For Anders, the problem is not that humans have created a world of artifice. Rather, the problem is that in the modern technological environment we make products that are not measured on the basis of human needs but dramatically exceed them.
When a prophet like Günther Anders speaks to us about the whole of what is happening in our time, when he does so with poetic urgency, we should sit up and pay attention to the dangers he names.
By what authority an institution, neither elected nor sovereign, may judge the common good.
. . . In other words, Chappie can be read as an allegory that calls for us to recognize our ill-treatment of the other, and the film seeks an alternative ethic that does not recourse immediately or uncritically to fear or hostility, leading to violence. We are to be more embracing of the ‘other’ who is, ultimately, more complex than we might first assume, and is never entirely ‘other’.