From: Robin Hanson (rhanson@gmu.edu)
Date: Fri Jun 29 2001 - 13:34:54 MDT
Thought-provoking, and moderately entertaining.
Spoiler-filled details below.
During most of the movie it looked like it was going to be a
tragedy of human hubris gone terribly wrong. But at the end
we find a more positive scenario. But then they invoke
some silly mysticism to shy away from the natural really
positive scenario. Instead of creating a mother who loves
him as much as he loves her, and letting them live forever,
they make a mother that can only last a day, at which point
they both die.
The movie does one thing very well - it makes the viewer care
deeply and emotionally about a single robot. I suppose its
similar to the way Spielberg's E.T. make many people care
about aliens for the first time.
What is thought-provoking and saddening for me, however, is
just how shallow people are about what they care about.
The movie shows a stadium of people gleefully massacring
robots, who are all then horrified at killing something
that looks like a boy crying. The movie is full of robots
who could not do what they did without having complex
internal lives, great knowledge, a will to live, and some
rudimentary understanding of and functioning emotions. And
yet it is assumed that their lives are worth little because
they do not know how to pout and cry like a little boy. Even
though this robot almost killed a human boy, and does kill
a robot boy, that is considered largely irrelevant to his
moral worth. All that matters is that he suffers from
strong understandable emotions.
Some less important flaws: in the movie vehicles need power
sources or they die, but robots apparently do not. Robots
also work just fine underwater, but are seriously hurt if
you put spinach in their mouth. Global warming raises the
sea levels far beyond anything plausible.
A more serious but understandable flaw: there is little sense
of how A.I.s change the nature of the economy and society.
The focus is entirely on how a few individuals interact.
Pretty much all A.I. stories get this wrong, but wrong it is.
Robin Hanson rhanson@gmu.edu http://hanson.gmu.edu
Asst. Prof. Economics, George Mason University
MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030-4444
703-993-2326 FAX: 703-993-2323
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