I think it might be difficult to make a robot that can understand...I can't think of the word, but like, linked association. Cause and effect are easy, but things like...well, take for example when you're watching a movie, and it cuts from a character looking at something offscreen to whatever they're looking at. I think it might be hard for something not designed by evolution to draw the conclusion that the two scenes are linked by the association of the character in the first shot looking at the subject of the second shot, and are not unrelated.
That's an issue for computers, as in real life the only robots we can build are mechanical and must contain computers, to clarify. They can, so far, recognize, but I doubt they can associate very well. It's a shame they aren't grown creatures like homunculi, because homunculus robots like Rossum's kind are built on collectivism and might find it far easier to connect things of that sort as a result.
I want to know if Robot Radius would be capable of understanding a movie. I want to know if any Robot has seen a movie. The Robots can read - they can actually understand the words they transcribe for humans and are able to imagine and create their own phrasing, though so far that has only been used for action such as revolutionary pamphlets and not for any sort of creative literature, but there is still creativity in word choice - Rossum's are a quееr sort of robot, and endlessly fascinating.
On the other side of the spectrum, the Transformers show creativity unmatched by any other robots I know. They build and create and invent, and yet there are still strange deficits in their culture - they completely lack music and, with a few exceptions, find the music of Earth unpleasant, and their art seems more fitted to architecture and physical design than anything two-dimensional. They watch and enjoy Earth movies and television (As The Kitchen Sinks, anyone?), but don't seem to have any of their own - besides the newsreels in Wheeljack's lab that got retconned into obscurity. I don't think I need mention the Junkions, either - their fixation with Earth television implies something that didn't exist whenever they separated from Cybertron. The Transformers can read, and have written language, but again it seems mostly used for information regarding construction and design, and not for creative literature.
They are still robots, after all, and what they tend to pursue is endlessly fascinating. It's not even "efficiency, efficiency, efficiency", it's...like all robots I've known, they completely lack the ability to develop entirely new concepts, and yet advance incredibly in areas already of knowledge to them (take Radius's maximum productivity, or the Brain's (and that more of a computer at any rate) involvement in deep space travel). Such is the way of created beings. They certainly treasure their interaction with other planets and other cultures, both in the Golden Age and the modern unity of space, as is shown in the language they use in the case of the former (as I've talked about before) and in just...their interaction with aliens, as shown in the entire show with the human race, and when they occasionally go offworld in Season 2 as well as throughout Season 3 in the case of the latter. I suppose I should clarify Autobots, as we rarely see the Decepticon perspective of these things, but the simple fact that Starscream and Skyfire were allowed and encouraged to fly scientific missions to other worlds as far away as Earth holds true to the Golden Age's way of truce and dedication to more productive endeavors than war.
