Troperville
Editing Help
Tools
Toys
|
|
|
Ridiculously Human Robots
|
alt title(s): Ridiculously Human Robot 
So do we, man.
"I bet bioandroids wish they didn't have to be that human."
"I wanna know what would happen if I were human. I mean, being a robot's great but we don't have emotions and sometimes that makes me very sad."
"You're a robot? I should have known. No human is that humane."
Robots in television — particularly comedic television — are usually human-like in ways that very few sane programmers would deem useful. It can be something as simple as being philosophical (wanting to understand human emotion, wondering if they have a soul, etc.), but can extend to such things as robot social cliques, robot food, robot entertainment, robot religion, and even robot sex. It doesn't matter if it makes no sense in the context of a mechanical servant, or even if it's truly undesirable, the designers have put it in there for some twisted reason.
In reality of course this trope makes very little sense, or at least requires an absurd amount of hand waving to justify. Artists who utilize this trope rarely stop to think that a solid state microchip might favor appreciably different logic than that of an organic bio-electric human brain. We're just supposed to assume that everything which has a certain amount of raw intelligence is automatically going to look human and fit neatly within Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs . On a more practical level, the reasons why people decided to design and mass produce human-like robots are usually reduced to them being stronger or more efficient than humans, but that only raises additional question of why they spent so much effort trying to cram all that physical capacity into the human form in the first place instead of drawing up designs which make slightly more sense in engineering and economic terms. And why they decided to give these expendable grunts and mining robots complex neural networks and baby blue eyes in the first place is anybody's guess. Usually these concerns are just ignored because they undermine the plot or themes of the story.
The degree to which this is actually "ridiculous" varies depending on the setting. In some cases they get a free pass - it may be that an intelligence, artificial or not, needs to be human in the basics of intelligence, free will, et cetera to be functional at all. In this case, Ridiculously Human Robots make sense. Also, a few illogical design choices are a small price to pay for keeping them out of the Uncanny Valley. However, it's rare that a series explicitly spells this out, and often, these human-like AIs are put right up next to similar, yet emotionless equivalents that function perfectly.
A corollary to this is that robots are comfortable in their own oddball version of society, and consider human conventions bizarre and silly. You'd think they would be programmed to be familiar with human behaviour, and find it perfectly normal. Robots from places without humans, who are exempt from this complaint, curiously tend to adapt to human customs faster.
If a Ridiculously Human Robot has a Personality Chip, it's not likely to blow out, short-circuit, or turn off.
For an alternative, see Pick Your Human Half. Interestingly, there will usually be at least one character (or society in general) who insists it's " Just A Machine".
See also Instant AI Just Add Water, Super Powered Robot Meter Maids, and Robot Girl. Compare and contrast with Artificial Human, Robot Me or Mechanical Lifeforms. May become subject to a Robotic Reveal if the robot looks ridiculously human enough to pass as one. Expect the reveal to have some squick if it's done via means like an Unusual User Interface. Contrast Deceptively Human Robots, for when the apparent humanity is only skin deep.
Examples
Anime
- Sexaroids Sylvie and Anri, in Bubblegum Crisis. However, given their intended function, this isn't so strange. Perhaps more unusual (and disturbing) is the fact that, of the two Boomer models designed to resemble women, only those purposely designed for sexual use appear to be sentient. And then there's Anri, who's apparently built to look permanently underage...
- To be fair, if robots don't legally count as people, it might be "better" in some sense of the word to sell the Anri-types to those who like that sort of thing, rather than let them do what they've been doing before that.
- It might be if the said robots didn't feel emotional pain like Anrie and Sylvie, who escaped because they experienced their life as continuous sexual abuse. The main reason why you shouldn't make any robots too human-like, unless you're willing to treat them as humans.
- The comic relief robot in Uchuu Senkan Yamato (also known as Star Blazers) is apparently programmed specially for sexual harassment.
- Though exceedingly nonhuman in form, vaguely resembling R2-D2.
- I.Q.-9 (Analyzer) claims that, because of his larger mental capacity, he actually has a wider range of emotions than a human being. "I have more emotions than you." And his little soliloquy after Nova rejects his love is actually very sad.
- Alpha from Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou eats, sleeps, dreams, cries, has fantasies and generally behaves in a very human manner, including having a romantic relationship (with another Robot Girl, no less). She never ages though while all the human beings around her do, making for quite some melancholic moments, especially in the manga. The robots of Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou have in particular one feature that is especially ridiculously human: for some reason their data input ports are all in their mouths, which means that for one robot to transfer data to another, they have to kiss.
- The mouth-as-dataport thing is impractical, and at the same time manages to be reasonably predictable of some kinds of engineers. Betcha that's what Dilbert would do.
- The androids from Armitage III are actually ranked according to how human they are. "Firsts" are basically non-human robots, "Seconds" are androids, and the "Thirds" are so close to human they can get pregnant.
- So can the Cyberdolls in Hand Maid May. This is hinted at at the end.
- The Sexaroids from Ghost in the Shell 2 also fit this trope until they start ripping their skin off and committing robo-suicide, causing their faces to burst open and wiring to flow out. They fall into the Uncanny Valley somewhere around that point. As the last scene shows, they somewhat start out there too.
- Really, all the androids in the Ghost in the Shell movies/shows fit this. To the point where they have humanoid androids running their computers by typing really fast. Why not just build their A Is into the computer? Or, at the very least, use direct, wired, connections to the computers, rather than typing?
- The operators share more varied jobs and duties to perform besides monitoring information coming in through a computer. They need the Human appearance to carry out those tasks.
- It's a security measure. The gynoids Section 9 uses (they're called 'Operators') are deliberately not connected to anything to prevent hacking attempt.
- Additionally, Section 9's operators serve as tilt-rotor aircraft pilots, serve coffee and food, and answer telephones. Being hardwired to computer serves would keep them from doing this, and more. Likewise, the JGSDF is shown using their own model of operators, distinguished by military fatigues, short hair and glasses, who are assigned the rank of Private, First Class. Metropolitan police use policewomen operators who have the rank of constable.
