Robots and Bionics vs. Zombies and Vampires

"Priests and cannibals, prehistoric animals
Everybody happy as the dead come home
Big Black Nemesis, parthenogenesis
No one move a muscle as the dead come home"*

I have to admit, I do not understand the apparent obsession with dead people (or undead people) that has manifested itself in the form of popular novel trilogies and movies about vampires and zombies. I'm not saying I'm against this particular segment of popular culture, just that I am under the impression (perhaps woefully uninformed) that vampires and zombies can only do so much before they've played out their usefulness. Plus, they will never be part of reality (and this is where my analysis starts to get really subjective). They don't evolve or really contribute much at all to society, no matter how much theory we use to discuss their relationship to human culture. And because of that, they bore me. Before anyone starts throwing cyber-tomatoes at this post, I should point out that I did watch every episode of Buffy back in the day (my interest petered out with that "Angel" spinoff, though), I read all of Anne Rice's books when I was a teenager, and I actually count "Night of the Living Dead" (the original black and white) as one of my favorite movies because it has the distinction of being the first film that gave me nightmares (plus, the underlying social commentary makes it a classic). But, if I'm honest, I have to admit that I'm really more of an AI person than a vampire/zombie person (I hate to create a dichotomy where there may really not be one, but for some reason it seems like more and more we are called upon to pledge our allegiance to one or more cultish fads and, in doing so, exclude another).

I think what draws me to AI in popular culture and IRL is that, for one thing, the cyborg mythology really isn't a myth any more. Let's face it--"robots" have bridged reality and science fiction for quite some time--but now, it seems that, ironically, though in 1950 imagination could still far exceed what was possible in actual scientific application, we live in an age when imagination (as represented by examples of AI in films) is matched and even informed by actual application (for example, robots perform certain types of surgeries, and one was recently built that can conduct an orchestra, and then there was the infamous Deep Blue chess playing computer). Therefore, I think cyborgs, robots and bionic technologies in all their real or imagined glory are just plain cool. But this is coming from someone whose first favorite television heroine was Jaime Sommers, also known as The Bionic Woman; Who knows? Maybe if she had been "The Zombie Woman" instead, my devotion would go to the undead...

In this clip, Jaime (the perfect embodiment of Haraway's concept that we are all "chimeras" and human/machine hybrids) attempts to defeat a "fembot" while wearing sensible shoes (who knew fembots had Farrah hair?).



(Song lyrics courtesy of Shriekback's 1985 song "Nemesis," which used to play in constant rotation on 94.5 The Edge, a Dallas based alt station that no longer exists)