Every Saturday at 8 you can find me in the front row of Herter 231 laughing my head off watching Mission: Improvable, UMass’s short form improvisational comedy troupe.

Sometimes one of the performers, Cardigan, likes to introduce a game by getting the audience to talk about their feelings. He always points out that emotions are a chief difference between humans and robots.

Sometimes there was a hint of something darker in his voice, as if recognizing our feelings was going to be the way humanity could survive when the robots started secretly replacing us. I have never personally had any trouble with robots, there aren’t very many in Vermont, although I took an advanced placement physics class with one in high school (he was salutatorian).

But then inflammatory posters started appearing in the Campus Center, the Student Union, and the various message boards around campus, accusing a UMass student of being a dangerous robot.

The posters were put up by a group calling itself CARE – Citizens Against Robot Equality – and within days another group, calling itself PETAR – People for the Ethical Treatment of Amicable Robots – was putting up fliers of its own, alleging that the CARE fliers were “unwarranted and hateful.”

CARE responded with more fliers that depicted the student in question with Terminator and Megatron and one that purported to be issued by the UMass Republican Club (careful readers noticed that the date was a year off).

The war of words unleashed some heavy thinking on my part, challenging my previous – often unconscious – beliefs regarding robots and robotism. I thought of the robots I had grown up watching on film and television – R2-D2, C-3PO, Terminator, K-9, Bender, Tom Servo, Gypsy, Crow T. Robot – only the Terminators were ever evil (although Bender was far from benevolent or helpful).

But a key point in the discussion is that R2-D2, K-9, C-3PO, and Bender were created as property, machines for doing work that could be bought or sold at a human’s whim. Terminator was the product of an artificial intelligence and was created for killing humans and the other three were built especially for making fun of bad movies.

PETAR’s assertion that popular culture has created a negative image of robots (unless those robots are servants) is certainly warranted. CARE’s signaling out of one particular robot among possibly dozens of others on campus as dangerous without evidence (has this student been seen terrorizing campus or attempting to seize control of OIT kiosks? No.) is rightfully condemned.

CARE is certainly a robotist organization in asserting that robots should be denied their property rights and the civil rights deriving there from because they are robots.

I mean, until the first robots were built, the main dividing line between humans and other animals (and the reason, in natural law theory, why nonhuman animals have no rights) is that humans have the capacity to reason.

After robots, the dividing line has shifted as human-supremacist philosophers continue to think of new ways to deny robot people there rights, since robots can reason. There was the argument that humans are alive, life being defined as the ability to reproduce combined with a metabolism.

But then robots got metabolisms and figured out how to reproduce. The argument has now shifted to emotions (although some robots have been able to mimic these – Keanu Reeves for example) and the more metaphysical notion of the soul.

While I do not deny that, so far, robots do not experience genuine emotion and I doubt a robot will ever have a soul. The only thing they prevent robots from is guilt at sinning against a God who is very pro-human.

Lack of emotion has never stopped humans from being afforded their natural rights (Hillary Clinton has done rather well for herself) nor has lack of a soul – I mean, Dick Cheney died in 1998 and he’s vice president.

But PETAR is no more innocent of robotism than CARE. PETAR essentially claims to represent the interests of all robots. It is a short leap to see that should a robot ever rise to prominence while having interests that generally align with the majority held by humans, that robots will be accused of betraying its model number.

Just like how the humans who hold views similar to many robots are called species-traitors. The reason it is robotism (or anti-humanism, for that matter) is that it is impossible for any organization to represent the interests of all humans or robots.

Humans and robots are individuals and the voluntary associations individuals enter into with each other are their own and nobody else’s. Even if several people hold the same opinions about one subject, those opinions are still held by the individual alone and not by a group. For example, if seven people all own the same copy of a book, then each individual person owns a copy of the book, not the group of seven owning the book.

While humans are generally spoken of in individual terms, robots – even by their defenders – are usually spoken of collectively. When we see robots and humans as collectives and not as individuals, each entitled to their dignity as persons – not as robots or as humans – then we become robotist or anti-human.

Matthew R. Robare is a Collegian columnist. He can be reached at [email protected].