Response to AI

The film AI is especially useful in an Ethics and Technology class, as it deals directly with the subject of how humans are ethically responsible for the machines they create.  The film does not posit much hope in humans--Steven Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick seem to agree with the philosopher who says that humans are simply incapable of loving or respecting machines.  In one instance, seeming to occur in the future suburbia, humanity is the betrayer--David's surrogate mother has no need of him once she has her real son back.  David's mother isn't necessarily evil--yet she seriously lacks the depth of understanding necessary to tackle such a complicated issue.

One line from the film that stuck out to me was at the beginning, when William Hurt says something along the lines of, "God both loved and created Adam and Eve, so we can't we do the same with robots?"  This is an interesting theological riddle--it probably does require an absolutely perfect being to love one's creation--to love something that is inferior to you, as creator.  Since humans aren't perfect beings, the anxiety is that the creation will be more perfect than the creator.  This anxiety is played out especially at the flesh fairs--a part of the film which I felt was actually rather unimaginatively done (for such a futuristic society, they sure do have some medieval notions of entertainment).  However unconvincing it was, though, it is the only other glimpse we really get at humanity besides Monica, the mother who lacks a real understanding of the issue, and Professor Hobby, who even steals a Yeats poem in his capitalist driven search for David.  Hobby seems intelligent enough to grapple with the issue,

but he's a bourgeois pig, so everything for him is solved by profit.  So flesh fairs provide the only real clear answer of the issue of ethics and technology in the film, and that is, the human anxiety of our imperfections will cause a hatred of Artificial Intelligence, and machines will be forced into rather unimaginative and unimpressive torture devices.  Seriously, I was more worried when David was eating spinach.

It's hard to find the voice of reason in a film with so many voices about technology--it's not as clear cut as the episode of Star Trek, where Data spoke with through the voice of Hubert Dreyfus.  The ending of the film, though, does draw heavily from Lyotard's situation in his dialogue, where artificial intelligence is a way of preserving human culture and knowledge--a proof we existed.  At the end of the film, David becomes just that--a plaything that looks just like us--he's able to explain much about humanity, through memories and simply his existence, to the strange archeologists who happen upon him.