This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
Red Shoe: I don't think it really counts as an example of the trope, but there was a robot policeman from the future in Power Rangers Turbo, who was fully decked out for monster-fighting. But he spent his off hours handing out parking tickets. There's nothing nonsensical about his being super strong, but he literally was a super powered robot meter maid. (Also, an example of a recurring Power Rangers trope about the writers not realizing that police officers have such things as assignments and jurisdictions, and therefore a homicide detective in one city isn't going to give you a speeding ticket in the next state.)
Devil's Advocate: "Data from Star Trek The Next Generation often took over the ship with the abilty to perfectly mimic Captain Picard's voice and hack into his command codes." "Often?" I only recall one such instance.
Kendra Kirai: You know, many of the examples are quite logical, when you look at it from an engineering standpoint. It is far, far easier to use a powerful servomotor and have software regulate its power output (Which it would have to do anyhow, in order to perform delicate tasks) than to design, manufacture, and use servomotors that accurately mimic human tolerances. Endurance is a given...robots don't have lactic acid buildup in their muscles and can go at full power as long as their fuel/batteries last, while humans tire relatively quickly...thermal tracking isn't as easily-explainable, but a butler would probably need to have some sort of temperature-sensing equipment. Robots can act as fast as their computers can process information and their servos can move, explaining their speed. Flight and weaponry is very difficult to explain on anything other than law-enforcement or military robots (And in fact, with only a few exceptions, isn't present in the original designs).
Just sayin', from an engineering standpoint, this stuff really is logical.
- anonymous: I'd say, as far as robots having the capacity to do these things, anyone who questions the trope has never heard the term "feature creep."
Seven Seals: Except, of course, that any sane human who would employ robots like these would also make damn sure that there actually is software to regulate the robot's power output, and that it cannot be overridden by, say, the robot deciding to destroy all humans. In short, the net effect of building the robot with parts that don't have human tolerances should still be a robot that's perfectly safe for humans to be around.
Even if we accept that robots will be capable of more than they are used for, it's usually ridiculously exaggerated by this trope. If you build a robot to mimic human strength and endurance, for example, it might actually be stronger than a human being if not regulated by software, but it should still never be able to batter through walls.
Kendra Kirai: What would be the point of going to all the trouble to build a robot that can mimic human strength and endurance though? You'd have to cook up a special cocktail of metal alloy that precicely mimics human bone strength, a system to limit the power output of the robot's battery/generator to mimic the decrease in effectiveness humans get from being tired..Their outer shell would have to be quite similar to human skin...At that point you may as well just clone human beings. There's also times when you would WANT the robot to be able to surpass human limits. Law enforcement, for example. A Maid or Butler robot would have to be able to move furniture around, or carry heavy luggage. A manufacturing or demolitions robot would be far more capable and cheaper if it was built to industrial standards. There's a certain threshold of cost/safety that has to be decided, and when you think about it...It doesn't matter if you have the safest robot in the world, if it costs eight trillion dollars and is only as useful as a migrant laborer who'll work for two bucks an hour.
It should also be noted that humans can batter walls down without all that much trouble.
Seven Seals: There is really very little point to building a robot as human-like as possible — which makes you wonder why fiction so often insists on doing it, and then doing it wrongly. This trope is all about the fact that the robot will explicitly be intended for a task that does not require weaponry, rocket-propelled flight and enough strength to toss a car, yet will somehow be built to have all of this and more. "It was easier to build that way" only goes so far, and fiction almost always goes way over the line.
And regarding battering down walls: remind me not to pick a fight with you... :-)
LTR - That's pretty much what the trope is getting at, if robots are going to be built like industrial machinery or current household appliances, they are going to be more durable than human beings, and "stronger" than human beings, your fridge and your car already exhibit this behavior, let's see [i]you[/i] keep functioning even if shot a couple times, most appliances probably would. In your day to day life you can see thousands of examples of mechanical systems that outdo humans in terms of strength and endurance, hydraulics on forklifts and earth movers, etc.
