Moon- We're not programmed. We're people, do you understand?

"Sam Bell: You'd be okay?GERTY: Of course. The new Sam and I will be back to our programming as soon as I finished rebooting.
Sam Bell: Gerty, we're not programmed. We're people, do you understand?

 This snippet of dialogue is from one of my favorite films,  the 2009 sci-fi thriller Moon. In Moon, the audience is introduced to the main character, Sam Bell, the lone employee of a mining operation on the moon and his robot caretaker/companion/friend named GERTY. GERTY cares for Sam and ensures that all daily duties assigned to Sam by his employer are completed. As the movie continues, Sam's health begins to decline. In this state, Sam continues his work and goes to repair one of the many harvesters that have reported issues. On this usually routine operation, Sam finds himself incapacitated by his decline in health and crashes into the harvester needing attention. It is at this point that the audience is lead to believe that Sam has died. However, in the next scene, we find that Sam is roaming about his quarters as if nothing happened to him. After many interactions with GERTY, this "new" Sam eventually goes to repair the harvester that the first Sam went to fix and finds the former Sam clinging for life. The new Sam brings the old Sam back their quarters and they reflect how there can be two of them alive. They search the quarters and the old Sam eventually finds a hidden bunker where thousands upon thousands more incarnations of Sam. We then learn that each new incarnation is a 'clone' or in this case an android being that must be programmed to relive the life that.the original Sam Bell lived many many years earlier. Both Sams eventually make contact with Earth, to Sam's original family and the movie progresses to an escape for our former Sam and the movie comes to a close.

In terms societal impact, Moon can be analyzed in many different ways.While Sam Bell is not inherently contemporary nor is he a product of our current time period,  Sam Bell does represent the fears of the what robots could become in the future and what it means to be considered 'human.'

To start, Sam Bell represents the transference of labor to robots/androids that was once completed by humans as well as the advancement required to create a robot/android/cybernetic being able to take on such a task. This, while often a positive sign, is not inherently fail safe in this situation. The androids left to their own accord, given the advancement, will act and react as humans would and act outside their programming and pose a threat to stability. Further, this android also raises questions about what it means to be human. From simply looking at one of the Sam Bell replicates, one could not tell whether or not it was the original Sam Bell as is shown with the android's encounter with the original family of Sam Bell. Additionally, the replicate itself was convinced of the fact that it was the one and only Sam. Given the human desire for familiarity, we may see androids/beings such as these in the true future and may challenge our ability to tell what is human and what is android.

Overall, the inherent desire for technological advancement can be severely hurt when the technology can become sentient.