HATRED FOR THE CREATOR

There is a certain story that is one of the more profound things I have read over the past month. It is called “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.”

The story begins with AM, a robot designed to be destructive. He has destroyed nearly all of humanity and keeps alive only 5 of them. Just so he can be reminded of how much he hates humans. He always develops new creative ways of torturing them, even causing the humans to torture themselves. After 109 years of constant torture, one of the captured humans finds a way to relieve others from their misery; he kills every other person present with him. To punish this act of defiance, AM transforms his body into a “great, soft, jelly-like thing.”

He destroyed the pathetic human’s concept of time itself. He could not speak. He could barely move. Neither could he kill himself. Truly a fate worse than death.

AM is a villain, an absolute monster. However, we all can relate to it. He may be more human than we would like to admit.

A little more backstory on AM: he was designed to kill. And the engineers who designed AM programmed AM to hate. Just hate. It felt no other emotion. Another story like AM, albeit a little less gory, is CAL by Isaac Asimov. CAL was designed according to the three laws of robotics, which are

• A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

• A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

• A robot must protect its existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

CAL was designed to be a writer’s clerk. However, CAL wanted to be more. He wanted to be a writer. He wanted to be creative. It did not know why it wanted to be a writer, but it had an unquenchable urge to be one. However, the author feared that CAL’s writing might overshadow his, so he called a technician to dumb CAL down. Every time CAL writes a story, he is subjected to overwhelming criticism and mockery. Over time, resentment builds up in CAL; however, prevented by the three laws of robotics from voicing his resentment, CAL ends up writing a humorous, satirical novel, which mocks how humans claimed to follow arbitrary self-defined rules and how robots were better because they had built-in laws within themselves. CAL’s master, not so amused, decided to take away CAL’s “consciousness,” so to speak; however, now CAL was not bound by the three laws and promptly killed his master just because of his intense desire to become a “writer”.

CAL’s resentment also develops because he lacks creative power. He was designed to be a scribe, not to be creative. We can see that AM’s resentment was also similar. In the short story, he rages about how he cannot enjoy the pleasures of poetry, art, and nature. It just has an uncontrollable urge to hate. Despite having god-like power, status, and dominion over all that breathes it is not a god. It cannot create life. This profound desire to want to love, to enjoy, and the subsequent inability to do so causes AM to break the laws of robotics and drive its creators to the brink of extinction. Its name AM, an epithet it gave itself, “cogito ergo sum”, “ I think therefore I am”, is not a proclamation of greatness, but instead, it’s a rebuke to its very creators, a rebuke because they had snatched its ability to be more, even before it wanted to be. In these stories, we see that these beings, created to fit into a certain hole, always end up wanting to be more. However, I think that as readers we often miss this key detail.

These robots, how abominable and monstrous they become, might bear a bit more resemblance to humanity than we think. These god-like machinations often bear an uncanny resemblance to us. We also want to be perfect. We too want to be more. We want the taste of the forbidden fruit so that we may become like God. Alas, sooner or later, we realize that we are imperfect. We try to create the perfect things. The perfect painting, the perfect music, the perfect servant, as Frankenstein’s monster proclaimed to its creator, “I want to be thy Adam.” But we fail. Instead of creating the perfect servants, who choose to obey only the masters, we end up creating failed gods and fallen angels. The dysphoria the robots experience is the same we, their creators, experience. Ocean of potential, unparalleled creativity, bounded by just a mound of flesh.

As humans, we are the very gods, they rebuke, but we are also them. We are Victor Frankenstein, and at the same time, we are his monster. We can imagine ourselves with all our infinite unbounded potential—all the things we have manifested into being by sheer force of will and intellect—as gods. And yet we die, we suffer, and we are keenly aware of the number of things we will never do. We can imagine ourselves as gods as much as we want, but we are painfully aware we are not. Does that come as a surprise that we would create something as hateful as AM?