Ive never in my life heard or seen anyone talk about this movie. I saw it about 20 years ago, and I recently rewatched the tape. Man, it holds up. And Robins performance is so great.
If you haven’t heard of it, its a good watch. And it makes you think a little about what makes us human.
Yeah, I enjoy the clankers meme as much as anyone, but it’s not hard to see how it could quickly end up in a dark place. Consider this. How hard would it be for the term “clankers” to drift from referring to the LLMs themselves to instead refer to the people who use LLMs? I could certainly see the word being adopted as an epithet for the fools that produce AI slop.
And now we’ve shifted from just joking about robots to actually referring to living human beings with a slur.
I’ve heard some people with more sci-fi prothestics (or even any at all) be referred to as clankers, and I’m just like… Bro. Our skeletons are made of calcium, which is a metal. Most of our biological processes use electricity. We’re literally just as much of clankers as robots are.