Journal 12 (AI Response)

I've really enjoyed watching AI these past two classes. I can't think of a better movie that could appropriately reflect the topics in which we have been discussing this semester. One particular scene greatly reflected Dreyfus' idea that addresses the relevance problem found in search engines; in this case, Dr. Know. It was a very simple scene, but one that said a lot about the lack of common sense found in a database. It is something that, even in this futuristic setting, has not been acounted for and fixed. Aside from that, this movie reflected one of the ideas that I brought up in class one day that addressed the error in our quest for creating a replica of a human being. The problem is that we seem to leave out important factors such as emotion, judgment, pleasure, and pain. We instead think of these machines as nothing more than walking databases, but that would then contradict what it is that we are trying to achieve, which is a human-like robot. What I suggested and what the film shows, is that we don't really seem to want robots to be like us because if machines had feelings, desires, and preferences, then they may not serve us. That is, in my opinion, the entire issue with AI. We say that we want to create a being like us, but instead work to create nothing more than a servant. That is why David is so special in AI. Because he was given that ability to feel for his mother, he expressed himself in ways that no other machine would; jealousy, anger, fear, desire, sadness. David's emotions are what made him so close to human. These are the "imperfections" that AI researchers are trying to correct, but they are ironically the exact same features we would need to replicate in order to create a human-like machine.