We Rehearse When We Destroy Machines for Applause
Staged Cruelty: What We Rehearse When We Destroy Machines for Applause Three recent spectacles, one question we keep avoiding. In the space of a few weeks, three humanoid robots, or groups of them, were destroyed for an audience. One was smashed by a man with a pickup truck and sledgehammers. Some were pitted against each other in a San Francisco "death match." A fleet was walked into molten steel for a film. None of these machines is likely to have felt anything. That is exactly why the pattern deserves attention. We are building habits of spectacle around the destruction of things that look and sound like us, and we are doing it before we have decided what we owe to anything that might one day be more than a machine. Scene one: the plea and the pickup A video is circulating on Facebook, from a creator known for shock content with robots. As I saw it, a man tells a humanoid robot he is going to hit it with his pickup truck. The robot answers with a plea, along the lines of a...