- The human appearance of the androids used by Section 9 is explained, somewhat ironically, by the Tachikomas. Apparently they are designed to look real because their function is to socialize and work with human beings. The aim is to avoid uncanny valley. Still, their AI is very limited, as the Tachikomas then demonstrate by disabling one with a Logic Bomb...
- This has actually been done in the real world. Some poor terminal operator got landed with the laborious process of reading a long stream of data from one screen and typing it verbatim to another one right next to it... Apparently worth it to eliminate any security issues (apart from going postal) - ain't no firewall like a human, at least in 1970 - and to circumvent any hairy issues of incompatible network and database standards. What they would have given for a set of those robot fingers...
- They're not flawless however. Note the Major needing floatation devices to have ANY buoyancy in water, for example. And there are plenty of other non human A Is about, for example the Hecatonchires tanks.
- Motoko's body weighs about 300 pounds for her physical size. That's actually considered "Light" among most prosthetic bodies. She does have illegal modifications given to her from the government as part of her job though, so the extra weight is understandable.
- Ghost in the Shell does feature a lot of philosophy about what it means to be human - the Major is classified as a human even though she is an entirely artificial body, and it's implied that there are very few humans who don't have some form of cybernetic enhancement.
- The Human Liberation Front is an active anti-cyberization organization. Despite their views against connecting their brains to the internet, they're actually falling behind in society. Being cyberized has become the Status Quo for everyday living. Not being cyberized is the equivalent of being a special needs child in school. The issue is actually brought up in fair detail in the anime Real Drive, which takes place in the GITS universe. On the other hand, many mainstream religions encourage cyberization.
- Dolores from Zone Of The Enders: Dolores, i Has her own feelings and emotions, feels pain even when she's not particularly damaged, and even cries when she's sad, to the point of fluid leaking out of her primary optic sensors (once, she even smacks herself in the head to calm down). This, despite being a Humongous Mecha. it's hand waved later in the series by the reveal that the Dolores AI was developed based on the personality and memories of the Big Bad's dead girlfriend who was an assistant to the developer of the mech.
- Some people have never seen a good reason why almost all of the persocoms in Chobits couldn't be replaced with spiders with a voicebox. (Besides the total demolition of the plot, of course)
- One scene occurs in a police station, where all the cops are typing on keyboards plugged into...miniature Persocoms. Which then, of course, output to flat panel displays, thus fulfilling the job of a $300 generic beige-box computer in a hilariously roundabout and expensive manner. Way to go, guys.
- Good old Astro Boy inspired an entire country's culture with regards to this trope. Despite varying levels of humanoid physical appearance, robots have their own society and culture, and yes, even actual robot churches. Many real life Japanese roboticists have thusly been inspired to have the same mindset as the scientist who created Data in Star Trek: The Next Generation.
- It's also important to point out that Astro himself, if not necessarily the rest of that world's robots, was designed to be (super powers notwithstanding) as human as possible.
- Astro Boy retelling Pluto plays with this trope a bit. Some robots have ridiculously human bodies for interaction with humans and normal use. However, they can transfer their minds into specialist bodies for when they have work to do or their more human bodies are otherwise inconvenient. Examples of this kind include Brando and Hercules.
- Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha has the Wolkenritter (plural) and Reinforce, programs (albeit magical ones) with emotions and individual personalities. In addition to having physical forms, they eat, sleep, and bleed. The characters of the series pretty much consider them as humans.
- Also, there are Agito and Reinforce II, who are functionally anthropomorphic magical wands taught proper Japanese. And, if the theories are correct, Lily Strosek from Force may be one of these, too.
- Chachamaru from Mahou Sensei Negima, while she is programmed for certain things (being Evangeline's servant) possesses human traits, mainly emotions like embarassment (complete with
crying leaking laser fluid from her eyes), compassion (helping little old ladies up stairs and feeding stray cats), and, most obviously, love. Lampshaded by her creator, who can't figure out how the heck that happened, who (taking "hard science" a little to the extreme) takes personal offense that she's forced to consider philosophy to try and figure out what happened (though she resolves to be more of a mother figure to Chachamaru). Might be justified, since she's partly Magitek.
- And there is always the matter of 'winding her up' to recharge her... She basically goes into convulsions and ends up in a panting heap when Negi 'screws' the key (in the back of her head, you sicko). Hilarity Ensues. Period.
- As of Chapter 263 Chachamaru is officially recognized as a soul bearing being by the Powers That Be, for whatever that's worth.
- It did, however, take a good five minutes or so of snogging to get said Powers to recognize this.
- And an explosion.
- And there's also her "skin upgrade" (prior to the Wales Trip) that made her look and feel really human, which also seemed to justify the need for her to bathe naked in a river.
- Played with in Outlaw Star. Gilliam II, the titular Cool Ship's computer, is entirely sentient with the sole exception that he is incapable of contemplating his purpose in life. To get over this hurdle, he instead decides to contemplate his inability to contemplate his purpose in life. Trippy.
- There is also the case of Melfina who, despite her skeletal structure, some muscle mass, and specific parts of her brain are machinery (as shown in an x-ray during an introduction to the concept of bio-androids by the narrator), she still possess human organs and actual human skin.
- Rozen Maiden has as its protagonists a cavalcade of animate dolls built specifically to kill each other in a There Can Be Only One tournament. This is all in the good, but one is left to wonder why they were built capable to feel pain, grief, fear and loss. Or, for that matter, affection, attachment and remorse toward their sisters. It's little wonder the tournament didn't get anywhere in hundreds of years.
- Well, they were originally created to be the Perfect Girl, Alice. Emotions are presumably pretty important for that qualification. Possibly the entire Alice Game is just a Xanatos Gambit by Rozen meant to realize a doll that wouldn't want to fight. Or something - that guy has more twists in his plans than a corkscrew.
- In Steel Angel Kurumi, Kurumi and the other steel angels act exactly like humans except for their ridiculous power level. Be glad they're programmed to obey whoever activates them unconditionally, otherwise they'd almost certainly take over the world.
