Slouching Toward You Soon: Robots

As a movie, “Bicentennial Man” isn’t much. But as an idea, this Robin Williams vehicle about a robot who wants his humanity is big, and destined to get bigger.

The critics have already had their rant about “Bicentennial Man.” A roundup by Variety counted 20 negative reviews, 13 “mixed” reviews and just three positive reviews. Moviegoers seem to agree; the film placed seventh in the weekly box office rankings.

Which in a way is too bad, because someday soon, Americans are going to need all the help they can get in thinking through the mechanics, not to mention the ethics and the politics, of life with nonhuman humans. Whereupon “Bicentennial Man” might enjoy a revival: After all, the original story comes from Isaac Asimov, one of the giants of sci-fi. Set “in the near future,” the film shows Williams as an overachieving android; as such, he develops creativity, shows emotion and even falls in love.

And it won’t be much longer before science catches up with science fiction. In 1996, Honda built a 6-foot humanoid robot, “P2.” It weighed 460 pounds but could walk up and down stairs.

Since then, robotic technology continues its march. This Christmas, for $2,500, Sony was selling Aibo, the “dogbot” that can perform a few simple tricks. In a decade or two, human-like robots will surely be ready for buying and selling.

At which time, Asimov’s “three laws of robotics,” first propounded in the story “Runaround” in the March 1942 issue of Astounding Science Fiction and repeated in the film, will be worth remembering: “1.) A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2.) A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 3.) A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.”

Will these laws be obeyed? They weren’t in such machine-mutiny movies as “2001,” “Westworld” and “Terminator,” but “Bicentennial Man” makes a more optimistic forecast. Yet it still asks provocative questions: Will robots have rights? If they ask for their freedom, will we have to give it to them? And will that freedom extend to marrying humans?

But maybe “Bicentennial Man” hasn’t done well precisely because it imagines peaceful and productive solutions to these questions. After all, the popular imagination, at least as processed through the popular culture, seems fearful of the future and its creations--and not just the robots, cyborgs and clones of TV and movies but also the genetically modified crops and animals that increasingly dominate our everyday diet.

Fear of “Frankenfood” was a big part of the Seattle anti-World Trade Organization protests; evidently, rising scientific sophistication does not always bring greater acceptance of scientific production. Indeed, for an increasingly Greened population, DNA-dickering techniques are a psychic bridge too far.

If so, then a book with a long past will have an even longer future. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s “Frankenstein,” published in 1818, stands as the first real science fiction novel. Influenced by the Prometheus legend and every other creation/zombie myth in mankind’s stockpile of Jungian archetypes, Shelley’s work launched not only a thousand monster movies but also began a more serious conversation, across the centuries, about what it means to be human in a time of technological transition.

In the novel, Dr. Frankenstein called his creation “Adam,” mindful of the evocative power of that particular name. And yet this man-made Adam, denied a biblical explanation of his origins, is left to wonder: “Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? What was my destination?”

Not far beyond the bend of the millennium, some new entity will stretch its legs and, more to the point, its brain. It may think of Asimov’s rule-driven robots as an ancestor, or perhaps it will see Dolly the cloned sheep, or possibly Lee Majors, the “Six-Million Dollar Man,” on a lower branch in its family tree. But be it rough or cuddly or both, this new thing is slouching in our direction. And strange as it may seem, a second-rate Hollywood flick has provided a useful road map for its coming.