Tomorrow's Worlds: The Unearthly History Of Science Fiction (2014) s01e03 Episode Script
Robots
"I've seen things you people ".
.
wouldn't believe.
" This programme contains some strong language - NARRATOR: - Throughout history, the advance of technology has turned the wildest flights of fantasy into our everyday realities.
And from the earliest tools to the most advanced computers, we have built a succession of machines to substitute for human labour.
Science fiction has responded with a colourful assortment of robotic helpers.
- TV VOICEOVER: - You will meet a charming character in the robot.
But the dream of creating our own mechanical servants has always gone hand in hand with a terrible nightmare.
What if, one day, the machines turned on their masters? - WOMAN: - I think the idea of robots is that they superior power, they have superior intellect, computing power to us.
The great idea there, that creates drama, is that they overcome their programming.
- SANDBROOK: - And the really chilling thought is that our very desire to play God It's alive, it's alive! It's alive! .
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might finally lead to our own downfall.
Once you build this thing, once you create this consciousness, what's your responsibility to it? And what are the dangers of using technology on ourselves to enhance our own capabilities? - MAN: - They have stolen everything exceptthe man's soul.
Where do we cross the line and turn ourselves into machines? We could be deleted and transformed, and everything that we recognise as humanity could be replaced out of us.
From computers to cyborgs, from the clumsiest robots to the most sophisticated androids, science fiction has used the issue of artificial life to ask difficult questions about power, freedom, responsibility and the nature of humanity itself.
"Thank you for your cooperation.
" This is Oxford, where I have come in search of the first great work to tackle the theme of artificial life - Mary Shelley's 1818 novel, Frankenstein - or the Modern Prometheus.
In the book, Victor Frankenstein actually passes through Oxford, with the monster he has created hot on his heels.
But today, Oxford boasts another Frankenstein connection the book itself.
So, here it is - the original manuscript of what's arguably the first science-fiction novel ever written.
Now, this passage must be one of the most famous passages in all popular fiction, because it explores themes that would obsess science-fiction writers for years to come, because this is the moment when Frankenstein's monster comes to life.
".
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by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, "I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open" "How can I describe my emotion at this catastrophe?" ".
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I had selected his features as beautiful.
"Beautiful! Great God! "His skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath" ".
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breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.
"Unable to endure the aspect of the being I had created, "I rushed out of the room" And, so, Frankenstein abandons his creature with, as it turns out, disastrous consequences.
The lasting appeal is this incredible piece of imagining a moral problem .
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of thisthis person creating a person.
- MAN: - I mean, it's just perfect.
Frankenstein inventing something that runs away with itself, that's looking for consolation, and can't find it and goes howling into the night.
Is he innocent? Is he evil? You know, the book is very, very complicated and, so, people are just going to go on being fascinated by it.
Mary Shelley had become intrigued by the experiments of the Italian physicist Luigi Galvani, who had used electricity to animate the muscles of a dead frog.
BUZZING, THUNDER CRASHES In 1803, Galvani's nephew had stimulated the limbs of an executed criminal in London, reportedly causing the corpse's eye to open and his hand to raise.
But Shelley's underlying concerns were more moral than electrical.
I think the clue to Mary Shelley's thinking is right there in the title - Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus.
You see, in Greek mythology, Prometheus was the Titan who created man in the gods' own image, and stole fire from Heaven - the ultimate gift of knowledge.
Frankenstein is a story about the consequences of playing God, about creation and responsibility.
And those themes, and that idea of man as the modern Prometheus, have been at the very centre of science fiction ever since.
- DR FRANKENSTEIN: - It's alive! It's alive, it's alive! Today, our popular image of the monster owes most to Boris Karloff's unforgettable portrayal in the 1931 film.
- TRAILER VOICEOVER: - When this dead hand moves, the monster created by a man they called mad is turned loose to strike terror into the hearts of men.
In fact, Karloff's hulking bruiser bears hardly any resemblance to Shelley's agile, intelligent creature.
His jerky, lumbering movements and the electrodes in his neck suggest something far more mechanical.
They tapped into an emerging 20th-century phenomenon - a fascination with robots .
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and a mistrust of the mechanical that endures to this day.
The word "robot" was coined in 1921 by the writer Karel Capek, and he derived it from a Czech word meaning "forced labour".
In Capek's play, "R.
U.
R.
- Rossum's Universal Robots", the machines in question rise up and destroy their creators.
Not perhaps the most promising beginning.
Well, no.
But Capek's robots did strike a chord.
Remember that the 1920s were an age of extraordinary industrial change, with factories everywhere being transformed by mechanisation and mass production.
So, it's no surprise that ordinary workers began to ask themselves whether the future belonged to man or machine.
In 1927, those fears inspired one of the great landmarks in cinema history - the futuristic German film Metropolis.
Created by the mad scientist, Rotwang, the robot, Maria, takes on human form to lead the rebel workers of Metropolis to their destruction.
And for the first time, a robot captured the imagination of audiences across the world.
- MAN: - Metropolis stands out to me, on a personal level, of the robot, Maria, and how sexual she is as a robot.
And I think that's just something that from the first time I saw it, even as a shadowy kind of movie with those rings going around her, just made me feel like I was into some world that was not that safe in terms of the correlation between machine andand sexuality.
And I loved the feeling that that gave me, as an edge.
Beautiful and terrible and utterly unforgettable, Maria is the embodiment of our fears of the machine.
And she became an icon not just of German cinema but of the entire silent film era.
But one writer in particular hated what he saw as the pessimistic, anti-scientific bias of stories like Metropolis and Frankenstein.
He was an American biochemist called Isaac Asimov, and he wanted to write about robots that were good.
Asimov began to wonder just what would define a good robot.
And in a short story published in 1942, he outlined his Three Laws Of Robotics.
The first law is as follows - "A robot may not harm a human being "or through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
" Number two - "A robot must obey "orders given it by qualified personnel, "unless those orders violate rule number one.
" In other words, a robot can't be ordered to kill a human being.
Rule number three - "A robot must protect its own existence" After all, it's an expensive piece of equipment.
Uh, ".
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unless that violates rules one or two.
" Asimov's laws provided the basis for a series of memorable stories about robots, exploring the potential dangers of anti-robot prejudice and even asking if the Three Laws might cancel each other out.
But as the economic boom of the 1950s saw ordinary households installing fridges and washing machines, public attitudes to robots began to soften.
- VOICEOVER: - This is the kitchen of tomorrow - a press-button dream coming true for Mrs Housewife.
All sorts of wonders are hers at the push of a button.
Perhaps "Mrs Housewife" might rather fancy a robot servant.
The ultimate mod con.
BLEEPING And in 1956, the film Forbidden Planet presented us with Robby.
He wasn't just user-friendly.
He was almost lovable.
- TRAILER VOICEOVER: - You will meet a charming character in the robot.
Able to produce, on order, ten tonnes of lead or a slinky evening gown.
I loved Robby the Robot.
I just thought that was the coolest robot anybody could ever make.
And even though you always know it's a guy in a suit, it was just better.
It didn't have a face on it - it was just different and better.
I mean, there were several things great about Robby.
It was anthropomorphic in a way, in that it had arms and legs.
But it didn't really have a head or eyes or anything.
- VOICEOVER: - Always at your service.
It must be the loveliest, softest thing you've ever made for me.
- TRUMBULL: - And it had this thing that kind of lit up on it that was related to the voice track.
- ROBBY: - Star sapphires take a week to crystallise properly.
Would diamond or emeralds do? And then it had all these weird little orbiting gizmos that kind of represented its brain or its thought process or something.
And it was kind of a hybrid between something obviously very sophisticated, electronic, but also mechanical in a way.
While filmmakers have rarely been able to resist the idea of robots as basically men in shiny tin suits, scientists have always known that, in reality, robots would look a lot more functional.
And the first film that really embraced that was the early '70s ecological fable Silent Running.
It's the story of how, in the future, earth's last trees and plants are sent into space on a fleet of orbiting, Eden-Project-style ships, and tended by a team of robot gardeners.
Although Silent Running has become famous for its environmental politics, the director Douglas Trumbull's real motive for making the film was to show credible, non-humanoid robots on screen.
The Silent Running story began with the idea of, "Well, what would you do if you had some robots?" So, I had seen Tod Browning's movie, Freaks, and it had this amazing performance by a guy named Johnny Eck who simply didn't exist below the waist.
He had no legs, no pelvis, no anything.
And he walked on his hands.
And I thought, "If you took someone "who had the skills to walk on their hands adroitly, "and put 'em inside of a robot outfit "that was not anthropomorphic, even like Robby the Robot - "it would have no head, no shoulders, no anything - "and it's just walking on these appendages, "that would be a really cool robot for a movie.
" So, Trumbull employed three amputee actors to portray his robots, Huey, Dewey and Louie.
Now - HE SIGHS - This is the mulch.
That's what makes the tree grow.
HE SIGHS Now Now, Huey, you're gonna plant the tree and, Dewey, you're gonna dig the ditch.
- TRUMBULL: - There really are people in there and they .
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and, so, they have naturalistic behaviour to them, and they react andit's very subtle, but there's definitely something going on.
MYSTERIOUS MUSIC Trumbull's robots were to prove unexpectedly influential.
