Mandy Manilow in Roboland

Monday, 18 February 2008 By Chato

Defining Robopaths and the robopathic existence.

I remember all my life
Raining down as cold as
ice.
Shadows of a man,
A face through a window
cryin' in the night,
The night goes into

Morning just another day;
Happy people pass my
way.
Looking in their eyes,
I see a memory I never
realized
How happy you made me.

The problem of the physical machine takeover of
the destiny of people is obviously a phenomenon of
enormous proportion. An even greater problem, one
that is more subtle and insidious, exists. This
involves the growing dehumanization of people to
the point where they have become the walking dead.

Oh Mandy well,
You came and you gave
without taking,
But I sent you away.
Oh, Mandy you,
Kissed me and stopped me
from shaking,
And I need you today. Oh,
Mandy!

This dehumanized level of existence places people
in roles where they are actors mouthing irrelevant
platitudes, experienced programmed emotions with
little or no compassion or sympathy for other
people. People with this condition suffer from the
existential disease of robopathology. In a society
of robopaths, violence reaches monstrous
proportions, wars are standard accepted practice,
and conflict abounds.

Robots are machine-made simulations of people. I
would coin the term robopath to describe people
whose pathology entails robot-like behavior and
existence. Robopaths have what Kierkegard called
"the sickness unto death." A robopath is a human
who has become socially dead. Robopaths are people
who function in terms of a pseudo-image. They are
in fact egocentric, and without true compassion.

I'm standing on the edge of
time;
I've walked away when
love was mine.
Caught up in a world of
uphill climbing,
The tears are in my mind
And nothin' is rhyming.

Robopaths are the reverse of Capek's technological
robots, they are people who simulate machines.
Their existential state is ahuman. There are at
least eight identifiable and interrelated
characteristics that may help define the
phenomenon of the robopath. The include (1)
ritualism, (2) past-orientation, (3) conformity,
(4) image-involvement, (5) acompassion, (6)
hostility, (7) self-righteousness, and (8)
alienation.

In his groundbreaking work,
Robopaths: People as Machines,
Lewis Yablonsky writes:

It is increasingly a distinct possibility, the
final outcome of people versus their technological
robots may not be the total physical annihilation
of people. People may in a subtle fashion become
robot-like in their interaction and become human
robots, or robopaths. This more insidious
conclusion to the present course of action would
be the silent disappearance of human interaction.
In another kind of death, social death, people
would be oppressively locked into robot-like
interaction in human groups that had become social
machines. In this context, the apocalypse would
come in the form of people mouthing ahuman,
regimented platitudes on a meaningless dead stage.

Oh Mandy well,
You came and you gave
without taking,
But I sent you away.
Oh, Mandy you,
Kissed me and stopped me
from shaking,
And I need you today. Oh,
Mandy!

.oOo.