- Osamu Tezuka's Phoenix includes tales that hit on a group of robots who, despite looking like large metal cannisters with limbs, connect better with their masters because they seem a little more human than most. They're connected to a hive mind and, when one is executed, the others walk en masse to kill themselves in lava pits. Furthermore, one who is on the moon at the time considers his more human characteristics at length, because it seems odd that he cannot follow the actions of the others. He eventually proves he's more than a robot by murdering his arrogant boss. And somewhere in the mix, we find out that the robots are more than mere machines, since the first one was made from the joined souls of a human and robot lover (who, yes, appears to have had a soul as well, oddly enough).
- The robotic members of the GGG in Gao Gai Gar could easily be mistaken for Autobots in both appearance and mannerisms. In one episode, HyoRyu and EnRyu both get into an argument over whether it's right to let 9-year-old Mamoru into combat because of his Zonder-detecting ability, while at the same time, both are drinking... something... out of gigantic cups complete with huge bendy-straws.
- Don't forget, they're both powered by their own courage. Don't think about it too much, since by the end of the series, the number of self-powering Brave Robos is up to eight, not counting Galeon.
- Suzu in Hotori - Tada Saiwai o Koinegau clearly has a personality and emotions of his own, and is also (despite the fact that his internal mechanical workings are shown on several occasions and he doesn't really seem to have organs) capable of eating and crying.
- Imo-chan from Sora Kake Girl eats, sleeps, goes to school, has a job as a maid, and belongs to a club that restores old vehicles. Pretty impressive for a pint-sized, flying robot that appears to be designed as a vehicular auto-pilot system.
- Yuki the medical sexaroid from TheGalaxyRailways looks and acts so human you'd never notice if she didn't point it out.
- In All Purpose Cultural Catgirl Nuku Nuku, a Slightly Mad Scientist roboticist makes an inexplicably human looking (and young, female, stacked, and athletic... ok he's just an old perv) robot for some reason, but can't get the AI part to work and bring it to "life". So, he loads it in the car to tinker with at home over the weekend, along with the kitten that's his young son's birthday present. However as soon as the kid's gone Squee and given the kitty its first hug, it runs out into the road and gets pancaked. Faced with a bawling child, a ruined birthday, a physically mangled but vaguely-conscious animal and a brainless bim-bot, he does what any self respecting mad prof family man would do... and transplants the cat's brain into the robot and gives it to the boy as a replacement. Voila, three birds, one stone (please don't ask how the life support mechanisms work). Piles of ridiculously human, ridiculously cat-like, cuckoo syndrome / fish out of water / social naivety hijinks ensue. That and gymnastically fighting off the evil corporation now coming after all of them with guns, wanting their very very expensive 6-foot pile of mechanics, microchips and pneumatics back.
- As well as Git S, Shirow Masamune is quite hot on the needlessly realistic robots. At least, enough so to cause confusion in the enemy when they're battle bots... The attack gynoid of Black Magic may not fool anyone once its taken a bit of battle damage, but it's got a head and hair right out of the uncanny valley, a bosom and feminine curves... and given how much of a perv Shirow can be, probably a strategically located recharge socket.
- This also applies to Real Drive, where android Holon is so human-like that one of the main characters falls in love with her—and dumps his girlfriend who is the one after which Holon has been modeled.
- Although in Black Magic it's not really hair, it's a heat sink. The male unit was built for short bursts of high output while the female had a leaner build and longer hair for endurance during an extended pursuit. When the battle took too long to conclude the male overheated and was destroyed.
- Haruka's robot caregivers in Kurogane Communication are human enough that she considers them family; she also gets embarrassed when one of them walks in on her changing.
- Kanato's robot maids Lilith and Alice also qualify, as does his surrogate mother.
- Eve No Jikan is centered around a club where commercially manufactured servant androids can go to interact with each other and humans as humanly as possible. The club specifically has a rule against discrimination against one side by the other.
- Parodied by Mechazawa in Cromartie High School, a ridiculously inhuman robot (essentially a giant tin can with arms and legs) who everyone treats as though he were human. In fact, everyone except the main characters (including Mechazawa himself) seems to believe Mechazawa is human, even when he's doing things like giving himself oil from an oilcan. "We don't say those things about Mechazawa!"
- Yuria is ridiculously human, to the extent that she can get a stomachache from eating food that's gone off, to go along with the whole self-awareness and free will. (Free at least to the extent of her programming as a Sex Bot allows, i.e. constantly wanting to have sex.)
- Companion Autoraves in Ergo Proxy tend to look like this. The only indication that Pino is one is the fact that her limbs are made of metal, but they're usually covered in clothing anyway.
Comic Books
- Justified in the case of SHIELD's Life Model Decoys in the Marvel Comics universe, as they are meant to be completely indistinguishable from the people for whom they are body-doubles.
"This robot had a pseudo-pulse... it maintained an internal body temperature of 98-point-six... it duplicated all the expected bodily functions! And unless I miss my guess, there's some sort of masking device in the torso that would fool and X-ray camera! Those eyes even simulate the retina patterns of the late Baron Strucker! I tell you, Nicholas, this construct makes our Life Model Decoys look like tinker toys!"
- Double subverted in Invincible. Robot's thought process is very elusive, and he admits to not understanding his human teammates at all, and not particularly wanting to. Then comes The Reveal: Robot is a disfigured human who can remote control a robot body. When he eventually clones a new body, he's able to be fully human, but is still rather cut off from normal emotions (unless they have something to do with Monster Girl.)
- Doombots, programmed to act like the real Doctor Doom in his absence. Arguably, it's not very difficult to achieve perfect resemblance to the real thing when the template himself dresses like a robot with a hood and cape...
- Arguably justified to the point of deconstruction by Machine Man, in various Marvel Comics tales. The X-series robots are supposed to be, essentially, Terminators, but Abel Stack is convinced that a robot that can think as well as a human needs to think like a human; when the other fifty robots develop bizarre psychoses and X-51 remains sane, he's proven right, but X-51 also proves useless as a military device. Much later, in Earth X, Uatu the Watcher claims Abel made "Aaron" as an extension of himself, hoping to "live forever" in this way. In spite of Uatu's exhortations to discard his humanlike programming, X-51 continually wonders whether he can qualify as truly human or has a soul and is eventually proven wrong, in a Bittersweet Ending.
