Neill Blomkamp’s fictional film, ‘CHAPPiE’, follows Tetrevaal (a robotics company in South Africa) as they create a robotic police for the city of Johannesburg and then one of the programmers, Deon, created a conscious robot named Chappie who gets captured by local gangsters and used for a heist. The short story, ‘EPICAC’, by Kurt Vonnegut is centred around a robot (EPICAC), the narrator and Pat (the partner and eventual fiancée of the unnamed narrator). In EPICAC, EPICAC writes many beautiful poems to which the narrator signs his name before gifting the poems to Pat. The two stories have similar messages about humans and machines apart from in one field - CHAPPiE has a significant message that tells us to appreciate life as Chappie does. EPICAC …show more content…
They both feature conscious machines who are used by humans against the will and understanding of the machines. Due to the fact that the machines are conscious, it is exactly like humans using other humans which we know is wrong. There are examples of this in both texts: in EPICAC the narrator ‘[signs his] name to [EPICAC’s] poems’ without the consent of EPICAC. The same happens in CHAPPiE when his ‘daddy’ admits that ‘[he] needed [Chappie’s] help with the heist’ and was never going to get the ‘new bodies’ that Chappie so badly wanted in order to stay alive. We as viewers and readers build a liking to the machines because of the ways that they are portrayed and the negative things that the humans do. The humans using machines always results in something bad happening to the machine for example we see Chappie getting into dangerous situations and killing people and with EPICAC he ultimately kills himself. In both texts, the respective author or producers added these messages to prepare us for the future of conscious machines telling us that when they inevitably come, we need to respect them and treat them as humans and forget about the prejudice from the past or things much worse than in the story could