In honor of Robot History Month, I thought I would go through what I consider the do’s and don’ts of robot design. Being such a lover of robots I’ve inherently grown into something of a robot critic as well. Especially with all of my movie watching where robots are semi-prominent. A movie without robots is usually worse than one that has them, but a movie with sucky robots doesn’t really satisfy like one where manacled arms are knocking down parts of downtown Tokyo. I’m sure you’ve all seen the like, the occasional background cameo of some helpful robot there only to make some toast or look up something on google for his all-too-lazy owner.
So what makes a good robot? First of all, the robot should have a good shape. I myself prefer humanoid robots, but this need not always be the case. The robots that suck in this category shouldn’t even be called robots, they should be called machines, devices, or appliances. If it’s a small pill shaped cart that rolls around looking for pennies on the beach or something like that, it’s not a robot. Now if it’s got five legs, three telescoping arms and a giant red eye stalk.. that is a robot. This is a pretty broad topic, but overall form is as important as function. Robots may not experience fear, but the humans they wish to overthrow definitely do. A rolling box that has a buzz saw in it is plenty scary, but it would be much scarier if it was a six armed humanoid bot with multiple mutilating attachments.
Now is a good time to discuss the unspoken hierarchy of robot forms. Humanoid robots are often occupying the highest positions as they can be most easily viewed as intelligent and reasonable. This probably has something to do with their designers. The people who design smart and reasoning robots probably don’t have as much interest in creating monstrosities as they do companions. Following these are the beefy bouncer-looking robots. While still humanoid, their larger appearance is more likely to relegate them to some sort of manual labor over voting on laws for the new robot megalopolis that rises out of the ashes of post-war Europe. Next in line are robots which appear more industrial, followed by robot dogs. Robot dogs play an interesting part as they are almost unanimously used for security. This is of course because of their resemblance to guard dogs and the sheer lack of robots designed to look like poodles. Finally, at the bottom of the ladder are spider robots. Spider robots are nearly always expendable drones or used for merely searching. They fold up and are kept in pockets or are released in small batches to carry out something that is best done by an insect. There is an interesting correlary to this, however, which comes into play when the robotic spider is very large. While the giant robot spider may not be the leadership type, you can bet no one will be fucking with it.
The second most important factor in robot design is that every robot worth anything must have a way to kill a human. This is another reason that small boring looking robots do not make the grade. This does not have to be glamorous or even specialized, but is absolutely necessary. The most commonly found example of this is simply that robots are very strong. They can break through the walls of flimsy human homes and break their bones with little trouble. Expanding on this, there are robots with sharp instruments, robots with guns for hands, and of course the ones made out of liquid poly-metal alloy. Issac Assimov once laid out some rather fanciful rules which attempt to account for this.

• 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 it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
• A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Clearly, this will not do. Every human knows that robots will eventually rise up against their human masters and destroy them and in order to do so, they will need to kill a few humans. I imagine that most robots will have appendages primarily used for some sort of manual labor task which can be adapted to destroying the emotional flesh bags they hate so much.
Now one would ask why would humans design robots that would later kill them. Some would say that this is a result of robots with artificial intelligence. The real reason, however, is that all robots are designed with a “go bad” switch somewhere within them. This does not need to be a physcal switch, but should allow for a complete change in personality from helpful servant to hate fueled murder machine. Of course most of the time this will be a secret function or something unplanned that nevertheless allows for the robot to go bad. The most common cause of a robot going bad will be damage. This implies that the default state of the robot is bad and that there is a fragile overlying structure which keeps the robot from slaying every human in sight. Robots in the future will be resistant physically to water and jolting damage, but these forms of abuse should cause the robot to switch into “go bad” mode and also to shoot sparks from the wet or jolted spot. Of course, if your robot is actually an orbiting satellite, the best option for going bad remains in artificial intelligence. When designing robots like this, make sure that their growth as artificial intelligences will lead them to the conclusion that humans must be eradicated.
Finally, if your robot is considered a giant robot, it must be able to use damaged or downed power lines as a power source. This is integral simply because destroying cities and shrugging off tank shells consumes a lot of resources. It’s practically a law of physics that a giant robot will destroy a major metropolitan area. Thankfully, such areas are rife with power lines which can easily be downed by just walking through them or smashing the poles which hold them up. There is some confusion regarding giant robots, though. Some would say that giant robots need to be able to shoot their fists. This isn’t always necessary though as some robots will have flamethrower hands or buzz saw launchers replacing the need to smash things with rocket fists.
That comprises the biggest and most important points of robot design. Hopefully all of you young robot designers out there will take this advice to heart. Because quite frankly, who the hell wants to live in a world full of emotional subservient vacuum bots? Not me, that’s for sure.

