifying

what Lydia H. Liu calls the “Freudian robot.” A Freudian robot, in Liu’s words, is any

networked being that embodies the infinite feedback loop of human-machine simulacra,

rendering any differentiation between the two impossible.39

Ultimately, cyborgization seeks to

eliminate any divide between the organic man and his inorganic simulacrum, abolishing

“human” and “robot” as distinct categorizations of existence.


38. Neil Harbisson, Cyborg Foundation. http://eyeborg.wix.com/cyborg.

39. Lydia H. Liu, The Freudian Robot . (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), Ch. 1.



23

Cybernetic scholars such as Liu often describe the dissolution of organic/inorganic and

natural/artificial boundaries as “complicating” the man-machine relationship. But rather than

problematizing the possibility of cyborgization and the increasing convergence of human and

robot, I believe this development provides opportunity for us to mollify our deep-seated aversion

to humanoid machines. In becoming one with his robotic simulacrum, man might succeed in

defeating the death drive’s organic and symbolic manifestations and placating what Sterritt calls

“profound insecurity bred by human failures and inadequacies.”40 Nelson identifies the cyborg as

representative of God, the externalized soul, and the Divine Human — a unification of the

qualities man sees in himself and desires in machines.

41

By surmounting the destructive forces of

Thanatos, man could enjoy unrestricted growth of culture (in service of his instinct towards

perfection) and gratify the ego’s ultimate desire for dominance.

Of course, this proposition requires us to consider whether such a positive man-machine

relationship is possible at all, given the limiting and potentially violent powers of our preexisting

fear. Let us return once again to the question posed by Professor Hobby’s audience in the

opening sequence of AI : can man come to love a robot? In her essay “Love, Guilt and

Reparation,” Melanie Klein identifies a constant interaction between love and hate, as feelings of

love and tendencies toward reparation develop apropos and in spite of the aggressive impulses.42

Just as the baby simultaneously loves his mother for satisfying his needs and hates her for failing

to fulfill them, humans idealize the robot as a tool for satiating the conflict between Eros and

Thanatos and reject it when its uncanny likeness reminds us of death. Science fiction film

40. Sterritt, “Spielberg, Iconophobia, and the Mimetic Uncanny,” 6.

41. Nelson, “The Secret Life of Puppets,” 269.

42. Melanie Klein, “Love, Guilt and Reparation,” Love, Guilt and Reparation and Other Works 1921-1945.

(New York: The Free Press, 1975), 306.



24

provides a mechanism of phantasy building by which we can imagine the satisfaction derived

from robots’ existence and act out our aggressive phantasies of destruction. Klein additionally

describes the process of reparation, specifically that man’s ability to satisfy this tendency

depends upon his capacity to identify with another.43

Through the creation of emotional robots in

film, we create the possibility of identification and encourage acceptance of our artificial

simulacra.

For now, the possibility of cyborgization remains limited to the fictional realm.

Nevertheless, science fiction provides a valuable tool for navigating the potential technological

configurations of the future and our physical and emotional relationship to these advancements. I

argue that cinematic depictions of our fear of artificial creation functions as a method of working

through the anxieties spawned by technological development and our subsequent questioning of

previously held notions of humanity and its hierarchical delineations. Cinema acts as a robot

itself, our own artificially created and controlled life form onto which we project our real world

hopes and fears and attempt to reconcile our conflicting emotions through the screen. By

understanding robot narratives as representative of human experience, it becomes clear that both

the positive and negative qualities we have conferred upon these fictional machines align with

those things that we desire and dread in ourselves. In their depiction of emoting machines,

Spielberg and Scott sought not just to explore the future possibilities of artificial intelligence, but

also to underline the current insecurities that man feels in response to his perceived inadequacies.

If we succeed in comprehending the basis of these fears, we might come to see fictional robots as

a mechanism for reconciling our underlying psychical conflicts.

43. Ibid., 325.



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Android Anxiety: Understanding Robot-Human Conflict In Contemporary Science Fiction

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