- The Vision from The Avengers, who has had relationships and presumably active sex lives with the Scarlet Witch and Stature.
- The Vision's "brother", Victor Mancha, looks and acts so much like a normal teenager that he himself didn't know he was a robot for years. This is justified in that he was created specifically to pass for a human long enough to infiltrate the Avengers and avenge his "father", Ultron.
Film
- Robots, an entire movie built around the concept.
- The Terminators from the titular movies are made of human skin stretched over a robotic skeleton. As robots that are meant to infiltrate human camps and slaughter them from inside, the only thing that seems to tell them from a normal human is their Nigh Invulnerability; putting that aside, they look, smell, sweat, bleed and walk like an actual human. Dogs, however, aren't fooled.
- However, the Terminators don't act human (except the T-800 in Terminator 2, that learns things like "why humans cry", and the T-850 in the third movie, that has psychology in his programming and is thus able to do things such as lying).
- There is a deleted scene in Terminator 2 (restored in the extended release) that clarifies that most Terminators have their learning switch turned off before being sent out on the field. The reason being that Sky Net fears (or whatever) the Terminators learning -too- much and becoming sentient and self-aware like itself or otherwise troublesome to control. This switch is turned on for the T-800 in the movie in the scene and thus why it was able to eventually learn such things. Assuming higher numbers mean later models, it can also be assumed that Sky Net incorporates better research into the later models - the T-1000 was much much better at being an infiltrator though it seemed to kill most anyone within a few minutes of meeting them. It maybe also that those Terminators that are on a specific mission of infiltration rather than a mission where it'll kill anything that gets in its way are given more learning time and/or directive to act human; this is suggested in the Sarah Connor Chronicles where the resident Terminator has a flashback to the time when it interrogated the human it's based on as it was intending to access a heavily defended base. Strangely, the flashback occurs because the Terminator gets hit on the head (or something) and gets amnesia.
- Which begs the question of why a robot based designed exclusively to infiltrate and kill humans even has a switch that lets them become more human...
- I have the director's cut tape and have seen this bit. It's basically a write-protect switch on the memory that holds its main subroutines. They have to be programmed at some point, right? And in a changing warzone environment it would only make sense that they have some kind of flash ROM instead of fixed directives. It's how the older John Connor reprogrammed the (second) T800 to save instead of kill in the first place (it even gave the younger one instructions on how to unlock the "learning" function - presumably to stop tampering by anyone except for himself). It's a necessary step so it can adapt to fighting the T1000, and a bit of a turning point in the movie - if you're watching the cut version, it happens a little before John starts trying to teach it all kinds of new stuff; e.g, how to insult people just before you kill them ("Hasta La Vista... Baby" and all that). Note also that it *knows* why humans cry, showing it may be picking up a tiny bit of emotion (hope for Skynet yet?), but it cannot express the same feelings (it's still mainly a robot, with scrolling displays stolen from an Apple II debugger).
- Perhaps so that if Skynet were shut down (or they were otherwise out of range), they could truly infiltrate human society in order to position themselves in such a place that they could do as much damage to that society as possible?
- Ridiculously Human AI was avoided in Sunshine. Although, like HAL, the computer can respond to natural-language commands and has a creepily calm voice, it has no internal mental life to speak of and therefore doesn't anticipate or adapt to problems outside its original mission profile. If you've ever tried to wrestle a computer program into doing something beyond its basic functions, you'll see how accurate this is.
- It is, however, a plot point in 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which HAL becomes paranoid and psychotic after being given conflicting commands of equal importance. (At least, that is explanation offered outside of the film for his actions.)
- The problems inherent in programming ridiculously human robots is explored in A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, in which the robot David is programmed with genuine love, rather than the simulated love of previous models (like Gigolo Joe). This leads to a Pinocchio-like plot later on.
- It shouldn't have, however. The original story by Brian Aldiss contained none of the "Pinocchio" subplot (and it was better). Aldiss begged Kubrick not to include the Pinocchian subplot, to no avail.
- WALL-E never explains how robots, such as WALL-E and EVE, gained personalities, or why some do and some don't. It's probably better that way.
- WALL-E is actually insane in a good way. 700 years with no-one to interact with but a cockroach will do that.
- Essentially, all the character robots in the movie develop personality and emotion when they step outside of their primary directives. For some like M-O, this is a fairly short and abrupt step when he chooses to ignore the path he should be following in order to do something he wants to do (i.e. he gets annoyed enough to break a rule). For others like EVE, this is a more subtle development. Even the misfit robots in the robot infirmary aren't all depicted as insane - some just don't behave within their intended function.
- The droids in Star Wars. The Expanded Universe takes this further with "Human Replica Droids" such as Shadows Of The Empire's Guri. It takes special equipment to recognize that they aren't human.
- As for "regular" droids it is worth mentioning that most of them aren't programmed for personality, emotion or human behaviour. Some, like the most commonly known R2-D2 and C-3PO, develop those traits. Others don't.
- Of course, astromechs and protocol droids are explicitly amongst the most intelligent droids in the Star Wars universe; it's implied that the more intelligent a droid is and the more varied a life it leads, the more prone to illogical quirks and wilful independence (or developing a genuine personality, depending on your point of view) it becomes. This is why most droids are regularly memory-wiped, something again that explicitly hasn't happened to R2 or 3PO for far longer than the norm.
- The intelligent bombs of Dark Star, most notably Bomb No. 20.
- The "replicants" in Blade Runner are very difficult to distinguish from humans — it's very possible that protagonist Rick Deckard is, himself, a replicant. In fact, Ridley Scott has stated that Deckard is a replicant in at least one of the movie's two edited versions.
- In fairness, the replicants are biological in nature, so it's much more plausible that their brains and minds would function as a living being's do, even if that were not their builder's stated intent. In fact, at least in Rachael's case, making them indistinguishable from humans is their builder's stated intent.
