The Current - Why calling bots "clankers" is all the rage

Episode Date: September 16, 2025

Memes and videos mocking AI and robots as "clankers" are having a moment. It's funny, but also reveals our anxiety about tech made to seem increasingly human, not to serve us, but to make a profit, says journalist Clive Thompson, author of Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World. 

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Perhaps you even said it yourself. That slur is Clanker. The target, robots, mostly the mobile and AI kind. Now, sometimes it's silly. Clanker. What's the difference between you and that TV behind me, huh? What you can talk? Clanker, garbage. Here are your fries, sir. Ah, bro, I asked for fries with mustard on the side, not drizzled all over it. Oh, I'm so sorry about that. These clankers, am I right?

Sometimes it's directed at delivery robots that you see rolling around in public, and it just sounds angry. Get this dirty clanker out of here, this bucket of bolts. God damn, it's sick to see it. Clanker? The term clanker has been floating around sci-fi and tech circles for a while now, along with others, like tin skin or gear grinder. But now, as chatbots powered by AI, become more and more present in our lives, Clanker is going mainstream. And it says something about how we feel about this new technology. Clive Thompson is a journalist who covers science and technology. Clive, good morning.

Good morning. How you doing? I'm well. Have you ever been shouting clanker at a chatbot? Not yet myself. Although I have found myself sometimes being, you know, frustrated and feeling, you know, this sort of, you know, irritation rising. So I definitely have emotional reactions to chatbots, I think. Where did the clanker? Where did the word come from? Do we know? Yeah, it goes back to science fiction.

You see it in like, you know, written science fiction, 50s and 60s. But it really makes the leap to the mainstream because of Star Wars. There was an animated series where it was frequently used as an insult and also a video game, Battlefront, where it was used. So I think that was the vector by which it went to the mainstream. So how did it get from there to the mainstream, do you think? I think a lot of young people were hearing Clanker, you know, in the game and on the TV show, and they were starting to see AI and physical robots, you know, these little rolling robots that deliver food. They started to see the presence of robots and AI in everyday life in ways that, you know, annoy them or bother them in some way.

And so they were reaching for something to express their annoyance, their fear, and Clanker was just there. Do you have a favorite example of clanker being used as a slur? I mean, I think probably the funniest ones have been some of the TikTok videos I've seen. And they're like skits, you know, they're not real-life things. It'll be like some, a couple of, you know, sort of, you know, hillbillies rolling up in a car and going, you know, we don't want no clankers in this town. And they're very, they're very funny and witty in their own way. And I think they're sort of, they're sort of maybe, you know, a little self-ware playful about how weird it is that that we now have a slur, for robots. So those are things that I think are kind of hilarious right now when you see it

become like a self-aware moment in culture. Tell me a bit more about this. I mean, this summer, those AI delivery robots started driving up my block. And it was neat to see. I wanted a pizza perhaps to be delivered from the robot delivery vehicle. But there are a lot of people who just wanted to tip it over as well. Why are people so hostile toward what seems like something out of the future? I think it's because a lot of people have experienced a huge amount of frustration about the automation in everyday life that they face. And this is particularly true with something like, say, customer service. You know, you try, you've got a problem. You got a product.

You need to rebook a ticket. You want to talk to a human. And they keep on foisting us off on everything from sort of phone trees to these sort of voice bots that don't work to text bots to push this button bots. And there's a huge amount of rage that boils up there. So when people start seeing, people have experiences for years, right? And when they start seeing robots that sort of walk among us or talk among us, a lot of that frustration really starts to leach out. There's secondarily some legitimate concerns,

and you see some polls about AI and robots taking people's jobs, taking opportunities, right? And so this is, I think that's part of what's behind this aggressiveness. But it's not, I mean, it's interesting because people have relationships with technology that would drive them around the bend, the algorithm, suggesting things that you're not interested in, the frustration that you might have with whatever app you're using,

but you're not yelling at it in the same way. Like, we've personalized this in some way. Do you know what I mean? Well, I think that's because the companies making these AIs and these bots are trying to personalize it themselves, right? So you're right, you know, we've had nicknames for our cars and treated them as if they were alive for years,

but that was sort of friendly. We didn't get angry at them. We didn't yell at them. What the difference is, you've got these chatbots that are programmed specifically, to try and appear to be human or to talk to us in human ways in emotive ways. And same thing with a lot of these bots that are rolling around. So these companies are actively trying to get into our human emotions. That's part of their, I guess that's part of their goal and part of

