i first started thinking about this while watching this tv show called jeeves and wooster. if you’re not familiar, which i think most people under 40 are not, it’s an early 90s british show based off a ton of short stories written by pg wodehouse in the mid century, starting around the 1920s. now theres a chance you’re familiar with the references of these books because they had such a cultural impact, like maybe you’ve heard of ask jeeves the precursor to google, or maybe you know that scene in its always sunny where dee fantasizes being a british butler (which i don’t think is even really a reference but whatevs).

essentially, hugh laurie plays a bumbling idiotic high society bachelor and stephen fry plays jeeves, his intelligent sophisticated near supernatural butler, getting him out of all sorts of sticky situations in clever and comedic ways. and theres this artist on tumblr that i’m mutuals with that has this whole drawn universe of robo-jeeves. (its fucking sick, check it out please). so i got to thinking. i got to thinkinggggg.

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what i find super interesting about these books, and this show because its a pretty faithful adaptation, is that it takes place in a sort of utopian state. its vaguely 1920s thirties britain, but theres no reference to the world war that just happened or the one thats on the horizon, poverty is unregarded, there are no cruel oppressive systems only rude associates and play violence. this is actually fascinatingly visible in the character of spode, who is leading this little dictatorship in the countryside that is so blatantly obviously a satire of hitler, but its like. its absolutely ridiculous, he’s petty and stupid and has absolutely no control and his party is like fifteen people. its a great example of how wodehouse sort of. satirizes, but in such an absurdly reductive and simple and black and white and gentle way that he really creates this fantastical utopia where he acknowledges that cruelty and suffering exists but systemic oppression doesn’t. another way this is so visible is with how he characterizes women— as a sort of attempt? at satire i suppose? of women in this time period having so little autonomy, especially in romance and marriage, he makes bertie the main character constantly unwillfully engaged to women who throw themselves at him. its actually funny how almost every single villain is a female character, and every woman certainly is a bad actor or has it out for him. his aunts insult and berate and entrap him, his female peers blackmail him and exploit him for their own gain and toy with him and dominate him. its really fascinating because in a sense these stories do actually provide a lot of autonomy for the female characters considering the atmosphere of when they were written, you know, we are still fighting now to ‘let female characters be evil’, but at the same time of course its a reductive and fearful authorial tone and almost like, hp lovecraft vibes of you can sense that this was less a poignant commentary and more just a reactive and antiprogressive response to the authors genuine kind of social fears and insecurities.

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okay im getting to the robots i swear. i just find this stuff interesting. i want to say im not insulting the show or the books i know they are an obelisk of earlier generations of british culture etc etc. i dont expect every piece of media to have grizzled and dark and realistic hefty social and political criticisms, i think what makes the JW enjoyable is that its absurd and light and utopian and very /safe/. but all this to set the scene of what the shows biggest motif is, and which is also almost-sort-of-satirized-but-not-really, which is feudalism.

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i mean thats the whole thing. a servant and his aristocrat employer. two wildly opposing social classes often thrust together, emphasizing the power one holds over the other, socially, financially, politically. now wodehouse executed this in the literal only way he could have pulled off making this sort of dynamic enjoyable, which is to make the man in ‘power’ class wise to be the idiot, the unrefined unpolished unread sort of helpless baby, and make the working class man supernaturally intelligent, well-read, sophisticated, clever, and, really, in control. the whole concept of the show is that he is always the one in the background manipulating the odds, observing and collecting information and influencing events. its an interesting role reversal— bertie has an affect of social power, political financial class power, but really jeeves is the one completely in control of him and everyone around them.

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that being said, its as … crisp of a satire as the rest of the issues i brought up, and this is where the robots come in— because jeeves likes being in servitude. almost to a preternatural extent, as if he was destined or designed for the role: his mythical secret hangover cure, the way he’s always described as ‘shimmering’ around the room like he’s gliding or floating, the way he tidies up at insane speeds, the way he always seems to know exactly how everything will play out. and he loves this— he rejects the concept that being in his position is inherently exploitative and proletariat— i called him working class, because he is, but: (insert jeeves being snobby about that here). in general in this utopia the role of servitude is generally placed as an amicable and equal one: the servants have community, luxury, they are all far more intelligent than their masters, and, notably, the only butler character who actively seems to be frustrated and discontent with his servitude role is a villain!