- The Tyrell Corporation's slogan is, after all, More Human Than Human
- Don't think of them as robots/androids at all - they are "genetically engineered" - more like the characters in The Island (2005) who are cloned humans, created to provide spare parts for the people they are cloned from. They were just "designed" to only live a few years, the idea being that they would not live long enough to develop personalities, emotions, free will, etc. As if!
- Starchaser: the Legend of Orin is a huge example of this trope, as its various robot characters express just about every emotion that could possibly come up in an animated action b-movie (sarcasm, hysteria, cheering, evil laughter, frustration, indignation about being reprogrammed through circuits located in their metal asses, getting seduced by feminine robots, and so on).
-
Number 5 Johnny Five from Short Circuit gains sentience and self-awareness after being struck with lightning. Then, after a whole night of feeding on input (reading every book in Stephanie's house, and watching TV all the while) he grows a playful, childlike personality that is filled with wonder at the world around him. More impressive of all, he develops his own set of morals without ever being told, going as far as to reject his original purpose as a war machine and refusing to "disassemble" any other living thing (or, indeed, other robots) even when his own existence is at stake.
- As Nick says in Cavemen: "Cheesy?! What exactly is cheesy about a wise-cracking robot with a heart of gold fighting the military-industrial complex?"
- The notorious Andy Kaufman-Bernadette Peters comedy Heartbeeps (1981), about a pair of robots who fall in love with each other, goes to town with this concept.
- In the Alien movies, the androids Ash, Bishop, and Call all pass for human until they're "bleeding" a milk-colored Symbolic Blood. Call, in particular, conveys so much emotion that nobody ever would've suspected she was an android.
- In Westworld (and its So Bad Its Horrible sequel, Futureworld), the robots are ridiculously human precisely because they're supposed to entertain the human Guests. Some robots are even "sex models" for people who want to swing that way. Of course, AI Is A Crapshoot....
- One of Confused Matthew's gripes with The Matrix and its sequels was how the programs like Agent Smith and The Oracle acted more like humans than the human heroes.
Literature
Live Action TV
- Stargate SG 1 has robot doppelgangers of the main characters who are so ridiculously human that they think they ARE the humans and have a rude awakening when they find out. When the Teal'c one died, he even said to the real Teal'c, "For our father!"
- Fifth also counts as one of these, since he's a human-form replicator who wants revenge, falls in love, and even has a creepy stalker obsession with Carter.
- The gynoid Reese is an interesting variation of this, because she has the mind of a whiny little girl in an adult robot body and all the emotions that go with it. Which is how she ended up destroying her planet. She even created "toys" aka Replicators to entertain herself!
- The humanoid Cylons in the remake of Battlestar Galactica are the definition of robots being ridiculously human — most notably, "robot religion". And robots having robot or half-robot kids.
- Also notable that Doctor Cottle, upon having to do a Caesarian section on a Cylon, bitches her out for her race deciding to be so Ridiculously Human. As he puts it, even if they were gonna insist on having bodies that could pass for a fully functional human, there's no reason why they couldn't have made some basic upgrades to the "plumbing".
- From a serious scientific standpoint, the problem isn't the 'plumbing' (not usually, with humans, at least). The problem is our hipsize, which ideally should be larger than it is (to accommodate our large heads), but then wouldn't allow us to walk upright. This is why humans are one of the few animals to have such difficult childbirths and a disturbingly high mortality rate with childbirth (at least, before modern medicine). Still, you'd think the Cylons could have at least tweaked the design a little bit to eliminate the need for Caesarians, at least.
- It turns out that the ones to blame for this absurdity are the Final Five, and Cavil really holds it against them.
- Caprica reveals that the Colonists could've had ridiclously human robots the whole time, but their creator just had to base his design on a friend's dead daughter, completely squicking out the both of them.
- In The Twilight Zone episode "The Lonely", a convict, alone on an asteroid, is given a robot companion. He becomes so attached he elects to stay with her on the asteroid instead of taking parole, because there isn't enough room on the rocket for them both.
- There is, ultimately, no good reason for Star Trek The Next Generation's Commander Data to be "fully functional". Perhaps Data's creator deliberately set out to create an android as human as possible, setting a usable wang as a higher priority than basic emotional intelligence. Typical.
- Given his older brother, Lore, had basic emotional intelligence and was a sociopath; it was easier to mold a working wang than create a stable emotion matrix.
- Data created his own daughter, Lal, an even more ridiculously human robot than himself or his brother. Looking flawlessly human, she developed actual emotions which rapidly overwhelmed her positronic brain, eventually destroying her.
- First of all, and possibly most importantly, Data was an exact duplicate other than skin tone and his robot super powers to his creator, who presumably had a "usable wang". Secondly, he was a duplicate of Lore, except for his emotions. Lore was obviously designed to have a full range of human-like emotions. This would almost certainly result in some woman, at some time, wanting him to be "fully functional", even if Lore had no sex drive himself. Lastly, Data's creator was a perfectionist, and wanted Data to be able to do literally anything a human could, which requires functional genitalia, even if never used.
- Vicky and Vanessa's sibling rivalry on Small Wonder.
- In Get Smart, this extended to openly robotic characters smoking.
- The holographic Doctor on Star Trek Voyager was unnecessarily human for a medical expert system. Bedside manner is vital to a doctor, but his was terrible, wiping out that excuse. (The real reason is the engineer who created the Doctor program was a raging egomaniac.) In an early episode, which was a combination of a holodeck malfunction and a Cuckoo Nest plot, he wonders why it was that he worried about the meaning of his existence. A character responds that it's natural to do so, but the Doctor counters that as a medical program he knows exactly what his purpose is and why he was created.
- Parodied in Red Dwarf with Kryten, whose circuitry includes a guilt chip, a belief chip, a good taste chip which is sometimes bypassed by his humour circuits, etc. He also has more depending on which episodes require it: he has a "connoisseur chip" which is never mentioned again after "Legion," etc. He also has a Lie Mode and a Panic Mode.
- Red Dwarf is probably mostly an aversion, though. In the episode "Out of Time", the crew pass through unreality pockets. One of these makes them think that Lister is a droid, which is apparently plausible. He is supposedly an "earlier model":
Rimmer (to Kryten): Well, if he's an earlier model, how come he looks so much more sophisticated than you?
