The Committee to Nuke Elysium

Brave space robots literally make me misty. And it’s not just because they serve as a proxy for the East African Plains Apes millions of miles away, at their controls. In fact, I think most of the time we forget that our speciesmates are back there (back here!) on Earth, fiddling with joysticks and flipping toggles. Or tapping away on keyboards and puzzling over ambiguous shadows in photographs.

We say, “Curiosity discovered–” after all. We even construct gender for her and her and her sister Martian rovers–they’re female, a pack of brave, adventurous Girl Scouts out there earning merit badges and drilling in to rocks.

I may have shed a tiny tear when I stayed up way, way too late to ‘watch’ her land. I was certainly rooting for her with as much ferocity as I’ve ever rooted for a Bruce Willis character, and considerably more than I could muster for WALL-E. (That’ll be my unpopular confession for this column.)

It’s interesting to me that we can individually haul up this emotional connection, this strength of empathy, for a machine that–objectively speaking–is just a machine. Not a living creature with feelings and agency; nothing with an object position of its own. More than that, that that empathy is easy for us.

Collectively, we seem to have a hard time summoning that understanding, that complex imagining of the other, for beings who are far more similar to us than these brave space toasters. Who are separated only by a gene controlling pigmentation, or a religious or political belief structure. Possibly it’s because brave little robots are so alien. We don’t come with any installed stereotypes or unexamined prejudices, and they’re not exactly competition. Maybe it’s because robots don’t have political opinions, or a convoluted and shared history of competition and oppression.

In any case, maybe it’s a good sign.

If we can learn to care about robots, maybe we can learn to care about less alien but more strange creatures, such as each other.