George Lucas came to me after Silent Running and asked me to do the effects for Star Wars.
And, uh, he said he wanted to do, you know, robots, kind of like what I did.
And I said, "Great.
Can I help? I'll give you the names of my guys.
" What happened next made science-fiction history as Huey, Dewey and Louie inspired half of one of cinema's greatest double acts.
I've got to rest before I fall apart.
My joints are almost frozen.
R2-D2 BLEEPS What made R2-D2 and C-3PO extraordinary was their interaction not with human beings, but with each other.
I think the audience were surprised by the relationship between R2-D2 and C-3PO because you didn't expect that thing of a microwave, a washing machine, I don't know, a refrigerator.
And they're ostensibly talking to each other.
And what, I think, that does is allow the audience to recognise something that is non-ferrous in there, that has actually got some kind of human element.
Both R2-D2 and C-3PO owed a debt to their cinematic predecessors.
One of the things I remember was the robotic workshop, if you like, where there were all these carcasses for R2-D2 units.
And, um, on the walls were sketches and drawings and technical drawings of characters that I recognised from another movie, Silent Running - Huey, Dewey and Louie.
R2-D2 also inherited the idea that having an actor inside the suit would give him some character.
They'd put me in, then they'd put the head on, then I'd turn the motor on, from the inside, which was battery-driven.
And there was all the things going round - wheels and lights flashing.
And they just said, "Look, left, look right.
" "Now look fed-up.
" And how do you look fed-up? How do you look happy? And, eventually, I got to move it slightly.
I rocked it from side to side.
BEEPS RAPIDLY - Uncle Owen? - Yeah? This R2 unit has a bad motivator.
Look.
Hey, what are you trying to push on us? BLEEPS EXCITEDLY Excuse me, sir, but that R2 unit is in prime condition.
A real bargain.
For the look of C-3PO, George Lucas's concept designer, Ralph McQuarrie, delved even further back into the history of science fiction.
- DANIELS: - It was pretty clear to me that, uh, Threepio, in Ralph McQuarrie's concept painting, was based very much - and, indeed, George Lucas, it turned out had asked him to base it - on Maria from Metropolis, Fritz Lang's film.
And what it gave you is a classic design.
I realised that, very early on, a kind of, hmm, as it were almost a geisha-type, um, shuffle was really quite attractive, whereas a lumbering walk is actually very threatening.
And Threepio's eyes are also quite captivating because they give him this sort of permanent stare of wonder.
And he always cared too much.
And for a machine to care this much was such an oddball idea.
You got a lot of carbon scoring here.
It looks like you boys have seen a lot of action.
With all we've been through, sometimes I'm amazed we're in as good condition as we are, with the rebellion and all.
You know of the rebellion against the Empire?! That's how we came to your service, if you take my meaning, sir.
For a short while on the set, I was this new, fantastic star on the block.
It wasnobody had seen this kind of man before.
And, uh, within days, that totally changed.
Because when I wasn't actually performing, I would stay very still to conserve my energy So, I would stand like a model in a shop window - a mannequin.
And I clearly had become dehumanised very, very quickly - that people adopted the reflection of my performance.
Unless I was performing, they forgot I was alive, shall we say? And this feeling came back to me many years later, when I said to a bunch of roboticists in America, "You're all very clever, "but nobody in this hall knows what it actually feels like "to be a machine.
" And I'd had that experience.
By the early 1980s, with the Star Wars droids on everything from lampshades to lunchboxes, robots were becoming distinctly cuddly.
But in 1984, just when we were becoming a little bit soft about robots, the most terrifying artificial creation since Frankenstein's monster made a memorable entrance in a Los Angeles alleyway.
The Terminator, directed by James Cameron, features an unstoppable assassin.
Like Maria in Metropolis, he's a robot with a human facade - his organic flesh hiding a terrifying endoskeleton.
It was initially a fever dream that Jim had.
He literally had that central image of the Terminator endoskeleton emerging from the flames.
The car crashes and there's an explosion and this, like, shiny, metal skeleton comes out, and it's, like, "Holy shit.
" EERIE MUSIC When we initially started the casting process, we planned to have Lance Henriksen play the role of the Terminator because the initial concept of the Terminator was that he would blend in.
He wouldn't stand out.
He would look like you or me.
And, obviously, Arnold doesn't quite fit that.
His whole thing was Arnold Schwarzenegger is the Terminator - the most bad-ass Terminator in the history of cyborgs.
And the great note that Jim gave to Arnold, that Arnold embraced completely, was, "Think of yourself as a shark.
"You truly have one mission, you have one focus.
"You're there to kill Sarah Connor.
" SCREAMING AND GUNFIRE - HURD: - We were really interested in telling a story about the dangers of technology - that the technology that we were inventing at the time, which was in the '80s, was going to lead to this, lead to the machines taking over.
- REPORTER: - In the event of a nuclear attack - SANDBROOK: - This was the age of the Strategic Defence Initiative - a plan for a computer-controlled ring of laser-equipped satellites nicknamed, ironically, Star Wars.
Proceeding boldly with these new technologies, we can significantly reduce any incentive that the Soviet Union may have to threaten attack against the United States or its allies.
EXPLOSION ECHOES - HURD: - The future vision in The Terminator is one in which perhaps human hubris has led to the demise of civilisation, has led to a decimation of the human population, because we put all of our trust in technology.
In the Terminator, Arnie's assassin is merely an instrument of the real enemy, Skynet, an astonishingly sophisticated computer system - an artificial intelligence that has turned on its human creators.
Writers have long been fascinated by the idea that the really dangerous machine isn't necessarily stronger than us.
It's just smarter.
And that idea really gathered momentum in the early 1960s, when computers were first entering the public imagination.
Of course, back then, you could have filled this whole room with computers and you'd still have had only a fraction of the capability of today's mobile phones.
But as the writer Arthur C.
Clarke argued at the time, computers might seem a long way from matching the power of the human brain, but it was probably only a matter of time.
A great deal has happened very quickly with computers and people have exaggerated ideas about their capabilities.
But the fact is that all present computers are mechanical morons.
They cannot really think.
They can only do things for which they're programmed.
But this won't always be true.
In 2001 - A Space Odyssey, Clarke and the director, Stanley Kubrick, pushed the computers one stage further - asking what might happen if an intelligent machine followed its programming to its logical conclusion, regardless of the human cost.
The film's computer controls a manned mission to Jupiter, and it's name is HAL.
First of all, in 2001, HAL is among the most sympathetic characters in it.
But he determines that for the mission to be successful, these astronauts are not capable of doing the mission, and he concludes, logically, and not incorrectly, that he can do it better.
So, therefore, he starts murdering them.
It was conflict that caused HAL to go kind ofbonkers, you know? And, uh, so that that was the explanation for his kind of going crazy, rather than being evil.
Uh, really kind of an insane computer.
I think one of scariest moments in all movies is when Keir Dullea is in that pod.
He tries to retrieve Gary Lockwood's body, and then he brings it back to the giant mothership.
And he says, uh Open the pod-bay doors, HAL.
HAL: I'm sorry, Dave.
I'm afraid I can't do that.
What's the problem? I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.
What are you talking about, HAL? This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardise it.
I think up till 2001, a typical computer would have sounded like - HE IMITATES STILTED ELECTRONIC VOICE - "Dave, this is the computer.
"This is the way a computer would speak "and this is the way it would be portrayed, "and was portrayed, "in many science-fictionmovies.
" Well, he had a voice that really sounded a lot more human, in many ways, and I think this was intentional, than the actors.
We were more machine-like.
WHIRRING HAL: Stop, Dave.
- SANDBROOK: - HAL owed his warm, reassuring tones to the Canadian actor Douglas Rain.
SLOWLY I'm afraid, Dave.
They're a crucial reason why this scene, in which the tables are turned on HAL - HAL: Dave - .
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is one of the most compelling in all science fiction.
HAL's calm, rational voice, even as he's being destroyed, piece by piece - HAL: My mind is going.
- .
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is almost unbearably moving.
I can feel it.
I can feel it.
Poor old HAL might have got a bit carried away, but his thought processes were always relentlessly logical.
Indeed, what most writers found fascinating about robots was their dependence on logic rather than emotion.
But a year after 2001 was released, the British writer Brian Aldiss published a remarkably moving short story called Supertoys Last All Summer Long.
And this was the tale of a machine programmed not just to think, but to feel, and not just to feel, but to love.
- ALDISS: - The question set up in the story is whether our little artificial android boy is going to be a success, when he is taken over by his parents.
He is programmed to love his mother.
Why doesn't it work? His mother was not programmed to love him.
And that actually was part of my story.
I felt that although I had been programmed, my mother hadn't been, and that's the way that you can get things, I suppose, off your chest.
Aldiss's story became the basis for the film AI - Artificial Intelligence - developed for decades by Stanley Kubrick but finally brought to the screen by Steven Spielberg.
Why don't you look like one? Like one? You're not cute like a doll.
You just look like someone's ordinary kid.
At the heart of the film is Haley Joel Osment's uncanny performance as the robot child, David.
- OSMENT: - There's robots that you see in films that are, you know, ruthless killers or like HAL - they have analytical coldness to him.
And with David, his primary function is to love.
And if he becomes human, his mother will love him, and his number one objective is for his mother to love him.
