Robotic Alloparenting: A New Solution to an Old Problem?
2016; University of Maine; Volume: 37; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0271-0137
Autores Tópico(s)Space Science and Extraterrestrial Life
ResumoIn the second Terminator film, Terminator 2: Judgment Day (Cameron, 1991), there is a poignant scene in the desert. Sarah Connor (played by Linda Hamilton) and her son John (Edward Furlong) have escaped the depredations of the T-1000 terminator (Robert Patrick) for the time being, thanks to the intervention of the T-800 terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) which has been sent back in time to protect especially the life of John Connor. Sarah is gearing up for her attempt to assassinate the computer scientist Miles Dyson (Joe Morton) who is about to be responsible for designing the (ultimately) evil Skynet computer system. Sarah has collected weapons and other gear from a stash kept by her friend Enrique Salceda (Castulo Guerra). The assassination will not succeed, as it happens, because John and the T-800 will intervene. During our scene John is shown playing with the terminator as Sarah looks on. In voice-over we hear her thoughts about what she is seeing:Watching John with the machine, it was suddenly so clear. The terminator would never stop. It would never leave him, and it would never hurt him, never shout at him, or get drunk and hit him, or say it was too busy to spend time with him. It would always be there. And it would die to protect him. Of all the would-be fathers who came and went over the years, this thing, this machine, was the only one who measured up. In an insane world, it was the sanest choice. (Cameron, 1991)It is a short scene (barely 1% of the whole film), but a moving one. In it Sarah Connor imagines the terminator (an autonomous robot) as John's pseudo-father, protector, mentor, and even playmate. In the security of knowing this about him, she leaves the scene suddenly and with little prospect of surviving her mission. It is this supposition of a paternal role for the robot that interests me in this paper. That supposition comes to fuller fruition in the most recent of the Terminator series.In Terminator Qenisys (Ellison, Goldberg, and Taylor, 2015) the T-800 terminator, still played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, is now cast explicitly as the Guardian of the young Sarah Connor. Indeed, we are told that the terminator has raised her on its own from the age of six years (the young Sarah is played by Willa Taylor). This element of their relationship runs like a small red thread through the film, including speculation (and confirmation thereof) about a rich emotional relationship between Sarah and her Guardian, a relationship that will prove to be a barrier for Kyle Reese at the end of the film, even though the vicissitudes of time travel plus parallel universe creation destine him to be the real father of John Connor. In this new version of the history of the Connor family, the terminator itself is now cast in a much fuller parental role. Indeed, what we have here is a fuller exposition of the theme introduced in Terminator 2: the robot as alloparent. Moreover, the alloparenting function of the T-800 has evidently been carried out with signal success, for the adult Sarah Connor (Emilia Clarke) is quite evidently a well-adapted adult member of our species, someone in whom psychosocial maturity, emotional maturity, and intellectual maturity, all combine in a very attractive and effective way. Whatever the trauma of her first six years and whatever the potentially maladaptive effects of those trauma might have been, it is evident that she and her Guardian have formed a most resilient dyad, capable of surmounting those early traumatic events and producing a successful human adult, one who is about to make a momentous and (as we know) successful choice of a mate. It is this notion of the robot as alloparent that I wish to address most directly in this essay. Just how plausible is it to suppose that a social robot, even one so sophisticated as the T-800, could serve as an alloparent? My thesis is that the two films together posit an affirmative answer to that question. Recent scientific evidence, I will argue, also tends to support the plausibility of both films' hypothesis. …
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