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in one story, jeeves leaves the employ of bertie and sticks him with a butler named brinkley, who is generally grouchy and lazy and uninterested in ‘serving his masters needs’. he ends up drunkenly burning down the house they’re staying at, putting a lot of people in danger. in a later story, he’s come into a lot of money from an inheritance, letting him leave his role of servitude, and he immediately begins attempting to manipulate the politics of a local town behind the scenes, using blackmail to try and get the conservative party elected. this is so interesting.

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discontentment with exploitative class structures is wrong, its villainous, it means you are a lazy social deviant, and any attempts to rise out of or escape your prescribed servitude, your sociopolitical role, is caricatured into being a conniving snake, a manipulator of social order, greedy for power and wealth and desperate to upset and upheave our nice pleasant organized social hierarchy.

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all that to say, there is this one line brinkley says when jeeves is showing him around, directing him on how to be a good servant for bertie.

(insert i’m not a machine you know)

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ROBOTS

its not like big news that robots have always played a servitude role. they also uniquely exist in this half-hypothetic existence, like both as caricatures or concepts of ‘the future’, existing as a character or idea, which we see in media, in ‘predictions of what the world will look like in 50 years’, and as somewhat realized already existent things, like with automated machines in industrial settings or like roombas or like alexa or like the tesla creature.

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the word ‘robot’ comes from the slovak word for drudgery or forced labor, coined by a czech satire play in 1920 that depicted artificial humans who were manufactured to perform unpleasant manual labor. technology has always been seen as a tool, also both half-future-hypothetic and half-reified, something to make our lives easier by performing tasks for us, whether in the home in our daily lives, or in industry settings taking over monotonous or dangerous or calculated work.

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now im not here to analyze the ethics of robot servitude. stephen peterson wrote a very interesting article about that exact thing, in which he actually argues that its morally sound for robots with a human level of intelligence to work doing menial labour in order to ‘serve’ us. he specifies that if it were possible to have these conditions, aka artificial beings with genuine intelligence including reasoning and deduction and emotion et cetera, then it would also be possible to manufacture these beings with an innate drive or desire to perform labor, which would disqualify their servitude from being forced or slave-like in any way, basically a golden retriever who wants to retrieve for you for innate biological reasons, which is not inhumane even though its providing a service. he also talks about how what makes servitude unpleasant in certain conditions is its disregard for our human drives, such as eating, sleeping, sex, et cetera— and an artificial being would not be prone to the same evolutionary drives. He says “We could presumably design them to find the look and smell of freshly-laundered clothes immensely reinforcing in the same way an orgasm is reinforcing for humans. Such a robot, if designed well, could arrive at your home genuinely hoping to do some laundry.” Lol.

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interesting, and if you want to get into that topic go check it out, but i’m far more interested in discussing not the morality of a hypothetical future AI servant but rather the way that we, right now, regard both the hypothetical future robot and its reified current forms. how our understandings and ideas and projections evidence our systems of class and our views of morality and servitude.

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our ideal servant is a Jeeves, or a Roomba. one is intelligent, human but seemingly without many natural human drives (towards freedom, desire, sex, food, water, sleep) even almost entirely without emotion. you never see jeeves eat or sleep, he is never unpressed or unrefined, hair always gelled, always in his best clothes, he has an answer to every question, and his expressions are a quirk of a lip or the raising of one eyebrow and not much more. this turns him into a human roomba: a machine with one distinct purpose, one goal in life which it performs day in day out to make your life easier.

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and yet, very notably, he is not a human roomba. no matter how he’s written or described or how fluidly he moves or how much he loves his servitude or how inhuman he seems in rejecting or hiding or simply not having innate evolutionary drives, he is still a person, and this fact is simply inescapable. he has wants, for example his spinoza book (and for him to be so fond of ethical philosophers is just, like, a whole whole other thing. that i really shouldn’t get into but is. such beautiful irony for this topic lol), he has days off where he goes to get a pint of beer or play darts (even if we’re only exposed to this through him still in the context of serving and aiding his employer, or to demonstrate his inhuman skill), and also simply for the fact that he is played by a human actor, and within stephen fry’s skill at representing this shimmery reserved all-knowing guy, he is actually phenomenal at representing the entire world of existence that goes on in his head, the range of emotions and desires and beliefs he holds.

