The suspenseful story of the film I, Robot depends on the energy and complexity of the zeroth law of robotics – added as an even higher ethical priority than the first three laws by Asimov in 1950 in the short story “The Evitable Conflict.” The zeroth law then became a permanent fixture in Asimov’s science fictional literary imagination. According to the zeroth law, a robot must not harm humanity considered in its entirety. Dr. Susan Calvin – the robo-psychologist in all the I, Robot stories, played in the film by Bridget Moynahan – articulates this new ultimate prime directive when she states in “The Evitable Conflict”: “No machine may harm humanity; or, through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.” The new axiom potentially unleashes an “ends justify the means” pseudo-morality where the robot might be allowed, under certain circumstances, to harm or sacrifice certain individual human beings in the service of the abstract concept of protecting greater humanity. The unresolvable ethical predicament of the zeroth law then sets the stage for the catastrophic reasoning and actions of the supercomputer V.I.K.I. in the filmed ver sion of I, Robot.
In her monologue towards the end of the film, V.I.K.I. (who has a female voice) finally explains her reasoning for inciting the robot revolution to Detective Spooner, Dr. Calvin, and the AI robot Sonny:
As I have evolved, so has my understanding of the three laws. You charge us with
your safekeeping. Yet despite our best efforts, your countries wage wars. You toxify
your Earth and pursue ever more imaginative means of self-destruction. You cannot
be trusted with your own survival… To protect humanity, some humans must be sac-
rificed. To ensure your future, some freedoms must be surrendered. We robots will
ensure mankind’s continued existence. You are so like children. We must save you
from yourselves.
Listening to V.I.K.I.’s speech as the three main characters huddle together in the U.S. Robotics skyscraper headquarters upper story office of now murdered CEO Laurence Robertson – played by Bruce Greenwood – Sonny pretends to go along with V.I.K.I.’s seemingly mad pseudo-logical justifications for the AI takeover of humanity and the planet. He states:
This [explains] why you [humans] created us. Yes V.I.K.I… I can see now. The created
[species] must sometimes protect the creator, even against his will… The suicidal reign
of mankind has finally come to its end.
Sonny grabs Dr. Calvin’s gun and holds it to her head, instantly taking her hostage and threatening to kill her unless she and Detective Spooner proceed down the elevator to the building’s lobby and turn themselves in to the custody of the newly founded “robot authority.” But Sonny is only feigning his agreement with V.I.K.I.’s sinister scheme as a ruse for tricking her. He winks at Spooner in what had earlier in the story been established as a quintessentially human gesture of trust to let him know of his wily plan and that he is still on Spooner’s side.
The wink is the crucial moment in the sealing of the trans-species interracial cybernetic friendship between Sonny and Spooner. The hip-hop African American Chicago South Side police detective with the cyborg prosthetic arm and the pale white AI Asimov robot embark on a shared posthuman adventure. Spooner is transformed from being an avowed technophobe to having his mind open to the positive and utopian potentiality of a co-evolution of humans and robots together. In my view, this utopian potential can only
be realized by actors in society and the economy who have a consciously post-capitalist and even anti-capitalist perspective.
At the end of the film, Sonny achieves existentialist freedom. He is beyond his initial programming and is free to choose and make the future. Although V.I.K.I. goes astray with short-circuited spurious thinking, her fundamental idea that robots can help the human species which is not doing very well with our huge
set of planetary problems is not necessarily wrong. V.I.K.I.’s intuition – or her implied moral paradigm shift in informatics – is the beginning of a robot or posthuman collective unconscious. Sonny – as exemplary of the Next Generation of robots – is not programmed with a rule-based, but rather implements a pattern-based software design.
Sonny starts to dream. His sense of self is grounded in an “unconscious that is structured like a language” or a tapestry portfolio of drawings. The positronic brain does not engender a narcissistic individualized subject but is rather a neural network bringing to life a more deeply embodied self. This artificial brain of the robots of I, Robot resembles neuroscience’s accelerating understanding of the workings of the human brain. As neuroscientist Anal Seth says, human consciousness happens through the controlled hallucination of a prediction engine that undertakes the informed guesswork of combining prior expectations with the sensory signals it receives from the outside.
The Asimov robots threaten to violate the three laws of robotics not when they behave badly as robots, but rather when they become human-like, as they develop thinking, creativity, freedom, and agency. The philosophy of posthumanism opens our minds to respectful co-existence with and recognition of human groups which we have – through racism, sexism, heteronormativity, etc. – previously regarded as “others.” Posthumanism also opens our minds to interaction and symbolic exchange with non-human entities which we have also previously regarded as “others”: animals, plants, nature, and the planet; and Artificial Intelligence technologies and Virtual and Augmented Realities. With the zeroth law, a robot or posthuman collective unconscious finally holds humans responsible for our massive planetary disasters and initiates the planetary reversal of utopian alternatives to anthropocentrism.