CraveOnline: It’s interesting, because I feel like RoboCop – going back to the original – was more insular. It was all set in America, but now – and you touched upon it in the film – there are all these implications about drone use.
José Padilha: Yeah.
It doesn’t feel like a problem that is just distinctive to Detroit, or America, it feels like you really wanted to bring this out.
Yeah, I mean, listen… This is a universal problem that everybody’s going to have to face. I truly believe that the use of drones and the use of machines for war, and for law enforcement, will be a huge, gigantic issue that’s going to be debated in the near future. I truly believe in that. That’s why I made this movie. And I think every country is going to have to decide, are we going to use robots for law enforcement or not, and how do we change our legal apparatus to deal with that? If it makes a mistake and kills a child, who is to blame? Is it the guy who deployed it, is it the guy who wrote the software? I mean, we don’t have legislation that deals with that right now.
If you recall, like I think two weeks ago, there was a controversy over whether Amazon should be using drones to deliver packages, let alone cops and robots. Right?
Right.
So I think it’s going to be very controversial. Different countries will find their own solutions to that. I think it’s going to be a negotiation about what can and cannot be used for war, and it’s going to be a key factor in the future of mankind, how this thing plays out. It’s going to be universal, and you’re right, it’s not about Detroit. It’s about the world.
Now having said that, RoboCop is a Detroit character, so the key was how do we talk about this universal issue where we keep RoboCop in Detroit. Because OmniCorp is a Detroit company, the city has had a revival. The city has grown. There’s a military software, high-tech industry there, and they’re going to release the robot in there. They have relationships with the mayor, they’re going to convince the mayor to adopt this thing, and that’s kind of how we tackled the locality of it.
What’s interesting about the drone aspect of the film though, is that besides that bit in Tehran at the beginning, the drone robots are very effective.
Yeah.
If you look at the original RoboCop, ED-209 is completely unreliable. He’ll just shoot anyone.
Yeah, yeah!
But in yours, you’re saying that the drones will be very well programmed but that’s still an ethical dilemma.
Yeah, that’s exactly right. The thing about this is, the key debate about drones, it’s the debate you have and it’s really set up as a debate in the movie where Senator Dreyfuss and Raymond Sellars are in Congress, and Senator Dreyfuss insists that for someone to pull the trigger, the entity that’s pulling the trigger has to understand subjectively what it means to be human. It has to feel something, he says. [These drones] are only running software and Americans don’t want that. They don’t want a machine to be able to pull the trigger.
That’s the issue. The issue here is… because theoretically you could program a machine with society’s values, and if the machine and the software is sophisticated enough it could decide what to do based on the program, and make a very efficient decision that a policeman might fail with. The problem is, if it’s not a human being deciding, and the robot makes a mistake, it doesn’t make sense to put a robot on trial. Even to punish the robot or send the robot to jail or whatever. It’s an issue.
So this issue is going to exist for war, for invasions of other countries or occupations where drones are used, and it’s going to exist next door. You know, the city of Detroit and the science of the future, whether they’re going to want robot law enforcement or not. I would be curious about that. What is Detroit going to say?
I don’t know man, if it’s going to help us get out of this economic funk…
[Laughs.] That’s funny.
