3am Today

Ten robots hell bent on destroying the world:

Rossum’s Universal Robots: In 1920, Czech playwright Karel Capek basically invented the “kill all humans!” meme. In his play, “Rossum’s Universal Robots (R.U.R.),” he envisioned that humans would create not just dumb mechanical men, but a sophisticated artificial life form fashioned from synthetic bones and flesh, through a process vaguely resembling today’s cloning and genetic engineering technology.

Gort: In the 1951 sci-fi classic “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” (remade in 2008 with Keanu Reeves in the lead role), the intimidating robot comes from another world, not ours. But in way, humans are still responsible for its threat. A crisis begins when a flying saucer lands in Washington, D.C., and an extraterrestrial ambassador named Klaatu (portrayed by Michael Rennie) emerges on what he intends as a mission of friendship. He’s promptly shot by a trigger-happy human soldier. That sends Klaatu’s robotic assistant, Gort, into action.

The Robot City: Probably the biggest — and strangest — killer robot in science fiction appears in “The City,” a short story from Ray Bradbury’s 1951 anthology “The Illustrated Man.” The tale begins when a rocket from Earth lands on a distant planet, Taollan, and a team of astronauts discover an immense mechanized city, run by a computer network, which oddly has remained running even though it doesn’t seem to have flesh-and-blood inhabitants anymore.

The Voc Robots: These nasty machines appeared in a cycle of classic episodes of BBC’s sci-fi drama “Dr. Who” in the late 1970s, entitled “The Robots of Death.” The Voc Robots don’t have an explicit plan to kill the entire human race, but they probably wouldn’t mind having one, since they enthusiastically exterminate every human they encounter in various grisly ways.

Skynet: Director James Cameron’s 1984 movie “The Terminator,” starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as a cyborg assassin, was such a hit that it inspired several sequels. Schwarznegger’s freakishly hypertrophied physique and unwavering lack of emotional affect make him utterly believable as a killing machine, and his line “I’ll be back,” uttered at a police station that he subsequently returns to destroy has become a pop culture catchphrase. But what’s equally compelling about the “Terminator” fictional universe is its updated version of Capek’s basic theme, which is that humans are so darned clever that they’ll inevitably invent a machine that will destroy them.

The Sentinels: In the fictional dystopia depicted in the “Matrix” trilogy of films directed by the Wachowskis in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the basic scenario is that reality is a computer-generated illusion, and that a giant artificial-intelligence network has taken over Earth and reduced humans to comatose husks deluded by data, who are kept alive only to provide body heat and electrical energy that can be siphoned off to power the network. Not all humans are down with that, however, and a motley assortment of meat-body rebels — including a superhuman savior-prodigy named Neo, portrayed by Keanu Reeves — persist in doing battle with the Matrix and its robotic minions.

The Claws: Science fiction author Philip K. Dick was a master of the killer robot genre, partly because he imagined a future in which technology would become so advanced that the distinction between humans and machines would blur. And that works, because we all know how over-the-top murderous humans can be. Dick achieved his greatest fame from the 1982 film “Blade Runner,” based upon his novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” which depicts a policeman (portrayed by Harrison Ford) in pursuit of a killer android named Roy (Rutger Hauer) — who, as it turns out, is not so different from his nemesis. But Roy’s menace is tempered by one fact: He murders not out of blood lust, but in a futile effort to survive past his expiration date.

Ultron: The Marvel Comics Web site describes Ultron as “a criminally insane rogue sentient robot dedicated to conquest and the extermination of humanity.” To which you might respond, “Well, OK, that sounds pretty negative, but surely he must have a few good points too.” Not to disappoint you, but he doesn’t. Ultron isn’t a robotic slave driven into a rage by his servitude, like Rossum’s robots, or an avenging angel like Gort, who seeks to deter humans from their own evil nature. Nope, Ultron is just a thoroughly unredeemable mess of metal, who just hates people because, well, that’s what it does.

Bender: If you’ve had enough scary robots by now, it’s time for one who makes malevolence funny. Bender, a member of the cast of the animated TV comedy series “Futurama,” is more of a menace to propriety than a genuine threat to humankind. A sort of twisted doppelganger of the loyal, anxiously obsequious mechanical servant C-3P0 from the “Star Wars” film series, Bender — originally built in a Mexican factory as a metal-bending device — is a lazy slacker who consumes copious amounts of alcohol as fuel and contemptuously derides his human masters as “meatbags” [sources: Muljadi, Futurama]. As “Futurama” creator Matt Groening explained in a Wired interview: “He (Bender) is totally corrupt. He shoplifts. He thrives on the things that harm humans. He actually gets energy from smoking cigars and drinking beer. Bender also gets us around censor problems — he can’t be a bad role model for kids, because he is just a robot”