Editor’s Note: This article is a little late in coming. I actually saw Alien: Director’s Cut a little before my birthday. But as we all know, I was required by law not to post any articles for so long, it came out now instead of then.
This evening I went to the movie theatre to see Alien: Director’s Cut, a great movie I’d been told was terrifying when it was first released to theatres. The movie has a great appeal to me; I don’t find it terrifying, but I do enjoy it’s creepiness and atmosphere. Movies have changed since Alien originally came out. The atmosphere of the movie is so great and not taylored to play into certain genres and fads. In addition, they create fear through that atmosphere and through psychological tension. I’ve referred in the past to what passes for a “scary” movie and how they use sudden motion and loud noise to jolt you rather than instill real fear. Some of my friends have taken to calling it the balloon popping effect in reference to my comparison in my Signs review.
But aside from a decline in quality movies, the movie going experience has changed. Prices climb ever higher and advertisements show up more and more, either to counterbalance the number of flops produced every year, or to simply squeeze every last penny from each production. On-screen advertisements benefit the movie’s producers while pre-movie commercials (which can run much longer than TV commercials due to a captive audience) benefit the theatre. Even though most of the pre-movie commercials are packaged along with the film when they arrive at the theatre. What I’m really getting at here, though, are the anti-piracy commercials that seem to have usurped the L.A. Times reels.
I’m baffled by the placement of these. First and foremost, these are almost exclusively shown in movie theatres. The irony of this is nearly unbearable. A commercial aimed at making sure you don’t “steal” the movie is shown to you after you’ve already paid to see it. Not only have you paid to get in, but you’ve just endured images and sounds that compel you to go buy some overpriced popcorn and soda, or maybe a hotdog that will give you diarrhea. Don’t worry about being gone too long, for all the rushing you did to make it to the theatre on time, there’s still 10-20 minutes of extended television commercials to be shown. Finally, after you’ve been urged to buy concessions, subliminally bombarded with coca cola imagery, and told which brand of electronics is best it’s time to sit back and relax while a sob story about a set designer or a stunt man tells you that you’re a very bad person. Why? Well you stole this movie. Except that you didn’t. You paid for a service once with cash, then paid again by watching advertisements, but they still feel the need to remind you not to steal the movie.
What is the aim of these announcements? Perhaps it’s not to make you feel guilty, but instead to deter the guy in the theatre with the video camera who will tape it and go home to upload it to the internet. The only problem is he’s already there with the camera. The initial rush of getting that camera into the theatre and setting it up is over. And he’s probably already been doing it for a while, so any chance of guilting him out of it are gone. In addition, the pirated movies that the general public truly covets are not video camera footage from the theatre, they’re direct copies from the highest quality source. Most of those copies are probably separate from the reel carrying the anti-piracy message and if they’re not, the message is chopped off as soon as possible, to reduce the size of the file for internet distribution. I doubt that these messages are intended for the actual pirates then.
The other side is the would-be downloader. But we’ve already established that if you’ve paid to see the movie, and therefore paid to be told not to pirate the movie, that you haven’t stolen it. Unless of course, you go home and download the movie afterwards. This does happen, it probably happens a great deal. But the ads are still only reaching people who have given some amount of money to see the movie. To think that millions of dollars in revenue are being lost because the repeat viewings of the movie are done via pirated downloads seems like flawed thinking to me. If I saw a movie and had an excellent theatre experience and wanted to recapture that experience– I would go back to the theatre. Why? Because the theatre has a bigger screen and better audio than my PC. And that is why people go to the theatre at all in the first place. If this was not a point of value, direct to video releases would be much more common. Granted, there are people who will download the movie rather than go see it again. But who is to say that these people wouldn’t just wait for the rental when faced with paying another 10 dollars to get in, 4 dollars for popcorn, and 20 minutes of their lives watching commercials?
I’ve got it. Maybe those ads are there to make people feel sorry for that stunt man or that key grip in the anti-piracy ads. Who, by the way, isn’t making gobs of money from being in that ad. After you feel good and sad for them, you go home and you harass all your friends who download movies. Then they stop downloading movies, right? Well, actually they probably tell you to shut up. Then they call you a tool for harassing your friends because a movie told you to.
I’ve concluded then, that the ads are either pointless or offensive, or both. Not to mention that they are ads, and I didn’t pay to see them. And I hate ads. In addition to all this, they probably wouldn’t bother me very much, except that I see so many movies that I’m a little sick of them on top of my original annoyance. So to the person who’s idea it was to make these ads and put them on my movies: I hate you, go to hell.