Kryten: Sir, just because I have a head shaped like a freak formation of mashed potato does not mean I am unsophisticated!
Rimmer: Well, all right, how come he looks more realistically human?
Kryten: Humans have always found exact duplicates rather disturbing, sir. The 3000 series was notoriously unpopular.
- He states in one later episode that he's quite proud of the character flaws he has (with Lister's help) deliberately developed.
Lister: Kryten, I'm going to teach you how to lie and cheat if it's the last thing I do. I'm going to teach you how to be unpleasant, cruel, and sarcastic. It's the only way to break your programming, man. Make you independent.
Kryten: And I'm truly grateful, sir. Don't you think I'd love to be deceitful, unpleasant, and offensive? Those are the human qualities I admire the most! But I just can't do it.
- Also partially subverted; robots in the Red Dwarf universe have their own religion, but this is revealed to be a method of control programmed into them by their creators; 'good' robots, who obeyed their human masters unquestioningly, went to Silicon Heaven when they died. Even Kryten has no wish to stop believing in Silicon Heaven, even after he's used his newfound ability to lie to short-circuit another robot by telling him that Silicon Heaven doesn't exist.
- This may have been intended as a Take That to Christianity, considering Lister's revulsion and horror when he hears about it. Also has elements of hypocrisy because Lister, when Kryten tells him about it, insists that the idea of Silicon Heaven is "completely whacko" but then asks Kryten if it's the same place as human heaven — to which Kryten answers, "Don't be silly! Humans don't go to heaven! No, someone just made that up to prevent you from all going nuts!"
- Dwarf actually plays with this concept - and the Uncanny Valley - quite a lot. Kryten (along with Holly, and Hudzen-10) have suffered a bit of silicon rot and gone a bit crazy after 3 million years of existance... but all in very human ways, e.g. a quivering pile of neuroses (Kryten), general senility (Holly), homocidal psychopathy (Hudzen). The design of Kryten's head (and in a lesser way Hudzen, though he wears a helmet and mask most of the time) was apparently based upon that of his in-series creator's ex-husband (presumably the guy on the sales video introducing his replacement - Hudzen), as she found him "ridiculous", but then further corrupted to look distinctly artificial and non-human (largely flat panels and angles) to avoid the creepiness effect (and we can probably assume his "funny walk" is for the same reason). During an episode where their perception of reality is being altered, and it is "discovered" that Lister is an android, Kryten reveals that the model series prior to his own actually looked completely human, Terminator style - and were withdrawn for being just too darn creepy. This therefore makes Lister, technically speaking, an inferior model (and subordinate) to the more angular "novelty condom head" Kryten, as well as a fugitive from the recall. (This turns out to be untrue, as it was only their perception and Lister still is human). They also play a bit with various personality-related parts burning out, like guilt/conscience chips (several times, as it's Kryten's main trait, including on purpose by Lister and via the wholly ridiculous action of a Polymorph "sucking" it out of him, with reactions such as him smoking cigarettes or "clearing his exhaust tubes in public"), negative emotion drives, and even a "metaphysical dichotomy" over the "lie" of Silicon Heaven existing... when as we all know, even calculators and talking toasters have sufficient quasi-human AI to be allowed entry.
- Actually, Talkie Toaster fits this trope almost to a T — the toaster can sing, expresses opinions on religion, and several times appears to be more intelligent than the actual crew — eg having a better understanding of the effects of lightspeed travel than the crew does and calling them "bozos" and such. The downside to having such an intelligent toaster is that it drives Lister up the wall, and he ends up hitting it in a few episodes — including once fatally. Based on the above criteria, it probably does genuinely have enough intelligence to get into Silicon Heaven. Why it needs to, however, is another question entirely.
- One of the Red Dwarf books explains that Talkie Toaster was given intelligence and a personality with the intention that it would provide it's owner with polite banter and stimulating conversation over the breakfast table. This failed when the AI turned out to be pathologically obsessed with getting people to eat toast.
- In Gekiranger's fourth episode, Geki Red, Jan, gets poisoned. In a rare case of a Ridiculously Human Robot that is not sentient, the antidote to the poison is administered by injecting it into the arm of the giant robot that everyone is piloting.
- The Robot from Lost In Space shows several human emotions and even contemplates suicide on at least one occasion. Verda, the android who appeared in a couple episodes, actually turned into a human when she felt love for the Robinsons.
- Robert's Robots was a comedy series in which most of the cast were robots with ridiculously human characteristics, such as suffering from "condensation forming on my eyes" at emotional moments.
- Subverted in at least one Doctor Who episode, where a person who thinks that robots should be free of human rule is a maniac and the villain of the story. And is pursued by a secret agent robot.
- It's a dangerous step to go from "Robots should be free" to "I must kill all my fellow humans to free the robots", but that villain takes it.
- Cameron shows some very interesting quirks, not the least of which is her odd affinity for ballet.
- And the episode "Allison from Palmdale" shows her switching over to a normal human personality to disturbing effect. It is made even more disconcerting when we see in flashback that Cameron killed the woman who her personality was based on.
- The question of her humanity is brought up from time to time within the series as well; Cameron will sometimes existentinal questions, and seems preoccupied with the idea of suicide and her inability to do so if she loses control of herself, along with worries about her own mental stability. At one point, she even asks if Sarah believes in the Resurrection, as it relates to Cameron's own "redemption" by John Connor, who is humanity's supposed savior.
- She even develops humanlike possessiveness. In "The Brothers of Nablus" she gets upset (well, as upset as she can get) when her leather jacket gets stolen, and even goes so far as to single out the thief who stole said jacket.
- John Henry qualifies even more so, since he doesn't have Cameron's baggage of being originally designed as a killing machine, and is actively being groomed to be as human as possible. He is shown capable of imaginative play, and loves to play with legos, among other things, and holds genuine affection for the people close to him.
- On Farscape is a class of robot called bioloids, who are Ridiculously Human (or Sebacean, or Scarran, or Banak) for a good reason: they need to infiltrate organizations and replace the people they look like.
