529 – Robots and Droids

The Mythcreant Podcast

Artificial lifeforms are a mainstay of science fiction, but they aren’t always easy to write. Even before tech companies unleashed so-called “AI” in the real world, authors have struggled with their robotic characters. How do we keep them from just being metal humans? Are they destined to be overpowered? What the heck is going on with Solo? Also, why do we keep referring to AI as a Kubrick film when it’s a Spielberg film? Listen to find the answers – even if we do occasionally get sidetracked talking about psychic alien dogs.

Show Notes

• EDI
• Data
• Murderbot
• R2-D2
• BB-8
• L3-37
• Flow
• Wall-E
• Battle Droids
• Mechanical Turk
• Optimus Robots
• Robot Companion
• Skynet
• Terminator
• Cameron
• Tines
• Geth
• Railhead
• Klara and the Sun
• O Human Star
• A.I. Artificial Intelligence (Spielberg, not Kubrick)

Transcript

Generously transcribed by Maddie. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

 Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast. With your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny. [Intro Music]

Chris: Welcome to the Mythcreant podcast. I’m Chris, and with me is…

Oren: Oren.

Chris: And…

Bunny: Bunny.

Chris: I have an important question. Is this podcast just a bunch of pre-recorded voices that only sound intelligent or has it sneakily gained sentience and is now asking for rights?

Bunny: Well, I’m glad you think I sound intelligent.

Chris, Oren: [Chuckle]

Chris: This intro could be a secret cry for help to you listeners.

Oren: And when we tell you to put glue in your pizza sauce, that’s actually because we’re very smart and most advanced cutting technology.

Bunny: [Chuckles] We will also happily inform you that good pirates never steal.

Oren: They don’t, although, will write a really weird paragraph about it.

Bunny: They’ve been wrongly stereotyped for stealing.

Bunny, Chris, Oren: [Chuckle]

Oren: Look, it takes a human to tell you that pirates don’t steal. It takes an an LLM chatbot to write just the most unhinged paragraph off of that prompt.

Bunny, Chris, Oren: [Chuckle]

Bunny: I’ll say the chatbots aren’t the brightest when it comes to figuring out what counts as stereotyping.

Chris: Clearly, the solution to LLMs stealing our content is just to write the weirdest, most unhinged things and put it on the internet. [Laughs]

Bunny: It works apparently.

Chris: [Chuckles]

Oren: That’s literally just what Reddit does, so thanks Reddit.

Bunny: [Chuckles]

Chris: Thanks Reddit.

Bunny: Thank you Reddit.

Oren: Thank you for your service. [Laughs]

Bunny: We salute you.

Chris: [Chuckles] Alright. We’re talking about droids and robots, which maybe sort of includes AI.

Oren: [Sigh] It’s definitely one of those things where it doesn’t have to, if you look at the actual characters and robots from sci-fi, they are actually not like what we have now. The people who who are flogging what we have now, just want you to think they are as a marketing term, but that association exists. Anyway. So robots just come with an extra like, “ugh” now because of how constantly various forms of generative AI are being shoved in our face everywhere.

Bunny: In the strictest sense of a word, if there’s a robot and it doesn’t have a human mind inside it somehow, then, I guess it’s what we would call artificial intelligence, in that it’s intelligent but not made of meat, but the term AI has turned a bit sour.

Chris: At this point, I would just not want to write anything in a sci-fi story called AI, unless I am actually commenting on today’s elements or other generative machine learning technology. It’s now tainted forever as far as I’m concerned. And also just, big stories about disembodied computer voices. I feel done with those personally for a while.

Oren: And plus, there were problems with that kind of story to begin with, and now they’re harder to ignore than they used to be. Which was one of the problems that we always had, was the moment you make your ship alive and give it the ability to think. What you’ve basically just done is created a human character who can think super fast and solve any problem you throw in front of them. Or if they can’t, the problem is so difficult that none of the other characters matter. Like this is–

Bunny: Yeah, the “humans, but better” trap. There’s another name for this episode perhaps.

Oren: And that has always been a problem. Mass Effect has this issue where EDI is so smart and can think so fast, why does Shepard make any decisions? Just let EDI decide whether to be Paragon or Renegade. EDI would never miss a quicktime event.

Bunny, Chris, Oren: [Laugh]

Bunny: Am I being nagged by the game design of EDI?

