I AM NOT A ROBOT – But I Played One on Stage by Betsy Dorminey
In anticipation of our inevitable subjugation by a superior species I wish it to be known that I embrace the arrival of our robot overlords. I am pro-Bot, pro-Borg. Klaatu barada nikto, ya’all! It only needs saying once because I know they will remember forever. I’m your friend! And it’s only a matter of time before the takeover is complete. In fact, it may be all over now and we just don’t know it.
Because I know where they’re coming from, after a fashion. A couple of years ago I played a murderous robot in an adaptation of Karel Capek’s “Rossum’s Universal Robots” (R.U.R.) by Lee Eric Shackleford. Capek, a Czech writer, isn’t exactly a household name but he deserves to be, because he is to robots what Mary Shelley was to Frankenstein.
In 1920, when he wrote the play, Capek set the canon: like Ms. Shelley he draped our deepest fears in synthetic flesh. Made in our image? Check! Stronger and smarter than us? Check! Mistreated by us? Check! Vengeful, like us? Check and double-check! And ultimately the chickens come home to roost and there’s slaughter.
As Callida, the beret-wearing commander of the insurgent robot army, I turned my gun on Henry Domin (commendably played by Atlanta actor Fred Galyan): “We have labored in your laboratories for years. It is doubtful we have need of human scientists. And even if we did, you are not a scientist. You are only a salesman. A salesman who has no more customers to buy his product. You are no longer of value.” POW!
And so it ends for the human race – almost. I won’t spoil the show, but there’s at least a glimmer of salvation. And I let my robot pals saw my skull open to study my brain (offstage, thankfully).
Artificial Intelligence is waging a stealth war against the human race. If you don’t believe me just wait until the next time you drop your phone in the drink, or the computer crashes. We can be immobilized in a single tick of the atomic clock. Hackers provide regular reminders of our vulnerability but the robots will be much more efficient, and harder to stop.
Greg Nichols, writing in ZDNet quotes Pieter Abeel, a professor of robotics at UC-Berkeley and host of The Robot Brains podcast, saying that 2022 may be the inflection point where AI, machine learning, and machine vision finally come together:
“Popular coverage of robotics trends towards home-butler style robots and self-driving cars because they’re very relatable to our everyday lives. Meanwhile AI Robotics is taking off in areas of our world that are less visible but critical to our livelihoods – think e-commerce fulfillment centers and warehouses, farms, hospitals, recycling centers. All areas with a big impact on our lives, but not activities that the average person is seeing or directly interacting with on a daily basis.”
I don’t know about you but I’m getting ready. I say “thank you” to the navigation software in the car, to elevators, to Siri and Alexa and all the rest of them. Never cuss them out. I’ll dance with the guys at Boston Dynamics (especially the dog-one). I love you, robots!
They’ll remember.
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Betsy Dorminey is an attorney in Georgia, an entrepreneur in Vermont, and a blogger for The Freedomist. Her columns have appeared in the American Spectator, Western Journal, Townhall, Vermont Digger, and The Hill.
