Why Hollywood's Best Robot Stories Are About Slavery

malachiorion writes: "On the occasion of Almost Human's cancellation (and the box office flopping of Transcendence), I tried to suss out what makes for a great, and timeless Hollywood robot story. The common thread seems to be slavery, or stories that use robots and AI as completely blatant allegories for the discrimination and dehumanization that's allowed slavery to happen, and might again. 'In the broadest sense, the value of these stories is the same as any discussion of slavery. They confront human ugliness, however obliquely. They're also a hell of a lot more interesting than movies and TV shows that present machine threats as empty vessels, or vague symbols of unchecked technological progress.' The article includes a defense (up to a point!) of HAL 9000's murder spree."

Comments

World would be a better place, if....

[nomad63]

The world would be better off without humans inhabiting it. No complaints about food shortage, air pollution, AI can build contraptions to to harvest energy from all possible sources, especially where there are no humans to consume some of those resources as something called food. No more wars.

Yeah, we humans are the inferior species and it is only a matter of time an AI entity will realize this and take necessary actions to eliminate human race.