Ridiculously-Human Robots/Analysis

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


In reality of course this trope makes very little sense, or at least requires an absurd amount of hand waving to justify. Artists who utilize this trope rarely stop to think that a solid state microchip might favor appreciably different logic than that of an organic bio-electric human brain. We're just supposed to assume that everything which has a certain amount of raw intelligence is automatically going to look human and fit neatly within Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. On a more practical level, the reasons why people decided to design and mass produce human-like robots are usually reduced to them being stronger or more efficient than humans, but that only raises additional question of why they spent so much effort trying to cram all that physical capacity into the human form in the first place instead of drawing up designs which make slightly more sense in engineering and economic terms. And why they decided to give these expendable grunts and mining robots complex neural networks and baby blue eyes in the first place is anybody's guess. Usually these concerns are just ignored because they undermine the plot or themes of the story.