Automata Past and Future

"And I said you can't make everybody happy
He said you'd like to at least make yourself happy though
I'm not sure who I am
I'm not sure who I am
But I know who I've been"

Modest Mouse - Make Everyone Happy / Mechanical Birds


There should be some difference between golems and robots. Yes, I know they show up in different settings, but for that to be a meaningful distinction they should stand out by more than superfluities, more than just saying "beep-beep" versus... ida know, something in Hebrew, presumably.

I'll admit the few fantasy books I've read have not included such character-devices, but the many fantasy games I've played routinely do. And, just as wizards fell more and more into the role of scientists, golems acquired mithril circuitry and voice recognition programming and magic wand remote controls. Aside from the lamentable lack of imagination such gimmicks betray, blurring the lines between science fiction and fantasy saps much of both fields' charm. One genre looks forward to glorious futures, the other back to glorious pasts. Vulcans may be space-elves, but the distinction between wisdom and logic should not be so easily cast aside in desperation to cram every popular gimmick into every new intellectual property, the full gamut of emotions in every scene. We've beaten Clarke's third law into undeath, we've trolled the cyborgs of Shadowrun, we've implanted the three stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, and the steampunk appeal of magitek has had a couple of decades to play itself out. Science fantasy has gotten old. Enough with the beeping golems already!

On one hand, the confusion is justifiable. When Karel Capek coined the term, his robots recalled more than a little Mary Shelley's mountain-hopping daemon, and both echoed the Jewish myth of the golem escaping its creator's control. Long before that, endless mythologies held we humans ourselves to have been deliberately fabricated from baser components, usually dirt infused with breath or some kind of bodily fluids. (And you must admit, we do love gettin' dirty and breathy with our bodily fluids.)  But just as modern superheroes distinguished themselves from demigods (albeit not very decisively) by acquiring their powers via materialistic means, so robots were defined less by the process of their creation as by their potential as unbridled artificial consciousness.

I return once again to the distinction I always make between SF and Fantasy. Mythological plots rely on power handed down from above, doled out in trade for ritual and obeisance, whether the original source is divine or a wise ancient master of masterful ancient wisdom. Science on the other hand is a bottom-up process in which rational minds build up their understanding and means of affecting the world from basic elements. Two questions arise:

1) What is a golem, intrinsically, which a robot is not? What qualities are handed down to it by its creator?
2) What can a robot do which a golem cannot? Being technology, how does it advance the antientropic buildup of knowledge, the complexity of culture?

Both questions can be answered in various ways depending on the demands of the narrative. Your golems might house the spirits of martyred dwarves (though that tread upon the "free will" question of cybernetics) or your robot might help solve murders using his superior robo-logic. Maybe your golem is powered by The Word, held by its creator's charm on the line between truth and death. Maybe your robot interacts in novel ways with existing technology, like plugging itself directly into a network to hack it. Pick your gimmick.

But whatever the gimmick, golems should draw their power, purpose and limitations from above: the properties of their principal material, the will of their creator, the mystical domain of the divine force which sets them in motion. Robots, on the other hand, should find functions and purposes beyond their base attributes. Most crucially, a golem is defined by its origins and its conflict intrinsically defined by opposition or subservience to its maker. In that sense, Shelley's daemon, despite its displays of individual will, intellect and purpose, remained a mythical beast locked into its conflict with its life-giver Frankenstein. Now on the other hand a robot, in the progressive spirit of the best science fiction, should, given a long enough narrative, display transhuman interests and remake itself beyond its makers' ken, ideally growing into a ship of Theseus sailing the future. Capek, despite wording this fairly unimaginatively as "Adam and Eve" did hit upon such inevitability of automythopoesis toward the end of his play.