Welcome to the Machine ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE ON SCREEN
The earliest images of robots on the big and small screen were usually only vaguely humanoid; while they had something approximating a body, they were undeniably mechanical in nature. From The Jetsons’ Rosie the android maid (voiced by Jean Vander Pyl) to Lost in Space’s mononymous Robot (played by Bob May and voiced by Dick Tufeld), children’s TV versions of sci-fi robots were often benign, clunky creatures; the portrayals of their relationship with their human masters, however, suggested a desire on our part for our futuristic companions to have at least an approximation of intelligence and personality. The human need to communicate is perhaps the genesis of artificial intelligence (AI) as we see it most often depicted on screen now: the capacity to look, feel and speak like us makes robots easier to interact with, but also gives them the ability to manipulate our emotional responses.
As the gap closes between scientific reality and what is depicted in science fiction, our fascination with robots and AI has had something of a resurgence. Advances in special effects have certainly made the on-screen depiction of robots more visually impressive: the seamless human/cyborg appearance of Ava (Alicia Vikander) in Ex Machina (Alex Garland, 2014) and the 3D printing and inner workings of the robots in HBO’s Westworld television series, just to name a couple of examples, are stunningly realised. Tech and art design has always been a drawcard of sci-fi; however, it is the prevailing themes of our complex relationship with intelligent machines – their uses, dangers and coexistence with us – that really fuel our interest in AI on screen.
THE ULTIMATE MACHINE: ROBOT WORKERS
Robot workers depicted on screen (which, as opposed to the robotic devices operating in real-world industrial and scientific fields, often have a humanlike form) are purpose-built to assist, protect and do the jobs we don’t want to do, with a precision we are incapable of. Real-world fears of mass unemployment due to robotic automation has influenced the exploration of this theme. In the Swedish television series and its UK remake, , the widespread use of humanoid robots (in the latter, called ‘synths’) across the workforce causes social and, high schooler Mattie (Lucy Carless) tells her parents there is no point doing well at school as there will be no future jobs for humans anyway, while her father, Joe (Tom Goodman-Hill), is laid off in favour of a synth counterpart able to perform his job more efficiently and cheaply. Meanwhile, the situation of Hester (Sonya Cassidy), who works in a chemical plant, highlights a darker side of the synths’ humanlike appearance: how they are regularly abused by their human supervisors.
