Thursday, February 14, 2013

AI

The A.I. film was incredibly intriguing. The themes about imbibing robots with emotions and well as replacing children with robot children were both somewhat disturbing. It raises the question of whether or not it's our emotions that make us human. The ability to feel pain and experience feelings is how we think, act, and react, as well as how we interpret our experiences. The little boy in the film, although he was definitely mechanical, did feel. It raises many moral implications--especially in regards to where our current technological advancements are headed.

I also found it very intriguing how Spielberg decided to portray the robots and how they interacted with each other. in the film, the robots were, in fact, assisting each other. Joe went so far as to aid the boy in his escape--multiple times! If robots are, indeed, so mechanical, how did they develop the ability to determine when, and when not, to aid a fellow robot. The way in which this movie was filmed, and how the robots were depicted, greatly increased the relate-ability of the audience to the robots as they were more and more human-like as the movie progressed. Would purely "helpful" robots be such a bad thing?

2 comments:

Unknown said...
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Unknown said...

The little boy in the film was programmed to "feel"; this is why it was so difficult as an audience to watch his rejection. It felt real because he seemed real. I don't think "helpful" robots would be a bad thing in theory, but people would have difficulty in expressing how to treat the robots. Like we saw in the film, some embraced the robots, while others reveled in their destruction, because they were "other". This "otherness" is picked up even by little boys his own age, who want to know if he can swim, and if he has all the same body parts as they do. This film raised many great questions and implications about what would happen if robots were made to appear so as to "feel", if our technology could speak back to us.