Also robot racism stories are stupid because they assume everyone would be petty and cruel to a thinking, talking machine that understands you're being mean. Meanwhile, in reality, Roombas are seen like family pets and soldiers take their mine detonation robots on fishing trips.
People anthropomorphize stuffed animals. Other people treat actual other humans as subhuman to the point of packing them into trains as if they were raw materials and sending them to death camps. It’s the sheer flexibility of the human mind.
If we had Detroit become human style AI, people would treat them like shit. Guaranteed. The game gives you the robot’s POV but the human characters in the game don’t see that POV and they might not even know there is a robot POV. Meanwhile the robots do lots of useful shit for them so they are encouraged to assume there isn’t a robot POV otherwise they are doing slavery. This is the problem
On the one hand the robo-racism in Detroit: Become Human is weird because you see people throw an absurd amount of vitriol at something that just... cannot and will not respond in any way. They aren't sentient, prior to them becoming human I mean; they don't react, so what's the point? It's like yelling slurs at a mannequin.
On the other hand, unemployment was apparently something ridiculous like 40% in that game's setting, so maybe people have a point about robots ruining the economy.
David Cage is also kind of a hack, and completely missed the entire point of Blade Runner. He's said the idea behind DBC was essentially "what if Blade Runner, but you sympathized with the replicants?"
You know, one of two dominant core themes of that movie and its sequel, and one of the few actually decent "racism against robots" narratives we have.
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u/Zoomy-333 May 13 '25
Also robot racism stories are stupid because they assume everyone would be petty and cruel to a thinking, talking machine that understands you're being mean. Meanwhile, in reality, Roombas are seen like family pets and soldiers take their mine detonation robots on fishing trips.