doxa.comunicación | 27, pp. 295-315 | 297

July-December of 2018

Idoia Salazar

ISSN: 1696-019X / e-ISSN: 2386-3978

Universal Robots (RUR) in which, for the first time, the term robot was coined, derived from the Czech word robot, meaning servant or worker (Saiz Lorca, 2002). In it, the company that gives its name to the work built high-capacity artificial humans that took on the heavy workloads of its regular workers. Although they had been created with good intentions, the revolt against humans finally broke out.

The precedent was created, and its apparent feasibility led other authors to follow this line in their Science Fiction stories.

In 1950 the Russian writer and scientist Isaac Asimov, used the word “Robotics” in his work Runaround (Asimov, 1942) and began to become popular from short stories called I Robot. His vision at the time foresaw the possible ethical implications of those machines that were beginning to take shape in the imagination of Asimov readers. Consequently, he established the three inviolable laws of robotics that, today, are still in force in the minds of the scientists who develop them:

A robot cannot harm a human being or, by inaction, allow a human being to be harmed.

A robot must comply with the orders of human beings, except if such orders conflict with the First Law.

A robot must protect its own existence to the extent that it does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

With time, and by introducing more and more evolved robots into his stories, Asimov completed his three laws with a “Zero Law”, which is a generalization -or rather a qualitative leap- of the First Law, since it says that a robot cannot harm Human-ity nor, by inaction, allow humanity to suffer harm.

Since then, robots have been widely represented in literary and cinematographic fiction (González-Jiménez, 2018). The Star Wars saga left us friendly R2 D-2 and C-3PO (Kurtz and Lucas, 1977), always ready to help the Jedi. Their director, George Lucas, endowed them with reasoning, defects and virtues that resembled humans, which created a certain sympa-thy with the massive audience of these films.

Terminator, however, flooded the viewer’s mind with reasonable doubts as to whether the evolution of robots and artificial intelligence in general will be favorable to humans. There will be some good ones, like the Terminator (Hurd and Cameron (1984), starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, and others even more evolved and harmful like the cyborg able to change shape. How to fight against this? This saga presents us with a predictable holocaust for giving “too much intelligence” to machines. One more dilemma to think about when leaving the cinema.

I Robot, inspired by Asimov’s book of the same title (Asimov, 1950) introduces the robot Sonny. The film is set in the year 2035, a time when artificial intelligence, and all that it entails, is already part of the everyday reality of life on Earth. De-tective Spooner (Will Smith), who hates robots –although he himself admits to having robotic implants in his joints– is in charge of investigating the possible murder of a scientist at the hands of a robot –Sonny–. In spite of the 3 laws of robotics implanted in the positronic brains of each robot, it seems that Sonny is able to evolve in his reasoning, even over passing these apparently unbreakable laws. As the film progresses we see how the machines begin to reason for themselves, pro-tected even by their 3 laws: VIKI, the positronic brain that directs this whole highly mechanized world, sets in motion a revolution of the robots, under a firm purpose: to protect Humanity from itself and from its instinct of self-destruction.

Another cinematic work that definitely makes you think is AI (Artificial Intelligence) (Spielberg, 2001), directed by Steven Spielberg. In the middle of the 21st century, the American company Cybertronics creates the prototype of a robot-child capable of showing love for its human possessors. A robot son, called David, who even has a robot teddy bear, who watches