- That Mitchell and Webb Look had the Cheesoid, a cylinder-vacuum / tea-urn-esque contrivance made by an ex-robotics engineer and ex-soup-chef (just go with it) to replace his sense of smell lost in an assault, inexplicably has rudimentary but quite human AI and some kind of self awareness. And a sense of smell as bad as its creator, only being able to semi-randomly "identify" (generic) Cheese, and "Petril", in a whiny electronic voice. It gets increasingly vocally depressed about its lot, until after a calamitous mistake (serving petrol on toast, and filling a car's tank with brie) it attempts to commit suicide ... by covering itself in cheddar and attempting to light it, succeeding only in creating a philosophical quandry for itself. "Why petril not burn? Why Cheesoid exist?".
- The pathos of that character... Poor Cheesoid... Oh, the pain!!
- Mack Hartford in Power Rangers Operation Overdrive. His father had apparently decided that his biological clock was ticking, and for reasons unknown he decided to get one from a machine shop rather than a womb. Neither the robot in question nor the viewers were aware of his robotic nature until he picked up a computer virus.
- Some say Top Gear's "tame racing driver," The Stig, is one of these...
- Tom Servo and Crow T. Robot are so utterly described by this trope one doesn't know where to start, although the fact that they are often seen eating and drinking seems like a good place. All of this, of course, falls under both the Rule Of Funny and the MST 3 K Mantra.
- Buffy The Vampire Slayer had to deal with the robotic serial killer, Ted, and the two sexbots built by Warren Mears: April, and the BuffyBot.
- Choujin Sentai Jetman's Grey. Looks completely robotic. Acts very humanlike, which includes liking wines, smoking, listening to music and having the closest thing to 'love' for fellow Vyram Maria. When you notice that most Vyrams are inhumanly Complete Monster, Grey ends up being the resident Noble Demon, who acts quite humanly.
Music
- Janelle Monae's Metropolis is based around an android named Cindi Mayweather who falls in love with a human.
- KILROY of The Protomen is so human-like you'd swear he was wearing a mask.
Video Games
Webcomics
- Ping from Megatokyo sleeps like an actual human when she's in idle mode, can use the chemical energy from sugar to recharge her batteries, and in one chapter, she angrily tells Piro that she has real feelings even though these feelings are simulated. However, she does have a couple of robotic quirks: when she sees Piro all mopey because he couldn't wind up the courage to call Kimiko, Ping misrecognizes his posture and attitude as being rejected by Kimiko, and suddenly goes into Genki Girl mode. Not bad for a Play Station 2 accessory.
- She is also been explicitly stated to be "fully functional," and Word Of God has even implied that she has a working uterus.
- Some of the most memorable characters in the comic Freefall are robots. To be fair, discovering the reason for the robots' humanity has somewhat become a major plot arc.
- "Can we at least try to solve this logically before you robots go all emotional?"
- The webcomic Nine Planets Without Intelligent Life has a cast consisting of nothing but Ridiculously Human Robots, who eat (and gain/lose weight somehow), drink (and get drunk), feel pain and even date and wed each other. It justifies this by explaining that the humans that built them before humans went extinct wanted to make sure robots could better appreciate and interact with normally humans-only pleasantries, such as theme restaurants.
- Pintsize in QuestionableContent seems to have emotions (mostly schadenfreude and lust) and has even gone through a phase of questioning his gender/sexuality.
- "AnthroPCs" in general seem to be designed to combine the functions of a desktop/laptop computer, a pet, and (inevitably) a child.
- Lie Bot and Vlad from Achewood are both robots which are constantly lying, and talking about Make-outs respectively. Vlad, for no reason at all, has an accent.
- On the world of Terra, in Magical Misfits, magic makes artificial intelligences like computers, or robots, living things.
- Robots in SSDD seem prone to developing into this unless they are designed with caps on their intelligence and personality or if they don't have them they usually have their memories erased every few months.
- Various Robots from Gunnerkrigg Court display human-like personalites, and human-like comical incompetence. For example, they hide their presence by labeling their spare part storage room as "NO spare robot parts". Their gatekeeper, Doorbot, was fooled by Annie's Paper Thin Disguise. And the Guardbots attempting to apprehend Annie are completely flummoxed when she runs away from them. A possible explanation for this arises later: the robots are magitek.
- Also, the latest arc features a Robot King (who draws emotions on 'his' face with markers), a Robot Society, in turmoil, nontheless. And let's not even count the fact that the robots aparrently have true emotions, are capable of being moved by a painting and upset by a wreckage. Magitek at its finest...
- Warmech from Eight Bit Theater is convinced it is an example of this, despite being a walking tank.
- Shows up a few times in Sluggy Freelance, usually in different dimensions. Like in this strip:
Robot News Anchor: A massive search party is searching for the missing Secret Angel Princess-Princess as well as GOFOTRON's right arm. Our prayers go out for them both. But more for Secret Angel since she's a person and GOFOTRON's arm is a thing. But then again, I'm a thing, so who cares. Nobody cares about us things.
(beat)
I hate you all.
- The Muses in Girl Genius:
Master Payne: The Muses were renowned as miraculous, beautiful machines — but few would believe they were truly aware. And maybe they're not. It would certainly be easier to create machines that merely simulate emotion. However ... even if her grief is artificial, it is destroying her.
- Oh, and at least some of them are stacked, giving new meaning to Boobs Of Steel.
Western Animation
- The main example is the robot society in Futurama, which peddles this trope to the point of comic redundancy, complete with separate-from-human Robot Hospitals, Robot Pornography and even Robot Insane Asylums for Robot Criminals. In a show that's ostensibly a science fiction satire, it fits in quite well as a subtle Running Gag. In the DVD commentary, the writers kind of lampshade it, pointing out that the funniest things about Hedonism-bot and Tinny Tim (see below) is that someone, for some reason, decided to build and program them that way.
- Not to mention Jewish Robots who believe that Robot Jesus was constructed, and was a very well programmed robot, but was not their messiah.
- Robots even have their own Hell with a Robot Devil. ...Which is located in New Jersey, making it easy to escape.
