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I enjoyed "Wall-E", because the
graphics were nice, and the action was wittily contrived. Wall-E meets
and falls in love with a more uptodate computer that looks like an inflated
iPod. The two coo for each other.
But why do people so readily want to
believe that robots might some day be capable of having feelings?
This is an immutable and
irrevocable fact about robots: robots are programs-- there is not a
single thing they will ever do that is not the result of a programming
instruction placed there by a human technician. The "feelings"
expressed by a robot will always and ever be as real to anyone as the cuckoo
in a cuckoo clock, or those dolls that used to have a string in the back,
and will probably be twice as annoying after the very, very brief phase of
novelty wears off.
Well, there are movies about
talking dogs and flying men and 12-year-olds who know Unix (Jurassic Park), so what's the
problem? The problem is, I get why we might have a compelling movie
about a talking dog, or a smart 12-year-old, or a man with superpowers:
all of them correspond to real beings who have real feelings, and there are
explanations for the dog, the 12-year-old, and superman. There is no
explanation than can possibly explain why a robot would have human feelings,
just as there is no possible explanation of why a bullet might fly at 10
miles per hour, or there would be a parking spot available right in front of
that downtown office building our hero needs to enter immediately.
The problem is, I just don't find
a story line about a robot with feelings compelling. It's just not
interesting. It's impossible to care about the robot with feelings
because I can't escape the awareness of the fact that every action the robot
takes in response to his "feelings" is, in fact, the result of a program
created by his manufacturer.
Ironically, the most interesting
idea about a robot with "feelings" is this: what if the humans in the
story didn't know it was a robot?
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