One near certainty about raising a young child these days is that you and your offspring will be exposed to a lot of stories about robots. Another is that the robots working their charms most effectively on you will belong to a new kind of archetype: the sympathetic robot. Sitting in darkened theaters with my 5-year-old son, I have watched any number of these characters. They are openhearted and often dazzled by the wonders of everyday life — innocently astounded by, say, the freedom of playing in the surf, the bliss of dancing with a loved one or the thrill of just holding hands. They might be more winningly human than some of the humans you know.
The robots in our fictions used to be more sinister. Our notion of artificial life has included the bioengineered humanoids in “Blade Runner,” the homicidal computer in “2001: A Space Odyssey” and the one that wages war on its makers in the “Terminator” movies. Long before that, we had Frankenstein’s monster in Mary Shelley’s Gothic novel and the golem in some versions of 17th-century Jewish folklore. These were often stories of hubris, of humanity’s inability to think through all that we were setting loose: Synthetic life was constantly breaking away from its creators’ grasp and committing heinous, forbidden acts. Even when the characters were more abstruse, operating beyond the ken of the people they manipulated — like the artificial intelligence Wintermute in William Gibson’s “Neuromancer” — they were, in some sense, gods that we mortals unleashed on the world and then struggled to control.
This hasn’t entirely changed. We still enjoy stories about malevolent machines, like the homicidal A.I. doll in “M3gan.” With other fictional robots, it’s not clear if they’re dangerous or merely hapless: Look to “Sunny,” recently on Apple TV+, in which a human protagonist spends most of the series trying to determine if she can trust the upbeat, bumbling homebot left to her by her roboticist husband. That kind of fear and suspicion, though, has mainly been reserved for adults. Children are offered a far more optimistic view — one that has lately seemed to go well beyond the endearing robots of the past, like R2-D2 and BB-8 in the “Star Wars” films, or the Iron Giant, or Sox in “Lightyear.”
Take Roz, the main character of the animated film “The Wild Robot,” which came out in September. Like the Peter Brown book series on which it is based, the movie focuses on a robot protagonist that gains emotional complexity after she washes ashore on an island unpopulated by humans, learns to communicate with the animals she meets there and becomes the surrogate mother of an orphaned gosling. Roz changes and adapts; she goes from seeing her care for the gosling as a rote task to welcoming it as a real connection. She embraces the wildness of the animals around her and ceases to be the unfeeling machine that her programming intended. Instead, she becomes an unnatural champion for the natural world — one whose touching incomprehension of how to care for a newborn makes her charming.
Or consider “Robot Dreams,” an animated feature by Pablo Berger that came out earlier this year. Based on a graphic novel by Sara Varon, it is set in a version of 1980s New York inhabited by humanlike animals who can, among other things, order build-your-own-robot kits advertised on late-night television. This film, with its theme of loneliness and its surprisingly mature depiction of how relationships change, might be better for slightly older children: It follows a dog and its robot companion as they grow close and then are driven apart, exploring the ways that love can evolve over time. But near the end, it is the robot, not the anthropomorphic dog who built it, that has to make a heartbreakingly human decision.
This is all in spite of the remarkably bleak near future portrayed in many of these children’s films.
The great progenitor of this archetype is surely Wall-E, who was introduced in his own Pixar feature — the granddaddy of sympathetic robot movies — in 2008. Everything about Wall-E suggests the opposite of a computer’s binary inflexibility. Like Roz, he starts off stranded in a humanless world, trying to relate to whatever scraps or remnants of life he can find, cherishing a salvaged VHS copy of the musical “Hello, Dolly.” Like Monsieur Hulot in Jacques Tati’s oeuvre, he moves in unpredictable arcs and at odd angles to the world around him; eventually, aboard a futuristic spacecraft that serves as a refuge for humanity, he breaks out of the rigid orthogonality that defines existence there. Like a lot of today’s sympathetic robots, Wall-E is essentially childlike. He is wide-eyed, with a disposition not quite as adaptable or emotionally savvy as those of the humans watching him onscreen.
This might be our narrative way of looking down on robots: We take the clueless rigidity of the computers we encounter daily and reimagine it not as a frustration but as a kind of touching guilelessness. This is clearly something that small children can relate to, as they do with E.T. or Elmo. The sympathetic robot shares a child’s naïveté about the adult world around it; in fact, the robot can be so innocent of our world that it is actually the child who knows better and feels compassion for the awe-struck machine onscreen. Sometimes they pretend that they are them, my own son included: This year, he asked my wife to make him a Roz costume for Halloween.
We’re now inarguably living in the future that science fiction once imagined. Artificial intelligences weaned on vast libraries of human endeavor are coming online, their boosters hyping their potential to either fulfill our greatest wishes or realize our deepest fears. It feels notable that we are raising our children on pointedly comforting stories about robots that, instead of relieving us of our jobs or edging us to the brink of Armageddon, offer to show us how to be more human. Granted, computers are an inescapable facet of our world now. As they grow up, our children will consume stories about humanlike robots as naturally as our ancestors delighted in tales about anthropomorphic animals. Still, these stories seem to be doing an inordinate amount of work to help children feel warm toward the technologies that increasingly dominate our lives.
This is all in spite of the remarkably bleak near future portrayed in many of these children’s films. They tend to show us a world of ecological ruin devastated by climate change. “The Wild Robot” offers haunting images like the Golden Gate Bridge submerged in San Francisco Bay as a flock of geese passes overhead. The Earth in “Wall-E” has been reduced to a lifeless, postindustrial horrorscape reminiscent of the works of the photographer Edward Burtynsky; humans have fled it entirely. “Robot Dreams” evades this by being set in and around its 1980s New York, but even that film concerns itself greatly with the natural world. We see the robot experiencing the changing seasons on a wintry beach; the dog takes pity on a fish that he has caught and releases it. There is even a scene — echoing the surrogate parenting in “The Wild Robot” — in which the robot helps encourage a young bird to learn how to fly.
There is an echo here of the classic robot stories: Humanity’s hubris has once again led us to get in over our heads. But now we’re encouraged to take pleasure in watching a robot try to navigate what’s left, slowly figuring out that human values — love, connection, caretaking — are eternally important. The sympathetic robots are devised as much to comfort us parents as they are to make technology appealing to our kids. Despite the destabilized world that we’re leaving to our offspring, they reassure us, artificial intelligences could one day serve as our surrogates — and care for our children or, who knows, even love them for us when we’re gone.
Diego Hadis is a writer and the copy chief of T: The New York Times Style Magazine; he spends a lot of time rewatching movies with his son.
Source photographs for illustration above: Apple TV+; DreamWorks Animation/NBCUniversal Inc; Sunset Boulevard/Corbis, via Getty Images.
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