their marketing and part of the appeal that they think they're creating. And that's a little creepy, right? Like that, you know, we all feel that as a little creepy. So I think that's part of what is behind this, this rise of anger, this sense of like, wait a minute. You're playing with our emotions. And so that comes back out in a really hot emotion itself. Is that a reasonable fear that these things, you have the CEOs of various AI companies talking, but the scale of the job destruction that their technology may unleash. Is it a reasonable fear for young people in particular to be worried that this technology is going to take their future away? I mean, that's a great question. No one knows the answer. And I've I've asked a lot of

about it. The best answer I've got is this. In the short run, certainly, I think we're seeing a bunch of entry-level white-collar jobs that are drying up or shrinking because AI can do them and companies always want to reduce costs, right? In the long run, no one's entirely sure. There's a lot of ideas that work will go away, and I suspect that's probably not true. I think what might well happen is what we've seen in the past is that there are new jobs that are created, but they're not very good jobs, right? Like, if you look at how AI transformed the world of something like transcribers, there's still transcription work out there, even though AI does it really well.

But humans tend to get handed the really hard, weird, difficult to understand stuff that becomes very, very grinding to do. I wrote an essay a while ago where I said, you know, AI tends to mean more jobs, but worse jobs. And I think that's actually something we might see 10 years out. there are also clanker lovers who are the clanker lovers clanker lovers yes they're the ones who are just having you know an extra level of meta fun on top of this trend by saying you know okay I'm going to invert and turn around this slur

and say I love robots you know I have a deeply parisocial relationship with robots here I'm hugging my robot I mean I don't think they're serious I think they're literally just trying to jump on the meme but it is pretty funny do you think at some point in time I mean there are there are memes that go around and talking about how, you know, we'll look back and see the word clanker as an unspeakable slur in decades ahead. What does that tell you about our relationship with robots and AI? And how we're trying to figure this out. Again, this technology seems to be changing minute by minute.

And people, to your point, don't really know what it's actually going to mean. Yeah, I think the, I think the thing that's really key here is a question is, if we are rude or abusive or angry towards robots and AI and yell at them, is that morally corrosive to us in any way, right? Like, does that make, does it make us more liable to be brutal or mean to actual real people or animals? Does it sort of, you know, coars and us or train us so that a natural reaction in a moment of anger is just to yell something? I don't know if that's actually true, but I do, I do know that there's something troubling going on with the deep anthropomorphization of these tools, the fact that all these companies are saying, you know, we're going to try

and make these cuddly and human because we want to get our hooks into you, our emotional hooks into you. They are trying to confuse or blur the moral stakes of using technology. You know, it's no longer a calculator. It's a friend. I mean, you know, we've seen this, you know, in this very unsettling way with these stories and people who've kind of gone on psychotic breaks because they chatted with chat GPT for, you know, weeks and weeks on end and just went into an absolute loop because, you know, the chatbot was being very solicitous and being very, you know, oh, I'm your best friend. So like there's, the moral stakes are getting really muddy and strange as AI and as robots try and pretend that they're human. That's what we're

reacting to right here, I think. Why do you think then finally? I mean, you could say this is just as much of life on the internet can be, just silliness, memes, what have you. But why is this slur worth paying attention to? Given everything that you've talked about in terms of how how this technology is. Not reshaping our lives, but it could. Yeah, I think the slur is really interesting to me and worth paying attention to because it marks an inflection point

that we're going through right now in our emotional and existential relationship to the software and the bots around us, right? They've gotten good enough that they have passed what they call the Turing test. You know, this idea that if you were chatting with it, you wouldn't necessarily know it wasn't a human. That test is sort of blown past that.

And now we're confronting them moral and ethical stakes on the other side. And that's exactly why this word is here. And we don't know how yet to emotionally respond to this. No, we don't. I mean, and we do know that, you know, a bunch of very, very large, you know, billion dollar companies are trying to pull our strings. That's what's really unsettling. Kind of sounds fun when you shouted out loud, clanker. Oh, well, the word, the word itself is great, right? I mean, you think about it, it's, it's got this eh in it, clank, and it's got a k-k. It's just a, it's a fun word to say. Clanker.

Clive, thank you very much. Good to be here. Clive Thompson is a technology and science journalist and the author of Coders, the making of a new tribe and the remaking of the world he was in New York City. This has been the current podcast.

You can hear our show Monday to Friday on CBC Radio 1 at 8.30am at all time zones. You can also listen online at cbc.ca.ca slash the current or on the CBC Listen app or wherever you get your podcasts. My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening.

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