We love RoboCop and Terminator 2 for their action and characters.
Imagine youre Detroit cop Alex Murphy.
Youre an ordinary man in every respect: a loving husband and father with a home and a mortgage.
But then you wake up one day and you arent Alex Murphy anymore.
The hands you look down on are no longer your hands.
Your memories have been replaced by directives.
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He can still think, yet hes no longer a man.
At the films conclusion, RoboCop succeeds in overriding his programming and rediscovering the old Murphy within.
But even here, theres a note of poignance: his body is still encased in metal.
InTerminator 2: Judgment Day,James Cameron created a similarly tragic story which runs counter toRoboCops.
The T-800s understanding and emulation of what makes a human can only take it so far.
This summersTerminator: Genisysaimed for a similar note of pathos but flew wide of the mark.
We dont see the transformation from soulless killer to protector with a hint of humanity.
But theres another element to these films: the tragedy many AIs face is the same as our own.
The whole notion of the artificial being, or automata, was a particular obsession of the Enlightenment era.
The sailors were so terrified that they threw the automata overboard.
Through these stories, we can wrestle with the questions surrounding our own existence.
We were born, and some day we will die.
