Informal roundup of robot movies and television programmes and a glimpse into our robot future

David Bruggeman has written an informal series of posts about robot movies. The latest, a June 27, 2015 posting on his Pasco Phronesis blog, highlights the latest Terminator film and opines that the recent interest could be traced back to the rebooted Battlestar Galactica television series (Note: Links have been removed),

I suppose this could be traced back to the reboot of Battlestar Galactica over a decade ago, but robots and androids have become an increasing presence on film and television, particularly in the last 2 years.

In the movies, the new Terminator film comes out next week, and the previews suggest we will see a new generation of killer robots traveling through time and space.  Chappie is now out on your digital medium of choice (and I’ll post about any science fiction science policy/SciFiSciPol once I see it), so you can compare its robot police to those from either edition of Robocop or the 2013 series Almost Human.  Robots also have a role …

The new television series he mentions, Humans (click on About) debuted on the US tv channel, AMC, on Sunday, June 28, 2015 (yesterday).

HUMANS is set in a parallel present, where the latest must-have gadget for any busy family is a Synth – a highly-developed robotic servant, eerily similar to its live counterpart. In the hope of transforming the way his family lives, father Joe Hawkins (Tom Goodman-Hill) purchases a Synth (Gemma Chan) against the wishes of his wife (Katharine Parkinson), only to discover that sharing life with a machine has far-reaching and chilling consequences.

Here’s a bit more information from its Wikipedia entry,

Humans (styled as HUM∀NS) is a British-American science fiction television series, debuted in June 2015 on Channel 4 and AMC.[2] Written by the British team Sam Vincent and Jonathan Brackley, based on the award-winning Swedish science fiction drama Real Humans, the series explores the emotional impact of the blurring of the lines between humans and machines. The series is produced jointly by AMC, Channel 4 and Kudos.[3] The series will consist of eight episodes.[4]

David also wrote about Ex Machina, a recent robot film with artistic ambitions, in an April 26, 2015 posting on his Pasco Phronesis blog,

I finally saw Ex Machina, which recently opened in the United States.  It’s a minimalist film, with few speaking roles and a plot revolving around an intelligence test.  Of the robot movies out this year, it has received the strongest reviews, and it may take home some trophies during the next awards season.  Shot in Norway, the film is both lovely to watch and tricky to engage.  I finished the film not quite sure what the characters were thinking, and perhaps that’s a lesson from the film.

Unlike Chappie and Automata, the intelligent robot at the center of Ex Machina is not out in the world. …

He started the series with a Feb. 8, 2015 posting which previews the movies in his later postings but also includes a couple of others not mentioned in either the April or June posting, Avengers: Age of Ultron and Spare Parts.

It’s interesting to me that these robots  are mostly not related to the benign robots in the movie, ‘Forbidden Planet’, a reworking of Shakespeare’s The Tempest in outer space, in ‘Lost in Space’, a 1960s television programme, and in the Jetsons animated tv series of the 1960s. As far as I can tell not having seen the new movies in question, the only benign robot in the current crop would be ‘Chappie’. It should be mentioned that the ‘Terminator’, in the person of Arnold Schwarzenegger, has over a course of three or four movies evolved from a destructive robot bent on evil to a destructive robot working on behalf of good.

I’ll add one more more television programme and I’m not sure if the robot boy is good or evil but there’s Extant where Halle Berry’s robot son seems to be in a version of the Pinocchio story (an ersatz child want to become human), which is enjoying its second season on US television as of July 1, 2015.

Regardless of one or two ‘sweet’ robots, there seems to be a trend toward ominous robots and perhaps, in addition to Battlestar Galactica, the concerns being raised by prominent scientists such as Stephen Hawking and those associated with the Centre for Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge have something to do with this trend and may partially explain why Chappie did not do as well at the box office as hoped. Thematically, it was swimming against the current.

As for a glimpse into the future, there’s this Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles June 29, 2015 news release,

Many hospitals lack the resources and patient volume to employ a round-the-clock, neonatal intensive care specialist to treat their youngest and sickest patients. Telemedicine–with real-time audio and video communication between a neonatal intensive care specialist and a patient–can provide access to this level of care.

A team of neonatologists at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles investigated the use of robot-assisted telemedicine in performing bedside rounds and directing daily care for infants with mild-to-moderate disease. They found no significant differences in patient outcomes when telemedicine was used and noted a high level of parent satisfaction. This is the first published report of using telemedicine for patient rounds in a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). Results will be published online first on June 29 in the Journal of Telemedicine and Telecare.

Glimpse into the future?

The part I find most fascinating was that there was no difference in outcomes, moreover, the parents’ satisfaction rate was high when robots (telemedicine) were used. Finally, of the families who completed the after care survey (45%), all indicated they would be comfortable with another telemedicine (robot) experience. My comment, should robots prove to be cheaper in the long run and the research results hold as more studies are done, I imagine that hospitals will introduce them as a means of cost cutting.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *