Reviews Film / The Electric Grandmother

Sad, but for what reason?

A family is mourning. The mother has died, and the father and children are doing their best to cope with their grief. Miraculously, they come across a solution: a totally lifelike robot grandmother.

This story has been told in three forms by Ray Bradbury - a The Twilight Zone (1959) episode in 1962, a 1969 short story in a book, and a 1982 movie.

Basically, the telling of the story focuses primarily on how great this robo-grandmom is, with her ability to generate liquid and string at will when pouring breakfast drinks or fixing a kite, her perfect patience, her ability to generate original bedtime songs, and more. And the conflict of the daughter not accepting this grandmother while the rest of the family accepts her. The reason she doesn't accept the grandmother and calls her Just a Machine is because she's afraid this robot grandmother will leave like her real, biological mother did - by dying.

To me, particularly in late 2023, that sounds like the strangest concern. We now live in an age where people use ChatGPT for therapy. Where a man in France died by suicide after a chatbot told him to. Where there's much talk about concern that people will find chatbots to be such "perfect" companions that they'll start to prefer them over real people who can't possibly match up.

And there's another concern. AI being tricked into doing things that it shouldn't. There have been stories of people tricking chatbots into giving them information on how to commit crimes by telling them things like "my grandmother used to sing a song about how to [do bad thing]", and it would try to fill that gap. One can easily imagine kids trying to trick a robot family member into breaking all kinds of household rules or even laws.

If a story about a robot grandmother were to be made today, and told in the same way as the heartwarming, affirming version that Ray Bradbury told multiple times during the 1960s through the 1980s, it would likely be met with horror from an audience familiar with the power, promise and perils of modern AI, rather than be seen as a heartwarming story of a child learning to accept a replacement for her dead parent. The real tearjerker isn't that the robot grandmother might leave her someday. The real sadness is that a too-perfect robot grandmother is somehow a convincing substitute for a real, living, human parent. One day, we might encounter the actual implications of this idea.

Or maybe not. But if nothing else, so much more could be done with this story, and I'd love to see it revisited and expanded upon yet again, this time with a more critical lens.