The Robots

…and the question: why do I paint so many of them?

(Acrylic on Canvas)

I started to write the answer to this question and found myself writing an annotated bibliography instead of an answer.

I do that a lot.

Because there's a lot of fucking noise in my brain and sometimes it would just be easier for everyone if people read a primer before they asked me shit.

Why robots?

Because they are the perfect reflective blank slate onto which we can engrave the questions of what it means to be human. They embody a metaphoric duality: they stand in for us while simultaneously standing in as the ultimate other.

Ethologists (folks who study animal behavior) have been trying for a very long time to convince humans to pause and consider the complex phenomenological being of animals. Not based on the needs/wants of humans, but on the experiences of being of those animals themselves. In their own languages. Dragging the human mind away from its narcissistic self-absorption is hard enough when we ask people to just, you know, stop being dicks to other humans. When we ask them to step into the realities of different species? That is often a bridge too far.

I have found enormous wisdom in the lives of dogs and trees and the bean plants I killed the first time I tried to grow a garden. My dog has a sense of humor; we have inside jokes. The bean plants, sadly, have gone beyond the veil and cannot share these jokes with us, so I can't report on that. The challenge to empathizing with very different beings is they have the audacity to actually exist. We humans... well, we seem to find that insulting on some level.

Robots, unlike dogs and bean plants, don't really exist in an everyday kind of way. Which makes them easier to imagine ourselves into, which makes them better for storytelling. There are robots, obviously, but they're still a long way off from what Asimov, Wolfe (of the Gene variety, not the Thomas variety), and PKD imagined. And those are just the bodies. The minds aren't there either.

Every LLM that people call "AI" so they can sound super advanced and pull the synthetic wool over the eyes of stakeholders is just a hyped-up complex slurry bot that barfs up likely sounding statements based on whatever unfairly stolen data it was trained on by immoral jackasses (except in the cases where the AI in question is actually 700 humans pretending to be a unified synthetic intelligence).

"Likely sounding," by the by, is not a hard to reach benchmark when nearly 60% of the population in the U.S. reads at OR BELOW a 6th grade level.... And when it's in the best interest of the people who design such things to play on the dopamine weaknesses of the human brain. Not to mention the profitable role of soul-crushing lonliness. It sure is easy to sell a so-called AI companion to people who are so fucking lonely they live in terror of other humans. People turn to LLMs rather than counselors, therapists, spiritual guides, and friends for the same reason that they like deities: none of the above can show up in person and fuck up the self-aggrandizing delusion by needing things, like reciprocity and compassion.

That delusion, that we are at the center of something when we engage with bots, is dangerous. We often forget that the systems that surround us are not meant to work well, they're meant to route us along particular paths. When we rely on systems and external machinery to do our thinking, we blunt the sharp edge of our human genius by following expected paths instead of making accidents and being surprising.

I see I've digressed. As usual.

Robots.

Robots, when considered as beings, make clear the narratives of programming, free will, individual consciousness, the creation of self vs inherent traits. The way people react to robots reflects the limits of empathy and the necessity of something much more intentional. Robots embody the experience of dissociation and the possibility of reintegration. They are the potential of the real.

Humans can live entire lives in denial of the real. Distracted from depth, alienated from connection, deprived of a dozen kinds of nourishment, we somnombilate our way down paths that soothe or jostle us in ways and directions that someone else determines for their own gain.

I depict robots over and over and over for a few reasons. One, I can pull them apart and the result isn't gruesome horror, it's intricate investigation of being. Two, the metaphor of their cold solidity is interesting to me as a person who knows what it is like to need armor to survive. And, finally, three: because the struggle to become and stay conscious of being in the world is hard, scary, and deeply fucking weird. If Allan Watts was right, and we are the universe experiencing itself...well, that's an existential shit ton of experiencing. It's a lot. It is dangerously tempting to become mechanized and routine to ensure safety, in a quiet little space where no one asks anything of us and we don't need to take others' realities into account.

It matters that we don’t make that choice. That we remember we have the capacity for choice and action, well beyond what’s presented to us. We may have our own kind of programming, but we are capable of freedom and hard contact with the real; we are capable of building narratives of compassion, even when it's not the sleekest story option.

Maybe looking at robots can help us remember that we're human.