Heart Robot

Could you ever love a robot?

Could a robot ever love you back?

And now, introducing Heart Robot.

Heart Robot has a beating heart, a breathing belly, and sensors that respond to movement, noise and touch. Cuddle him, and he seems to soak up the affection. His limbs become limp, his eyelids lower, his breathing relaxes, and his heart beat slows down.

If I haven’t learned about Heart Robot, I would say the thought that robots with feeling is absurd. A couple of decades ago, the majority of humans pictured any robot to be heartless and just a machine who wouldn’t understand feelings. They were just programmed to function according to the serviceability needs. I grew up watching Voltes V, Mazinger Z, Voltron, Daimos and to me they were just junks of steels and useless without humans navigating them. In the film I-Robot there was this one robot who functioned differently. This robot behaved like a human being. Will Smith found him unique. This was out of the ordinary. Almost absurd. Because of this breakthrough, movies like WALL-E about a robot being in love with another robot make sense. No one will contest anymore that WALL-E can fall in love. The question is: how much feelings can a robot get? To what extent can a robot behave like a human being? It is a fact that machines can function a million times greater than human can. They can be faster, stronger, more efficient, more systematic and more intelligent. Isn’t that there is a danger if a robot can have feelings too and almost like human beings. Acting like human beings can mean that they can have all the good feeling and the bad feelings. How about pride, envy, greed, frustrations, anxiety, hatred, selfish desires? A robot programmed with superpowers and feelings can aspire to compete with man. And here is when we need the Transformers or Neo Anderson. I mentioned about aspiration and this makes me think about the movie AI. AI, like Pinochio, wanted to become a real boy. And how about the movie Bicentennial man? Bicentennial man, who was an android, petitioned the World Congress to recognize him as human but is rejected on the grounds that so long as he is in effect immortal, he cannot be human. Movies like these conceive of possibilities. And because of Heart Robot the reality of these possibilities is more achievable.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Filipino Sweet Style Spaghetti

STAGE DIRECTOR

UST Class 5 CE