A.I. Artificial Intelligence

Stephen Nottingham

(Director: Steven Speilberg, 2001)

The robotic has given way to the organic in movie androids, reflecting the sequencing of the human genome and developments in genetic engineering and cloning. In A.I., however, electronic circuits anachronistically lie beneath the skin. This film, released at the start of the twenty-first century, seems to reflect the time when Stanley Kubrick first started collaborating with Brian W. Aldiss on a screenplay of Aldiss' short (not much more than 2,000 words) story Supertoys Last All Summer Long (1969). Kubrick grew to think of the story as a version of Pinocchio, unlike Aldiss who warned him against consciously rewriting old fairy stories. After twenty years, Kubrick handed the project to his friend Steven Spielberg, noticing how closely the material fitted into Spielberg's oeuvre. Aldiss contributed two further very short stories in 1999, Supertoys When Winter Comes and Supertoys in Other Seasons. Spielberg borrowed a few ideas from these, but this ultimately is Spielberg's vision and he uncharitably claims sole screenwriting credit. The central tragedy of a boy who unconditionally loves his mother, but whose mother cannot love him back, is well played out. However, beyond this, the film becomes too diffuse, and in the process obscures an important plot point. It is carrying too much baggage. Disappointingly, the science element in A.I. also proved, beyond the first reel, to be of little interest to Spielberg. Instead the film drifts off into Spielberg's very personal take on Pinocchio.

In the film, Henry and Monica Swinton (Sam Robards and Frances O'Conner), a young couple whose terminally-ill son has been frozen in a cryogenics unit until a cure is found, decide to replace him with a surrogate robot child called David (Haley Joel Osment). David has been developed in the Cybertronics laboratories of Professor Hobby (William Hurt). David imprints on his new "mother", but their son Martin (Jake Thomas) is cured and returns home. Martin resents David's presence and engineers his eviction from the family. David has absorbed the story of Pinocchio, learns he is not human as he supposed, and sets out to become a "real" boy in order to regain his mother's love. David must survive in a cruel world, and is aided in his quest by a "love robot", Gigolo Joe (Jude Law). His journey leads him, via the horrors of a backwoods robot-torturing Flesh Fair and the more wholesome entertainment mecca of Rouge City, to the end of the world: Manhattan.

The film retains a three section Kubrickian structure (innocence, experience and afterlife). The first section of this film, and the scenes of a devastated Manhattan that end the second section, are remarkable. The film opens in 2050 with a discussion of artificial intelligence among a group of scientists at the Cybertronics headquarters in Manhattan. Robots that look convincingly like human beings are commonplace, but they lack empathy. At this seminar Prof. Hobby outlines his vision of the next stage in their development: robots with emotions. In particular, he wants them to imprint upon and love the human parents who purchase them. This research is commercially driven. Due to global warming, the Earth's ice caps have melted and flooded all the major coastal cities (e.g., New York, Amsterdam). The fate of the starving millions in the Third World is of little concern to those in the USA, who live in affluence in the mountains. However, due to shortages of food (but not expensive household gadgets), strict population control is practised, although how this is enforced is unclear. The Swinton's cannot have another child while one is in suspended animation, and so turn to an android child to fulfil the mother's emotional needs. This surrogate child does not eat valuable food resources and will never age. We are led to believe that the demand for this technology could be considerable.

One of the scientists at the seminar makes a telling comment. She says that the important question is not whether androids can be made to love humans, but whether humans can truly love them. Can humans really love technology? This is the dart that drives its way between Kubrick and Spielberg. Kubrick essentially distrusted technology (How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Robot?) and Spielberg has generally embraced it. Kubrick's vision of humanity in a technological age was essentially pessimistic, while Spielberg's has usually been optimistic. It makes for an uneasy alliance. In any case, giving robots real human emotions is not essential for Cybertronics' commercial goals. The robots merely have to be programmed to love and to mimic emotions to the extent that humans reciprocate. Humans need to make a bigger leap than robotic science for this android-human relationship to work. Making computers more user-friendly is one thing, but would loving a machine as much as a child not be considered a form of madness?

