Ethan Polk 3A
In the poem The Robots Are Coming, Kyle Dargan explains the future relationship between humans and robots. He starts the poem mid-sentence with a short description of the robots, calling them “clear-cased woofers for heads, no eyes.”. He then compares the robots to bats and humans to mosquitoes. Mosquitoes are bats’ prey, foreshadowing later how the human-robot relationship ends. Dargan says in lines 7 and 8, “They await counterintelligence transmissions from our laptops,” meaning robots will become too smart for humans to control. This would lead to robots taking over the world and the chaos that ensues. It will look like what the movies have pictured for years with “five welded fingers—wrench back our roofs” and “siderophilic tongues seeking blood.” This could be a real possibility with technology getting better and better and AI getting more reliable.
Dargan then continues to talk about life after the robots take over. For example, he says we will have no land to barter for our lives because the robot took it over. We then signed a treaty to let robots advance as a society without getting anything in return. Dargan then talks about how we took care of their cousins and honored them. He finishes by saying that humans are soft beings who “mourn manufacturer’s death as our own.”. This is a plea to the robots by saying that humans did nothing wrong and we will not hurt them because we are more similar than the robots think.
Dargan’s tone throughout the poem is serious and gloomy, but there is a tone shift at the very end. Words like “forgotten” and “seeking blood” gives the reader a picture of darkness and an unlivable community. It makes us scared for our future while also feeling authentic with familiar surroundings we have seen in movies. This continues throughout the poem, but the tone shifts to an imploring tone at the very end. Dargan is trying to plead with the robots so that there might be peace between the two races. Words like “soft beings” and “mourning others’ death as our own” give the reader hope that the robots will provide humans with some mercy.
The overall meaning of the poem is that humans as a society need to be careful with technology and robots. Robots are taking human jobs every day and forcing unemployment. With self-driving cars and robots in assembly lines, it’s taking away even more people’s jobs, and the question will be, when will it stop? In the future, will robots make everything, and all humans do is sit around and watch entertainment? Humans must stop and wonder if society is moving in the wrong direction with robots and technology. Sure it is helping, but it can also be hurting society by making us more dependent on technology than previously. Dargan takes this poem to an extreme by talking about robots taking over the world and humans getting eaten by robots. While that is a possibility, it is unlikely and shouldn’t be why we fear robots. We should fear robots because of our dependence on them and how they are taking away people’s jobs.
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