So, that's what he has to do.
And he gets more human in a way that It's not that just he becomes more and more and more of a loving, emotional character.
He hardens, in a way, too, and he learns about disappointment and abandonment and violence.
In this scene, in which David argues with Jude Law's cynical robot gigolo, Spielberg captures the little boy's emotional turmoil - a combination of anger, denial and child-like yearning.
I am real.
Mommy's going to read to me and tuck me in my bed and sing to me and listen to what I say, and she will cuddle with me and tell me every day, 100 times a day, that she loves me! Robots have always been, I think, seen as potential companions and helpers.
But that sort of like innocence and child-like, you know, wonder that this character has, I think was a sort of a new bit of territory that they uncovered.
It might just be a replication of human feelings but the core of the movie is that once you build this thing, once you create this consciousness, what's your responsibility to it? WIND HOWLS The question of a creator's responsibility to his creation takes us right back to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
Indeed, one of the book's most memorable passages comes when Victor Frankenstein confronts his monster high on an alpine glacier.
The monster has already shown himself capable of appalling violence.
But here, his tone is imploring, even desperate.
"Oh, Frankenstein, remember, that I am thy creature.
"I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, "whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed.
"Everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone am irrecoverably excluded.
"I was benevolent and good.
Misery made me a fiend.
"Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.
" This is, I suppose, the voice of Adam in the presence of God.
It's the voice of man cast out of the Garden of Eden, face to face with his creator.
And 150 years later, this howl of anguish echoed once again in one of cinema's best-known stories of creature and creator.
The film Blade Runner, made in 1982, was adapted from a novel, Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? by Philip K.
Dick.
The issue of humans and machines is a way of asking what a human is.
And, certainly, that was what, I think, that Philip K.
Dick was talking about.
He was talking about, "Well, what makes us human? "If you could get somebody and manufacture them "and stick in a bunch of memories, "why wouldn't they be human? "What is it? What is it that makes us so special?" Blade Runner explores this question through the story of a group of rogue androids, known as Replicants.
Almost totally indistinguishable from humans, they are limited to a four-year lifespan.
In a pivotal sequence, their leader, Roy Batty, goes, quite literally, to meet his maker, the Replicants' inventor.
Fittingly, the director, Ridley Scott, gives the encounter a religious atmosphere.
The lighting suggests a church, and the dialogue consciously echoes the Scriptures.
You were made as well as we could make you.
But not to last.
The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long, and you have burned so very, very brightly, Roy.
Look at you.
You're the Prodigal Son.
The encounter ends with Batty murdering his creator, but with no solution to the Replicants' imminent demise.
Like the rest of us, Batty must confront his own mortality, gazing into the abyss in a famous speech at the climax of the film.
The lines, written by the actor, Rutger Hauer, himself, have gone down in science-fiction history.
"I've seen things you people ".
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wouldn't believe.
"Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.
"I've watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate.
" Roy Batty's poetic sensibility is, I think, a nice little nod to Mary Shelley.
In the original Frankenstein, the monster is greatly moved by the poetry of Milton and Goethe, in which it finds echoes of its own tragic isolation.
And in the last minutes of Blade Runner, as his life ebbs away, Roy Batty proves himself the most romantic of Replicants.
- HAUER: - I really love the idea that Roy doesn't have a clue about poetry or about what it means.
But it's in his program and he likes it, you know? And I wanted to try and find one line where you could feel Roy's .
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you know, sorrow, so to speak.
"All those moments will be lost in time ".
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like tears "in rain.
" That's the one that nails .
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courage and pathos, I think.
You know, the courage to go on when there's no going on, because you're fuckin' dead and you know you're dead.
Everybody knows they're dead, but he's valiant.
"Time to die.
" What drives Blade Runner's story is perhaps the most primal of all human emotions - our fear of death.
Humans, Replicants, we're all terrified of our own extinction.
BUZZING But what if the Replicants had been allowed to live beyond their four-year lifespan? What if they really were indistinguishable from humans? How would we react to our android brethren - with open arms or with shrieks of horror? It's a theme explored in depth by the television series Battlestar Galactica.
Galactica is certainly in the tradition of Frankenstein and other pieces of man, you know, creating life and having life turn against him, and then examining that.
And I sort of felt that if we've created something, at some point, that looks and acts like us - that basically has emotions and basically has a sense of humour and can talk and dream and all these other things, at what point will we start to say, "Well, that's a person"? Or will we always sort of take the position that it's imitating a person? In Battlestar Galactica, the situation is complicated by the fact that the artificial Cylons have turned against their human creators in a devastating attack.
Now the Cylons have infiltrated the survivors, forming emotional ties as strong as any human bond.
She was a Cylon - a machine.
Is that what Boomer was? A machine? A thing? That's what she turned out to be.
She was more than that to us.
She was more than that to me.
She was a vital, living person.
It's a brilliantly paranoid dramatic idea - the thought that somebody you know, you trust, you love, might actually be an enemy machine.
But Battlestar Galactica pushed it one stage further, because some of the Cylon sleeper agents don't know themselves that they're Cylons.
They don't just look and think and feel like humans.
They believe they're human.
And at that point, well, who's to say they're not? To add to the surprise, the writers didn't even tell the actors themselves which characters were Cylons and which weren't.
No-one knew who was a Cylon.
We would find out at the readings.
So, you would just be reading a line and go, "Oh, my goodness.
" It was ait was just like People who watched the show were getting the same impact as those that read the show, because we were experiencing it at the same moment.
And, all of a sudden, people were relating to what the Cylons were saying, and they started to say, "Well, that's how we, as human beings, feel.
" It was really interesting how that flipped people.
I thought it was very important that the show not give a particular point of view on what the simple answers were.
Cos I didn't think there were simple answers to these things.
And I wanted the show to raise questions and to make the audience think about it.
Like AI and Blade Runner before it, Battlestar Galactica explored the consequences of a world in which machines didn't necessarily overtake humans, but, instead, became human themselves.
But science fiction has long been preoccupied with a parallel question - what if humans became more like machines? And this idea underpinned a controversial novel published in 1962 by Anthony Burgess - A Clockwork Orange.
Burgess offered various explanations for his book's curious title.
One was that it came from an old cockney phrase - "As queer as a clockwork orange.
" But the most intriguing went back to Burgess's days as a teacher in colonial Malaya, because there the word for man is "orang".
So, "A Clockwork Man.
" The story of a human being robbed of his free will and turned into a machine.
MUSIC: "Symphony No.
9 in D Minor" by Ludwig van Beethoven.
A Clockwork Orange is the story of the teenage drop-out, Alex, whose gleeful acts of rape and ultra-violence, unforgettably portrayed in Stanley Kubrick's film, provoke an extreme response by the state.
The point of the book was not the depiction of violence but, rather, a kind of projection of a possibility that we've become so worried about juvenile violence in this country, as they are in America and, indeed, in most countries of the world, and might decide to do something about it pretty radical.
I don't know whether this would happen in this country, but I heard talk in the 1960s of the possibility of getting these young thugs and not putting them in jail, because jails we need for professional criminals, but, rather, putting them through a course of conditioning - turning them, in effect, into clockwork oranges.
Not no longer organisms - full of sweetness and colour and light, like oranges - but machines.
In prison, Alex is subjected to an experimental course of aversion therapy that makes him physically sick at the very thought of violence.
But in the process, it also destroys his one redeeming feature - his passion for classical music.
The genius of Burgess's book - and, indeed, of Stanley Kubrick's very controversial film version - is that Alex is unquestionably a very bad man.
Faced with his brutal crimes, we instinctively cry, "Something must be done.
" But what? "At what point," Burgess asks, "do we strip the individual of his right to choose his actions - "to choose between good and evil?" I feared this, and that's why I wrote the novel.
I feared the possibility that the state was all too ready to start taking over our brains and turning us into good little citizens, without the power of choice.
For Anthony Burgess, the mechanical man was a metaphor.
But just four years after the publication of A Clockwork Orange, a chilling vision of human beings literally transformed into machines lurched onto Britain's television screens.
- HARSH ROBOTIC VOICE - You belong to us.
You shall be like us.
The Cybermen were created by Doctor Who's script editor, Gerry Davis, and the show's unofficial scientific adviser, Dr Kit Pedler, who was a medical scientist at the University of London.
Now, the 1960s had been a golden age of medical breakthroughs, from prosthetic limbs to organ transplants.
And Dr Pedler had started to wonder, "What would happen if our love affair with medical technology "acquired an unstoppable momentum? "What if we found that science could not just replace nature, "but could improve upon it? "What if we started upgrading ourselves and never stopped?" CYBERMAN CLATTERS We have been upgraded.
Into what? The next level of mankind.
We are Human-point-two.
Every citizen will receive a free upgrade.
You will become like us.
The Cybermen werewere, uh .
.
a race of humans much like ourselves.
And, uh, they slowly replaced themselves, part by part.
SCREAMING The key to what makes us afraid of the Cybermen - that we could become like that, that we could be deleted and transformed and that everything that we recognise as humanity could be replaced out of us.
That's the key to what makes them eternally interesting as a villain.
Aaagh! SHE SCREAMS CLATTERING FOOTFALLS RESOUND The Cybermen, for me, were scarier than the Daleks.