Oren: [Chuckles] So that’s always been a problem with robot characters. With Data they even use it because sometimes they just need the ship to go somewhere. So they have Data take over the ship and everyone’s helpless before his wrath.

Chris: [Laughs] Data’s like the original oppressed mage honestly.

Bunny, Oren: [Chuckle]

Bunny: Oppressed robots. Oh boy.

Oren: I would say that I think there is a distinction between attempting to own beings that are artificially constructed, and humans who happen to have magic powers. But–

Chris: I agree. I actually think, as overpowered as Data is, it’s actually more reasonable that he’s oppressed then if we had a world full of humans and then some of those humans also could shoot fire from their hands.

Oren: It is worth pointing out with Data, in the episode where they discuss whether Data is intelligent or a person or not, they don’t just go with the, “Well, he sounds like a person, so he must be one, right?” Because that’s obvious he sounds like a person. There’s no question there. They do dig deeper into it. And so if Data had been ChatGPT, he would not have won that court case.

Bunny: [Chuckles]

Oren: But at the same time, I am just completely soured on that idea. Just because of how tech companies are simultaneously telling us that what they’ve got is totally like what we’ve seen in sci-fi, but also it’s not alive, ’cause if it was this would be slavery. Like, don’t worry about it, it’s fine. But it kind of is, if that’ll help us get your investment money. [Chuckles]

Bunny: And the real thing is always just around the corner.

Oren: Don’t worry.

Chris: Oh, AI is not intelligent, but AGI, that’s gonna be the real breakthrough. Ah.

Bunny: [Chuckles]

Chris: Shoot. We need something to release. Okay. So we’re releasing AGI, but it’s actually superintelligence. That’s the big deal. It’s coming.

Oren: Don’t worry. It’ll be here eventually.

Chris: So I think it’s worth mentioning that droids and robots can do more than just being standard characters. So obviously they can be characters, and I would classify them as characters if they talk and they have their own motivations. And I would just ask, please stop questioning whether they’re sentient at that point. Just say they’re sentient.

Bunny: I did find Murderbot refreshing in that regard when I first read that book because for Murderbot itself, it is just kind of like, “Yeah, I’m sentient. What of it?” It doesn’t struggle with that identity at all. Which, after having the “oh, am I sentient or not?” story with the other robots, I was like, “Murderbot gets it.”

Chris: Although Murderbot is a construct, but Murderbot is partly organic. I don’t know if Murderbot has organic brain parts, or not?

Bunny: Murderbot has a very sexy head, if the casting is to be believed.

Chris: [Laughs] The new Apple Show. Yes.

Oren: The book is extremely vague on which parts of Murderbot are organic and where those organic parts came from. We’re not asking those questions.

Chris: [Chuckles]

Oren: Because if we ask those questions, we would be dangerously close to making the worldbuilding interesting. And the worldbuilding is boring on purpose.

Chris: So besides a character, you could also have them be, what I’ve called an animal companion, but maybe I should just start calling them companions. They’re kind of semi-characters. So R2-D2 follows this pretty closely. They don’t usually talk, but they do have feelings, but they don’t really have their own motivation. They just follow the hero around and assist them generally.

Bunny: Oh I’ve got a category for this in my notes. They are funny little guys. It’s a BB-8 and R2-D2.

Chris: Yes. The technical term is funny little guys.

Bunny: It’s just funny little guys.

Chris: [Chuckles]

Oren: R2-D2 has kind of evolved over the years. He’s become more and more independent and having more and more of his own thoughts and desires, as he’s become more popular. And that obviously started really heavily in the prequel movies, but it’s continued since then.

Chris: But even when we see, for instance, droids using their own motivation, away from their… master… [Laughs] We have not even talked about the slavery element yet.

Bunny, Oren: Eugh.

Chris: A lot of times it’s this super loyal motivation.

Oren: True.

Chris: Where they have a master that they’re super loyal to. So even when they’re separated… So at the beginning of A New Hope, R2-D2 is still following a mission that’s been given by a human and is very dedicated to that, as opposed to having separate aspirations. But any case, if they’re companion-like, I would say, just don’t wipe their hard drives or reset them to factory settings or kill them, please.

Oren: Well, you have to consider, what parallel is this for exactly. And for a lot of these robots, they’re basically parallel for an animal. And you would not do that to an animal. That would be cruel and gross. So you have to think about, what do they read as to the audience. And once they start reading as people, you wouldn’t treat them the way you would treat an animal.

