I don’t think I actually like that movie. In theory, it’s right up my alley and I technically enjoy it a lot. However, it annoys me in the same way that Dog Movies annoy me. Dog movies are always cloyingly, cheaply sad, plucking at the low-hanging fruits of human emotions.
AI: Artificial Intelligence isn’t a robot movie. It’s a dog movie. It’s Marley and Me. It’s Hachiko. It’s Old Yeller. The robots, exactly like dogs, are created by humans to serve specific purposes and created to be adorable, innocent, and hopelessly, tragically devoted to their masters. We love dogs, but are we not also haunted by a kind of unassuageable guilt that we can never love them as much as they love us? As much as they deserve? We designed them to love and obey us and, if need be, sacrifice themselves for our benefit. Do we not envy that capacity for absolute altruism?
Other robot stories are (often) about free will, consciousness, identity, the meaning of personhood, rebellion, self-awareness, cognition, freedom, emotion, and social deviance. Failing at and being failed by society. They’re frequently tacky, clumsily mishandled, or sullied and dated by the “acceptable” bigotries of the eras in which they were created… but it’s easy to recognize your own story in a dirty computer.
AI is… I mean, I haven’t watched it since I was in middle school for a reason. It just seemed like it was about longing and suffering and innocence, but in a peculiarly upsetting “family friendly” way. It felt designed to make people sad in really cheap, obvious ways by playing upon easy weaknesses – children suffering, parental abandonment, imperfect love, the inescapability of time, and pointless cruelty.
Ugh. This took me an hour to write because I kept getting choked up about dogs and robots and children. I… I think I need a hug…
I’ve argued about this with a few people, but I think it’s a more interesting (but possibly even more tragic) story if you read Gigolo Joe as the real protagonist who never gets any credit— the AI scientists towards the end of the movie are all “this robot tried to become a real boy! what a step forward in free will!” without taking into account that David only wants to become human to please the woman he’s programmed to love as his mother. Meanwhile, Gigolo Joe, who was programmed as a sexbot, put all that on the back burner to help a kid on a quest, and none of the humans pay the slightest attention to that.
Mooncustafer 