When I was seven years old, I remember watching these Cybermen, who didn't really say anything, mostly.
They just came out and they did things.
They were implacable and they had these terrifying faces because the faces were humanoid, yet not.
What the Cybermen represent is man's technological ambition - our scientific hubris carried to its logical extreme.
Look beneath a Cyberman's mask and you might just find yourself looking back.
But we've never really lost our fascination with the idea of using technology to upgrade our abilities.
Indeed, medical science now offers the genuine prospect of human/machine hybrids - cyborgs - the premise of one of the most popular American TV shows of the 1970s.
- TV VOICEOVER: - Gentlemen, we can rebuild him.
We have the technology.
We have the capability to make the world's first bionic man.
Its opening titles are a manifesto for the possibilities of artificial enhancement.
RAPID BEEPING Better than he was before.
Betterstronger .
.
faster.
The Six Million Dollar Man trades on the fantasy that one day, science will make superheroes of us all - in this case, at what now looks like a bargain price.
It was inspired by a surprisingly gritty novel, Cyborg, by the American writer Martin Caidin.
But the TV version was much more family-friendly.
For instance, the producers were very wary of the word "cyborg".
They preferred "bionic".
For most children, though, The Six Million Dollar Man was memorable for one thing - Steve Austin's frankly extraordinary turn of pace.
Chh-chh-chh-chh-chh-chh-chh! You wanted to see the slo-mo running, you know? And you wanted to see the eye - thedoo-doo-doo-doo-doo! And it was just, like, great.
It had all the great little science-fiction pieces to it.
MUSIC: "The Six Million Dollar Man Theme" It's easy, now, to laugh at Steve Austin's billowing flares.
But when I first saw scenes like this as a child, I completely believed in Steve's slow-motion super-athleticism.
But for all the fun and games, the tone of the series wasn't entirely one of unvarnished optimism.
- MOORE: - There was something sort of wounded about Steve Austin.
There was something sort of reticent about him.
Really, what I remember I remember him being this guy, this astronaut, whose life dream was taken away from him in this horrible crash, and then the government gives him these abilities that he doesn't really want and didn't really ask for.
And then they sort of basically dragoon him.
But there was always a sense that he really regretted the entire experience, you know? That he really wished that it had never happened to him.
And there was something really human about that.
Poor Steve Austin really didn't have much choice about working for the American government.
After all, Uncle Sam had paid for half his body and was naturally expecting a return on his 6 million investment.
And the fear that one day, science might be used to improve, even resurrect us, but at the cost of our own individual autonomy, also lies at the heart of an altogether darker tale about a cyborg hero.
RoboCop is the story of Murphy, a Detroit policeman who has been fatally wounded.
The private corporation running the city's police force wipes his memory, replaces much of his body with mechanical parts and sends him back on the street as a cyborg.
"We can take the identity of a guy, rip it off, "turn that into half-machine, half-beast, "and in the name of, you know, movin' on, it's OK.
" They have stolen everything except .
.
the man's soul.
But to the film's director, Paul Verhoeven, the deeper themes of the story weren't immediately obvious.
Verhoeven turned it down, initially.
Um, he later told me that he read the title page, which said "RoboCop - the Future of Law Enforcement", and threw it over his shoulder.
His wife wasended up reading it, uh, I think, and she said, "No, I think there's something here that you might like.
" Then I picked it up again, but now with, uh a dictionary, in fact, because there were many English words that I had no idea what they meant.
And I think he got to the scene I think he started to change his mind when he got to the scene where the gang torture-murders the hero.
So, what happens to Murphy in the beginning is he gets crucified, really.
He got shot in the most horrible way.
And then, later, when he's dead, and then he is resurrected.
So, for me, that was a theological thing.
But Murphy's resurrection comes at a price.
He has now become a tool of the sinister corporation that revived him.
Bring in the LED.
Lock it down.
For all his technological enhancements, he's a tortured, even tragic, figure.
Early on, I thought, "You know what? "I don't really know what we're doing, but we need a good actor.
"I just know we need a good actor.
"We can't just put anybody in the suit.
" And everybody was going, "Oh, it's not even a good role for an actor.
" But I knew that the acting would be in the nuances, the small movements, and Peter really embraced that, you know? He really went for that.
And we spent a weekend really working with it, tweaking it, and that's when we slowed everything down into bigarticulatedslow, beast-like stuff.
Sort of something of the silent age of, you know, very visual, uh, very staccato, very punctuated, so that you could put sound effects and create this other being, RoboCop.
Drop the gun.
You are under arrest.
- HE FIRES GUN - Fuck me! Fuck me! Fuck me! HE FIRES GUN Fuck me! SCREAMING Thank you for your cooperation.
Good night.
Paul, at one point, he said, you know, "I just realised that the audience is going to be so "They just will wonder, 'What's left?' "As long as he has that helmet on, "they're gonna wonder, 'What's left? 'What's left? 'What's left?' VERHOEVEN: I felt that the film was about humanity being lost, and being recovered.
And it hinges on that last line, in the last scene.
The old man asks, um, "What's your name, son?" "What is your name, son?" And then the answer is "Murphy.
" And it's the story of resurrection, you know, in whatever culture you want.
It makes me weepy, thinking about it.
RoboCop was a parable of how humanity might survive the forcible imposition of technology.
But by the time the film was released in the mid-'80s, a more fundamental shift in our relationship with technology was already under way.
Now the future wasn't defined just by mechanical hardware, but by virtual realities.
And nobody did more to spread this idea or the word that came to define it, than the Canadian-based writer William Gibson.
"Cyberspace.
"A consensual hallucination experienced daily "by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, "by children being taught mathematical concepts.
"A graphic representation of data "abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system.
"Unthinkable complexity.
"Lines of light ranged in the non-space of the mind, "clusters and constellations of data.
"Like city lights, receding.
" William Gibson is often seen as the great prophet of the internet age.
He's the man who popularised the term "cyberspace" and the man who effectively foresaw our almost symbiotic dependence on digital technology.
Funnily enough, though, Gibson himself was far from being an early-adopting techno-geek.
His hugely influential first book Neuromancer was written not on some pioneering home computer, but on a battered, old, manual typewriter.
You see, what really interested Gibson wasn't so much the hardware.
It was human behaviour.
He had become fascinated by the way in which we were now interacting with machines, above all in that great playground of the early 1980s - the video games arcade.
- GIBSON: - Seeing the body language of kids in video arcades was a big inspiration for Neuromancer because when I looked at them .
.
when I looked at them, I'd see there was a sort of feedback loop going.
They were looking so deeply into the game screen and there was a sort of neurological loop coming back to their hands onon the controllers.
And I could see how they wanted to be within that loop.
Gibson's observation prompted him to make a startling imaginative leap.
Several years before the invention of the World Wide Web, he imagined a single, interconnected space behind all the world's video game and computer screens.
A world with its own reality and its own geography.
Cyberspace.
Neuromancer's vision of cyberspace is a kind of virtual reality where you jack in to interact with other intelligences, both human and artificial.
And it's in this World Wide Web that our hero, Henry Dorsett Case, tries to pull off the ultimate computer hack, effectively staking his life in the deadliest game of all.
This is a vision of the internet that plays not just on our fascination with technology, but also our fear of it.
As a story-teller, one of the things that I love about that virtual reality and cyberspace is that it makes everybody slightly anxious, going in, which is, you know, to my advantage because I want to get them in there and really get them going about what could what could happen.
Gibson's idea of a shared virtual world was taken to a terrifying conclusion in the film The Matrix.
Here, reality itself turns out to be an illusion - built by a network of malign machines.
In our Matrix, no-one knows that they are part of the machine.
So, it's really a contrast between that and the real world.
This is a manufactured reality that's all happening inside one's brain.
The machines have created this false reality to occupy our minds while they farm us for their energy.
In one of The Matrix's most powerful scenes, the real world is revealed.
Here is the ultimate dystopian vision of the machines taking over, with billions of humans reduced to mere batteries.
- PATERSON: - We do see, of course, the harvesting fields and we saw the power plant where Neo was born.
The idea was that it was sort of an industrial thing.
The machines were the product of human beings, originally.
And they had, at some point, you know, gained consciousness.
At the heart of The Matrix, there's an intriguing twist.
Of course, it's a very disturbing idea that reality might not actually be real, but once its characters realise the truth, they can start to manipulate their world.
Their existence might be a glorified video game, but now they can change the rules.
The film's signature scenes show the heroes performing extraordinary feats that defy physics or time.
Like Prometheus in the Greek myths, they have stolen some of the power of the gods.
GUN FIRES Here, nightmare goes hand-in-hand with wish fulfilment.
Films like The Matrix feel an awfully long way from the world of 1816, when Mary Shelley was writing Frankenstein.
But the really remarkable thing is that so many of Shelley's concerns, from the awful responsibility of creation to the unending tension between man and machine, feel more timely than ever.
Two centuries ago, she identified both the extraordinary potential of science, and the moral dilemmas implicit in our desire to play God.
From assembly lines and home computers to cloning and the internet, we have built ourselves one monster after another.
And like Victor Frankenstein, we are still struggling to come to terms with the consequences of creation.
Next time Jump in the TARDIS No, no, no .
.
fire up the DeLorean.
From adventures in the past I came to make sure of Robespierre's downfall.
.
