Archos
Archos is the Frankenstein’s creature of the story. He is simply an experiment in pushing artificial intelligence past the point at which at which it can be controlled. He is another symbolic addition to the archetypal entities representing why humans should refrain from tampering in God’s domain.
Professor Nicholas Wasserman
Wasserman is the Dr. Frankenstein of the story. He is the esteemed scientist whose narcissistic belief in his own genius leads to creating Archos. And in doing so, he creates a monster that threatens the extinction of the human species. In this way he is yet another potent symbol of Jurassic Park’s Dr. Ian Malcolm’s never-ending provocative suggestion: just because you can doesn’t mean you should.
The Freeborn
Through both action and name, the freeborn robots who turn against the dominion of Archos in order to help the humans win the war become symbols of free will. Artificial intelligence is posited as no different from non-artificial intelligence in the sense that it is created without a moral dimension and is therefore capable of determining whether it wants to be good or evil. Archos chooses evil while the freeborn choose good. At least from the human perspective.
All Robots
Although not directly and explicitly asserted, the robots collectively serve as a symbol which constitutes a minor theme of the story. All—well, certainly almost all, at least—of the robots in this story that serve to put the future of humanity at risk have been created by some of those very humans to perform tasks that other humans could very well do themselves. And, it might be added, do every bit as well. Robots are essentially a symbol of human laziness. For the most part, we don’t need them, but are getting precariously close to not being able to do without them.
The Cube
The entire novel except for the first and last chapters, basically, are a flashback. The first chapter tells of how a soldier named Cormac Wallace discovered a strange basketball-sized cube that contains accounts of the entire history of the robot war. So, basically, the cube is a futuristic symbol of history books. Or, put another way, a prediction of what books will one day become. Either way, the cube is a symbolic representation of how the very act of reading the novel is destined to one day become obsolete.
