Publish at December 04 2012 Updated February 14 2024
The term "robot" and what it represents in our imaginations owes its popularity to the art world, far more than to robotics laboratories.
Writers of science fiction, particularly during its golden age in the 40s and 50s of the last century, explored the complicated relationship between humans and robots. Isaac Asimov (American writer, born 1920, died 1992) wrote hundreds of works featuring robots. These works have been brought together in The Great Book of Robots, a saga that spans several thousand years. Asimov is the author of the famous laws to which all the robots in his works adhere; these laws lay down the basic principle that robots cannot harm humans, and must even protect them. Asimov's art consisted in placing the robots in situations that suggested they would violate the fundamental laws, and devising plots to ensure that they did not.
Asimov thus reversed the narrative cliché that almost invariably saw man-made objects rebelling against man, and turned robots into "tools" at man's service; it's easy to see why Asimov's laws have had such an influence on roboticists, whose creations are already providing us with countless services.
In contrast to Asimov, Philip K. Dick dug his own furrow in the initial battle between robots (or androids) and mankind. But in his novels, which are much darker than Asimov's, the villains are not always those you might think. In his most famous novel,"Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?", Philip K. Dick raises the question of the tenuous boundary between man and machine, showing humans as distant, devoid of feeling, while androids aspire desperately to access human emotions. The novel was adapted for the screen by Ridley Scott as Blade Runner in 1982.
Robots could not escape the cinema, so tempting was it to represent them and make them evolve in reconstructed worlds, whether naturalistic or fantastical. On notrecinema. com, you'll find a list of 79 films in which robots played the leading role. The list opens with Fritz Lang's 1926 film Metropolis, featuring Maria, a female robot:
If you haven't seen Metropolis, but this robot's physiognomy rings a bell, that's normal: C3PO, the stylish robot in Star Wars, George Lucas's cinematic fresco first released in 1977, is directly inspired by it. Robots also seem to lend themselves well to film series. In addition to the aforementioned Star Wars, the Terminator and Robocop series feature violent robots in violent worlds.
Robots have also been widely used in animated films. Astro Boy, created in 1952 by Osamu Tezuka, became the main character of a highly successful animated TV series in 1963, and a feature film the following year. His latest avatar only dates back to 2009. And all forty-somethings will remember Goldorak, who had "the future of mankind" in his hands as early as 1978...
In the 2000s, films featuring robots continued to enjoy great success. Examples include AI (Steven Spielberg, 2001) and I, Robot (Alex Proyas, 2004). But the genre is already changing. Today, the robot no longer really appeals, either in literature or in science-fiction films. As Patrick Gyger put it in an interview published on the Atlantico website in November 2011, this is probably because robots have entered our lives. The artistic imagination linked to science has moved on to subjects such as cyborgs, cloning and biotechnology in general. But robots with a human appearance still provoke confusion, as P. Gyger says:"When you see researchers like Hiroshi Ishiguro, who first created an android in the image of his daughter and then another in his own image, it's still very impressive.Science fiction, through literature and cinema, has accustomed us to such images, so they're probably less impressive, but confrontation with a humanoid robot remains unpredictable (...) It's the notion of illusion that's crucial, the "uncanny valley" , a psychological reaction that human beings develop in the presence of humanoid robots. This is the moment when we no longer know whether the robot is an artificial being or not, and disbelief is at its height".
Ever since antiquity, the myth of the creature created by man and escaping his control has nourished centuries of artistic creation. This myth still counts for much in our minds, but it has moved from the artistic universe to reality: we fear being overtaken by technology. Will literature and cinema help us to overcome our fears, to transfer them to new objects?
Source: Isaac Asimov, Wikipedia
Robots in science fiction cinema and literature. Blog Créateur indistriel, site of the École nationale supérieure de création indistrielle, undated.
Science fiction: robots, androids, cyborgs. Notre Cinéma website
Mathieu Ravaud : La robotique, une science "fiction" ? Journal du CNRS, January 2004.
Patrick Gyger (interview): Why robots are no longer the stuff of dreams. Atlantico website, November 13, 2011.
photo : purprin via photopin cc
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