.
to warnings from the future .
.
science fiction goes travelling in time.
.
wouldn't believe.
" This programme contains some strong language - NARRATOR: - Throughout history, the advance of technology has turned the wildest flights of fantasy into our everyday realities.
And from the earliest tools to the most advanced computers, we have built a succession of machines to substitute for human labour.
Science fiction has responded with a colourful assortment of robotic helpers.
- TV VOICEOVER: - You will meet a charming character in the robot.
But the dream of creating our own mechanical servants has always gone hand in hand with a terrible nightmare.
What if, one day, the machines turned on their masters? - WOMAN: - I think the idea of robots is that they superior power, they have superior intellect, computing power to us.
The great idea there, that creates drama, is that they overcome their programming.
- SANDBROOK: - And the really chilling thought is that our very desire to play God It's alive, it's alive! It's alive! .
.
might finally lead to our own downfall.
Once you build this thing, once you create this consciousness, what's your responsibility to it? And what are the dangers of using technology on ourselves to enhance our own capabilities? - MAN: - They have stolen everything exceptthe man's soul.
Where do we cross the line and turn ourselves into machines? We could be deleted and transformed, and everything that we recognise as humanity could be replaced out of us.
From computers to cyborgs, from the clumsiest robots to the most sophisticated androids, science fiction has used the issue of artificial life to ask difficult questions about power, freedom, responsibility and the nature of humanity itself.
"Thank you for your cooperation.
" This is Oxford, where I have come in search of the first great work to tackle the theme of artificial life - Mary Shelley's 1818 novel, Frankenstein - or the Modern Prometheus.
In the book, Victor Frankenstein actually passes through Oxford, with the monster he has created hot on his heels.
But today, Oxford boasts another Frankenstein connection the book itself.
So, here it is - the original manuscript of what's arguably the first science-fiction novel ever written.
Now, this passage must be one of the most famous passages in all popular fiction, because it explores themes that would obsess science-fiction writers for years to come, because this is the moment when Frankenstein's monster comes to life.
".
.
by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, "I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open" "How can I describe my emotion at this catastrophe?" ".
.
I had selected his features as beautiful.
"Beautiful! Great God! "His skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath" ".
.
breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.
"Unable to endure the aspect of the being I had created, "I rushed out of the room" And, so, Frankenstein abandons his creature with, as it turns out, disastrous consequences.
The lasting appeal is this incredible piece of imagining a moral problem .
.
of thisthis person creating a person.
- MAN: - I mean, it's just perfect.
Frankenstein inventing something that runs away with itself, that's looking for consolation, and can't find it and goes howling into the night.
Is he innocent? Is he evil? You know, the book is very, very complicated and, so, people are just going to go on being fascinated by it.
Mary Shelley had become intrigued by the experiments of the Italian physicist Luigi Galvani, who had used electricity to animate the muscles of a dead frog.
BUZZING, THUNDER CRASHES In 1803, Galvani's nephew had stimulated the limbs of an executed criminal in London, reportedly causing the corpse's eye to open and his hand to raise.
But Shelley's underlying concerns were more moral than electrical.
I think the clue to Mary Shelley's thinking is right there in the title - Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus.
You see, in Greek mythology, Prometheus was the Titan who created man in the gods' own image, and stole fire from Heaven - the ultimate gift of knowledge.
Frankenstein is a story about the consequences of playing God, about creation and responsibility.
And those themes, and that idea of man as the modern Prometheus, have been at the very centre of science fiction ever since.
- DR FRANKENSTEIN: - It's alive! It's alive, it's alive! Today, our popular image of the monster owes most to Boris Karloff's unforgettable portrayal in the 1931 film.
- TRAILER VOICEOVER: - When this dead hand moves, the monster created by a man they called mad is turned loose to strike terror into the hearts of men.
In fact, Karloff's hulking bruiser bears hardly any resemblance to Shelley's agile, intelligent creature.
His jerky, lumbering movements and the electrodes in his neck suggest something far more mechanical.
They tapped into an emerging 20th-century phenomenon - a fascination with robots .
.
and a mistrust of the mechanical that endures to this day.
The word "robot" was coined in 1921 by the writer Karel Capek, and he derived it from a Czech word meaning "forced labour".
In Capek's play, "R.
U.
R.
- Rossum's Universal Robots", the machines in question rise up and destroy their creators.
Not perhaps the most promising beginning.
Well, no.
But Capek's robots did strike a chord.
Remember that the 1920s were an age of extraordinary industrial change, with factories everywhere being transformed by mechanisation and mass production.
So, it's no surprise that ordinary workers began to ask themselves whether the future belonged to man or machine.
In 1927, those fears inspired one of the great landmarks in cinema history - the futuristic German film Metropolis.
Created by the mad scientist, Rotwang, the robot, Maria, takes on human form to lead the rebel workers of Metropolis to their destruction.
And for the first time, a robot captured the imagination of audiences across the world.
- MAN: - Metropolis stands out to me, on a personal level, of the robot, Maria, and how sexual she is as a robot.
And I think that's just something that from the first time I saw it, even as a shadowy kind of movie with those rings going around her, just made me feel like I was into some world that was not that safe in terms of the correlation between machine andand sexuality.
And I loved the feeling that that gave me, as an edge.
Beautiful and terrible and utterly unforgettable, Maria is the embodiment of our fears of the machine.
And she became an icon not just of German cinema but of the entire silent film era.
But one writer in particular hated what he saw as the pessimistic, anti-scientific bias of stories like Metropolis and Frankenstein.
He was an American biochemist called Isaac Asimov, and he wanted to write about robots that were good.
Asimov began to wonder just what would define a good robot.
And in a short story published in 1942, he outlined his Three Laws Of Robotics.
The first law is as follows - "A robot may not harm a human being "or through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
" Number two - "A robot must obey "orders given it by qualified personnel, "unless those orders violate rule number one.
" In other words, a robot can't be ordered to kill a human being.
Rule number three - "A robot must protect its own existence" After all, it's an expensive piece of equipment.
Uh, ".
.
unless that violates rules one or two.
" Asimov's laws provided the basis for a series of memorable stories about robots, exploring the potential dangers of anti-robot prejudice and even asking if the Three Laws might cancel each other out.
But as the economic boom of the 1950s saw ordinary households installing fridges and washing machines, public attitudes to robots began to soften.
- VOICEOVER: - This is the kitchen of tomorrow - a press-button dream coming true for Mrs Housewife.
All sorts of wonders are hers at the push of a button.
Perhaps "Mrs Housewife" might rather fancy a robot servant.
The ultimate mod con.
BLEEPING And in 1956, the film Forbidden Planet presented us with Robby.
He wasn't just user-friendly.
He was almost lovable.
- TRAILER VOICEOVER: - You will meet a charming character in the robot.
Able to produce, on order, ten tonnes of lead or a slinky evening gown.
I loved Robby the Robot.
I just thought that was the coolest robot anybody could ever make.
And even though you always know it's a guy in a suit, it was just better.
It didn't have a face on it - it was just different and better.
I mean, there were several things great about Robby.
It was anthropomorphic in a way, in that it had arms and legs.
But it didn't really have a head or eyes or anything.
- VOICEOVER: - Always at your service.
It must be the loveliest, softest thing you've ever made for me.
- TRUMBULL: - And it had this thing that kind of lit up on it that was related to the voice track.
- ROBBY: - Star sapphires take a week to crystallise properly.
Would diamond or emeralds do? And then it had all these weird little orbiting gizmos that kind of represented its brain or its thought process or something.
And it was kind of a hybrid between something obviously very sophisticated, electronic, but also mechanical in a way.
While filmmakers have rarely been able to resist the idea of robots as basically men in shiny tin suits, scientists have always known that, in reality, robots would look a lot more functional.
And the first film that really embraced that was the early '70s ecological fable Silent Running.
It's the story of how, in the future, earth's last trees and plants are sent into space on a fleet of orbiting, Eden-Project-style ships, and tended by a team of robot gardeners.
Although Silent Running has become famous for its environmental politics, the director Douglas Trumbull's real motive for making the film was to show credible, non-humanoid robots on screen.
The Silent Running story began with the idea of, "Well, what would you do if you had some robots?" So, I had seen Tod Browning's movie, Freaks, and it had this amazing performance by a guy named Johnny Eck who simply didn't exist below the waist.
He had no legs, no pelvis, no anything.
And he walked on his hands.
And I thought, "If you took someone "who had the skills to walk on their hands adroitly, "and put 'em inside of a robot outfit "that was not anthropomorphic, even like Robby the Robot - "it would have no head, no shoulders, no anything - "and it's just walking on these appendages, "that would be a really cool robot for a movie.
" So, Trumbull employed three amputee actors to portray his robots, Huey, Dewey and Louie.
Now - HE SIGHS - This is the mulch.
That's what makes the tree grow.
HE SIGHS Now Now, Huey, you're gonna plant the tree and, Dewey, you're gonna dig the ditch.
- TRUMBULL: - There really are people in there and they .
.
and, so, they have naturalistic behaviour to them, and they react andit's very subtle, but there's definitely something going on.
MYSTERIOUS MUSIC Trumbull's robots were to prove unexpectedly influential.
George Lucas came to me after Silent Running and asked me to do the effects for Star Wars.
