There are two fundamental axes of robotfuckery:
1. Morphology: how far does the robot in question diverge from a basically human form?
2. Mentality: how badly does the robot in question want to kill all humans?
(Some frame the second axis as “how inhuman is the robot’s mentality?”, but I find that problematic on the basis that a. I’m not convinced that popular media is capable of envisioning a truly inhuman intellect, and b. I know some pretty weird humans; in practice, anthropocidal fervour is a more useful metric.)
With respect to morphology, there are several considerations to weigh, including:
Body plan (e.g., an android versus, say, a sapient toaster)
Discreteness (e.g., a robot with an identifiable corpus you can point to versus a robot embodied as information or infrastructure)
Scale (e.g., a robot the size of a person versus a robot the size of a planet)
Aesthetics (e.g., fleshy versus shiny)
Mentality, meanwhile, is more straightforward, with “will actively preserve human life” on one end of the scale and “personally annihilated all human life in the universe“ on the other.
G0-T0 scores very high on robot aesthetics (black plastic and chip wiring never goes out of style!), and middling on body plan (a hovering sphere is reasonably inhuman, but we can do better); however, it’s both entirely discrete and approximately human scale, and so receives no points on either of those metrics. Meanwhile, its mentality is passively malevolent at best – it’s more misunderstood than anything – so that axis receives a low overall score.
Comparison to Optimus Prime is informative here. Optimus Prime doesn’t score particularly highly on any morphological metric, but he doesn’t zero out any category either: in terms of body plan, he’s half human and half truck; in terms of discreteness, he’s generally depicted as being able to separate himself into several autonomous modules; in terms of scale, he’s pretty big; and in terms of aesthetics, he’s shiny but comparatively conservative. Morphologically, he’s the Mario of robotfucking: average or slightly above in every category, but excelling in none. Where he loses the majority of his points is on the mentality axis, being essentially benevolent.