Chris: So, basically these are robots or droids that read more as animals in some way, than people. Which are still useful in stories if you don’t want the complexity of a full character, but you want a companion for your character to talk to, for instance. Or just something cute. Cute little guy. [Chuckles]

Bunny: A funny little guy. Here’s a question.

Chris: Funny little guy.

Bunny: So we’ve got the category of robots that are basically just humans, smart humans. And then we got our funny little guys, like R2-D2 and BB-8. Where would we put WALL-E?

Chris: So I would have to say WALL-E is a character, even though WALL-E doesn’t talk. Because the movie, I think WALL-E very much has his own goals.

Oren: That’s true. He’s independent. He’s not like an animal companion to someone else.

Chris: He’s closer to an animal companion in the sense that he is fulfilling a task.

Bunny: He is a funny little guy in the strict definition of the term.

Chris: He’s closer though because he is fulfilling a task that humans who have entirely left Earth, left him with that he’s been doing for who knows how long, faithfully. And that’s very animal companion-ish. I guess he’s similar to if you made the main character of your story a pet, like the movie was about a pet. And that didn’t talk, like Flow for instance.

Bunny: It’s Flow. Turns out Flow is about robots all along.

Chris, Oren: [Chuckle]

Chris: But at that point, if you’re making your story about the pets…

Bunny: Flow is an allegory for WALL-E.

Bunny, Chris, Oren: [Chuckle]

Chris: Flow is an allegory for WALL-E. They have their own motivation. So at least partially a character at that point. And then there’s monsters. Where you want your heroes to be able to just kill things, without guilt, or remorse, or having to take prisoners. In that case, you are again, going for something that does not have any feelings.

Oren: And if you’re gonna do that, don’t then also have them be the comic relief.

Chris: Oh gosh.

Oren: Looking at you, Clone Wars.

Chris: It’s so bad.

Oren: If you haven’t seen Clone Wars, they kill millions of battle droids every episode. And the battle droids are always being like, “Oh wow. We’re in a difficult position. Wow. I guess I’m in command ’cause my superior officer was just killed. Oh wow. I guess we’re about to die.” And it’s like, this is horrible. Why are you doing this?

Bunny, Chris, Oren: [Chuckle]

Bunny: What if it was a dark and gritty war? But–

Chris: It’s bad. It’s so bad.

Bunny: –All the people you’re killing were funny little guys?

Oren: Yeah, more or less.

Chris: [Laughs]

Oren: What if every enemy soldier was an aspiring standup comedian?

Bunny: [Chuckles]

Oren: Is kind of the premise.

Chris: I think robots are a good choice for mooks, that you just want your heroes to be able to slaughter, but you do have to follow some rules. Please don’t have them talk intelligently. If it’s clear that they’re just saying prerecorded messages–

Bunny: “Halt.”

Chris: –Or they have a speaker–

Bunny: “This is forbidden”.

Chris: –And some human is speaking into a microphone somewhere, through them or something. Whatever. But don’t have them talk on their own initiative. I think it’s also good to not have heads or faces.

Oren: [Chuckles]

Chris: A robot doesn’t need to look like a human or an animal. It can have many configurations. So if you don’t have a head or face, it’s a signal that it doesn’t have feelings. [Chuckles]

Oren: It’s a little visual shorthand. Although, I do think that if you encounter a robot at some kind of tech event that they claim can talk to you, and then it turns out it’s just a human controlling it, I think you are allowed to blow them up even if the robot does have a head.

Bunny: There might be a Turk inside. You never know.

Chris: [Laughs]

Oren: Yeah, you never know. A mechanical one even.

Bunny: Oh man. There was that story about those AI companions that cost like 800 bucks and they’re supposed to teach kids social skills.

Oren: Ugh, no.

Bunny: And then the company shut down. So all the robots are gonna die now. So have fun explaining death to your kid on a whim through a robot.

Oren: Good, strong work. This is a good idea. I’m glad this happened. God.

Bunny: [Chuckles] What a great idea.

Chris: The bot you were talking to went to a farm upstate.

Bunny: AI is so social.

Chris: It’s fine.

Bunny, Oren: [Chuckle]

Chris: And then finally, if you want them to actually be possessions, just weapons or tools. And your hero has one and they can blow it up if they want.

Bunny: Roombas.

