X-Message-Number: 16933
Date: Mon, 9 Jul 2001 08:36:10 -0700 (PDT)
From: Scott Badger <>
Subject: My Take On Spielberg's A.I.

********   WARNING  A.I.  SPOILERS   *********

I saw A.I. over a week ago but wanted to wait until
most people had a chance to see it. Don't read the
following if you haven't seen it yet. First of all, AI
was visually stunning, I admit, and  I recommend it
for the special effects alone. And obviously, lots of
people really enjoyed it.  The parts of David and of
Gigolo Joe were played superbly. Nevertheless, I did
have several problems with the story.  The rest of my
message is pretty critical, but I must also admit that
I couldn t tear my eyes away from the screen for a
moment.  Anyway, here goes.

I found this quote from a Salon review interesting: 
 More than any other filmmaker, Steven Spielberg has
presented childhood as an almost sacred concept, a
province of innocence and imagination that he has
devoted his considerable technological, narrative and
emotional gifts to celebrating. The shock of "A.I." is
that Spielberg, at least in the first section, has
chosen to make a film about the monstrousness of
childhood or, specifically, about the monstrousness of
children's emotional dependence on adults. 

In A.I., a corporation chooses to design/program a
robot who can and  must  love one person only (why not
both parents?) even though the robot is designed to
live significantly longer than the human it loves
resulting in a whole lot of unavoidable emotional
distress for the robot.  What a cruel and
short-sighted design!

David reminded me of a wind-up toy that walks into the
wall and can do nothing except continue to walk
despite the futility of its actions.  This pathetic
little android is consequently condemned to engage in
irrational, obsessive behaviors, while its creators
pat themselves on the back and interpret David s
behaviors as  self-motivation  and  following his
dream .  Meanwhile, he doesn t have the intelligence
required to figure out that the blue fairy queen
doesn t really exist. 

The main quote used in all the promotional trailers
was  His love is real but he is not.   Well since his
love was completely programmed (e.g. he instantly
loved Monica as soon as she said the seven imprinting
words), I wouldn t exactly call that  real  love. 
There was no choice or free will involved.  David
didn t have any control over the one primary emotion
he was programmed to experience.  

And why did the memory trace of his recreated mother
(only allowed to exist for one day for some vague
reason) fail to ask any questions about where the rest
of the family was in the future scene?  If they really
wanted to make David happy they would have placed him
in a virtual world where he could have been with his
mother indefinitely. Or the future creatures could
have simply enhanced David when they found him instead
of accommodating the obsessive-compulsive parameters
of his programming  I mean really, compared to the
advanced creatures, David was a primitive toy with
crappy programming. And was anyone else a bit
uncomfortable with the oedipal-like intimacy between
David and his reborn mom? 

John Grigg thought the advanced creatures were
post-humans but I got the impression they were
descendants of the robots instead. Mainly because of
what Joe said, (paraphrased)  They hate us because
they know that after they re gone, we ll still be
here.   And yes John, the advanced creatures looked a
whole lot like Close Encounter aliens and I was
disappointed with that lazy depiction.

I m also sick and tired of this repeated theme about
some non-human entity whose only desire is to become
more human, be it Data from Star Trek, Bicentennial
Man, or the aliens in Dark City..  Aren t we humans
just great!  Much preferable to rational, logical
beings. We have that undefinable and intangible
essence called  spirit , that makes us the envy of all
the robots and aliens.  

What anthropocentric drivel.

Even so ... like Mr. Grigg, I too am grateful for a
movie that will probably infuse the culture with memes
friendly to the ideas of artificial intelligence and
the transhuman movement, and I will probably see it
again.  I think the Salon critic was right on when he
suggested that a Kubrick/Spielberg film was doomed to
be problematic from the start.  Kubrick characters are
typically cold and zombie-like, while Spielberg is all
about being warm and fuzzy.  

Finally, I d like to pose the questions;  Did David
truly experience emotions or did his programming
simply prompt him to exhibit those behaviors commonly
associated with emotional responses in order to
accurately simulate emotions?  In other words, is the
physiological arousal associated with human emotional
responses required for a feeling to be authentic?  I
know upload enthusiasts will maintain that a perfect
simulation of that physiological arousal would be as
authentic as the original process.  If it were me
adopting David, though, I d have a very difficult time
treating his feelings as if they were real because
they were simply poor simulations.  But suppose they
then develop better programming and take David back to
the shop for an upgrade and when he returns there is
noticeable improvement but he still falls short of
appearing emotionally authentic.  Then they come up
with even better programming, etc..  Point is, even if
David got to the point where his emotional responses
were perfect human simulations, could I ever regard
them as authentic after watching him undergo all the
successive approximations?  And if I couldn t regard
his perfect simulation as authentic, how could I
regard my own emotional responses as authentic since
A=A?  After all, evolution provided the programming
for my emotions.

OK, I'm starting to ramble now, so I'll let it go.

Bottom line:  This film is definitely worth seeing but
it is darker and more conflicted than anything
Spielberg's done before. For every scene that made me
wince, there was another than captivated me.

Best regards,

Scott Badger

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