Movie Review – Bicentennial Man (The line between robots and humans, and what defines a human?)

Andrew is a robot, but he gradually becomes more human-like. He acquires human characteristics, both physically and mentally, and has free will and self-consciousness. Eventually, Andrew is legally recognized as a human being, and his story sparks debate about the definition of humanity.

 

‘I guess I’m a well-coded machine,’ my friend muttered to me one day, exhausted from a long night of coding, as he trudged off to his dormitory sleeping quarters. At lunch that day, my friends and I discussed whether there was any evidence that we were not machines. Of course, if you look for it medically, you’ll find it, but the question was enough to pique our curiosity: if our minds are made of code, can they be human? If a human being is made up of many mechanical parts and software, can it be called human? I remembered a movie from my childhood.
In the movie “Bicentennial Man,” there is such a robot. Andrew, purchased as a household robot for a family, gains intelligence, curiosity, and human emotions thanks to mayonnaise that falls into the robot’s circuitry during production. The robot has a human side that the robotics company says “could not and should not have”. Andrew’s owner recognizes the special things that set him apart from other robots and treats him as an individual. Andrew teaches himself to do carpentry and even dresses up in a tuxedo to usher at weddings. Realizing his feelings of love, Andrew falls in love with the little lady of the house, but he is unable to fulfill his love because he is a robot. His desire to have a human body led him to use human skin and artificial organs to live a life like a real person. When Andrew returns home, he meets and falls in love with his granddaughter, Portia, who looks exactly like the little girl he had a crush on. After a court battle to have his humanity recognized, Andrew gives up his immortal life as a robot when it is ruled that “immortal humans cannot be recognized”. Andrew grows old and eventually dies after 200 years, holding Portia’s hand, and the court finally recognizes him as a human being, and the movie ends.

 

 

Robots will become closer and closer to humans. But what is the difference between robots as machines and humans as members of society? When we say that machines are changing and becoming closer to humans, what are the criteria to distinguish humans from machines? Let’s think about it in terms of physical and mental aspects.
First, let’s see if the physical aspect is the same as humans. To do this, we need to understand the definition of a living organism. Living things metabolize. We eat food every day to get nutrients. Organisms react to stimuli in their environment, and reproduction and heredity are important characteristics. Organisms leave offspring that carry their genes in order to maintain their species. Other characteristics include growth, homeostasis, adaptation, and evolution.
Let’s see if Andrew from the movie fulfills the definition of life above. After Andrew is created, he metabolizes and responds to external stimuli. As a domestic robot, he must listen to and act on his owner’s commands, so he reacts to the environment and the behavior of humans around him as coded. Metabolism refers to all the chemical reactions that occur in the body, and Andrew’s metabolism is the process of increasing the energy level of the battery by charging it with electricity, and changing its chemical state to a lower energy state as it works and consumes energy. It can also be considered homeostatic because it can keep its internal environment constant even if the external environment changes. Although it satisfies the characteristics of a living organism to some extent, it cannot be considered a living organism. This is because it has the characteristics of a robot.
However, over time, he becomes mentally humanized and upgraded to a human form, which is different from a normal robot. It has a human-like appearance, a nervous system and artificial organs implanted in it to give it a human body structure, except for blood. Eat food to gain energy and partially acquire a human-like structure. They are only recognized as human in the movie when they receive a blood transplant and give up their infinite lifespan. Sexually disabled people are also an exception because no one denies that they are human, even though the requirements for reproduction are not met. It’s not necessary to have all the characteristics of a living being to be recognized as one. A good example is viruses. Viruses are unable to metabolize substances and live by infiltrating their hosts. However, viruses are recognized as life. Arguably, Andrew also fulfills the important human element of having a body, except for this characteristic.
Now let’s see if Andrew can fulfill the mental aspect of being human. The criteria that distinguish robots from humans are self-consciousness and free will.
Free will is the ability to voluntarily choose an action without being externally coerced, dominated, or constrained. When Andrew reads about the materials and characteristics of trees to make sculptures to give as gifts, or designs artificial organs to make his insides more human, he is not doing what someone else tells him to do, but what he chooses to do. They also demanded ‘freedom’ from their masters. This is something that a passive robot that only follows its built-in program or the tasks it is told to do cannot do. But Andrew chose to do these things of his own free will. From these actions, we can say that Andrew has ‘free will’.
In addition, Andrew’s exploration of himself over the years has given him a distinct sense of self-consciousness. Self-consciousness is the awareness of the self as a self-identical entity that unifies the various ways in which it feels, thinks, expresses its will, and acts, as opposed to an alien consciousness. Non-human animals, such as dogs and cats, recognize themselves in the mirror as other entities, i.e., they have no awareness of their own existence. In contrast, when humans look in a mirror, they recognize their reflection as themselves. They know that ‘themselves’ exist. Similarly, Andrew can be said to have self-consciousness because he recognizes himself in the mirror. However, Andrew’s consciousness is the consciousness of thinking of himself as a human being. Over the years, as he meets all the robots in the world, he realizes that there is no other robot like him, and he begins to think that he is not a robot. The question “Who am I?” becomes a constant thought, and when he meets someone he loves and becomes desperate to be human, Andrew begins to think of himself as human. “I’d rather die as a human than live as a machine forever,” he says as a reason for giving up eternal life.
The question of whether Andrew is a human being is debatable. However, since he has a human body and possesses the “free will” and “self-consciousness” that are said to be exclusive to humans, and since he is mentally capable of being human, I consider him human. I think that Andrew, who gave up one advantage after another to become a human, is perhaps closer to the ideal human than we are.