“It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.” — Albert Einstein
Robots are humans’ attempt to create an extension of ourselves through technology. But artists and movie-makers have promised a lot of robot stuff that, frankly, most people are not seeing improve their lives. Robocops were supposed to capture sadistic murderers, change our tires and give us all the speeding tickets we wanted. Look what happened in Elmwood Place a few years ago: In the end, not one dollar benefitting the small Hamilton County village was paid to their speeding ticket robot.
That’s lame.
Ironman-robotic suits were supposed to revamp our weak and crumbling military-industrial complex. Instead of billionaire entrepreneurs directly fighting super-terrorists around the globe from inside their super-suits, we’ve still got a bunch of ordinarily clothed nerds in dark rooms crossing their fingers as they shoot missiles at bad guys from remote-controlled drones. This is very disappointing.
But who is to blame?
Around the same time period as the Elmwood Place camera debacle, philanthropists were busy funding the return of Nam June Paik’s Metrobot, a giant friendly robot that attempts to present an optimistic view of our relationship with technology, but fails, because it serves only as a telephone and a weird-looking sign. This is a perfect example of how charitable gifts from foundations use their tax-free status to fund robots that don’t even do anything cool for humanity. This is lost tax revenue that can be funneled to robots that actually shoot things and blow stuff up for the good of all humans in America. This is also exactly why Trump’s plan to defund endowments for the arts and humanities — each currently wasting .012 percent of discretionary spending — is a good idea.
We can’t ask coal miners in West Virginia and single mothers in Detroit to indirectly subsidize silly, smiley-faced robots through public endowments. However, we can ask them to donate to our anemic defense budget, which is currently only 54 percent of discretionary spending. Increasing defense spending will save our endangered military and also help struggling companies such as Northrup Grumman and Boston Dynamics produce robots that more closely resemble the heroic machines that artists have promised but failed to produce.
Tump’s proposed budget is one that all of humanity can benefit from. Instead of being disappointed by friendly robots like Metrobot, we will finally see a collective future where privately owned companies use public funds to trickle their technology down into our everyday lives. Not only will awesome, functional robots make waging war, fighting crime and giving out speeding tickets sexy again; as they surveil us from the depths of their infrared optical targeting sensors and microchip brains, we will stare intrepidly into a reflection of the oldest and most essential part of our human selves.
This article appears in Mar 22-29, 2017.