And, uh, he said he wanted to do, you know, robots, kind of like what I did.
And I said, "Great.
Can I help? I'll give you the names of my guys.
" What happened next made science-fiction history as Huey, Dewey and Louie inspired half of one of cinema's greatest double acts.
I've got to rest before I fall apart.
My joints are almost frozen.
R2-D2 BLEEPS What made R2-D2 and C-3PO extraordinary was their interaction not with human beings, but with each other.
I think the audience were surprised by the relationship between R2-D2 and C-3PO because you didn't expect that thing of a microwave, a washing machine, I don't know, a refrigerator.
And they're ostensibly talking to each other.
And what, I think, that does is allow the audience to recognise something that is non-ferrous in there, that has actually got some kind of human element.
Both R2-D2 and C-3PO owed a debt to their cinematic predecessors.
One of the things I remember was the robotic workshop, if you like, where there were all these carcasses for R2-D2 units.
And, um, on the walls were sketches and drawings and technical drawings of characters that I recognised from another movie, Silent Running - Huey, Dewey and Louie.
R2-D2 also inherited the idea that having an actor inside the suit would give him some character.
They'd put me in, then they'd put the head on, then I'd turn the motor on, from the inside, which was battery-driven.
And there was all the things going round - wheels and lights flashing.
And they just said, "Look, left, look right.
" "Now look fed-up.
" And how do you look fed-up? How do you look happy? And, eventually, I got to move it slightly.
I rocked it from side to side.
BEEPS RAPIDLY - Uncle Owen? - Yeah? This R2 unit has a bad motivator.
Look.
Hey, what are you trying to push on us? BLEEPS EXCITEDLY Excuse me, sir, but that R2 unit is in prime condition.
A real bargain.
For the look of C-3PO, George Lucas's concept designer, Ralph McQuarrie, delved even further back into the history of science fiction.
- DANIELS: - It was pretty clear to me that, uh, Threepio, in Ralph McQuarrie's concept painting, was based very much - and, indeed, George Lucas, it turned out had asked him to base it - on Maria from Metropolis, Fritz Lang's film.
And what it gave you is a classic design.
I realised that, very early on, a kind of, hmm, as it were almost a geisha-type, um, shuffle was really quite attractive, whereas a lumbering walk is actually very threatening.
And Threepio's eyes are also quite captivating because they give him this sort of permanent stare of wonder.
And he always cared too much.
And for a machine to care this much was such an oddball idea.
You got a lot of carbon scoring here.
It looks like you boys have seen a lot of action.
With all we've been through, sometimes I'm amazed we're in as good condition as we are, with the rebellion and all.
You know of the rebellion against the Empire?! That's how we came to your service, if you take my meaning, sir.
For a short while on the set, I was this new, fantastic star on the block.
It wasnobody had seen this kind of man before.
And, uh, within days, that totally changed.
Because when I wasn't actually performing, I would stay very still to conserve my energy So, I would stand like a model in a shop window - a mannequin.
And I clearly had become dehumanised very, very quickly - that people adopted the reflection of my performance.
Unless I was performing, they forgot I was alive, shall we say? And this feeling came back to me many years later, when I said to a bunch of roboticists in America, "You're all very clever, "but nobody in this hall knows what it actually feels like "to be a machine.
" And I'd had that experience.
By the early 1980s, with the Star Wars droids on everything from lampshades to lunchboxes, robots were becoming distinctly cuddly.
But in 1984, just when we were becoming a little bit soft about robots, the most terrifying artificial creation since Frankenstein's monster made a memorable entrance in a Los Angeles alleyway.
The Terminator, directed by James Cameron, features an unstoppable assassin.
Like Maria in Metropolis, he's a robot with a human facade - his organic flesh hiding a terrifying endoskeleton.
It was initially a fever dream that Jim had.
He literally had that central image of the Terminator endoskeleton emerging from the flames.
The car crashes and there's an explosion and this, like, shiny, metal skeleton comes out, and it's, like, "Holy shit.
" EERIE MUSIC When we initially started the casting process, we planned to have Lance Henriksen play the role of the Terminator because the initial concept of the Terminator was that he would blend in.
He wouldn't stand out.
He would look like you or me.
And, obviously, Arnold doesn't quite fit that.
His whole thing was Arnold Schwarzenegger is the Terminator - the most bad-ass Terminator in the history of cyborgs.
And the great note that Jim gave to Arnold, that Arnold embraced completely, was, "Think of yourself as a shark.
"You truly have one mission, you have one focus.
"You're there to kill Sarah Connor.
" SCREAMING AND GUNFIRE - HURD: - We were really interested in telling a story about the dangers of technology - that the technology that we were inventing at the time, which was in the '80s, was going to lead to this, lead to the machines taking over.
- REPORTER: - In the event of a nuclear attack - SANDBROOK: - This was the age of the Strategic Defence Initiative - a plan for a computer-controlled ring of laser-equipped satellites nicknamed, ironically, Star Wars.
Proceeding boldly with these new technologies, we can significantly reduce any incentive that the Soviet Union may have to threaten attack against the United States or its allies.
EXPLOSION ECHOES - HURD: - The future vision in The Terminator is one in which perhaps human hubris has led to the demise of civilisation, has led to a decimation of the human population, because we put all of our trust in technology.
In the Terminator, Arnie's assassin is merely an instrument of the real enemy, Skynet, an astonishingly sophisticated computer system - an artificial intelligence that has turned on its human creators.
Writers have long been fascinated by the idea that the really dangerous machine isn't necessarily stronger than us.
It's just smarter.
And that idea really gathered momentum in the early 1960s, when computers were first entering the public imagination.
Of course, back then, you could have filled this whole room with computers and you'd still have had only a fraction of the capability of today's mobile phones.
But as the writer Arthur C.
Clarke argued at the time, computers might seem a long way from matching the power of the human brain, but it was probably only a matter of time.
A great deal has happened very quickly with computers and people have exaggerated ideas about their capabilities.
But the fact is that all present computers are mechanical morons.
They cannot really think.
They can only do things for which they're programmed.
But this won't always be true.
In 2001 - A Space Odyssey, Clarke and the director, Stanley Kubrick, pushed the computers one stage further - asking what might happen if an intelligent machine followed its programming to its logical conclusion, regardless of the human cost.
The film's computer controls a manned mission to Jupiter, and it's name is HAL.
First of all, in 2001, HAL is among the most sympathetic characters in it.
But he determines that for the mission to be successful, these astronauts are not capable of doing the mission, and he concludes, logically, and not incorrectly, that he can do it better.
So, therefore, he starts murdering them.
It was conflict that caused HAL to go kind ofbonkers, you know? And, uh, so that that was the explanation for his kind of going crazy, rather than being evil.
Uh, really kind of an insane computer.
I think one of scariest moments in all movies is when Keir Dullea is in that pod.
He tries to retrieve Gary Lockwood's body, and then he brings it back to the giant mothership.
And he says, uh Open the pod-bay doors, HAL.
HAL: I'm sorry, Dave.
I'm afraid I can't do that.
What's the problem? I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.
What are you talking about, HAL? This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardise it.
I think up till 2001, a typical computer would have sounded like - HE IMITATES STILTED ELECTRONIC VOICE - "Dave, this is the computer.
"This is the way a computer would speak "and this is the way it would be portrayed, "and was portrayed, "in many science-fictionmovies.
" Well, he had a voice that really sounded a lot more human, in many ways, and I think this was intentional, than the actors.
We were more machine-like.
WHIRRING HAL: Stop, Dave.
- SANDBROOK: - HAL owed his warm, reassuring tones to the Canadian actor Douglas Rain.
SLOWLY I'm afraid, Dave.
They're a crucial reason why this scene, in which the tables are turned on HAL - HAL: Dave - .
.
is one of the most compelling in all science fiction.
HAL's calm, rational voice, even as he's being destroyed, piece by piece - HAL: My mind is going.
- .
.
is almost unbearably moving.
I can feel it.
I can feel it.
Poor old HAL might have got a bit carried away, but his thought processes were always relentlessly logical.
Indeed, what most writers found fascinating about robots was their dependence on logic rather than emotion.
But a year after 2001 was released, the British writer Brian Aldiss published a remarkably moving short story called Supertoys Last All Summer Long.
And this was the tale of a machine programmed not just to think, but to feel, and not just to feel, but to love.
- ALDISS: - The question set up in the story is whether our little artificial android boy is going to be a success, when he is taken over by his parents.
He is programmed to love his mother.
Why doesn't it work? His mother was not programmed to love him.
And that actually was part of my story.
I felt that although I had been programmed, my mother hadn't been, and that's the way that you can get things, I suppose, off your chest.
Aldiss's story became the basis for the film AI - Artificial Intelligence - developed for decades by Stanley Kubrick but finally brought to the screen by Steven Spielberg.
Why don't you look like one? Like one? You're not cute like a doll.
You just look like someone's ordinary kid.
At the heart of the film is Haley Joel Osment's uncanny performance as the robot child, David.
- OSMENT: - There's robots that you see in films that are, you know, ruthless killers or like HAL - they have analytical coldness to him.
And with David, his primary function is to love.
And if he becomes human, his mother will love him, and his number one objective is for his mother to love him.
So, that's what he has to do.
And he gets more human in a way that It's not that just he becomes more and more and more of a loving, emotional character.
