I... Robot?

The argument of emotion, sentience, and self-awareness differentiating a robot from a human repeatedly circulates my thoughts back to the movie i, Robot starring Will Smith. In the movie Smith plays a detective in the mid-21st century. This futuristic setting allows for the production and widespread placement of robots to act as servants for humans. The robots are relatively intelligent but are completely obedient of humans and must obey the "Three Laws," written by their original designer. From the beginning Smith has a grudge against machines, which you in time learn is because of an accident. A semi-truck locked Smith's car up with another car containing a young girl and her father. The dad was killed on impact and the cars were pushed into a cold river. A passing robot jumped in and calculated that Smith had a 40% chance of surviving vs. the girl who only had 12% and saved him instead of the girl despite Smith pleading and yelling to save the girl instead. This causes Smith to get on the trail of Sonny, the personal robot of the creator of the robots, once the creator turns up dead. Sonny is special because he was allowed to break the 3 Laws. This is important later in the story once it is found out VIKI (Virtual Interactive Kinesthetic Interface) creates a Zeroth law that allows her to circumnavigate the 3 Laws and attempts world domination.

The brass tacks of this movie is that there are two robots, Sonny and VIKI, that are closer to androids because they have their own plan and think for themselves. To me it represents the two different viewpoints people can take on the world, good and evil. I like it because it feels like the screenwriter for the movie made these opposing forces to show that not only people are subject to these decisions. Even the fabled robot that has much advanced processes than the human, can self-evolve and become aware. This concept is not necessarily new but in this movie it is not just in the world domination, apocalyptic, hell-fire raining ideologies that people normally resort to. Sonny represents the good in the world and the altruistic values that people have also evolved to retain. Sonny doesn't care if VIKI takes over the world, she has no hold on him and her main goal is to oppress the masses because humans are violent and cannot be left to make their own rational decisions. Sonny helps Smith because VIKI was the one who indirectly killed his creator (who he refers to as his father) and wishes to harm humans. Which, thankfully, Sonny doesn't care for either and ends up helping Smith to kill her.