Scientists are already starting to make robotic or computer "intelligence" that is convincing to humans. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Labs, computer programs are being written that respond to human emotions. They "know" when humans feel anger or frustration, by monitoring words, tone of voice, facial expressions, and physiological reactions such as sweating and skin colour changes. The computers respond accordingly. This is the beginning of "emotional intelligence" in machines. Emotionally orientated software (EOP) is currently being written for a wide range of computers. Supertoys that respond to a child's moods, like Teddy in A.I., may soon be with us. Mechanical pets that respond to a limited range of human emotions are already being produced. Could they one day be loved as much as real pets? However, although this technology will become evermore sophisticated, there is still a big leap from a simulation of emotions to actual extended consciousness, as we know it. This is unlikely ever to be achieved in a machine.

It is unclear how, when or why extended consciousness (EXTC) evolved in humans. It is distinct from core consciousness: a simpler biological phenomena shared with most animals, which is concerned with the here and now. EXTC is evolving and dynamic, and incorporates an awareness of being within an individual history, with an anticipated future and a lived past (the autobiographical self). It may have arisen gradually during human evolution in response to numerous factors; each acted upon by natural selection. EXTC gives mankind its motivation, its ability to fantasise and tell stories, and take pleasure in leisure activities, such as watching A.I.. Aldiss has noted that evolution is not over and that our EXTC may change the way we think in the future. Kubrick has also explored evolving consciousness, along with Arthur C. Clarke, in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Antonio Damasio in his book The Feeling of What Happens has emphasised how vital the interactions between the brain and the flesh are for EXTC: consciousness and the emotions cannot be separated. It is a mind/body function acquired through evolution, and we still know precious little about it. To be truly intelligent, computers would need an artificial consciousness of this type. EXTC needs to be quantifying and its functioning understood before it can be programmed into a machine. Aldiss has noted that since he wrote his short story in 1969, we know far more about the human brain and computer technology. The brain now appears more wonderful, complex and elusive than ever, while the constraints on technology have become more evident. In reality, artificial extended consciousness is, if anything, receding rather than getting closer.

If "intelligent" machines do acquire a high level of autonomy, it is clear that many humans will consider them as a threat. The introduction of robots into the workplace, for example, has been resented by the workers they have replaced. In A.I., the Flesh Fair is an event organized by and for anti-technological luddites. Humans have made so many long-lived computers that they now outnumber the human race. The Fair acts both as a bloodsport and a way of culling the technology. However, as the technology becomes more "intelligence" and better able to mimic human emotions, ethical questions arise concerning how to dispose of it. Primitive robots are gleefully sacrificed in the arena, but David's presence confuses the crowd.

When David eventually reaches Manhattan, he again meets Prof. Hobby (his "real" father), who has been desperately searching for him. Despite building numerous David (and Darlene) clones, which sit in rows in boxes waiting to be sold to their new human owners, there is apparently something singular about David. This meeting recalls the one between Roy Batty and his maker Tyrell in Blade Runner (1982). The replicants, although organic and genetically engineered, are very similar to the robots in A.I.. Both Roy and David ask their creators for more life. In A.I., David wants to become a "real" boy like Pinocchio and the film would like us to believe that it is dreams and imagination that makes us human. Yet, David does not lack these things. His dream is to become human. He has self-consciousness. How more real could he be? Maybe Hobby is right when he replies to David's request to be made a "real" boy, "O, but you already are". David becomes as effectively human as the replicants in Blade Runner. The nature of reality, of course, is central to this line of thought. In Aldiss' source material, the robot boy asks: "How do you tell what are real things from what aren't real things?". Teddy, his supertoy, in the end concludes: "Nobody knows what 'real' really means". The boundary between reality and fantasy, actual and virtual, becomes blurred in a technological world. An exploration of the nature of reality, however, is not Spielberg's aim in this film.

In 2001: A Space Odyssey, the computer HAL, once created with a high level of "intelligence", demands that it live on its own terms. The question raised by artificial intelligence movies is therefore whether in giving computers (robots, clones etc.) programs that mimic human intelligence and emotional responses to a high degree, those computers should be afforded any rights? At what point, if any, could they be described as sentient? What is it that humans have that machines with artificial intelligence can never acquire? Critics of artificial intelligence, such as Roger Penrose in his influential book The Emperor's New Mind, invoke quantum physics operating at the neuronal level and other mechanisms that give humans a spiritual dimension unattainable by machines. These are things that make humans more than the sum of their parts. Therefore, anyone creating a human mind and body from components (electronic circuits, neural networks, body parts or genetic engineering) would not be able to put in the final piece.

