Sorry for the long delay...I've been out of town visiting my sister & her kids. On Thu, 19 Jul 2001 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > As usual I agree with most of what you have said but the problem I have is > that the film makers did not really explore the issue of what makes something > "real" in David's sense of the word. First, Joe and Teddy are not sharpely > distinghished from David. The film makers use these characters to manipulate > our emotions (especially Teddy). I never found Teddy to be particularly disturbing. It seemed to me that he was the kind of supersmart toy I would try to design and market myself--a kind of surrogate playmate/nanny. Programmed to warn the child if it's about to do something wrong or dangerous, to offer solace if the kid seems disturbed, etc. > If they really wanted to explore this issue > there should have been a sharper demarcation between the old bots and new bot > (David). I'm not sure the point of the film is to determine categorically whether or not David is real, or if he is real by human standards. We know from the movie's tag line that he isn't, and even the muddled ending can't convince a person who's ever spent much time around real children that David has actually become human. David has none of the organic chaos percolating inside him that characterizes a real child or even adult (another reason I think the problem of emotions is different from the problem of intelligence as such). (More below...) In addition, David is a peculiar invention. Given what amounts to > human emotions (at least one - love of mother) and yet not really given > anything else. He can't grow old, can't eat etc. He is a unifunction machine > whose purpose is to alleviate the lonliness of one individual, his "mother". > This reminds of another weakness in the "design" of David and therefore the > story. He does not bond with his "father". If you were designing a surrogate > child robot for a family wouldn't you want the "child" to love his father as > well? So in fact David is a tool a machine with a single purpose. In this > context I don't see him as real. I don't think we're supposed to. I agree with with your conclusion that he's a single-function machine--I'm reminded of a pint-sized Terminator programmed to love rather than kill. The problem that's posed in the movie, for me, is "What is real?" and not, "Is David real after all?" By taking A.I. to a certain level, the society portrayed has not created human machines, or mechanical humans, but a kind of alien race of docile slaves. Teddy and Joe exhibit a sort of intelligence that passes under the radar of their creators because it's not linked to normal human feelings, and I think that they provide us with a robot's-eye view of humanity which is what the movie is really about. David is different from them in that he is programmed not merely to avoid damage, but to care about himself in a way that mirrors human ego. He is designed to model a narrow selection of human emotions, so to me the real story is what his algorithmic scheme, if you will, says about his creators. My initial reading is that his creators have decided, based on a basically consumerist view of human nature (we are talking about a society that has abandoned humanitarianism and global justice for the sake of insular luxury, after all) to create a narrowly focused machine in order to satisfy a narrowly (and falsely, but perhaps workable with the right market research and advertising) defined human need. David's spectacular failure with Monica points out how far wrong his creators are, how divorced from reality their view of human nature really is. On the other hand, the variety of other robots we see shows that David represents just one more step in a progression of self-alienating acts of creation--robot toys, robot servants, robot lovers, robot children...the ultimate conclusion is robot humanity, the superbots at the end of the movie. Utterly alien from us, yet perhaps happier because their desires can be clearly defined and satisfied according to fairly basic formulae. Like I said, that's my initial reading...I think I want to watch the movie again and see if I think it holds up. Marvin Long Austin, Texas Nuke the straight consumerist wildebeests for Buddha!
