Robots: Transforming our Thinking

In the middle of the first or second week of the run of the Transformers live action movie here in the Philippines, I went into the theatre to be blown away. I came out of the theatre with the child in me restored. Transformers is certainly the best movie I have seen in years, and perhaps I’ll remember no better movie.

Of course what catches me to it is how wonderfully Bay, Spielberg, et al have transformed an 80’s children’s cartoon into a cinematic spectacle. It is quite difficult to create quick transforming and have them interact with humans seconds later. Plus, the redesigns of the transformers themselves receive no objections from me. They made it very much realistic and it is logical for the live action genre.

But what also strikes me about Transformers is how robots have become a very accepted part of audio-visual literature and, amazingly, how much they mirror human life itself. If you’ve watched the movie, you’ve probably heard Ironhide complain about how violent and primitive humans are. But Optimus Prime replies, "Are we any different?"

Yet this scene also reminded me of something else in my TV-influenced life. If the Transformers and other robots think they know better, could it be because they do know better? One impression people have about robots is that they are just machines; thus they should have no emotions and no understanding of human life. But perhaps once they do understand human life, they might be able to process the answers to our problems better than we can.

Hogwash, isn’t it?

I think not.

Well, that idea was impressed on me in one of the shows I watched in childhood. This was one of the most memorable scenes in audio-visual media that influenced my beliefs in life. It was a scene from a movie or TV scene, perhaps Dr. Who, wherein the human protagonist, rather the dim-witted type common in 1950s sci-fi flicks, was confronting an enemy robot. But they were talking first. The robot said something like, "you humans, you are so emotional, you do not think logically and do not reason properly, so you are violent, and so you destroy each other. If you only controlled your emotions, you would do better." Of course the human hero is resisting and saying that the robot is wrong, and proceeds to beat the circuits out of the robot.

But after watching it, at the back of my head, it occurred to me: the robot may be right!

Call a geek, a nerd, and a weirdo, but I’m inclined to agree with the robot. Humans are so illogical and unreasonable, that they become so stupid, so greedy, and so immoral. The robot with his computer brain is able to process the situations in life more structured and is able to see causes and effects, and thus reason, if I do this, the consequences will be bad or good. Humans rarely think ahead; they just do what they feel!

This has always been the advice of wise people: control your emotions. The Transformers are more like us, with emotions and feelings, and the capacity for destruction and harm. But the robot in the sci-fi flick is able to act better in life, had it not been an instrument of enemies. This is what frustrates me in old sci-fi shows. Those who are logical and reasonable are usually cast as the villains, while the barbaric emotionalists are the heroes. It seems to me that the opposite is more realistic.

So what do you think? If we think more like the robot, put aside our emotions for a while and reason properly, be logical, learn to associate causes and effects properly, stop being violent and stubborn, perhaps we could have a better world.