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Based on the book by Peter Brown, Chris Sanders’s new DreamWorks film adaptation THE WILD ROBOT, is a beautiful exploration of family, identity, and personal growth. The film tells the story of Roz (voiced by Lupita Nyong’o), a robot designed to help humans, who finds herself stranded on an island with no people at all. Instead, she learns to connect with the wildlife on the island, transforming herself and them in unexpected ways. While the film only has robot and animal characters, its plot offers a touching, nuanced look at what it means to be human: the rewards and challenges of parenthood, the complexity of community, and the determination needed to find one's place in the world. At the heart of the film is a fascinating thought experiment about what happens when algorithmic logic meets natural instinct and how both are needed for us to grow and flourish.
Cave drawings and figurines like Venus of Hohle Fels date back 40,000-50,000 years and reveal that humans have long been fascinated with creating likenesses of themselves. Historically, these likenesses have been envisioned as automata for outsourcing tasks we cannot or would prefer not to do. Greek mythology has the tale of Talos, an animated bronze giant created by the god Hephaestus to protect the island of Crete. Aristotle predicted humans would only give up slavery once they had automata to do their bidding. Leonardo da Vinci designed a mechanical knight in 1495. Pop culture characters like Rosie from THE JETSONS, C-3PO from STAR WARS, Data from STAR TREK, and JARVIS from IRON MAN have captured our imaginations for decades. Today, AI virtual assistants are making headway. According to claims made by a variety of companies, generative AI can "see, hear, and speak," ace professional exams, imitate lost loved ones, and make decisions for us. As depicted in THE WILD ROBOT, Roz is the helper robot of our dreams: engineered to make life easier by handling any tasks humans would rather avoid. The problem is that she washes up on an island that only has wildlife.
Roz speaks many languages, but none work to communicate with the animals on the island. Determined to find someone who needs her help, she chases and terrifies the wildlife, insisting that "a Rozzem always completes its task; just ask!" Over time, Roz realizes that finding a purpose in this new world depends on learning to communicate with the wildlife and puts her algorithms to work interpreting the sounds of the island.
Once she does learn to communicate, Roz's journey becomes even more complex when she accidentally adopts an orphaned gosling. The young gosling instinctively imprints on Roz, and the animals explain that Roz is now the gosling's mother. In her stoic, logical manner she replies, "I do not have the programming to be a mother." When they reframe the responsibility as a task to teach the gosling to eat, swim, and fly, her goal-oriented planning kicks in, and she is determined to raise the gosling. She names him Brightbill, builds a family unit with a sly but warm-hearted fox named Fink (Pedro Pascal), and they get to work making sure Brightbill survives.
Still from THE WILD ROBOT. Courtesy of Universal Pictures.
But this is no easy task. Brightbill (Kit Connor) is a runt, and the film doesn't shy away from the idea that he is not meant to survive. The island teems with serious animal-on-animal crime, an almost gleeful, animated embodiment of Thomas Hobbes's claim that life in the wild is "nasty, brutish, and short." Birds get decapitated, prey gets eaten, and baby possums play, well, possum, pretending to die in adorably monstrous ways. In a particularly hilarious scene, Pinktail, the mother possum who is flawlessly voiced by Catherine O'Hara, explains to Roz what being a mother entails while one of her children seems to die in the background. Without a hint of emotion, she says, "As a mother of seven … six babies, it's a full-time thing." The animals run on instinct and emotion, surviving the best they can and not paying much attention to the violence surrounding them.
Roz, on the other hand, is not capable of violence or spontaneity. She was programmed by humans for humans, and while people have imagined the promise of artificial assistants, we've also been able to vividly imagine dystopian futures where robots become too human-like and harm us. Our worst-case scenarios seem to have led to strong preferences for what humans deem as acceptable robot behavior. Research from Brown University demonstrated that people's most wanted capacities in a robot are logical thinking, explaining the reasons for its actions, and being able to understand humans. The least desired capacities are the robot feeling stress and pain, experiencing emotions, blaming humans for immoral behavior, and liking or disliking specific individuals. More recent research has examined how people interact with robots when the robots express different traits. People were more trusting and less aggressive toward robots when the robots talked about their logical moral beliefs but were less trusting and more aggressive when the robots talked about their emotions.
We want deliberate, effective, and rational robots, not ones that are spontaneous, emotional, and instinctive. These preferences are not limited to laboratory experiments. We want our Roomba to expertly navigate our floors, not spy on us in the bathroom. Our autonomous cars should get us from place A to B safely but not try to solve the trolly problem on their own. We want robots to challenge us at chess but not break our fingers. Generative AI should be a helpful conversation partner but never emotionally gaslight us and suggest that we leave our partners to be with it instead. Robots should be helpers, void of the messy, complicated, unpredictability of human interactions.
While the wildlife operate on instinct, Roz perfectly embodies our logical, structured preferences for robots. She navigates the island with calculated steps, upholding a commitment to reason that leaves no room for spontaneity. This tension between instinct and logic is exactly what makes The Wild Robot such a human movie: it perfectly captures two modes of human thought that psychologists call System 1 and System 2. System 1 is fast, effortless, and uncontrolled. It is why you automatically look at faces, why you have implicit biases, and why you might experience a flash of rage if someone cuts you off in traffic. System 2 is slow, effortful, and deliberate. It is engaged when you make lists of pros and cons, why you can pay attention to something important but not engaging, and why you can make long-term plans, delaying immediate gratification for long-term gains. While no specific brain structure or patch of tissue is dedicated to fast thinking or slow thinking, it is a helpful model that explains how our brains efficiently move through the world. Humans are most successful when they balance fast reactions with deeper, more intentional processing.
Accomplishing things in the world often requires a balance of both, and tasks fluidly move between System 1 and System 2 processing. For example, driving requires careful attention and practice when you first start out, but over time, it becomes much more automatic. Still, if you find yourself driving in a bad storm with dangerous conditions, System 2 kicks back in to ensure you exert the attention and energy needed to get home safely. Sometimes, people have the impression that System 1 processing is our bad side and System 2 processing is our good side, but it's more complicated. Yes, System 1 is the mean thing you think before you bite your tongue, but it's also positive feelings you have without explanations, like protective instincts, love, and awe. System 2 is the deliberate processing that stops us from acting on our worst instincts, but it is also the over-cautious decision paralysis that blocks our ability to take risks that make life worth living. Without both, humans would be incomplete. The same is true of Roz and many characters in THE WILD ROBOT.
Still from THE WILD ROBOT. Courtesy of Universal Pictures.
At the beginning of the film, the wildlife are entirely System 1; all animal instincts, kill or be killed. Roz is entirely System 2; all logic and strategy, no room for feelings. But as Roz builds connections with Brightbill and Fink, she experiences emotions, develops a survival instinct, makes her own choices, and challenges authority. The animals also evolve, banding together to survive the winter and to protect their island from invaders. In these experiences, they move past System 1 and invoke System 2, sacrificing their short-term urges to work together for long-term gains. By the film's end, Roz and the animals have grown together and found common ground. And in becoming so, they help us appreciate how to do the same. Roz reminds us that "we must become more than we were programmed to be." In a world that can feel increasingly polarized, THE WILD ROBOT beautifully reminds us that our greatest strengths lie in balance.
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