He hardens, in a way, too, and he learns about disappointment and abandonment and violence.
In this scene, in which David argues with Jude Law's cynical robot gigolo, Spielberg captures the little boy's emotional turmoil - a combination of anger, denial and child-like yearning.
I am real.
Mommy's going to read to me and tuck me in my bed and sing to me and listen to what I say, and she will cuddle with me and tell me every day, 100 times a day, that she loves me! Robots have always been, I think, seen as potential companions and helpers.
But that sort of like innocence and child-like, you know, wonder that this character has, I think was a sort of a new bit of territory that they uncovered.
It might just be a replication of human feelings but the core of the movie is that once you build this thing, once you create this consciousness, what's your responsibility to it? WIND HOWLS The question of a creator's responsibility to his creation takes us right back to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
Indeed, one of the book's most memorable passages comes when Victor Frankenstein confronts his monster high on an alpine glacier.
The monster has already shown himself capable of appalling violence.
But here, his tone is imploring, even desperate.
"Oh, Frankenstein, remember, that I am thy creature.
"I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, "whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed.
"Everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone am irrecoverably excluded.
"I was benevolent and good.
Misery made me a fiend.
"Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.
" This is, I suppose, the voice of Adam in the presence of God.
It's the voice of man cast out of the Garden of Eden, face to face with his creator.
And 150 years later, this howl of anguish echoed once again in one of cinema's best-known stories of creature and creator.
The film Blade Runner, made in 1982, was adapted from a novel, Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? by Philip K.
Dick.
The issue of humans and machines is a way of asking what a human is.
And, certainly, that was what, I think, that Philip K.
Dick was talking about.
He was talking about, "Well, what makes us human? "If you could get somebody and manufacture them "and stick in a bunch of memories, "why wouldn't they be human? "What is it? What is it that makes us so special?" Blade Runner explores this question through the story of a group of rogue androids, known as Replicants.
Almost totally indistinguishable from humans, they are limited to a four-year lifespan.
In a pivotal sequence, their leader, Roy Batty, goes, quite literally, to meet his maker, the Replicants' inventor.
Fittingly, the director, Ridley Scott, gives the encounter a religious atmosphere.
The lighting suggests a church, and the dialogue consciously echoes the Scriptures.
You were made as well as we could make you.
But not to last.
The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long, and you have burned so very, very brightly, Roy.
Look at you.
You're the Prodigal Son.
The encounter ends with Batty murdering his creator, but with no solution to the Replicants' imminent demise.
Like the rest of us, Batty must confront his own mortality, gazing into the abyss in a famous speech at the climax of the film.
The lines, written by the actor, Rutger Hauer, himself, have gone down in science-fiction history.
"I've seen things you people ".
.
wouldn't believe.
"Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.
"I've watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate.
" Roy Batty's poetic sensibility is, I think, a nice little nod to Mary Shelley.
In the original Frankenstein, the monster is greatly moved by the poetry of Milton and Goethe, in which it finds echoes of its own tragic isolation.
And in the last minutes of Blade Runner, as his life ebbs away, Roy Batty proves himself the most romantic of Replicants.
- HAUER: - I really love the idea that Roy doesn't have a clue about poetry or about what it means.
But it's in his program and he likes it, you know? And I wanted to try and find one line where you could feel Roy's .
.
you know, sorrow, so to speak.
"All those moments will be lost in time ".
.
like tears "in rain.
" That's the one that nails .
.
courage and pathos, I think.
You know, the courage to go on when there's no going on, because you're fuckin' dead and you know you're dead.
Everybody knows they're dead, but he's valiant.
"Time to die.
" What drives Blade Runner's story is perhaps the most primal of all human emotions - our fear of death.
Humans, Replicants, we're all terrified of our own extinction.
BUZZING But what if the Replicants had been allowed to live beyond their four-year lifespan? What if they really were indistinguishable from humans? How would we react to our android brethren - with open arms or with shrieks of horror? It's a theme explored in depth by the television series Battlestar Galactica.
Galactica is certainly in the tradition of Frankenstein and other pieces of man, you know, creating life and having life turn against him, and then examining that.
And I sort of felt that if we've created something, at some point, that looks and acts like us - that basically has emotions and basically has a sense of humour and can talk and dream and all these other things, at what point will we start to say, "Well, that's a person"? Or will we always sort of take the position that it's imitating a person? In Battlestar Galactica, the situation is complicated by the fact that the artificial Cylons have turned against their human creators in a devastating attack.
Now the Cylons have infiltrated the survivors, forming emotional ties as strong as any human bond.
She was a Cylon - a machine.
Is that what Boomer was? A machine? A thing? That's what she turned out to be.
She was more than that to us.
She was more than that to me.
She was a vital, living person.
It's a brilliantly paranoid dramatic idea - the thought that somebody you know, you trust, you love, might actually be an enemy machine.
But Battlestar Galactica pushed it one stage further, because some of the Cylon sleeper agents don't know themselves that they're Cylons.
They don't just look and think and feel like humans.
They believe they're human.
And at that point, well, who's to say they're not? To add to the surprise, the writers didn't even tell the actors themselves which characters were Cylons and which weren't.
No-one knew who was a Cylon.
We would find out at the readings.
So, you would just be reading a line and go, "Oh, my goodness.
" It was ait was just like People who watched the show were getting the same impact as those that read the show, because we were experiencing it at the same moment.
And, all of a sudden, people were relating to what the Cylons were saying, and they started to say, "Well, that's how we, as human beings, feel.
" It was really interesting how that flipped people.
I thought it was very important that the show not give a particular point of view on what the simple answers were.
Cos I didn't think there were simple answers to these things.
And I wanted the show to raise questions and to make the audience think about it.
Like AI and Blade Runner before it, Battlestar Galactica explored the consequences of a world in which machines didn't necessarily overtake humans, but, instead, became human themselves.
But science fiction has long been preoccupied with a parallel question - what if humans became more like machines? And this idea underpinned a controversial novel published in 1962 by Anthony Burgess - A Clockwork Orange.
Burgess offered various explanations for his book's curious title.
One was that it came from an old cockney phrase - "As queer as a clockwork orange.
" But the most intriguing went back to Burgess's days as a teacher in colonial Malaya, because there the word for man is "orang".
So, "A Clockwork Man.
" The story of a human being robbed of his free will and turned into a machine.
MUSIC: "Symphony No.
9 in D Minor" by Ludwig van Beethoven.
A Clockwork Orange is the story of the teenage drop-out, Alex, whose gleeful acts of rape and ultra-violence, unforgettably portrayed in Stanley Kubrick's film, provoke an extreme response by the state.
The point of the book was not the depiction of violence but, rather, a kind of projection of a possibility that we've become so worried about juvenile violence in this country, as they are in America and, indeed, in most countries of the world, and might decide to do something about it pretty radical.
I don't know whether this would happen in this country, but I heard talk in the 1960s of the possibility of getting these young thugs and not putting them in jail, because jails we need for professional criminals, but, rather, putting them through a course of conditioning - turning them, in effect, into clockwork oranges.
Not no longer organisms - full of sweetness and colour and light, like oranges - but machines.
In prison, Alex is subjected to an experimental course of aversion therapy that makes him physically sick at the very thought of violence.
But in the process, it also destroys his one redeeming feature - his passion for classical music.
The genius of Burgess's book - and, indeed, of Stanley Kubrick's very controversial film version - is that Alex is unquestionably a very bad man.
Faced with his brutal crimes, we instinctively cry, "Something must be done.
" But what? "At what point," Burgess asks, "do we strip the individual of his right to choose his actions - "to choose between good and evil?" I feared this, and that's why I wrote the novel.
I feared the possibility that the state was all too ready to start taking over our brains and turning us into good little citizens, without the power of choice.
For Anthony Burgess, the mechanical man was a metaphor.
But just four years after the publication of A Clockwork Orange, a chilling vision of human beings literally transformed into machines lurched onto Britain's television screens.
- HARSH ROBOTIC VOICE - You belong to us.
You shall be like us.
The Cybermen were created by Doctor Who's script editor, Gerry Davis, and the show's unofficial scientific adviser, Dr Kit Pedler, who was a medical scientist at the University of London.
Now, the 1960s had been a golden age of medical breakthroughs, from prosthetic limbs to organ transplants.
And Dr Pedler had started to wonder, "What would happen if our love affair with medical technology "acquired an unstoppable momentum? "What if we found that science could not just replace nature, "but could improve upon it? "What if we started upgrading ourselves and never stopped?" CYBERMAN CLATTERS We have been upgraded.
Into what? The next level of mankind.
We are Human-point-two.
Every citizen will receive a free upgrade.
You will become like us.
The Cybermen werewere, uh .
.
a race of humans much like ourselves.
And, uh, they slowly replaced themselves, part by part.
SCREAMING The key to what makes us afraid of the Cybermen - that we could become like that, that we could be deleted and transformed and that everything that we recognise as humanity could be replaced out of us.
That's the key to what makes them eternally interesting as a villain.
Aaagh! SHE SCREAMS CLATTERING FOOTFALLS RESOUND The Cybermen, for me, were scarier than the Daleks.
When I was seven years old, I remember watching these Cybermen, who didn't really say anything, mostly.
