Two Nerds got a request we watch Automata, a steampunky short about a human private detective, his robot partner, and a murder mystery. This made us consider what robots do, as a trope, and what questions narratives with robots tend to pose. Mostly, we came back to the concepts of sentience, autotomy, and humanity, and how the robot shows those concepts in tension with one another. We speak at length about the middle section of a film called Doomsday Book, which concerns an enlightened robot, Blade Runner, the novel Autonomous by Annalee Newitz, the various androids in the Alien franchise, and droids in the Star Wars universe.
