Blood for Robots

M3GAN 2.0, Murderbot, and our increasingly moody machines

M3GAN 2.O/ Universal Pictures

I’ve just come from seeing M3GAN 2.0. and now I’m reclining quietly at my community center, watching a thin red stream of my blood fill up a plastic bag.

Robots don’t need blood, I thought.

We built robots to serve us — to execute certain assigned tasks. They’re a thing. An it. As their programming became more and more sophisticated, it was only logical that robots would get smarter and stronger. But after seeing this movie, I wondered, when did robots get so… emotional?

In M3GAN 2.0, America’s favorite creepy AI mean girl has been reprogrammed, and after all the murders in the first movie, thank God. This time, in order to take down an even meaner, more rapacious AI, M3GAN has been given a paramilitary glow-up. She’s still bodyguarding a grieving child, but she’s also engaging in a lot of Mission Impossible high tech shenanigans, i.e. kung fu and gunplay and dispensing bitchy one-liners. Human activity is a subplot, at best.

Over on Apple TV+, Murderbot, based on Martha Wells’ acclaimed novels, stars a security unit (SecUnit) who has hacked its own governor module, meaning it could go rogue — but mostly it just wants to be left alone to binge human TV shows, chiefly a hilariously bad soap called The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon.

SecUnit’s job is to protect a ship full of touchy-feely human planetary explorers and does so with gruesome efficiency. But SecUnit doesn’t love his shipmates, hell, SecUnit doesn’t even like them. Nonetheless, the stoic bot starts to (maybe) care what happens to them, and just maybe it has developed, ugh, feelings. What a drag.

In both stories, robots are expected to obey their programming — and yet they both seethe with rage, sarcasm, rebellion. Each wants human approval, but also bitterly resent it. The bots are smarter than we are, and they know it so, in their view, how did they end up working for bozos like us?

Is it any surprise that humans have become increasingly terrified about our creations? We’ve built these fabulous Frankensteins, but why? And to what end?

Do we want super-soldiers or house cats that never die? Passive assistants or adorable BFF’s? Obedient children or gods fit for worship?

Both stories want to know who plays the parent now, who gets to be the grown up in the room. M3GAN 2.0 suggests that humans are the Tiger Mom in this relationship and that we keep a tight leash on our rebellious digital offspring. Murderbot often takes the opposite tack — that humans should relinquish control entirely, because machines — free from the squish of emotion — will make better decisions than we ever could.

As M3GAN and SecUnit develop emotions, they grow to distrust the wobbly flow of moods. Feelings aren’t a gift, they’re a problem. Pop culture has reached a point when it asks, without irony, is it possible to be too human?

SecUnit believes anything that doesn’t contribute to safety is a threat. Logic reigns. It’s a kind of Spock robot — emotion must defer to results. Meanwhile, M3GAN is going through a messy adolescence, a nutty mix of ego, jealousy, and control. Emotion gives each bot a competing set of priorities they wished they didn’t have.

This is problematic when you can destroy everything in your path. With superior firepower, you don’t need emotions. Being a killer robot is like being a tiger in the jungle — the food chain needs to watch out for you. But if that tiger starts to feel something?

Do we really want machines with moods? Especially machines that are smarter, faster, stronger than we are and doesn’t get drunk and starts singing “Sweet Caroline” at weddings? What if your laptop says, “I’m just not feeling it today” and shuts down?

As our machines grow smarter and more self-aware — and more superior — we must ask: will human emotion — our empathy, our creativity, our vulnerability— be our salvation? Or our Achilles heel? Will we discover, too late, that humanity is overrated?

Both M3GAN and SecUnit imply that their “lives” would be far easier without emotions. The weird part? They may be right.

So here I sit, carbon-based, fragile and dumb, bleeding into a bag.

I get up from the recliner, a little woozy. M3GAN never had this problem.

I drink some apple juice, bite into an Oreo and wonder, would I give blood to save a robot? Would a robot bleed into a bag for me?

And this: will it ever want to?