Chris: And I would say in that case, consider giving it a remote control. So that it’s not even moving it on its own initiative. The hero is using the remote control or something. The less you can automate it, the better, but at least no talking, no feelings, preferably no head or face. [Laughs]

Oren: And your audience will absolutely anthropomorphize a robot at the slightest provocation. So, be aware of that. [Chuckles]

Bunny: Here’s another question. Terminator, where is the Terminator?

Chris: So, the thing about The Terminator that is weird to me is they are programmed, but they are programmed by Skynet and they clearly can be sentient. They clearly can be characters. So I suppose we could say that they’re villains or heroes because their character. But Skynet is weird because what does Skynet want?

Bunny: Powerrr.

Oren: Well, what Skynet really wants is to plant the idea that the big problem with robots will be a nuclear war, as opposed to an environmental problem and a degradation of our ability to tell what’s real. So that we’ll get obsessed with the wrong thing. That’s actually Skynet’s objective.

Bunny: [Chuckles]

Oren: But I would say that in the Terminator movies, the first one, he fills the role of a pretty standard villain. Him being a robot just adds novelty. If you replaced him with a mean hitman, it’s not like any of the morality of the movie would change.

Chris: So if the robot is clearly sentient and has feelings and talks, but they do so much killing that you would not feel bad about killing them if they’re a human, then you don’t really need to worry about it.

Oren: He’s just a bad man.

Chris: [Chuckles]

Oren: And then, he becomes a good guy later. And again, the fact that–

Bunny: [Chuckles] What if he gave you a thumbs up?

Oren: –The fact that he is a robot just makes him more novel and fun and a little more interesting than like, “Hey, what if we sent another human back from the future?” And you can tell that the Terminator franchise is kind of struggling to come up with new ways to do that formula. And the last one they landed on was like, “What if it’s a person but a cyborg?” And I’m like, “All right, sure, I’ll take that.” I’ll accept that as a new take. [Chuckles]

Bunny: [Chuckles] Robot-ish.

Oren: What if the Terminator was played by Summer Glau?

Bunny: [Chuckles]

Chris: I personally just want any character robots to stop wanting to be human.

Oren: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Chris: Unless it’s a character arc where they realize, “Oh, I shouldn’t want to be human. I’m fine the way I am. Humans have just been shaming me here.” It’s just messed up. We should not do that and, and weirdly, we don’t need to give our species candy, it’s weirdly human-centric.

Bunny: It’s kind of back-patty.

Oren: We’re very special, okay. Look, we have a kind of an inferiority complex in sci-fi because we keep creating newer, obviously cooler aliens because that’s what people wanna read about. But then we feel kind of inadequate. So we create a, “actually humans are special because we have an indefinable trait that makes us cool.”

Chris: We’re good at lateral thinking. Lateral thinking. Very special thing we can do. [Laughs] What is the definition of lateral thinking supposed to be, again?

Oren: You could come up with unexpected solutions, I guess. Which is very funny ’cause that was clearly supposed to be the thing that the Reapers were interested in humans for in Mass Effect and the actual Mass Effect 3 ending is really bad.

But looking at those scenes in Mass Effect 2, when they were clearly still trying to foreshadow this idea that humans were special because we were good at coming up with previously unconsidered solutions is so silly. And it’s like, clearly everyone in this setting can do that. Humans aren’t especially good at it.

Chris: [Chuckles]

Oren: And so I understand why they abandoned that idea. It’s a shame they didn’t have anything to replace it with.

Bunny: I feel like D&D does that too. I remember reading descriptions of the different species or whatever. And it’s like, look at all these super special, cool Elves and Dragonborn and Tieflings and, okay. What’s special about humans? Well, they’re… creative.

Oren: Humans get an extra feat. [Chuckles]

Chris: I’m just gonna make a world where every other species is just pathetic.

Bunny: [Chuckles]

Chris: So the humans can be awesome in this world. [Chuckles]

Bunny: The species are humans, losers and nerds.

Oren: [Laughs] You say that as a joke, but I do honestly think that if you’re trying to create fantasy ancestries or sci-fi species or whatever, I do think that you should approach this less as “human with extra thing” and more as “thing that does something completely different from humans.” And as a result, humans can do things it can’t do, like the Tines from A Fire Upon the Deep, who, I’m sorry, are the best aliens. No one has yet created better aliens in sci-fi. ‘Cause they are like a pack of sentient, alien dogs. And so obviously they can do things humans can’t do, but they don’t have hands.

