Why Can’t Robots Stay Robots?

Alan Turing’s original 1950 proposal for what we now know as the Turing test—an experiment to gauge whether a machine can convincingly act like a person—hinged on a party-game concept he called the “imitation game.” A man and a woman hide behind a curtain; the party guests ask the hidden players questions; the players answer in writing; and then the guests try to determine whether the man or the woman is providing the answers.

Turing proposed to replace one of the players (the woman) with a machine, changing the game from man versus woman into man versus computer. In other words, a classic test to determine whether a machine can pretend to be human was based on another test of “fundamental” identity: Can a man and a woman act like each other? This is but one of manifold ways that the history of AI reveals how ideas about gender are embedded into the way humanness is conceived. Just think of the way companies give feminine voices to “smart” household appliances such as Amazon’s Alexa; the gendering is intended to make “her” seem domestic, harmless, and ready to serve.

A deep ambivalence about what it takes to be human comes across in The Wild Robot, the hit animated movie about a service robot that crash-lands on a remote island and has to adapt to its new surroundings. Based on a best-selling book by Peter Brown, directed by Chris Sanders, and voiced by an outstanding cast including Lupita Nyong’o, Pedro Pascal, and Kit Connor, the film has charmed parents and children alike with its lusciously rendered imagery, dramatic soundscape, snappy dialogue, and heartwarming plot. Its protagonist is the stranded robot, Rozzum 7134, who forms relationships with the animals on the island—and, most important, develops maternal love for an orphaned bird.

At its core, the film is about parents and children: how the hard work of caregiving creates a mutual bond. But what starts as a winking nod at the challenges of parenting ends up a heavy-handed fable about the primacy of human values, with an emphasis on the idea that a gendered role is essential to becoming human.

From the start, Rozzum must figure out its place as a customer-service machine in a world that doesn’t seem to need one. It wanders the cliffs, shores, and forests in search of a “task” to complete. “Did you perhaps order a Rozzum helper robot?” it asks a skeptical squirrel. “Is that a no?” it continues. “Here’s a free sticker. Scan the code and get 10 percent off.”

Happenstance gives it a reason to stay on the island. When it accidentally crushes a goose nest, the sole surviving egg hatches, and the gosling, laying eyes on the robot’s face, immediately imprints on his new parent. Pinktail, a possum mom passing by with a litter of possum babies, explains that Rozzum is now the orphaned bird’s mother. “I do not have the programming to be a mother,” Rozzum objects. “No one does,” the animal retorts. “We just make it up.” The robot takes on the chore of raising the bird (“Task acquired, return mode delayed”) and initially interprets “mothering” as simply keeping the bird alive—an ironic comment on the idea that the complexities of motherhood could be reduced to a chore.

With the help of a mischievous fox named Fink, who takes on the role of surrogate dad, “Roz” learns how to soothe their new child, whom they name Brightbill. In a bedtime story that relays Roz’s journey to motherhood, Fink bestows a female pronoun on her, marking the moment that she becomes dedicated to Brightbill’s well-being and, apparently, develops the capacity to love. Yet she continues to bemoan the “crushing obligation” that “has delayed me, damaged me, and violated my protocols.” No, Fink corrects her: She feels “very lucky to be a mother.” Any hardship or bodily harm, he implies, is worth facing to become a mom.

Roz’s shift toward humanness is not coincident with but contingent on her shift to motherhood, which becomes not only her task but her purpose. Even when the job is technically complete and Brightbill takes off for the flock’s annual migration, the robot doesn’t leave the island, instead waiting and longing for his return. Weirdly, when Rozzum acquires the role of “mother,” her hardware also seems to acquire a kind of biological essentialism. The fact that a gosling can imprint on anyone could have served the opposite point: not that anyone a child latches on to becomes a mom but that caregiving can exist in any number of different capacities, independent of gender. It could also have also shown that sometimes caregiving is really just work.

