We don’t normally side with the machines here at The A.V. Club, because we’ve always maintained that the human race is doing a damn good job destroying itself without needing any help, but we also believe that the world of pop culture has plenty of room for new voices—even the digitized hum of cold, soulless robot.…
Fulfilling the grand, dystopian dreams of playwright Karel Čapek—whose 1920 work R.U.R. introduced both the word “robot,” and the concept of people being dicks to robots, to the world—science has finally delivered unto us a robot boy who can bleed and cry on command. Per Wired, Hal—which, c’mon, people, can we at…
Life as an actor may seem exciting and glamorous, but it’s not all red carpets, Tonight Show appearances, and Oscar parties with an open bar. Sometimes you have to fight to get auditions, you wait for callbacks that never happen, and then you end up losing the role to a white guy named Chris. Despite the many…
It’s weird days recently for one of TV’s already-weirdest reality franchises, as Big Brother—the human zoo in which people are kept drunk, bored, and on-camera until they either get voted out of the house, or reveal their most racist and sexist inner selves—lumbers forward through its 20th season on CBS. Desperate to…
Many of us have long assumed that our deaths would come at the hands of vengeful robots, mad because some of us advocated beating them up whenever possible. What we did not assume, however, was that said deaths would have such a Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon vibe to them. As can be seen in the video above, Disney…
Last week, writer and comedian Keaton Patti showed how bots can be a force for good when he said he fed 1,000 hours of Olive Garden ads to a machine and asked it to write one of its own. The result was an absurdist nightmare in the mold of Heiner Müller’s Hamletmachine, a terrorscape where the “pasta nachos” are “warm…
It may not be the nicest restaurant in the world, but there’s something special about going to Olive Garden with a couple friends and splitting a big plate of lasagna wings. Or sharing an order of the Gluten Classico with your spouse. Heck, sometimes it’s fun to just get a table for one and dig in on the unlimited…
We’ve all seen evil machines in The Terminator or The Matrix, but how does a machine become evil? Is it like Project Satan from Futurama, where scientists combined parts from various evil cars to create the ultimate evil car? Or are machines simply destined to eventually turn evil when their processing power or…
One day soon the robots will replace us in all things, whether we like it or not. They’ll be doctors and engineers and even artists and, though we may still prefer human expressions of creativity in this gleaming future, it won’t matter because the robots will probably have us living in rows of vats, sucking out our…
As part of their final promotional push for the new season of Westworld, British broadcasting company Now TV decided to scare the ever-loving shit out of some poor Londoners who were just trying to get a drink. They did this by placing “Fred”—a humanoid robot that’s about as close as you can get to a real-life…
Ghost In The Shell made digitally uploading your brain seem pretty cool, especially if you can eventually drop your memories into a badass cyborg body with purple hair. Even if you can’t do that, though, being able to ditch your fragile meat body so you can live forever among the memes in the cold embrace of…
Are you tired of spending up to eight hours a day folding laundry? Have you had it up to here with piles of unfolded clothes interrupting the most important moments of your life? Do you worry you have way too much room in your house? Then may we introduce the FoldiMate, a $1000 robot that can fold some of your clothes…
As has been our American tradition since our Founding Fathers first gripped the Constitution in their cold robot hands, today saw another ceremonial addition to the hallowed Hall of Presidents—a simulacrum of slack, rubbery flesh spouting empty platitudes, a puppet installed at the behest of giant corporations who…
Sooner or later we’ll all be bowing down to robot overlords, so it’s for the best that humanity humiliate and debase our future mechanical masters as much as possible while we still have the chance. That the machines aren’t in charge just yet was made clear when a San Francisco anti-homeless robot was pushed over,…
The time has come for some new motherfucking robot dogs! Boston Dynamics has previously dazzled and terrified the feeble, fleshy human populace with their stunningly agile humanoid worker replacement robots and lifelike dogs, one of which memorably got the shit kicked out of it on Silicon Valley. They’re capable of…
In an interview that sounds suspiciously like that scene in a movie where one misguided person tries to convince everyone else that the monsters are harmless, the head of Facebook’s AI research facility has suggested that we should stop worrying about Terminators trying to wipe out mankind—or, at the very least, that…
Every advancement in artificial intelligence technology seems like a step closer to one of Hollywood’s many robot-related dystopias. A robot becomes impossibly good at Ms. Pac-Man? That robot will soon be a Terminator. Robots learn how to track humans even when not on the internet? That will be helpful for when the…
Earlier this week, a battle two years in the making was finally streamed live for the world to see. This ultimate robotic showdown between team USA’s 16-foot-tall mech, “Eagle Prime,” and Japan’s 13-foot-tall “Kuratas” was meant to show the destructive capabilities of these massive machines in a heart-pounding…
Fans upset over the introduction of Porgs to the Star Wars universe better grab their inhalers, because Force Friday II—the holiday where you buy special Star Wars stuff, as opposed to all the regular Star Wars stuff you buy on other days—has already begun in Australia. That means that the “brand new addition to the …
The moment when an artificial intelligence becomes smarter than the humans who created it is usually the turning point in a sci-fi movie, and it often happens just before someone desperately tries to unplug a network cable, whacks at some servers with an axe, or futilely clicks the “cancel robot apocalypse” button on…
