PROMPT: What kind of robot would you like?
I'm at 480 words. I should probably add some more reflection, but I don't know where... I didn't want to ramble too much about Star Wars. Feedback/ideas?
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If I could have any robot, ever, I would totally have a droid from Star Wars. I suppose an astromech droid like R2-D2 would be the most practical. However, in my heart of hearts, I would want HK-47. He’s so cool, and also hilarious. Except HK-47 is also an evil assassin droid who wants to kill basically everyone (the title of this blog post is a quote from him), so I’d only want him if he definitely wouldn’t murder me. If I’m being totally realistic, I don’t know what I’d do with him. I have the feeling that he’d get fed up with my normal life, and want to kill people instead.
In reality, I would want the opposite of a droid from Star Wars. My ideal robot would not look humanoid, and would have little to no personality. Robots are basically in your complete servitude, so if you think about it it’s kind of disturbing if it acts like a person. I understand it’s fun to get quasi-human interactions without any consequence (how many of us have or have wanted to ask Siri ridiculous questions?) but if I think too much about it, humanlike droids are creepy. Even though I half-joked about getting a droid from Star Wars (half, because HK-47 is cool as hell, okay), if those droids existed in real life, I would kind of freak out over the ethics of it.
Really, a robot would be most useful to me if it mitigated my stress and work in some way, so most of what it would do would be taking care of school-related tasks. It could take dictations or record lectures, or remind me about important stuff. I know these tasks sound like stuff you could just have your smartphone do, but dictation on iPhone sucks and also, you have to set reminders yourself. It’d be cool if the robot were smart enough to remember to-dos or events after just hearing or reading about them. For example, if it saw in my email that there was an event, it would ask me if I was going, and if I said yes, it would remember and then remind me later at an appropriate interval. (Like, if I was meeting someone, it would tell me an hour or so in advance, not 5 minutes.)
Having a robot like this wouldn't help me be more responsible -- the opposite, probably -- but hopefully this robot will stick with me for life. In order to facilitate that, I guess my biggest requirement would be that only people I approve of can use the robot. I don’t want it to get hacked or stolen. I have no idea how this security measure would be implemented, but hey -- if I’m describing an ideal robot, with no limits, I’m entitled to some hand-waving.
Oh, and if it could bring me food that’d be cool too.
I really like how you answered the prompt in two different ways in your essay. You answered in both from the perspective of what would be cool and from the perspective of what would be practical. This duality in thought seems like a natural reaction to the prompt and I had a similar one. You managed combine the two different ways to answer the question into one coherent essay, while preserving the thought process of the conflicting reactions.
ReplyDeleteI really liked this essay. I think your two perspectives on the robot question are both very interesting especially the ethical question. I also liked how you opened up with stuff about HK-47 who I had forgotten about. This post does a really good job of opening up to readers and showing personality without having to try and tell something too deep about the you.
ReplyDeleteVery good essay. I like the contrast between practicality and aesthetics when you are talking about what robot would be cool (personally I would try to find a balance). I also like how you discussed that there might be ethical problems with the robots. If you wanted to add in some reflection, you could explain why you find HK-47 so cool.
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