Peng Yu - Tumblr Posts

The Boston Dynamics dog and the blood squeegee art installation robot both illustrate ways in which humanity imbues its automatons with life and spirit but in separate moral directions.

The Dog took the shortcut, copying a well loved animal that already has a soul and mimicking its movements and mannerisms. Add an expensive marketing campaign with music and good lighting and choreography and its easy to believe this sleek and beautiful piece of machinery is practically alive.

Then take the other, a faceless mechanical arm. Beautiful perhaps in an abstract and brutalist sense, but with no friendly mannerisms or colorful chassis. It is in fact frightening and shocking to behold, scooping what appears to be blood across the floor.

But then we have the mask slip on the friendly dog, and the thing that tried so hard to be cute and funny and beautiful is revealed to be just another toy for the military to use in its quest for human destruction, hiding its purpose behind its ability to dance and play.

All the while sympathy mounts for the mechanical arm, its movements become sluggish, its resolve grows weak, its ability to keep pulling its blood back into itself begins to wane, much like in our own human selves, and this terrifying appendage eventually dies, much like ourselves, having done no harm despite its terrible appearance.

How much easier then is it to bestow the idea of humanity on the arm than the dog. Where the dog becomes better and more capable over time yet more prone to inevitable violence; yet the arm becomes tired in its age and uninterested in harming anything, it merely struggles to keep moving until entropy claims it and it cannot do even that any more.

It becomes an almost hamfisted example of how evil lurks beneath the veneer of advertising, a perfect illustration of how beauty doesn't equal goodness.