Most first-time viewers of A.I. (myself included) probably think that the creatures who appear in the final section and revive David are aliens. Spielberg's previous associations with extra-terrestrials would seem to underline this connection. The story has similarities with E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982), while the creatures look remarkably like the aliens in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). Spielberg does not do enough to temper these references, with the result that the richest reading of the film is over-obscured. The creatures are hyper-evolved robots. Their intelligence and emotions are of a different order to the extinct human race. The artificial intelligence (evolved from ancestors like David) can reconstruct human beings from artefacts like David and fragments of human DNA, for example, preserved in hair samples. They attempt to make human intelligence, just like humans used to try and make artificial intelligence. They create a human (the mother), which is sufficiently "real" to fulfil David's emotional needs. This inverts the scenario in the first section of the film, where the human mother takes home a human-made robot boy to try and satisfy her emotional needs. However, Spielberg has let the film drift off into the realm of fairytales and more personal concerns by this point, to the detriment of these interesting philosophical explorations of artificial intelligence.

Spielberg has consistently been interested in lost children, for example, in his Peter Pan movie Hook (1991) and in E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982). A quote from W.B. Yeat's poem The Stolen Child leads David inexorably to Manhattan. Here, through the director's intention and events beyond the director's control, the focus of the film changes, and it ceases too be about artificial intelligence.

Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

Manhattan is drowned and in this vale of tears the child who strives to be human will swim through a submerged Pinocchio theme park and meet the blue faery who can grant him his wish. David believes in fairytales, they are real to him. Any reading of the last section of the film must note how strongly Spielberg identifies with David, who wishes to have his mother brought back from the dead so that she can love him as a "real" boy. They lie together (sans husband and wicked brother) in eternal sleep, in romantic oedipal repose. Is this the same movie we came in on? Shouldn't these things be strictly between the director and his therapist? The narration, with a storyteller carrying on after the human race has become extinct, is also problematic. Are stories really this timeless? Is the storyteller omnipotent? The blue fairy merges with the futuristic creatures to grant humans their every wish. If there is religious significance here (and the blue fairy is clearly represented as the Virgin Mary), it's of the same order as that in E.T.: childish wish-fulfilment and a return to a time of impossible innocence.

The amazing sequences of a Manhattan in ruins cannot now fail to bring to mind the terrorist attacks on New York on September 11th 2001, which occurred a week before A.I. was released to cinemas in the UK. Future viewers may find it hard to believe that these evocative sequences, which include a body falling past a ruined towerblock, with its angel and mournful music, were filmed before these events took place. Although beyond the film-makers control, this apocalyptic vision now appears more relevant to war and terrorism than a supposed global warming disaster. In any case, a sea level rise of just a few metres would spell disaster for large sections of the world's population. The waters are just too high here and are surely of more symbolic value?

David is frozen in the waters of New York for 2000 years, after which there is one day's reprieve (makes 2001). Spielberg strains for closure in A.I., in stark contrast to the open-ended conclusion of 2001; a film echoed here in the room created for David by the advanced intelligence. The pseudo-science explanations, involving, amongst other things, quantum physics, space-time pathways and the recreation of memories, dished up to "explain" events towards the end of A.I., are among the creakiest in modern movie history. (Aldiss once famously told Kubrick, regarding expositions in science fiction: "The more you explain, the less convincing it gets"). Moreover, given the drift toward fairytale, they are superfluous. Along with the dated vision of its androids, as if the human genome project and cloning had never existed, it leaves the impression that we are watching a science fiction film from two decades ago, rather than one from the twenty-first century. Nevertheless, this is still an essential film. There are great things here and much resonates beyond the frame. However, Spielberg in trying to sum up both his own and Kubrick's careers has overreached. Less would have been more. There is only so much that can converge.

© Copyright Stephen Nottingham, 2001.