That Roz’s subservience makes her the ideal mom is a telling inversion of the “Born Sexy Yesterday” film trope—embodied by characters such as Leeloo in Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element, Ava in Alex Garland’s Ex Machina, or Bella Baxter in Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things—whose innocence and naivete also happen to make them unselfconscious sex objects. Roz, with her programmed eagerness to serve, signifies the flip side of that trope: something more like “Born Maternal Yesterday.” Roz’s evolution toward motherliness is evident in the way her robotic voice transitions to warm feminine expression (a change expertly reflected in Nyong’o’s voice acting). Here, the foundations for the ultimate customer-service appliance are essentially the same as for the self-sacrificing mother.

[Read: What is a robot?]

This turn toward the maternal is key to other directives that Roz assigns herself out of an emerging desire to help the animals survive. For the first half of the movie, her animal friends make plenty of wisecracks about how easily animals die in the wild. Fink eats everyone he can find; Pinktail acts mildly annoyed when one of her rowdy offspring turns out not to have been devoured by a predator. As an elder goose notes, Brightbill would likely have perished had he not been adopted by a creature with the dedication to raise him and the skills (extendable arms, logical deduction) to keep him alive.

But Roz teaches the animals to act against their nature—to befriend one another, accept Brightbill, and work together to survive. In fact, she labors so hard to do so that her metal body starts to fall apart. A standoffish, pretentious beaver with a British accent (voiced by Matt Berry) can’t help but come to respect her, and chews her a replacement wooden leg when her metal ankle is crushed. What seems like a story about the ways that robots and animals are not like humans becomes a story about the benefits of becoming human, or, more to the point, being “civilized”: Roz builds everyone a cozy home to live in, a plot point that illustrates her evolution toward embracing humanist morals and nuclear-family structures.

Of course, an island food chain would collapse if bears stopped eating fish and foxes stopped eating eggs, a clear contradiction to the film’s ethos of cross-species cooperation. In one of the first scenes, Roz learns to scrabble up a cliff by copying the movements of a fiddler crab (which is immediately swiped by a seagull). By the last scene, feral and moss-covered, she’s loping along in a shambolic approximation of a large mammal. What if Roz had turned animal rather than human in more profound ways? That might have meant killing a bear that, at one point, tries to attack her. Or what if she’d stayed a logical-deduction machine? If so, she might have determined that the island ecosystem didn’t need intervention and let the gosling perish, thus leaving the cycle of life unchanged. (This version would have been less suitable for a children’s movie, to be sure.)

[Read: What AI can teach us about the myth of human genius]

Notably, The Wild Robot features almost no actual humans, save a few in the control center of Universal Dynamics, the mega-conglomerate that produces and monitors the robots—and wants to retrieve Roz, with her valuable, newfound humanlike knowledge. We’re given to understand that the “wild” island, if humans discovered it, would be turned into the type of sanitized, space-age agriculture dome that houses the company headquarters. And despite a climactic battle, ultimately, that’s where Roz ends up: in the final scene, Brightbill finds Roz in the dome, docilely tending to crops alongside dozens of identical machines. Although Universal Dynamics has extracted her intelligence and rebooted her, she magically remembers and loves Brightbill, whom she’s kept in her “heart.”

In its depiction of Roz and Universal Dynamics, the movie makes obvious references to the Czech writer Karel Čapek’s eerily prescient 1920 play R.U.R., known for coining the word robot (based on robota in Czech). The titular acronym stands for “Rossum’s Universal Robots,” an island factory that produces humanlike androids. Although the machines’ inventor is concerned with metaphysical questions—do intelligent robots disprove God’s existence?—his engineer son sees the potential for major profit and manufactures robots for sale around the world, with disastrous results.

The word robota is derived from the Czech for “forced labor,” and the play draws a clear comparison between the robots’ instrumentalization and the way that people are exploited. That last image of Roz doing agricultural labor among identical robots echoes this idea. But Roz doesn’t come across as angry in that scene; unlike Čapek’s robota, she’s not leading a rebellion against her overlords. She’s content, because she’s fulfilled and gratified—by the experience of motherhood, of a nuclear family. Watching her read a bedtime story to Brightbill earlier in the film or tend to an orange tree at the end, we might consider whether becoming “human” should mean conforming to narrowly defined roles—or whether we might imagine more expansive ways of being, for robots and for ourselves.