Raised by Robots

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

An artificial lifeform raises a normal child, whatever the 'normal' standard is. The reasoning can be different each time; sometimes the parents are absent, but still around, leaving the robot as their only friend. Other times the parents are dead outright leaving the robot to be the only parental figure the child has.

Compare Raised by Wolves, Robo-Family. Sub-Trope of Promotion to Parent.

Examples of Raised by Robots include:


Advertising

  • There's a Geico ad where a woman tries to save money by enrolling her children in a daycare run by robots. It does not go well.

Anime

  • In Kurogane Communication, Haruka is raised by five robots: Spike, Trigger, Angela, Cleric, and Reeves.
  • Ruri in Martian Successor Nadesico was raised by a prerecorded program that was meant to be "the perfect parents". Also her best friend was a robot.

Comic Books

  • Magnus, Robot Fighter: Our hero was raised by the freewilled robot A-1, who trained him in robot fighting.
  • In the Sillage Prequel Series Navis the title character is raised on a jungle planet by a robot. However, she can also apparently talk to the local animals and has a tiger-like creature for a friend, so it kinda overlaps with Wild Child.

Film

Literature

  • The book I, Robot opens with the first short story about a young girl named Gloria and her nursemaid Robbie, who happens to be a mute robot. The plot of the story is to get him back after Gloria's mother returns him to the factory for fear of her daughter coming out strange due to the influence of the robot.
  • This was discussed in a short story by Spider Robinson, in which a time traveler, interested in studying the nature of humans, travels through time to ask a wise man whether an experiment was ethical: kidnapping children otherwise doomed to die in order to have them raised by robots using a language stripped of all religious references to see if they develop religion. The catch? The intensely curious wise man doesn't get to know the outcome of the experiment if he says it was unethical to kidnap the doomed children.
  • In Edda by Conor Kostick, the main character, Penelope, was raised by a sentient artificial intelligence being. From his virtual world, he is able to control the life support in the real world that keeps Penelope alive, and he raises her: her body is kept alive by his controlling the machines, and her mind is hooked up to the virtual reality equipment that puts her in Edda.
  • In a couple of Philip K. Dick 's stories a totally sociopathic character is this due to robots replacing families.

Live Action TV

  • Zev bellringer in Lexx was raised by malfunctioning robots after being sold to the wife bank on the planet B3K.
  • The sociopathic villain of the Doctor Who story "The Robots of Death" was raised by robots.
  • An episode of Welcome To Paradox was about a facility where humans are raised by androids, and free humans from outside trying to free them.
  • The Twilight Zone episode "I sing the Body electric" is about children who were raised by a robotic nanny, and grow up to love her as a mother. It was remade into a TV movie name The Electric Grandmother
  • Deconstructed in a Star Trek: The Next Generation, where Data creates a robot daughter and attempts to raise her. She actually surpasses Data in her ability to simulate humans, such as using contractions and briefly experiencing fear. She ends up "dying" in the end, from irreparable damage to her "brain".

Web Comics

Western Animation

SLEEP LITTLE DUMPLING, FOR I HAVE REPLACED YOUR MOTHER.

  • Zim from Invader Zim loved the cold unfeeling robot hand that raised him.
  • Zig Zagged by Sari from Transformers Animated. She's a human raised by a human, who later loses her father to kidnapping and has to live with the Autobots in a warehouse until he shows up. Then it's revealed that she's a techno-organic, which means that she was a robot raised by a human raised as a human later partly raised by robots.
  • The robotic nanny from The Jetsons.
  • Sidekick: Eric is left alone to run amok with only Maxum Brain, a hyperintelligent computer, to keep him in check.
  • On Legion of Super Heroes, Superman-X was cloned from Superman's DNA and raised by the robot(s) who created him.
  • Buzz Lightyear of Star Command has a less dramatic example: one episode features a human girl adopted by robot parents, but in this world robots are sapient and emotive, so it's not really any weirder than, say, a white family adopting a black kid.
  • In the Donald Duck cartoon "Modern Inventions", Donald sees a robot nanny in an exhibition and decides to test her out by pretending to be a baby. Turns out the robot is still a little buggy and treats him rather roughly.
  • Larry 3000 from Time Squad acts as a maternal figure towards Otto. Buck's around, but isn't Otto's father or very "fatherly" in general.
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