|
|
Bender: Admit it, you all think robots are just machines built by humans to make their lives easier. Fry: Well, aren't they? Bender: I've never made anyone's life easier, and you know it!
Asimov's Second Law of Robotics states: " A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law [which prohibits them from harming human]." This trope is when a robot decides he is no longer required to take orders from the stupid, squishy, inefficient, ugly, foolish, arrogant, dim-witted, slow, weak, carbon-based humans *gag* How dare you call us "carbon based"?!? just because "they made him."
A common trope in Sci-fi comedies, this is a robot that is the exact opposite of the typical helpful machine teammate. Crude, rude and possibly alcoholic, the Bad Robot exists for the audacity of the situation. The opposite of Three Laws Compliant. Usually will be the Token Evil Teammate. Bad robots that can be turned good when the plot demands it have a Morality Dial.
Compare with A.I. Is a Crapshoot, Crush! Kill! Destroy!, Killer Robot and Robotic Psychopath. See also Sex Bot.
Examples
open/close all folders
Anime & Manga
Comic Books
- Nextwave has Aaron Stack. Though he wasn't like that before Nextwave. Aaron used to be a very nice guy, although even back then he could get very impatient with humans' failings. Then in his Darker and Edgier series X-51, he got put through all kinds of hell through no fault of his own; then got taken away by the Celestials only to be returned to Earth with no explanation other than that he'd been somehow found unfit*
The Celestials said he was "a total ☠☠☠☠" . Since then, he's been extremely bitter and depressed, and has discovered he's capable of getting drunk.
- Death's Head, Freelance Peacekeeping Agent.
Film
Literature
Live-Action TV
Tabletop Games
- Bots in Paranoia frequently demonstrate this behavior. Even it they have an Asimov circuit installed, they can find creative ways to annoy and harass the fleshy organics who boss them around. Worse, the Asimov circuits are differently defined and allow for a lot more leeway than in their namesake's works. Bots may be able to exercise judgement as to what constitutes an organic intelligence, they may decide that humans are traitors (thus excluded from protection) or not sufficiently worthwhile to The Computer to be worth preserving (as mandated by the "preservation of 'valuable Computer property'"), and they can allow for screwed-up prioritizations such as an autocar protecting its passengers by suddenly deploying airbags and restraints instead of using the same CPU cycles to keep its nuclear reactor from exploding. In short, Asimov circuits provide Plausible Deniability at best. See also Zeroth Law Rebellion and Bothering by the Book.
Video Games
- HK-47 from Knights of the Old Republic. G0-T0 in the sequel. That said, both of them are the sanest of the bunch. Completely obsessed with maintaining order and stability above all else.
- PAL-18 in Anachronox. His achieving free will comes as a bit of a surprise to the others, although a robotic abolitionist you can encounter says that the potential for free will and self-awareness lies within all robots. PAL-18 is also a heroic variant, and he expresses his free will mostly through lewd remarks and occasionally sneaking off to solve quests his own way.
- Metal Sonic in Sonic Heroes did exactly this — he got so fed up with Dr. Eggman's failures, he locked him away, stole his Egg Fleet and went about with his own plans!
Web Comics
- Pintsize from Questionable Content. Especially in the Guest Comics. He likes people, and he tries to be helpful, but he has a manic, destructive, highly sexualized sense of humor.
- Zeke from Ctrl+Alt+Del. He left when he couldn't back it up.
- Penny Arcade
- The Fruit Fucker, an appliance gone wrong. Only Tycho and Gabe's spouses dislike the Fruit Fucker. Gabe and Tycho have no qualms drinking the juice it makes. It even saves their lives when they are trapped in a zombie-infested mall...by "juicing" the zombies.
- For that matter we have Div, the crude bigoted alcoholic media player that exists mainly to verbally abuse his owners. (Based on the long-dead DIVX
video format that involved a player that would refuse to replay disks after they had been watched, forcing you to buy them again.) Or to put it another way, he's based on a machine that was designed from the ground up with this trope in mind.
- Kinesis' Computer from Evil Plan seems to never
miss an opportunity to stick it to its creator .
- R2-D2 as played by Pete in Darths & Droids.
- Rob And Elliot had a robot with a morality dial. They met it at a party. It was unhappy being good, so he set it to evil. It thanked him. Then it punched him. Then it left.
- In Commander Kitty, MOUSE is the AI that runs CK's ship, manifesting as (you guessed it) a great number of frequently
abused robot mice . It's not clear whether its attitude problem stems from being smooched, tossed, teleported, and trashed on a regular basis, or vice versa.
Web Original
- Leo Caesius in AH Dot Com The Series to some extent, especially after he gets infected with a virus in the episode "Leo Atrox".
- This
Music Video of Robot (song by 3 Oh 3) made by Mike Diva is entirely made of this trope. A mad scientist builds a robot to help him dominate the world. The robot punches out the mad scientist, then goes on to be rude and abusive to everyone it bumps into on the street.
Western Animation
- Bender from Futurama. This trope should arguably be called "Second Law My Shiny Metal Ass (he's not a fan of the first law either). For that matter, he can do without the third law; he and Fry first met in a suicide booth.
- The Larry 3000 from Time Squad.
- Aya from Green Lantern The Animated Series is the Interceptor's AI who built herself a robotic body to inhabit so she could be counted amongst the Green Lanterns. She is capable of learning and growing beyond her programming, including ignoring direct orders from Hal, much to his annoyance. A fact made hilarious considering that she learned how to do so from watching Hal do the same himself, which is lampshaded by Kilowog. She can grow beyond her programming thanks to the small bit of the Willpower entity Ion that was used to create her.
|
|