But, what this trope is really getting at is that all these machines in the real world are higly specialized. They do some impressive things, but thier ability to do task "A" without much effort doesn't mean they can effortlessly do tasks "B" "C" and "D" just as well. A forklift can't batter through solid rock, a chainsaw can't cut steel beams, and a car can't use it's computer to help you do your taxes.
TV robots seem to be swiss army knives, incorporating tools and weapons of such variety that it makes you wonder why the designers thought it would be nessicarry to install them.
From an economics standpoint, it would only make thier model of robot that much more expensive to build and market for every bell and whistle they attach. What good would a vaccum cleaner with night vision do you when you can just turn on the house lights? Who really needs to be able to vaccum when the power goes out?
Heck, consider the cost of developing the programming, why would thier programming even allow them to consider things beyond what thier job duty is? If you take a friendly worker robot from an assembly line and ask it to kill all humans, it's realistic natural response would probably be "Error, concept "human" not understood" as why (assuming it's programming doesn't include outright sentience) would it know a thing about humans if all it was programmed to do was a series of precise spot welds day in and day out? You could handwave that if it's going to be working around humans, it needs to know what they are just so it doesn't hurt them, but then again, would it know how to kill one? That would require knowledge of anatomy and the weaknesses therein, and why would such info be programmed into it? This quickly builds a series of extra handwaves that need to be put in place to explain exactly why that robot hedge trimmer not only has a laser in it for cutting the hedge instead of a blade, but why that laser can also be cranked up to a wattage that could vaporize a man, or why the machine was given enough mobillity and programming to understand how to circumvent the doors and walls that said man is probably going to take cover behind if he notices the machine going haywire.
It's not that machines are more powerful than men that this trope is concerned with, it just seems that TV machines are built in ways that make no economic or practical sense except to ensure maximum collateral damage when they inevitably suffer a breakdown
Daniel LC: I don't see why anybody thinks this makes sense. It may be expensive to build a robot that's exactly as powerful as a person, but it's still significantly cheaper to build one that's around the same then one that's an order of magnitude more powerful. As a simple example where this applies: every piece of your cell phone is built to last until the warranty expires. Note that, rather than lasting fifty years because they don't want to do the research to see how to make everything last the right amount of time, the cell phone will break soon after the expiration. The thing about robots never getting tired doesn't make much sense. They last until they run out of power, but so do people. The robot would be built with a battery or fuel tank that lasts long enough to go between recharges: probably around an hour. People last long
Gattsuru: In a highly limited viewpoint, it's not as illogical. I've built a small battery powered device (effectively a glorified watch) that runs something like sixty days before needing a recharge, but intended to be charged daily. Larger batteries just made sense from an economic and design standpoint; trying to find smaller widely available lithiums and a decent controller just wasn't worth the minor cost and space applied. Likewise, if I have to build a structure, it's probably going to come out with 80/20 material and steel bolts rather than the weakest material and structure possible, both for reasons of simplicity and for reasons of economics of scale.
To provide a real-world example, I have an impact-proof (aka 'shock') box sitting in front of me that's supposed to save computer equipment from some pretty specific standards of impact or weight. In practice, I've put a good three or four times that weight on an empty older box without it noticing a thing. Overengineering isn't that uncommon if you need to match very specific criteria and even a single failure can result in the loss of a contract, or if the device is intended for constant use. If you want a robot to run every day, it's probably going to need at least three times the durability and endurance, if not an order of magnitude more, when fresh from the factory. Motors decrease in efficiency, batteries lose maximum capacity, metal stresses.
That doesn't excuse the meter maid with a rocket launcher in its nose, but it does excuse the meter maid that can survive an impact with a small car, especially if it was built to survive the attacks of those who don't like paying tickets. The programming issue is a nightmare, though. I'd be as worried about false positives as robots 'freezing up' on negatives, at least if they're able to interact with non-RFID-equivalent-chipped people.