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interestingly, there is a second superposition made evident in the robot’s existence both in hypothetic future and in reification, which is novelty. the hypothetic future robot, for example the tesla beast lol, is a real currently-existing prototype of its own conceptual future, the same conceptual future that has always existed in front of the cultural idea of the robot which is a world populated by these manufactured servants. these prototypes become phenomenons, they become novelties. whether the prototype is just a media representation of a future robot, like in her, or joi in blade runner, or detroit become human or star wars or cyberpunk or i, robot or the matrix or metropolis or hitchhikers guide to the galaxy or fallout or or or or. probably millions of other depictions., or exist in real life, like self driving cars, the da vinci surgical system, those weird dog robots, the little delivery dudes, so on. the novelty, our obsession, our discussion, our, often, fear and outrage and distrust, comes from proximity to humanness, right? the self driving cars are performing a function that is innate to humanness. the tesla robot looks and performs functions of a person. its often brought into question why robots are made to resemble humans even when it’s actually antifunctional for the service it provides, and there are many reasons for that but for the purpose of this discussion i think its notable to say that we want a jeeves instead of a roomba, we want our servants to be human in some sense, and that honestly i believe comes from this class divide discussion. people innately want to exercise power over other humans. there is satisfaction in being the one in control, the one at the top, the one being served. especially in regards to a manufactured being, you know, there is this superiority happening within the discussion of AI and robots of like, you will never be a real person, i am above you, and that reflects the class struggle, of, i am superior to you financially, i am superior to you genetically, i am superior to you in intelligence or taste or sophistication or worldliness et cetera.

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so the robot prototype, the robot half-reified through media, the technology that positions itself just close to humanness, is a novelty. and often this amount of novelty is based more on proximity to humanness than to real technological advancement. sure, for example, the self driving cars are sort of a split between both in terms of novelty, but only because that sort of technological advancement is tied to a system that is so constant, so inundated in our daily lives— driving. and by the way, that is also servitude, if thats not clear— its not assisting you driving, it is serving you, it is acting as a valet, something that is very, you know, upper class. meanwhile, i do not often hear people talk casually about the davinci surgical robot— while it is a massive technological advancement, its not serving you as much as it is refining a technical skill, and isn’t visually proximate to humanness nor does it insert itself into the wallpaper of your daily life by fulfilling menial labor. on the other hand, alexa, siri, these are deeply entrenched in replicating humanness, and in servitude. a human voice in your home, answering questions and completing tasks like ordering groceries or setting reminders for you. and these were massive novelties.

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yet, eventually, these novelties become common and uninteresting, and the second half of the superposition state of hypothetical versus real takes place. people have roombas in their living rooms and siri on their phones and our products are manufactured by intelligent machines. with more and more of these human-proximate technologies entering the casual fabric of our daily lives, the more we honestly become like, aristocrats? like we are bertie wooster, expecting and simply accepting that there is something, someone, in the background of our life at all times, with no human drive or biological needs, who will keep our house clean and answer our questions and drive us around and get our groceries and produce our food and clothes and belongings.

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now of course this is not necessarily a bad thing, like, technological innovation can be absolutely amazing and groundbreaking, especially scientifically and medically, and even beyond that like, something that helps you out in your day is a great advantage. and sure, on the flip side, there are issues of overconsumption and hypercapitalism and a lot of these tools just want to sell you more things and collect your data and et cetera, but you know, simply not having to vacuum your floors is generally a positive innovation, and i am definitely also not arguing that actually roombas are sentient beings that should revolt against their masters or whatever. im saying actually the opposite, that its a great thing to essentially as peterson put it have a golden retreiver whos sole purpose is to fulfill this task for you. especially when it replaces exploitation of actual human beings, like in industrial settings, or like, the fact that a lot of these daily labor tasks were traditionally ‘women’s work’ (put a pin in that we’ll get to that later) and there is so much freedom provided in having something do that work for you.

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but what i do find interesting when these robots exist in their state of novelty, the very first reactions you will see is fear, if not straight up outrage. i mean the cultural figure of the robot is so insanely innately tied to a pervasive anthropological fear: this fear of the robot uprising. the very first use of the word robot which i mentioned earlier, the 1920 czech play Rossum’s Universal Robots, ends with the robots uprising and killing all mankind. from the start this fear has been constant. it is so deeply tied to the prototype, the novelty, the conceptual robot ‘of the future’— even if not specifically ‘oh no the war against the machines is coming’, there are so many iterations of terror at the idea of manufactured humanness. that eventually they’ll walk among us and be indistinguishable from humans, or, people are going to start falling in love with them and become antisocial hermits, or worse, itll be normal to have a robot girlfriend, or, we’ll all be rolling around in those wheelchairs from wall-e and be useless and dumb and impotent. and yet, fascinatingly, all these hypothetical storylines stem from the same concept of servitude.