They just came out and they did things.
They were implacable and they had these terrifying faces because the faces were humanoid, yet not.
What the Cybermen represent is man's technological ambition - our scientific hubris carried to its logical extreme.
Look beneath a Cyberman's mask and you might just find yourself looking back.
But we've never really lost our fascination with the idea of using technology to upgrade our abilities.
Indeed, medical science now offers the genuine prospect of human/machine hybrids - cyborgs - the premise of one of the most popular American TV shows of the 1970s.
- TV VOICEOVER: - Gentlemen, we can rebuild him.
We have the technology.
We have the capability to make the world's first bionic man.
Its opening titles are a manifesto for the possibilities of artificial enhancement.
RAPID BEEPING Better than he was before.
Betterstronger .
.
faster.
The Six Million Dollar Man trades on the fantasy that one day, science will make superheroes of us all - in this case, at what now looks like a bargain price.
It was inspired by a surprisingly gritty novel, Cyborg, by the American writer Martin Caidin.
But the TV version was much more family-friendly.
For instance, the producers were very wary of the word "cyborg".
They preferred "bionic".
For most children, though, The Six Million Dollar Man was memorable for one thing - Steve Austin's frankly extraordinary turn of pace.
Chh-chh-chh-chh-chh-chh-chh! You wanted to see the slo-mo running, you know? And you wanted to see the eye - thedoo-doo-doo-doo-doo! And it was just, like, great.
It had all the great little science-fiction pieces to it.
MUSIC: "The Six Million Dollar Man Theme" It's easy, now, to laugh at Steve Austin's billowing flares.
But when I first saw scenes like this as a child, I completely believed in Steve's slow-motion super-athleticism.
But for all the fun and games, the tone of the series wasn't entirely one of unvarnished optimism.
- MOORE: - There was something sort of wounded about Steve Austin.
There was something sort of reticent about him.
Really, what I remember I remember him being this guy, this astronaut, whose life dream was taken away from him in this horrible crash, and then the government gives him these abilities that he doesn't really want and didn't really ask for.
And then they sort of basically dragoon him.
But there was always a sense that he really regretted the entire experience, you know? That he really wished that it had never happened to him.
And there was something really human about that.
Poor Steve Austin really didn't have much choice about working for the American government.
After all, Uncle Sam had paid for half his body and was naturally expecting a return on his 6 million investment.
And the fear that one day, science might be used to improve, even resurrect us, but at the cost of our own individual autonomy, also lies at the heart of an altogether darker tale about a cyborg hero.
RoboCop is the story of Murphy, a Detroit policeman who has been fatally wounded.
The private corporation running the city's police force wipes his memory, replaces much of his body with mechanical parts and sends him back on the street as a cyborg.
"We can take the identity of a guy, rip it off, "turn that into half-machine, half-beast, "and in the name of, you know, movin' on, it's OK.
" They have stolen everything except .
.
the man's soul.
But to the film's director, Paul Verhoeven, the deeper themes of the story weren't immediately obvious.
Verhoeven turned it down, initially.
Um, he later told me that he read the title page, which said "RoboCop - the Future of Law Enforcement", and threw it over his shoulder.
His wife wasended up reading it, uh, I think, and she said, "No, I think there's something here that you might like.
" Then I picked it up again, but now with, uh a dictionary, in fact, because there were many English words that I had no idea what they meant.
And I think he got to the scene I think he started to change his mind when he got to the scene where the gang torture-murders the hero.
So, what happens to Murphy in the beginning is he gets crucified, really.
He got shot in the most horrible way.
And then, later, when he's dead, and then he is resurrected.
So, for me, that was a theological thing.
But Murphy's resurrection comes at a price.
He has now become a tool of the sinister corporation that revived him.
Bring in the LED.
Lock it down.
For all his technological enhancements, he's a tortured, even tragic, figure.
Early on, I thought, "You know what? "I don't really know what we're doing, but we need a good actor.
"I just know we need a good actor.
"We can't just put anybody in the suit.
" And everybody was going, "Oh, it's not even a good role for an actor.
" But I knew that the acting would be in the nuances, the small movements, and Peter really embraced that, you know? He really went for that.
And we spent a weekend really working with it, tweaking it, and that's when we slowed everything down into bigarticulatedslow, beast-like stuff.
Sort of something of the silent age of, you know, very visual, uh, very staccato, very punctuated, so that you could put sound effects and create this other being, RoboCop.
Drop the gun.
You are under arrest.
- HE FIRES GUN - Fuck me! Fuck me! Fuck me! HE FIRES GUN Fuck me! SCREAMING Thank you for your cooperation.
Good night.
Paul, at one point, he said, you know, "I just realised that the audience is going to be so "They just will wonder, 'What's left?' "As long as he has that helmet on, "they're gonna wonder, 'What's left? 'What's left? 'What's left?' VERHOEVEN: I felt that the film was about humanity being lost, and being recovered.
And it hinges on that last line, in the last scene.
The old man asks, um, "What's your name, son?" "What is your name, son?" And then the answer is "Murphy.
" And it's the story of resurrection, you know, in whatever culture you want.
It makes me weepy, thinking about it.
RoboCop was a parable of how humanity might survive the forcible imposition of technology.
But by the time the film was released in the mid-'80s, a more fundamental shift in our relationship with technology was already under way.
Now the future wasn't defined just by mechanical hardware, but by virtual realities.
And nobody did more to spread this idea or the word that came to define it, than the Canadian-based writer William Gibson.
"Cyberspace.
"A consensual hallucination experienced daily "by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, "by children being taught mathematical concepts.
"A graphic representation of data "abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system.
"Unthinkable complexity.
"Lines of light ranged in the non-space of the mind, "clusters and constellations of data.
"Like city lights, receding.
" William Gibson is often seen as the great prophet of the internet age.
He's the man who popularised the term "cyberspace" and the man who effectively foresaw our almost symbiotic dependence on digital technology.
Funnily enough, though, Gibson himself was far from being an early-adopting techno-geek.
His hugely influential first book Neuromancer was written not on some pioneering home computer, but on a battered, old, manual typewriter.
You see, what really interested Gibson wasn't so much the hardware.
It was human behaviour.
He had become fascinated by the way in which we were now interacting with machines, above all in that great playground of the early 1980s - the video games arcade.
- GIBSON: - Seeing the body language of kids in video arcades was a big inspiration for Neuromancer because when I looked at them .
.
when I looked at them, I'd see there was a sort of feedback loop going.
They were looking so deeply into the game screen and there was a sort of neurological loop coming back to their hands onon the controllers.
And I could see how they wanted to be within that loop.
Gibson's observation prompted him to make a startling imaginative leap.
Several years before the invention of the World Wide Web, he imagined a single, interconnected space behind all the world's video game and computer screens.
A world with its own reality and its own geography.
Cyberspace.
Neuromancer's vision of cyberspace is a kind of virtual reality where you jack in to interact with other intelligences, both human and artificial.
And it's in this World Wide Web that our hero, Henry Dorsett Case, tries to pull off the ultimate computer hack, effectively staking his life in the deadliest game of all.
This is a vision of the internet that plays not just on our fascination with technology, but also our fear of it.
As a story-teller, one of the things that I love about that virtual reality and cyberspace is that it makes everybody slightly anxious, going in, which is, you know, to my advantage because I want to get them in there and really get them going about what could what could happen.
Gibson's idea of a shared virtual world was taken to a terrifying conclusion in the film The Matrix.
Here, reality itself turns out to be an illusion - built by a network of malign machines.
In our Matrix, no-one knows that they are part of the machine.
So, it's really a contrast between that and the real world.
This is a manufactured reality that's all happening inside one's brain.
The machines have created this false reality to occupy our minds while they farm us for their energy.
In one of The Matrix's most powerful scenes, the real world is revealed.
Here is the ultimate dystopian vision of the machines taking over, with billions of humans reduced to mere batteries.
- PATERSON: - We do see, of course, the harvesting fields and we saw the power plant where Neo was born.
The idea was that it was sort of an industrial thing.
The machines were the product of human beings, originally.
And they had, at some point, you know, gained consciousness.
At the heart of The Matrix, there's an intriguing twist.
Of course, it's a very disturbing idea that reality might not actually be real, but once its characters realise the truth, they can start to manipulate their world.
Their existence might be a glorified video game, but now they can change the rules.
The film's signature scenes show the heroes performing extraordinary feats that defy physics or time.
Like Prometheus in the Greek myths, they have stolen some of the power of the gods.
GUN FIRES Here, nightmare goes hand-in-hand with wish fulfilment.
Films like The Matrix feel an awfully long way from the world of 1816, when Mary Shelley was writing Frankenstein.
But the really remarkable thing is that so many of Shelley's concerns, from the awful responsibility of creation to the unending tension between man and machine, feel more timely than ever.
Two centuries ago, she identified both the extraordinary potential of science, and the moral dilemmas implicit in our desire to play God.
From assembly lines and home computers to cloning and the internet, we have built ourselves one monster after another.
And like Victor Frankenstein, we are still struggling to come to terms with the consequences of creation.
Next time Jump in the TARDIS No, no, no .
.
fire up the DeLorean.
From adventures in the past I came to make sure of Robespierre's downfall.
.
.
to warnings from the future .
.
science fiction goes travelling in time.