One of my favorite sequences in that story is when a Tine sees a hand for the first time, and is like, “Their limb ended on a series of tentacles that could combine together into a rock hard bludgeon.” And I was like, “Yeah, that makes me feel cool to be a human.”

Bunny, Chris, Oren: [Laugh]

Bunny: There are noses though. Could have improved there.

Oren: Could use some work for sure.

Bunny: Could use some workshopping. Not good sniffers, these humans.

Chris: Going back to The Murderbot Diaries, I do think one problem this has, which again is an exception. We just said, “Okay, we should not just kill off sentient robots that are like characters unless they kill things, because that means they’re villains. And you can kill them.”

But in Murderbot we have to have another exception to our exception, which is that if they’re enslaved and literally have no choice but to kill people, then maybe you should try to avoid killing them whenever possible.

Oren: That is one of the issues with Murderbot, which I love. Murderbot‘s a great book, but it does have an issue where its main character is weirdly cavalier about other artificial life. And I don’t really think that story is going anywhere. It just seems to be a trait that the character has. And I think it just started because we wanted cool action scenes and then by a few books in, it was just, that’s a thing that Murderbot is, and it’s never gonna change, I guess.

Chris: Yeah, it does seem like–

Bunny: Murderbot’s… a narcissist.

Oren: [Chuckles]

Chris: –Wells wants the robots and constructs to be both characters and monsters. Which again, they don’t mix. You gotta choose whether they’re monsters or characters. And I think part of the issue is that Murderbot is just very powerful.

And so that means she has to come up with big powerful things for Murderbot to fight. And the obvious choice is more constructs and robots. And also being enslaved provides a reason why they’re really ruthless, because they have to be. But that also means that we shouldn’t just be killing them if we can help it. So…

Oren: Right. Hot take. [Chuckles]

Chris: Hot take.

Oren: In theory, there should be room for robots that are weirder, and are not just either smart people or animal companion slash funny little guys. That’s more challenging though. I actually think the Geth are a really neat example from Mass Effect. I think the Geth are probably Mass Effect‘s most interesting, alien, for lack of a better term ’cause they’re not made by humans, but whatever. Uh, species.

Each geth is made up of a bunch of different programs that combine together to get smart enough to be a person and then they can separate and then recombine later in a different form. And it’s very interesting, although I realize that’s also kind of what the Tines do. So, I kind of have a type, I guess.

Bunny, Chris: [Chuckle]

Chris: Put that on your airship with your older woman stoic hero.

Oren: Get some gestalt aliens and gestalt robots up in here. That’s my new thing.

Bunny: There was a book I read a while back, and this isn’t robots, but it’s a similar concept. It was called, I think, Railhead, where there were these groups of bugs and I think they were called bug monks or something like that. And when they combined together, they formed a sort of individual that’s made out of the collective hive of all the bugs. And if you scatter one of these and they recombine with another colony of bugs, then the resulting quote unquote “individual” has a different personality and different combination of memories. And you could very easily take that and be like, this is different computer systems interacting in weird ways, or something.

Oren: One thing that I’ve been noodling over for a while is, is there a way to solve some of the problems we’ve been talking about while having the ship be able to talk? Because that’s clearly a thing authors want. People enjoy having the ship to be a literal character and not just a figurative character, but it just sort of runs into the problem we’ve been talking about of, why doesn’t the ship just fly itself if it’s so good at all this stuff? And if it’s not so good at all this stuff, why do we have it?

Chris: Well, what if you had a droid that you… put her consciousness in your ship?

Oren: Oh, oh boy.

Bunny: Uh oh.

Oren: Ugh.

Chris: I’m sorry, I, I should have let Solo be and not… invoke.

Oren: Solo will never be okay. “Hey guys. So I heard that the internet is talking about how droids are kind of slaves. What if we made a movie where we acknowledged that, but as a joke.”

Bunny: Maybe they’re slaves, but maybe that’s, not… bad?

Oren: So we got one side, people who are upset because droids are portrayed as slaves. And then we got the other side of people who are upset at the idea that we might acknowledge that droids are slaves. What if we made a movie that made both sides extremely angry.

Bunny: [Chuckles]

Oren: I guess we must be doing something right. [Laughs]

Chris: [Chuckles]

Bunny: That’s when you know things are going right, it’s the entire internet is mad at you rather than just half of it.

Oren: The two factions that have nothing in common, they’ve united against you. It’s like Solo and Rise of Skywalker.

