The problem with the robot is that it did too good a job of treating human beings as equally valuable.
It sought to make its best effort to save human life. It chose the one most likely to succeed.
The issue here is that Will Smith character valued the girl’s life above his own. The robot was not programmed to take that into account.
The robot was doing its job at improving the chance it would save a life. What if the robot had calculated that the girl had identically zero chance of being saved but Will Smith didn’t realize that? Would it still have been the “wrong” decision?
Actually what we have in this case is a totally and objectively pro-life robot, and does not discriminate. Smith preferred to sacrifice himself in order to give the girl a chance to live. Keep in mind that by the time Smith knew the reasons the robot saved him, the emotional impact of the moment had already passed. The robot may even have realized that Smith, when giving the order, did not have all the information available to make the decision as it did.
The “correct” solution to this particular dilemma would be for us to program a system into the robots whereas the robot could learn how to place a numerical value on different human beings so when a decision has to be made it can be weighted in favor of the preferred ones.
Perhaps the robot did the best thing in the long run. If the robot had saved the girl in the first place, then Smith would not have been around to save the rest of humanity. The girl was sacrificed for many, though not by her own will but circumstance.
We humans, especially macho men, like to say, “women and children first” and the traditional context is about who gets the lifeboats when there aren’t enough or when there isn’t enough time to all escape from whatever the problem isl. That’s good strategy for humanity, because it keeps the future intact. However, it is not an absolute law, in that if the men are the ones who know and have ability to lead, navigate, or whatever, then somebody should go help the women and children (if you want to view is less sexist then just say “children”). For example, we wouldn’t put a boat with 20 children under age 10 with no marine experience in favor of a boat with maybe 18 children and one adult to guide them?
On an airplane, one is admonished that if pressurization is lost, one must put on one’s own oxygen mask first so one doesn’t pass out while assisting others. This is the other side of “women and children first.” Take that as an absolute value system, and those who need assistance are not likely to be helped by serving first, as those assisting them will not be able to breathe.
The movie, I think, juxtaposes absolute and relative, in terms of behavior systems. If the robot behaves exactly as programmed, we don’t get what we want. We want to have human interpretation above and beyond any written rules so that in a critical situation we may override our previous notions of what good behavior is.
Personally I think this was the message of Christ. The law, as interpreted by Christ, was not hostile to humans but only to sin. The law, as interpreted by everyone else, was robotically applied (at least in some cases) and that’s what I think Christ was against. For example, if the law says one caught in adultery must die by stoning, then a robot would be obedient to the law, and that is the role the people took in the parable. Christ introduced human reason and compassion into the equation, which transcended written law.
To me, the message is that no law, no matter how simple and harmless it seems, if carried out with perfect obedience to the law as written, will be able to replace human love and compassion as decision making tools. There had to be a disobedient robot to break the chain of power, once the decision making process had led them into a position of control.
Strictly speaking, in human decision making, one may actually have to choose which of two pro-life actions to take. We want to have the flexibility to make a decision based on human intuition (or guidance of the Holy Spirit) that goes against all previous rules.
If Christ were a robot like the others, he would not have let his people pick and eat grain on Sunday. He would not have prevented them from stoning the prostitute. I think that is why we need to be careful not to live up to anti-Catholic’s claims of being “legalistic.” We must have an out for human love to make a decision based on the future situation, whether or not the scenario was envisioned in designing the laws with which we claim to live by. Remember that of faith, hope, and love, the greatest of these is love. The robot followed its rules in perfect “faithful” obedience, but did not try to factor in “love.” The rules it followed were human rules, designed by humans who didn’t realize what their own rules implied in a particular situation.
Alan
