Obey Me

Reading through the different artificial creatures, Lotte Dolle’s proposal stuck out to me. She talked about the quality of obedience, which I found very interesting. Being obedient is something I believe both humans, animals, and technology share. Humans can be obedient to each other, animals can listen to their trainers, and technology can follow people’s commands. At the same time, I also believe that all of us share the aptitude for rebellion. Lotte also discusses this, proposing an artificial creature which rebels against its controller.

This exploration of obedience vs. rebellion had me thinking about society’s attitudes towards this kind of behaviour. In humans, rebellion can be seen as both negative and positive. We expect people to follow laws and be obedient to societal customs, but at the same time, we can admire some’s rebellious nature. For example, Rosa Parks’s stand against racial segregation rules is seen as a historic act of rebellion that altered American history and has inspired many to face injustice across the world.

Rebellion of artificial intelligence and creatures, however, is something most of us fear. As humans, we make tools and use technology and expect these things to be obedient to us. We do not want our ovens to rebel against us when we are cooking, and we hate it when our computers don’t operate the way we want them to. Just like Lotte described, in movies, rebellious technology is usually a sign of the apocalypse, of evil computers taking over the world and destroying humanity.

In this way, we can forgive and even admire disobedience in humans, but we get frustrated or are even intolerant of rebellion in other creatures.