When Robots Choose to Die by Liz W. Faber (review)

Reviewed by: When Robots Choose to Dieby Liz W. Faber Stephen Dougherty When Robots Choose to Die. Liz W. Faber. Robot Suicide: Death, Identity, and AI in Science Fiction. Lexington, 2023. 99 pp. 85 hc, 45 ebk. Liz W. Faber's Robot Suicidebegins with a real news account from a decade ago about a robot vacuum cleaner malfunctioning and bursting into flames. A light goes off in her head, and a thought experiment is born. "As far as we know, " she writes, "robots cannot now, nor have they ever been able to, die by suicide" (1). But robots have been known to do so in science fiction. So what might science-fictional robot suicide tell us about human suicide? It seems like a fair question, and a novel one. It does not end up grounding a satisfying book project, however. "Ultimately, " Faber writes further along in her Introduction, "the goal of this book is to talk about suicide, especially how it's represented in robot fiction, but also how philosophers, scientists, and others have grappled with it for the past century" (10). That is a tall order for such a short book. Robot Suicideworks better as sf criticism, though it is not fully convincing either as sf criticism or as "suicide awareness literature, " which is the other genre with which it identifies. "I hope when you have finished reading this book, " Faber writes, "that you will walk away with a new appreciation of SF history. But more than that, I hope you'll find yourself seeking new ways to address the problem of suicide in US culture" (10). The book's advocacy and its criticism are not effectively integrated. Neither is the criticism always illuminating. In Chapter 1, on despondency suicide, Faber complains that Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979) promotes a "pro-suicide message" (27) in not taking the depressive robot Marvin's depression seriously enough. Obviously, Adams had other ideas in mind, and his wager that many readers would appreciate his robot satire was not wrong. Faber's reading of Hitchhiker's Guideis juxtaposed with another interpretive reading, this one of a 2007 General Motors Super Bowl commercial featuring a robot automotive plant worker contemplating suicide (in a robot dream) after a minor screw-up on the job. The commercial was undoubtedly in bad taste, and GM was widely criticized for it. It does not seem fair to suggest that Hitchhiker's Guideis comparable to it in a meaningful way. Chapter 2, which examines the connections between popular sf representations of altruistic suicide and US war culture, is more successful. Faber's interpretations of selected Isaac Asimov robot stories and James Cameron Terminatorfilms are critically more astute than the readings in the previous chapter. Still, there is a mysterious impulse to diminish the significance of the sf that Faber is reading, even as she presents it as casting an important light on the subject of suicide. She stops herself in the middle of the chapter: "I contend that SF often does misunderstand how computers work and instead offers viewers simplified moral perspectives, packaged neatly into familiar hero narratives" (40). It is reasonable for a cultural critic to warn that pop culture fare may trade in simplified moral perspectives, but I do not understand the claim that popular sf "misunderstands how computers work. " I would bet that Cameron especially did not have a clue about how computers work, but that did not stop him from creating successful movies about End Page 105rampaging robots. As with the Hitchhiker's Guidecriticism, there is something dour about the remark. It seems to partly conceal a prejudice against levity, and even imagination, as a hindrance to dealing with the harsh reality of suicide in a properly serious and meaningful way. Chapter 3 is about the topics of physician-assisted suicide, disability, and eugenics, although their articulation is confusing. We are instructed that "euthanasia in fictional texts is often—problematically—portrayed as an act of compassion for white people with disabilities" (57). A little further along in the same paragraph Faber turns to Darth Vader to exemplify the sometimes unfairly. . .