Is It a Game? What if the Answer is No: Artifical Intelligence

You cannot take a boy with ambition, a dream for his future- a boy with a reason to live- and demolish absolutely everything human about him. You cannot simply stare into a child’s eyes, completely ignoring his desires, and, at the same time, fulfill your own instead. You cannot take from him his passion and his sole purpose in life. Is it just me or is this wrong? Mecha or Orga – it is inhumane and cruel.

In Artificial Intelligence: AI, Steven Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick reel us into a future that has progressed beyond that which we can imagine. A devastating downfall has forced humans to continue their survival by creating robots to replace themselves. This world of machines was our own doing, and we ourselves chose to allow this world to occur. What this movie presented to me, however, was the notion that human beings cannot handle this futuristic world – we cannot understand it and we are not willing to accept it. If ever a time came that humans would be created not from bare flesh and bones, but from nothing but nails and metal (and a little bit more, I’m sure), it would become difficult for humans to distinguish real from artificial – or, as stated in the movie, “fast fact” from “fairy tale.” For me, this idea was offered through the journey of David, the machine child that can love.

There are several moments throughout the movie that a combat of dialogue presents an argument of how real David truly is. When Monica is talking to Henry about David, they cannot agree: Monica goes on to say “He is a child,” to which Henry responds “He’s a toy,” and finally Monica concludes “He’s a gift… from you.” Once again, when David is trapped in the cage at the flesh fare, the man is in awe as he speaks to this child, “You are a machine.” To this, David responds, “I’m a boy. My name is David.” Expectedly, to this the man responds, “Impossible.” While listening to these types of conversations, I was constantly reminded to reconsider the depth of David’s existence in the world. This is a child machine who can love, and alongside with that, bring with him countless other emotions. Being a mecha means that eating spinach causes David’s face to fall apart –other than this trivial detail, however, David can feel the warmth of a loving smile, he can feel the passion of desiring something with all his “heart,” and he cannot help but feel the subsequent devastation after everything he has ever known and cared for is cruelly torn away from him. In other words, this character feels all those things that all of us have felt at some point in our lives. We can relate to him because, as unreal as the other characters try to make him, he is everything that we are.

There were too many times while watching the movie that I empathized with David, thinking how unjustly he’s being treated – like leaving him stranded in a dark unknown forest… what’s with that? Hello, world, why is this allowed?  He could have been eaten by bears, or, since this is the future, stalked by flesh fare hunters who want nothing more than for him to explode. Furthermore, I empathized with David when he felt the awe-strucking pain of discovering that there are 500 machines and counting that are almost identical to him – a thought that overcomes and depresses the machine child. The very first thing that came to mind while watching this occur was why aren’t there laws against all this? I realized, however, that the humans in this movie cannot consider what is going on inside of the machines “heads” – they do not feel the need to create laws for how to treat machines. Especially in the case of David, he has emotions and for all symbolic purposes of this body part, he has a heart. When technology has come to a point of instilling a machine with emotions, alongside with that comes the question of how we are allowed to treat this machine. For all we know, David can feel exactly as we do, and as such, laws should have been created so that he could be treated as an individual.

           The movie made me think about how science and technology is progressing at an unimaginable rate. In a world full of ethics and laws, there seems also a constant need to create order so we can live harmoniously alongside those things which are, but not entirely, like us. Maybe we are not completely ready or capable of accepting and loving these inventions for the issues they present in our world, and maybe we are – I think we’re the ones who can ultimately create that answer, and thus, also shape what is to come.