A weeping angel could be killed by a robot. They are only stone, and thus unkillable when being observed by a LIVING creature. Robots are not alive. This means it is down to speed and strength, and puts the angels on far more even ground.
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I actually love this and now I need Big Finish to put out a DW boxset that pits the Weeping Angels against the Robots with the Doctor caught in the middle.
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I didn’t mean you, K9!
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Yes. I don’t know why this isn’t a reality already, or why no-one has thought of it.
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Why are they giving water to my emotional support fictional robot dog? They’re going to electrocute him 
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Dont worry! …It’s gin.
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Ah, so he won’t feel it when it still shorts him out.
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I’d honestly think artificially intelligent things like robots or androids in Doctor Who are alive enough to still count as observing the Angel, but let’s say it doesn’t and the Angel can move. I still give it to the Angel for two reasons. One, there’s still nothing preventing the Angel from zapping it back in time at a touch, and two, its visual memory banks would also contain an image of the Angel as soon as it sees it (if the image in a brain’s memory counts, I’d say it still does in the drive or whatever data storage its got) so it’s got an Angel inside it now.
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That makes sense. One issue. Characters can remember Weeping Angels, without being hijacked by them. As long as the robot in question doesn’t look into it’s eyes, it’s fine. I think the angels would win due to their extreme strength and speed.
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Oh, there’s such an interesting philosophical question here. By robot, we mean a machine capable of conducting complex tasks. Robots might be semi autonomous, fully autonomous or, in DW, even sentient.
At what point does a complex machine become alive? At what point might the physical bodies of living things be said to be flesh machines? Ultimately, our bodies are just mechanical vehicles for the software of our minds. In this sense, we are not so very different from machine kind.
Just because an autonomous and sentient individual may be artificially constructed, does this mean it can’t be alive?
I agree that it might be possible to direct a non sentient and definitively non living machine against a weeping angel but things get considerably more complex when that machine becomes sentient and potentially alive. The act of perception is critical for weeping angels. Can you be perceived by something non living?
Perception requires awareness and interpretation. At the point true awareness becomes possible, we’re surely in the land of the living, right? Many robots in DW qualify. The others, those that specifically would need to be directed by a sentient other, could be used as weapons against the angels… but the sentient directors should be afraid. Very afraid!
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I would personally use the MRS GREN definition of life. Also, sentience isn’t required to be alive, so, say a mouse, would also turn an angel to stone.
For those who do not remember high school biology, or learnt something different due to being in a different country, MRS GREN is an acronym that stands for Movement Respiration Sensitivity Growth Reproduction Excretion Nutrition.
By this definition, robots are not alive, as they pretty much always gain their energy via a source other than respiration, and do not reproduce.
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Some robots in sci fi can reproduce[1], usually nanobots. If you count building other robots, then a lot more can.
asexually, obviously ↩︎
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Fair enough. I would say that does count as reproduction.
There is still respiration, though. Robots do not respire. Generally a robot’s power source is some kind of battery, though I have read stories where they contain a small electrical generator of some form.
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I love the idea of weeping angels being locked in place by bugs or even just a bunch of midges flying in their face, trying to swat them away in the milliseconds while they’re buzzing the other way
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I think what’s more important is if Doctor Who, the show, the universe, would think it’s alive than if we in the real world would define it as alive. I think there are so many instances of robots and the like being considered alive in Doctor Who that we have to for the sake of this discussion, regardless of how we’d classify it in the real world, as alive. As this is a hypothetical within the Doctor Who universe, not ours, so I don’t think real world logic has much weight.
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That makes sense.
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Definitions of life are far in need of an overhaul from those criteria. Personally, I have far more sympathy with Brillouin and Shrodinger’s negentropy as a starting point. It’s an amorphous concept, but then so is life.
As has been pointed out, many robots can reproduce. So can computer viruses for that matter. Nutrition is all about context. What we perceive as feeding may look very different to aliens or mechanical life forms. The key element in nutrition is to claim order and energy from outside in order to prevent local entropy. This, a robot able to use solar radiation is engaging in nutrition in a sense, as is one that can patch itself up or replace components. Many robots in DW would fit with this definition.
And, no, you are quite right in that sentience is not required for life. It is, philosophically speaking, not a necessary condition, but I would claim that sentience is very much a sufficient condition. In other words, you don’t have to be sentient to be alive, but if you are sentient then you are, in a meaningful sense alive.
There is still much we don’t know about the weeping angels, but what we do know suggests to me that sentience is of importance with regard to them being perceived.
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Of course that’s true, but it’s so much more interesting to try and make it make sense in the universe that we know and (strive to) understand.
I love these kind of discussions and hypothetical thought experiments/games. 
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This is why I have issues (genuine issues, as a professional ecologist/zoologist) with high school definitions. Respiration is merely the mechanism we understand. The question is not “what do we call it?” but “what does it do?”. I contend that there is nothing respiration achieves (in terms of sustaining function) that robots (or indeed some alien forms of life) can’t achieve by other means.
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