Robopocalypse by Daniel Wilson

Loved it. World War Z with robots.

I don’t use this word a lot, but it was very creative. You might think, Screw this, I’ve seen Terminator. Well, this is better. Trust me. It takes the concept to a far more interesting place from start to finish, and there’s no complicated nude time travel involved.

It also adheres to what I think of an important rule of fiction, the Rule of Witness. Basically, how does the narrator know what he’s telling me, and why is he telling me? Robopocalypse has a really well-thought-out way of not only working around this problem that’s so common in fiction, but of integrating it into the story.

Read it. One of Pete’s Top of 2011, fo sho.

That said, there is one thing that bothers me about these robot uprisings.

In general, the scenario goes something like this:

It’s the near future, we’re very reliant on our mechano-men, and all of a sudden some bad shit goes down and they all turn against us.

Okay, I’m down with that.

But the one thing I never understand is Why Are Domestic, Helpful Robots Given the Strength of Ten Men? That part, to me, never really makes sense.

Yes, I understand that it would be helpful to have a very strong robot who could, I don’t know, haul a huge load of bricks on his back. But why not give him a human amount of strength and pair it with increased endurance? That way, the robot could easily unload the car. It just takes a minute longer, but he wouldn’t be able to punch down your house if something went wrong.

Or take for example, the problem of grip strength. Every robot has a vice-like grip that lets him crush a skull like it was nothing. For what? What scenario would require a grip strong enough to powder human bone? I would pose this theory: Giving a robot super grip strength would only be harmful.

I actually listened to this on audiobook, and I listened to part of it on the way home from the grocery store. I was carrying an overloaded plastic bag, and I just barely made it in the door before the bag shredded itself to pieces. Now, an increased grip strength would not have helped me get the bag home intact. The tensile strength of the bag allowed it to only hold so much weight, and that weight is way lower than what I’m able to carry.

In short, the objects of our world are not strong enough to test the limits of human strength, so what would be the purpose of a robot with ten times the strength of a human?

I suppose you could say that it might be useful for a robot to grip a lugnut and twist it off when you need a quick tire change. But if that’s your plan, why create humanoid robots at all? Wouldn’t the purpose of a humanoid robot be that we wouldn’t have to create an entirely different set of tools and environments for the robots? The elegance of them is that they could do what we do, the way that we do it. So it’s either lugnut-changing robot with built-in torque, or it’s humanoid robot who can use a tire iron.

I just don’t understand the conversation between scientists who are building these robots. Is there one mad scientist who just wanted to make the strongest robot possible? Does his assistant not forsee any possible problem with this?

Even a simple machine, a nailgun, has a safety measure on it that supposedly only allows a nail to be fired when the gun is pressed against the wall. It’s not perfect, but it’s SOMETHING. Why wouldn’t robots have something similar?

I think the answer is simple, and somewhat the point of these robot uprising books and movies, which is that humans can be very lazy and quickly get used to machines doing things for them. There’s really nothing wrong with that until we lose the ability to understand the principles behind the machines, at which point we lose control. I get that, and it’s a valid point.

So I guess this is my plea to scientists: If you’re working on robot projects, please consider not making the robots a hundred times stronger than yourself. Just consider it. I know you think it would be really cool to make an indestructible robot that looks like a horrific skeleton with glowing red eyes, but I would ask that you refrain. Just don’t.