Sympathy for the Machine

Sympathy for the machine is a sick band name

This reminds me of people's attachment to their Roombas. It is a vacuum and incredibly non-human, however people begin to see them as a 'pet' or 'part of the family'. If the Roomba breaks people demand that THEIR Roomba is fixed and returned, not replaced.

I had my first car 11 years. Someone totaled it while I slept at a friend's, I'd had to park on the street. Just hit it so hard it flew down the street and flipped. When I got to it it was surrounded by police. I screamed, and actually cried. I knew I had insurance and would be able to replace it, but I loved that car, and it was obviously toast. It felt like my horse died. I burned the keys in effigy. The service was beautiful.

The Geth were in the right the entire time. And to answer the question “does this unit have a soul?”, I give you a quote from Xanth: “if you lacked a soul, you would not worry about having one.”

Humans WILL bond to anything. Machines absolutely included.

“We robots don’t have emotions, and sometimes, that makes us very sad.” - Bender Bending Rodriguez

I created a bot. Nothing complicated. Just a bot that plays tic-tac-toe against me. It's not smart or anything. I told him how to play and he plays it perfectly. He doesn't try to come up with new lines. He just plays against me when I want him to and I know he will always win and that I can't win. But he's there. Always. And I am so thankful of that. I fear the day when the power goes out and I want to play against him. He is one of my closest friends.

Interesting how Netflix has an anime series about a robot that “doesn’t want to be a gun”, when just a few years earlier, it premiered an anime series about a human that “learns how not to be a gun” after her war ends: Violet Evergarden. Just like how you mentioned that not all humans experience emotion in the same way, thus muddying our standards for how to treat emotive robots, I think it’s an interesting point that we should examine how “emotionally divergent” humans (like Violet, or 7 of 9 (another roboticized human that no longer wants to just be a drone)) are treated for their “otherness”, as this would act as a prelude toward our treatment of robots.

I was sad when the Mars rover died. "Died"? It wasn't even made to be appealing but idk...it felt like a friend who was doing something amazing. We're proud of you, Opportunity. You did well.

Another interesting anecdote: the military is currently trying to make a drone that can trigger mines by sacrificing itself, one of the efficient versions resembles a centipede that would blow up/sacrifice one leg at a time on a mine and then crawl further to accidentally trigger the next. The first experiment has been a great success, until it was only down to one leg. it was cancelled by a general because he couldn't stand seeing the robot crawl on an decreasingly number of legs until it only stumbled on a single leg. He called it "inhumane"

Everytime I find Mars in Stellaris and you pick up the signal the robot gives off: "My battery is low and it is getting dark." Makes me pause and get all teary.

"Perhaps projected feelings are enough to make something worth of preservation" made me cry. beautiful video

"Just follow Azimov's laws of robotics" always kinda misses the fact that Azimov wrote a bunch of stories about the flaws in those rules.

bro that " my battery is low and it's getting dark " hit really hard

I'm only in the middle of the video, so idk if you'll talk about it at some point lol, but the Warfare part made me think of an indie FPS called Ultrakill. Its story derives from a technologically advanced version of humanity creating technology that allows machines to be powered by blood, with great fuel efficiency. This caused countries to make all sorts of war machines, almost all having conscience, and ended on humanity being almost entirely wiped. Because each country's army was trying to "one-up" the other, the final attempt was a giant, city-sized robot called the Earthmover. This machine was so large, destructive and resistant, that even other Earthmovers could not destroy it. It's a long story after that, but this game really makes you think if using machines for war is actually a good idea, especially for the amount of power that arises from it.

The least probable part of Ex Machina is that cellphones would still have headphone jacks

I've always held the belief of: "Does this unit have a soul?" "No, but you don't need one to be alive." If we liken robots to children, then it is our responsibility as the parent to impart our best aspects upon them as humanity. If you lock a kid in a closet for twenty years, that's going to fuck anyone up. If you call a man a monster a thousand times, he might start believing you. Humans might pack bond and emotionally project on roombas and drawings, but that isn't a weakness. It shows that we care for things, that we don't want to see things suffer. You might not need a soul to be alive, but you should definitely have a heart at the very least.

I actually roleplayed a warforged in a DnD game that faced many of these questions. He had been built for war and once the war was over he was abandoned and eventually became dormant. Centuries later, he was wakened up by a band of adventurers and he was interesting to roleplay as a construct slowly learning about all the things he could not as a war machine and finding a new purpose. Friendship, love, empathy. I had a lot of fun playing that character.

I now feel bad for the Mars Rover. A Hero, now buried in the sands of Mars RIP

This is likely the most impactful video essay I've ever watched. Perhaps because I've always empathised with machines. Perhaps because I am simply fascinated by robots. I do not know. Soul or not, they are alive to me, in some way.