Mister 8

Fiction, especially spy fiction, is rife with robots created by evil geniuses bent on world domination and/or destruction. Sometimes those robots are destroyed by superhero secret agents, but sometimes they miraculously develop a moral consciousness, turn on their creators, and choose to do good. Let’s take a look at a pair of those today!

The first is truly a “cybernaut,” a human-looking (specifically Dick Gauthier-looking) bot named Hymie, invented by Dr. Ratton and dispatched by KAOS to kill Maxwell Smart (of Get Smart, naturally). In the end, when Hymie’s creator calls him a monster, he short circuits and is able to overcome his programming and save the day:

Hymie became a full-fledged member of CONTROL, though he was sure to say that his first preference is IBM, which he thought would be a, “nice way to meet some intelligent machines.” I’m wondering if, since the Avengers episode that seems to have coined the term “cybernaut,” hadn’t aired in the U.S. yet, if the episode where Hymie first appears was the first time American audiences heard the word. I also wonder if the writers of Get Smart used the term independently of the Avengers?

(For anyone interested, Dick Gauthier sells autographed pictures of himself as Hymie, for a relatively inexpensive price, as far as celebrity autographs goes.)

Our next good guy robot is not from a secret agent television show, but, like Jonny Quest, exists in a world predicated on Cold War tensions. Even beating out the Pixar movies, which I adore, this is my favorite animated film of all time: The Iron Giant.

Based on a novel by Ted Hughes, The Iron Giant was directed by Brad Bird, who later went on to make The Incredibles and Ratatouille. The film features a giant metal man who crash lands off the coast of Maine, and the young boy who teaches him about the important things in life: love, fun, Superman. A four-story tall robot is hard to hide, and so rumors begin to spread about the Giant. Those rumors are investigated by the U.S. Army, specifically Kent Mansley, who comes to see the Giant as a threat to the American way. Mansley, though the villain of the piece, does have a semi-valid point: the Iron Giant is a weapon, though with Hogarth’s help, he learns to suppress his violent programming.

If you haven’t seen this film, go out and find it. Playing the voice of the Giant is by far Vin Diesel’s best performance, and I still prefer this over Bird’s Pixar films. If you have seen it, perhaps you’ll enjoy revisiting the climax of the film:

Two questions to think about today:

1. Isn’t a robot that breaks programming, by it’s very nature, defective?

2. Is it wrong (speaking hypothetically) to build robots that do bad, or morally ambigious things, to give them self-awareness to realize this, and yet to not allow them to break their programming?

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A few additional notes:

NOTE #1:

I play pub trivia every week with my wife and other students in my program. Our trivia czar is a swell guy, and each week, the winning team gets to choose a category for one of the rounds of the next week’s trivia. My team had won the week before, and so last night, we answered questions in a category of my choosing, “60s spy TV shows.” We aced the round. How would you have done?

1. Who was Maxwell Smart’s partner on Get Smart?
2. How many seconds does Jim Phelps have before the tape self-destructs?
3. What is the cover career of Alexander Scott and Kelly Robinson?
4. Why is KAOS located in Delaware?
5. If you referred to yourself as a Steedophile, you would be a fan of what show?

Bonus: For whom was Artimus Gordon a sidekick and master of disguise?

Unfortunately, we lost all of our points on a wager in the final round, so we didn’t get to pick the category for the following week. Maybe next time!

NOTE #2:

The next Man v. Machine post may be a little late, because I’m having a birthday party tomorrow night! Expect our week-long look at spies and technology to extend into the weekend, and perhaps even spill over into next week….