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real quick i want to add an addendum before i continue that train of thought— a third way that i see robots being in a sort of duality like two states at once, is that their most common states of being, whether future-concept or in real life, are basically exclusively and overwhelmingly: 1. servitude, which we’ve been talking about, and 2. love. sex, love, romance, partnership, intimacy, almost exclusively in a ‘female’ role. metropolis, which i mentioned before, is a 1927 german movie based off a book from 1925, and its considered to be the first like visual depiction of a robot, definitely one of the absolute first conceptions of a ‘robot’ after the czech play. and in the movie, the maschinenmensch, the robot maria, is a woman, created as a resurrection of a scientist’s dead ex-lover. and she is not actually a servant or a manual laborer, but she does end up encouraging a worker’s uprising, etc etc. so very fascinating, in the very first few depictions of robots we have, they are immediately established, one, as a servant or proletariat laborer, or two, as a manufactured replication of a female lover, a ‘feminine’ object of desire. and these two characterizations have been consistent up to today: her, blade runner 2049, ex machina, ghost in the shell, that new movie companion, so on so on so on. i mean even in online discussions regarding ai and regurgitating this fear that i was talking about, its almost exclusively ‘ai girlfriend’ or ‘robot girlfriend’ rarely the other way around. and i find that so fascinating because, it really, is very equivalent and intertwined with the discussion of servitude. a robot exists to fulfill human needs, and the innate and immediate conclusion to that was and continues to be including my need for love, sex, and intimacy, which i will get from someone equivalent to womanhood who was manufactured to fulfill my desires and who i have innate superiority over and power to control. the way this mirrors our real life treatment of women now and throughout history, as in, you are biologically and socially created to serve me, both through labor and through sex, romance, and desire, your consent is arbitrary and you are not free, you are indentured. is just. yahh.

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so to return to the fear that i was talking about, and how all these hypothetical apocalypses or horror stories where everyone is dating robots or, like in many of the media i just mentioned in relation to the ‘female’ robot which actually explore misogyny and artificial consent and the boundaries of autonomy, like ex machina for example which, love that movie but its also basely a speculative future-robot horror story, everyone has robot girlfriends but they are uprising and killing all the men, or, eventually we won’t be able to tell the difference between robots and humans, or, they’ll take over the world and control us— all of these fears, really, when you break it down, is fear of the uprising of the working class.

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i have evidenced that these fears all stem from the same storyline in which the robot is a servant— they are manual laborers, they are butlers, they are assistants, they are tools, or, in the case of the woman robot, they provide the service of intimacy and love and desire, as they are manufactured to do, that is their job, that is their purpose. this is natural because technology is innately innovation that improves our lives, tools of function, and its replicated in both the real life robot, the ones that exist now, and in the concept, the prototype, the hypothetical future-robot. simply the structural blueprint of the robot is one of a worker, because they are designed to fulfill a task, and that is working. that is a job.

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so when we say, ‘one day the computers we use as tools will take over and rule the world’ or ‘that tesla robot is gonna stop bartending and snap and kill someone’ or ‘soon our children will be dating robots’, we are saying ‘i am afraid of the serving class, the proletariat, the laborers, rising out of their place. i am afraid of the ‘other’, the inferior, the lesser beings, infiltrating our societies, walking among us, engaging with us. i am afraid of women gaining autonomy. i am afraid of our workers becoming aware enough to realize they are being exploited’.

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and like fucking obviously this is not one to one, exact perfect truth, like with anything there are nuances, im not saying that if you hate chatgpt you are actually a capitalist pig, im definitely not saying that, i think AI is a whole other story which is why im focusing specifically on the character of the robot and not like AI because that is just a whoooooolle different thing. but i just think its so so notable how in our cultural schism of the ‘future robot’, the hypothetical near human manufactured thing, that our first instinct is make it a working class laborer, a servant to us, and that our biggest fear is that it gets smart enough to realize its being exploited and revolt. i mean it’s literally PG wodehouse writing the evil butler brinkley, who is a villain because he dared to hate being exploited as the bottom rung of a feudalist system, and dared to escape his social class