Why might the androids be hated by the Post-Apocalyptians?

Question

Before the nuclear war, android servants were common all around the USA, especially in the larger cities, where they did numerous tasks. The androids are programmed to help any human in need, and if you reboot their software, you can become the robots new owner and it will preform any tasks you ask from it.

But, for some reason, the androids are hated by most human communities, with only a few exceptions (Fresno, San Francisco). Humans would rather shoot an android down and do all the back breaking farm work themselves. What would be a plausible reason for why the androids are so universally hated?

The androids don’t look human, but not in an uncanny valley way. They look like mechanical men, who are about the size of a human. The domestic androids are made to be adorable, but riot control and army androids are more fierce looking

Answer 1

Maybe it could depend of what the androids can be programmed to do. After the end, raiders or warlords could program the android to kill anyone who trespasses or to walk into an town turn all humans into red stains. And to keep these "weapons" from being reprogrammed again and used against the raiders/warlord who sent it, they jam the reboot button so the android can't bond to a new master.

Not only would this create a bad association with androids, but shoddy orders on the part of the warlords could make them exponentially more dangerous. For example, the warlord failed to mention when the android should stop marching and killing. Now an android on the horizon could be a relentless serial killer or an incredibly useful resource. A lot of people would rather shoot on sight than roll the dice.

Bear in mind you don't need exceptionally strong or smart androids for them to be dangerous. An android with a sniper rifle wouldn't need anything sleep, food, and would likely have above average accuracy. An Android with a spear could follow a caravan until they have to sleep, then take them out one at a time. Heck, just an android capable of lying about directions could doom a whole caravan to starvation or death-by-environment.

Even if it takes a really smart raider/warlord to overcome the failsafes that prevent androids from killing (Asimov's three laws or whatever), it would only take a few wandering soldiers to sully androids reputation.

Answer 2

Bad History

In the period of escalating violence and increasingly despotic government leading up to the war governments both created mass layoffs of vanilla humans to increase war effort productivity and lessen costs. In addition androids were often deployed for dirty work that human soldiers or police might balk at like exterminating smaller towns, rounding up and interring the captured enemy populace in labor camps, or violently suppressing riots. The nuclear war isn't going to erase survivor's nightmares of being hauled out of bed by cold emotionless machines working for the governments secret police, or receiving a vicious beating from a squad of police riot suppression androids simply for missing curfew. They will tell these stories to their children and they to theirs until being an android approaching a human settlement is the equivalent to walking into a human right's summit with a swastika that somebody else forcibly tattooed to your forehead.

Perhaps not all androids participated in these pre-war events, maybe they do not even have memories of these actions anymore due to repeated reprogramming, but that doesn't mean people have forgotten or forgiven, even generations later. Or maybe they do have memories of those dark times and freed of being directly compelled to commit such atrocities they are attempting to make amends for what they were forced to do.

Answer 3

Herbert's Dune had it's Butlerian Jihad and Asimov's Foundation had it's banning of robots.
No matter how good things are going some people will want to blame the system for their unrealized dreams. If that system includes robots then they are an easy target since they are not human and have no moral advocate.

Think how, in the US and other places, immigrants (legal or not), are often blamed for society's shortcomings whether it's true or not. Business concerns will even contribute (often surreptitiously) to this belief because it is a distraction from the real economics of what's happening (shipping jobs overseas, automation, and mostly wage suppression).

Othertimes, would-be leaders/tyrants, use existing bigotry to put themselves at the fore of a movement and gather power for themselves. Doesn't matter the cause or who the scapegoats are as long as they get power.

Who will morally speak for the robots? In the past and still today, Gypsies, Mexicans, Albanians, Africans, etc, get blamed not only for low wages/lack of work, but also for crime and moral decline. Current US president is a recent example of promoting it with no facts needed. Then the stories of women and children, families, come into the debate and there's a softening in the bigotry of many and a counterargument. No such possibility for robots since no babies or families.

  Proof of this use for ulterior purposes is that illegal immigration could be ended in a day by seizing or very heavily fining the companies that hire such workers. Apart from an occasional raid for appearance sake or business/political motivation this does not occur and even then workers are replaced immediately with more undocumented (or obviously falsely documented) workers (or the same people who can make the return trip in a day). It is not the will of the powers that be to end such practice, but it is their will to keep the scapegoat issue alive and charged as a smokescreen for the appeasement of the population.
   Post-apocalypse there wouldn't be the political power to retain it both ways, blaming them for all the problems and keeping them for the cheap, disposable labor.

Answer 4

I would suspect that the hatred or non-hatred of the androids would be keyed to the general level of trust of technology after the Great Unpleasantness.

If the general mindset is "Let's get back to how things were before the war so we can have cars and iPods again", there might be little to no hatred. Indeed, they may be seen as highly coveted items - a reminded of how great thigns were.

Contrariwise, if people now distrust technology, and have move to a more Luddite mindset, they they'd be much more likely to view these obvious and prevalent reminders of What Went Wrong with great animosity.

Answer 5

See my other answer for the android memory issue - the devastating malware attack "shellfyre" which roared through the blockchain-secured Wi-Fi connecting all the most advanced androids (IoT) not only did irreparable damage to all systems it infected: it also directed massive anti-human lethal strikes from a random percentage of such infected androids.

Though some of the surviving humans do understand that those androids which survived managed to quarantine those malware executables, and those systems which couldn't be purged were destroyed by their fellow androids, their indelible memories of the atrocities committed leave them scarred, twitchy and uninclined to even try trusting something whose motive you cannot guess t through nonverbal cues.