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 __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get personalized email addresses from Yahoo! Mail http://personal.mail.yahoo.com/ Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=16933