Review: “End of Evangelion”

The problem with giant, humanoid battle robots is that they’re huge targets that everyone can see from a hundred miles away–or even from space. Old fashioned fighter planes, artillery guns, and nuclear missiles could see them and hit them from long distances, out of range of the robots’ own weapons. Another problem with giant robots is there’s no way to hide if you get in trouble, unless maybe you can dive into a large body of water or into a deep, jagged canyon. Giant humanoid robots would be top heavy and unsteady on their two feet, which would be major problems. Just imagine how well you’d make out if you were sitting on the very top branch of a 200-foot tall redwood tree, and then a logger cut it at the base, and you had to endure a (seemingly) slow tip-over that ended with your top branch slamming into the ground at high velocity. Not pretty, and it’s exactly what would happen to you inside your cockpit every time your robot tripped or got knocked on its back by an alien. So human pilots won’t do. The bipedal layouts of the robots would also make their legs and feet major weak points, which enemies would surely target and be able to cripple using relatively weak weapons. Note that these same problems with poor concealment, top-heaviness, and vulnerable drive systems would also apply to smaller bipedal robots, like the “AT-ST” from Star Wars VI: Return of the Jedi. This might also help explain why no military has tried to build armored vehicles that walk on legs instead of roll on wheels. Finally, the use of giant robots for combat might also be unethical given the high risk of collateral damage caused by the robot accidentally stepping on people or falling on them. I imagine you’d feel pretty guilty if an alien body-slammed you and your giant robot into a skyscraper full of thousands of people.

Destroyed robots will come back to life. End of Evangelion’s pivotal battle happens when the good guy base is attacked by the Japanese military, which hitherto had been their friends. The Japanese military has nine of its own giant humanoid battle robots, but they’re piloted by computers instead of humans. Caught off guard, the best the good guys can muster forth is one of their own combat robots, piloted by a redheaded teen chick who is in need of bipolar medication. Redhead uses karate and a giant spear to beat/chop up all the enemy robots, and then her own robot runs out of power. Unfortunately for her, the seemingly dead enemy robots slowly start twitching back to life, and they get up–in spite of severed limbs and other visible damage–and kill her and her helpless robot. This is actually realistic. Not only will future military machines be able to keep fighting in spite of enormous amounts of damage, but it will be possible to fix them–perhaps without leaving the battlefield–even if they’ve suffered “fatal” damage.

As a precedent, it was common practice in WWII for armies to fix their destroyed tanks and to return them to service as fast as possible, with new crews. After all, tanks are large, expensive pieces of machinery, and it makes no economic sense to abandon them if they can be repaired. Tanks that had been incapacitated and defeated in combat had the burn marks scrubbed off, the dead bodies and body parts inside of them removed, the damaged systems identified and fixed, and any holes made by enemy weapons patched with liquid metal or welded-on sheets of armor. As WWII progressed, tanks that had gone through multiple “restorations” and multiple dead human crews became common sights.

Feigning death to either wait until the enemy goes away, or to get the enemy to lower his guard, come near you, and open himself to your surprise attack will also probably be common tactics for combat machines. This is because it’s much easier to pretend you’re dead if you don’t have externally detectable life signs (e.g. – chest movements from breathing), and it’s easier to risk a feigned death sneak attack on an enemy if you are a machine who fears nothing. In WWII, the Japanese soldiers were viewed as fanatics because they used tactics like this to ambush unsuspecting American troops (usually the “corpse” would suddenly wake up as you were walking by and detonate a grenade). It terrified and demoralized the Americans and forced them to laboriously shoot or bayonet every seemingly dead enemy soldier they passed, “just to be sure.”

A technological Singularity could happen so abruptly that you wouldn’t understand what was happening. Right after redhead dies, another of the teens gets his battle robot online and goes out to fight the Japanese military robots. When he sees his dead comrade, he has a mental breakdown because he had a crush on her. At that moment, the enemy battle robots grab his robot, levitate him far above the Earth, and start some type of “crucifixion” ceremony. The teen is the only person who can initiate a global transcendence event, and the enemy robots have been programmed to help him along. For some reason, killing his girl in front of him and rendering him distraught was also needed in order to ensure he would make “the right decision” regarding the transcendence. All of this was part of some incredibly complicated plan formulated by a secret cabal that only now–at the end–is revealed to be pulling all the strings. Yes. Ridiculous. Anyhow, we hear the teen’s rush of thoughts at this critical moment, and partly because he wants to end the suffering inherent to life, he decides to send out an energy pulse that travels across the whole planet, causing every human and animal to instantly burst into pools of red goo, which contain the souls and “essences” of each living being. The pools of liquid all run together, and Earth’s seas become red with them. Humans and all Earthly life transcend into a new form, where thoughts and feelings are directly shared, and there is no more suffering. Without ever using the term, this ending sequence of End of Evangelion depicts a possible future event called the “technological Singularity,” often shortened to “the Singularity.”

While there are many different theories about what form a Singularity could take, most thinkers believe it will happen thanks to machines achieving superhuman levels of intelligence. The reasoning is that, once machines get smart enough, humans wouldn’t be able to grasp the former’s thinking anymore or to anticipate their actions, and the machines would be capable of suddenly doing anything, like taking over the Earth, exterminating all humans, or elevating the human race to a superior state of being. Some believe that machines will achieve this level of intelligence and power very abruptly, so whatever changes they decide to make will happen without notice from the perspective of slow-thinking humans. A Singularity could be as abrupt and as life-changing to you as having an energy wavefront suddenly sweep over you from behind while you’re eating your breakfast waffles, converting you into a puddle of conscious, psychic, red liquid. Moreover, a future scenario where a superpowered entity (whether a distraught teenager or a superintelligent machine) decides to pursue a benign mandate like ending human suffering and then starts doing confusing and even scary things to achieve its goals is plausible. We simply don’t know how an AI with an IQ of 1,000 would act. For the record though, I think a Singularity is unlikely, and changes to technology and our way of life will happen slowly enough for humans to keep up and to have some influence over the course of events. In the far future–perhaps 150 years from now–I think the technology will exist to elevate humans like us to a higher state of being where suffering as we know it would be eliminated and thoughts and feelings could be directly shared, but we’ll get to that point gradually, with each necessary advancement setting the stage for the next.