[watch this video] Kara

[unjapanologist]

Social experiment: please watch the video before reading any of the text that follows it? There seems to be wide agreement that this is a moving and poignant short, but I'm curious to know exactly why different people find it poignant, so I don't want to impose my framing of what happens beforehand.

Kara (7min)

"Kara" is intended to show off the motion capture technology that will be used for some future games on the PS3. Reading the full article only after I'd watched the video, it struck me how my reaction to it was different from that of Cory Doctorow, whose introduction to the vid on Boing Boing was the only text I read before moving on to the video. He writes that "the unsettling poignancy of this clip arises from the gender and form of the robot". In the comments to that article (which are somewhat iffy in places), lots of people pipe up with where they think the poignancy came from, citing everything from the robot's appearance to her human-like reactions to the music. There's more interpretations in the comments on YouTube (which are iffier).

I found this moving as well, but I'm fairly sure that the "gender and form of the robot" had very little to do with my reaction. For me, this video was all about the story of Kara and the assembly worker, their interactions, and their relationship. Kara is certainly impressively human-like, the acting is good, the music helps, and so on, but all that just works to support what is essentially - for me - a character piece. Some Boing Boing commenters felt the story would have been stronger if the whole thing had been deliberate, a test to see if the robot was self-aware enough. While that might have been interesting, it's not my preferred interpretation, because it would interfere with my reading of this as two characters interacting. If it was all a set-up and the assembly worker's reactions were routine and fake, something he does twenty times a day with every robot he tests, that would mean these two characters didn't really connect. I want there to be shippiness everywhere, darn it.

Comments

[angrymermaids]

I found it poignant from a sci-fi perspective. What if we eventually create a robot that has consciousness but not free will? Will anyone think that these robots deserve rights? What defines a human? She believes that she's alive, but I wonder how many others would agree. Is keeping one of these robots technically slavery? I would think so, but how many people wouldn't? And what about the assembly guy's insistence that Kara behave herself--what would she have to sacrifice to avoid being disassembled? If all the other robots are conscious as Kara is, then they might also have individuality, and that opens up a whole mess of stories that could spring from each one of the identical, boxed robots. What is it like to be aware but literally unable to act with your own agency? What's the life of one of these robots like? Can it even be considered "life"?

All of these questions keep attacking me, and it just gets worse and worse. Furthermore, what is the outside society like that gave birth to a market for all these Karas, not to mention the assembly guy?

[unjapanologist]

The role assigned to this robot certainly seems to correspond to that of a slave. And whether or not people would think of this as slavery may depend on whether people agree that she's conscious/alive enough to be recognizably human; if she is human, and she's being treated as property and forced to work against her will, that's slavery. If she's a machine, it isn't. My own gut reaction is that what we see here is a person; I didn't think of her as a machine for even a moment. Maybe that also has something to do with the fact that the first thing we see of her is her complete, human face. We don't see the face being assembled. The video sets us up to think of her as human.

Furthermore, what is the outside society like that gave birth to a market for all these Karas, not to mention the assembly guy?

A society pretty much the same as our own, I think. People are already trying to build these kinds of robots today, for the purpose of helping in the home, and most people don't seem to mind. As soon as home robots look lifelike enough, I'm pretty sure the first "functionality" expansion people will be asking after is to make them fit as sexual "partners". And I find it depressingly easy to imagine an assembly guy who likes to talk to his (female) creations as if they're human while believing that they aren't. If you're completely used to the things you assemble being machines...

[angrymermaids]

Yeah, I felt that she was portrayed as undeniably human, and I didn't think of her as a machine either.

Looking back into this hypothetical world, the inevitable debate over whether or not Kara is a human would be hideous. There's the faction that thinks that humanity is determined by being born, i.e. an animal. Then there's the faction that thinks that the ability to think and reason like a human makes humanity. And then the one that thinks that free will, in addition to reason, makes humanity. And then eventually you'd have the robot separatists. And then those who believe that Kara is an abomination and that her creators are playing in God's domain, etc etc etc...

The assembly guy's "My God..." at the end actually made me think of Frankenstein once I thought about it for a second. I interpreted it as "My God, what have I done, I built something alive," and wondered if a Frankenstein-esque "I must destroy the abomination" followed. Eurgh. I'm freaking myself out. And then there's the question... if he had disassembled her, is she human enough for it to be considered murder? Maybe not from a legal standpoint, but what would the assembly guy have thought about doing it?

The whole idea of humanoid domestic robots creeps me out. I'm cool with domestic robots that look like, I don't know, a vacuum cleaner with arms (or whatever), but the idea that we'd want an unthinking slave that looks like us seems abhorrent.

(I have been thinking about this video all morning. Each question gives birth to more and more.)