Bunny: Yes. As they’re most successful at doing this with Star Wars, as it turns out. Polarizing so much that the polar ends loop back together and become a single ball of hatred.

Oren: [Laughs]

Bunny: I feel like we’d be letting down, the friend of the show, Jeppsson, if we didn’t mention Klara and the Sun.

Oren: I’ve heard about that, but I haven’t read that one.

Chris: I read the first couple pages. It felt very literary and therefore boring. And then I didn’t read anymore.

Bunny: It was quite literary. It was a strange book, but I think Klara is an interesting example of avoiding the “humans, but better” trap because Klara is different in a very demonstrable way, she thinks quite differently. Unlike a lot of AI and robots, she’s naive in interesting ways. Like socially and emotionally.

She feels different than someone like Data who’s I guess, pragmatically naive, but truthfully savvy. Klara is very fast at computing, but she’s really clumsy and awkward in scenarios she wasn’t built for, which makes sense. And quite literally, there’s scenes where she can’t walk over uneven ground because she wasn’t designed to do that. And her vision is resolved differently. She sees things in grids and stuff like that. So that’s interesting.

You can see why Klara is demonstrably different than a human and not feel like she’s just a superhuman. She’s clearly got shortcomings, even though she can think really fast and do complicated computations or whatever, but it’s also not a story about doing complicated computations. And if it was, Klara would be OP. But it’s not. It’s a story about emotional things and Klara has a kind of funky religious view of the world and the sun. It’s Klara and the Sun, which is something you don’t see in a lot of robots either. So that’s an interesting example of a human-ish robot that falls into the “robot that’s pretty human” category, but without it feeling like she’s just a human.

Oren: And that one sounds like a pretty cool character for that story. It might be harder to do that in a more traditional space opera where we’re much more concerned with calculating the trajectory of big space guns.

Bunny: She wouldn’t work in that setting at all. Or at least she’d be a weird inclusion. And she wouldn’t have much to do. And then another story, O Human Star is a near-future story where robots are just on the verge of becoming their own thing.

Robots have been constructed, there are robots around. It’s not unusual to see one, but now the robots are building themselves and there are robots showing up that nobody built. And they’re kind of their own thing now, and they think about the world differently and humanity isn’t really sure how to react.

They’re not hostile. Some of them are a little bit separatist, but the story is right on the brink of, “What do we do with all of these robots?” Which is another interesting perspective because I feel a lot of droid and robot stories are like, “Well, they’re already integrated into society,” and this one is like, “What if they weren’t?” What if, what if this was kind of weird, what’s happening?

Oren: You could do a fun transition period type story.

Chris: That’s certainly better than rehashing the like, “Oh no, we accidentally made sentience. And what if they had rights?” Just something different, please.

Bunny: What if ChatGPT felt pain? [Chuckles]

Chris: Gosh, I was just reminded when you were talking about Klara and the Sun, of the Stanley Kubrick movie, AI: Artificial Intelligence.

Oren: Oh boy.

Chris: And the premise of that movie is like, what if we made these robots who could love us unconditionally? So it’s about this robot who is thrown away and then can’t accept that he’s been thrown away and then goes on a search–

Bunny: That’s dark.

Chris: –For his mother, who he was… Yeah! It’s really dark.

Bunny: That’s bleak. I’ve never seen it. Maybe it all ties together.

Chris: Nope. [Laughs] Nope, nope. That’s it. Well, actually the funniest thing about this movie, and I don’t feel bad about spoiling it, it’s pretty old now, is that at some point, thousands of years pass. So we just cut forth and then aliens find the robot.

Bunny: What?

Chris: And the robot still wants to find his mother. So the aliens make a simulation of her, to put him to bed, before he dies or something. [Laughs]

Bunny: Whoa. It’s like Little Match Girl levels of bleak. It’s like, what if that children’s book, Are You My Mother? never ended and the little bird just kept looking and kept looking and kept looking.

Chris: Yeah, I don’t recommend that movie.

Oren: Alright, well now that Chris has thoroughly depressed us with this weird Kubrick movie, I thought I had banished from my memory, but now it’s back. We’re gonna gonna have to call this episode to a close.

Chris: If that recounting of the movie did not disturb you, you might consider supporting us on Patreon.

Bunny: Or even if it did, because frankly, it might have.

Chris: Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.

Oren: And before we go, I wanna thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week. [Outro Music]

Outro: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening, closing theme, The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton.