RoboCop
(This entry references the 2014 reboot of RoboCop, but the principles are basically the same in the 1987 original movie).
RoboCop, despite looking and sounding much more like simple popcorn entertainment than some of the others on this list, actually comes the closest to showcasing one of the ultimate transhumanism ideals – the one that doesn’t just focus on enhancing individual human abilities, but claims that transhumanism holds the key to solving some of the wider world’s worst and seemingly endless problems, such as poverty, disease, malnutrition and crime.
Not that RoboCop has much to do with famine. The movie begins with giant corporation OmniCorp demonstrating a new type of crime-fighting robot that is already being used by the military but which the company now also wants to sell to the civilian market, to replace the human (i.e. comparably weak) police force. These robots are not as well received as OmniCorp have hoped, however, on the basis that even though their technology allows them to distinguish between guilty and innocent parties, should a mistake be made the robot would have no reaction. That is, law enforcement would now rest in the hands of an entity that has no conscience – or, more brutally – that doesn’t feel anything. This, it is argued by the anti-police-robot senator in the movie, is an unacceptable trait for a law enforcer.
Then, OmniCorp are given a golden (or black and silver) opportunity to overcome this piffling little quibble, when police detective Alex Murphy is almost killed in a bomb blast, his body completely destroyed except for his right arm, and his heart, lung and brain function. In order to “keep him alive” (cough, pursue their agenda, cough), Alex is given an OmniCorp cybernetic body. And in a glorious moment of ‘ta dah!’ for the company, they have a perfect compromise between their original design and the senator’s concerns: An entity with all the physical strength, resistance and power of their original robots, which also has a fully functioning human brain. That brain can use all the technology made available to it by its artificial carry-case, but ultimately it can pass judgements that are based on the essential human characteristics of consideration, conscience, compassion and integrity.
The big transhumanist theme in RoboCop then is that age old question of ‘what, exactly, does it mean to be human?’ This, literally, has been asked by so many people for so many centuries that surely the collective brain power spent on it has to have come to something at least nearer to 12% by now, but apparently not because still no-one has an answer. But someone dig up Aristotle and get him over to Colombia Pictures Studios pronto, because RoboCop – for all its impressive action sequences and predictable storylines – actually comes a damn sight closer than many.
For a start, RoboCop is not of the opinion that the biological human body matters. We might not even need all of our memories (although if this capacity ever did become available it would sadly remove all comedy value from the concept of things we ‘can’t unsee’). Being human might not – according to RoboCop – even involve having a completely free will. At first, when Alex’s visor comes down he believes that he is in control of his actions when actually the software is overriding him and merely giving him a sense of acting of his own volition.
But what the human being definitely does require however, in order to remain something that we truly recognise as being human, is emotion. As soon as Alex’s emotional reactors are removed from his brain (which is done in order to prevent the seizures he experiences as he is exposed to his own traumatic memories) he loses that delicate balance between power and conscience that had been aimed for; he remains a human that has been enhanced to the point of physical invincibility, but his capacity for making decisions now relies purely on technological information – and no longer on the human sense of right and wrong. Once Alex is devoid of emotion, he no longer – to the movie’s very basic but very clever word – hestitates. And all humans must hesitate when making difficult decisions, or else we may as well be nothing more than robots, and humanity really will be lost.
They will stop making Pirates of the Caribbean movies (a decision that some producer somewhere should be hesitating over a lot more than they are the moment) before someone answers the question of what it really means to be human. But in the meantime – as wonderful as it might sound that humans could somehow be adjusted in some way that could reduce crime on a world-wide level (for another movie that handles this issue surprisingly well see 2009’s Surrogates) – Robocop is a great example of the dangers of aiming at perfection. Who knows what monsters “perfect” human beings might become.