When Robots Had Soul: The Humanity of Classic Sci-Fi Machines
If there’s one thing classic science fiction got wonderfully, dramatically right, it’s this: robots were never just robots. They were mirrors, confessions, ethical experiments… sometimes even therapy with metal joints and glowing LEDs. Long before our modern anxieties about server-melting AIs and rogue chatbots, sci-fi was already wrestling with something more intimate: What makes a being human? And even more daring: What if our machines get there before we do? Classic sci-fi didn’t imagine robots as faceless appliances. It gave them longing. It gave them pain. It gave them the kind of emotional baggage you’d usually expect from someone who’s been to way too many family reunions. In other words, those old stories insisted that somewhere behind the metal...