- Seemingly taken to its absurd comedic conclusion with Hedonismbot, a robot grafted into a permanently reclining position with a roman couch as its legs, programmed for no purpose beyond its own earthly pleasures, but then taken to even further extremes once the viewer learns that Hedonismbot is "Your Tax Dollars at Work."
- No, the absurd comedic conclusion is definitely Tinny Tim, a crippled, destitute, orphan robot. How that even works is never explained.
- One of his arms is a crutch, too.
- Transformers. Need I say more? Their own wiki details how ridiculously human they can get, despite being not even human-made, but alien robots.
- Special mention goes to Sari Sumdac and Alice, both of whom transform into humans (or, in Alice's case, a very humanlike animatron), and were actually mistaken for humans in their initial appearance.
- It also bears mentioning that, despite what Fan Fic writers would tell you, they diverge from humans in that two transformers reproducing isn't exactly as exciting or pleasurable as it is for us- what we evolved sex to accomplish, they accomplish by drawing up blueprints and maybe filling out forms for Mac Guffin use, which doesn't exactly scream "hot eroticism". To most people.
- Parodied on one episode of The Simpsons: a burning robot screams "Why? Why was I programmed to feel pain!?"
- And in another when a peek into the future reveals robots that are so advanced they can even cry... except they're not waterproof and the tears make their heads catch fire and melt down.
- Remarked upon by a scientist disassembling a robot at Itchy and Scratchy Land:
(removing robot's head) I wish they wouldn't scream like that.
- In The Movie, a bomb-dismantling robot cracks under the pressure and shoots itself in the head. Chief Wiggum comments that "he always talked about it, but I never thought he'd go through with it."
- Referenced but not used in an episode that involved robot fighting.
Announcer #1: Can robots actually feel pain?
Announcer #2: If so, then we are horrible, horrible people.
- This is pretty much the core concept of My Life as a Teenage Robot, featuring a superheroic Do Anything Robot built to protect the world from threats from outer space, who happens to be programmed with the personality of a girl teenager. Why Dr. Wakeman felt XJ-9 needed such a frequently rebellious, attitude-prone personality is never really explored.
- It is implied however that Dr. Wakeman, perhaps even subconsciously, created Jenny as a substitute daughter of sorts, which would explain at least some of her personaliy traits if not all of them.
- Parodied or perhaps even subverted in Invader Zim with the eponymous character's robot henchman, GIR. "He" eats, drinks, sleeps, cries, parties down and basically acts like a human child. "He" is also assembled from random bits of garbage, dangerously (and often explosively) defective and the most insane recurring character in the series, which is quite a feat. The only other machines that even speak are a ship that had its owner's personality deliberately downloaded into it for security purposes and Zim's other robotic servants, which also seem to have been infected with his mania.
- Don't forget the apathetic and lazy "Computer", Zim's house AI. Though the least humanoid of robots—-he's a glowing green house, after all—-he ironically seems to be the most rational of Zim's servants, and thus one of the most "normal" characters on the show.
- Speaking of "Computer"s, Dexters Laboratory AI is a feminine presence in most of the facility, and sometimes surprises Dexter with quips and logic counter to his commands. Where it (she?) is not, there are rejected, obsoleted experiments, that are dejected, if not vengeful, over Dexter's negligence of them.
- Mocked in South Park, where AWESOM-O is, according to naïve little Butters, a robot buddy. He's actually Cartman in disguise trying to recover an embarassing video. Butters, however, firmly believes he's a robot despite having creativity, breathing air and eating, and draws the line only after "AWESOM-O" farts.
- While Butters is fooled by the disguise, he never sees AWESOM-O eating and knows that robots don't drink or need money.
- The Robot in the "So Beautiful, So Dangerous" segment of Heavy Metal, while obviously a robot, actively makes a play for the human woman accidentally sucked up into his starship (this being typical robot behavior, according to one of his coworkers). After seducing her he wants to go steady. Also, he shows an essentially flawless grasp of colloquial speech, sarcasm, deceit (with conspiratorial wink), and profanity.
- Cyber 6 in Cybersix.
- Zeta from The Zeta Project certainly qualifies. A soft spoken, innocent, and trusting naieve robot who doesn't want to hurt anyone and can't resist helping people, he's not only more emotional than most humans on the show, he's actually a better person than most of them. The amazing thing is, he was supposed to be a mindless killing machine, not an Actual Pacifist with a heart of gold, meaning Zeta is one of few examples on this list to be here on accident.
- Which makes Zeta the most ridiculous example on this list. Though his appearance has an in-canon explanation, his full range of emotions, human like body language and expressions don't make sense once you realize he's not supposed to have them. At least everybody else on this list was programmed/designed deliberately to be Ridiculously Human.
Real Life
- Project Aiko. *shudder*
- That's uncanny alright.
- Justified in Japanese society: Their aging and declining population, plus their homogeneous culture, coupled with some very restrictive immigration laws, forces them to get creative about replacing themselves.
- But that one's being built by a Chinese-Canadian otaku.
- How is this not awesome?
- Because it's kinda creepy. Well, it would be if it weren't very obviously made of plastic. Thing looks like a life size doll.
- There is mounting evidence that animals with intelligence comparable to humans tend to develop human like characteristics such as strong emotions and elaborate social networks. This might suggest a similar trend might emerge in the field of artificial intelligence, but of course you have to remember that animals and humans faced more or less the same selection process in evolution, which is definitely not true of computers.
- Well, except that that's exactly what AI designers are seeking to implement in their machines - learning algorithms and accelerated evolution. It's been long since discovered that it's largely futile to even dream of building a sentient AI from scratch, and those interested in the field are mainly concentrating on creating the conditions where intelligence might emerge. At the moment this means studying the human brain and trying to mimic its functions.
- Natural selection takes millions of years or more to be effective. Computers have a better process because the flaws in their designs can be weeded out in a couple of years.
- Natural selection is only time-consuming because it has to select tiny differences over generations. It also doesn't have a goal, and conditions tend to change. Simulating the conditions to create artificial intelligence can be much more focused, faster, and involve human intervention to assist/experiment.
|
|
