From: hal@finney.org
Date: Sat Jun 09 2001 - 01:19:28 MDT
We haven't discussed Spielberg's upcoming movie, "A.I., Artificial
Intelligence" much. Spielberg took over the project from Stanley Kubrick,
with Kubrick's blessing before he died. (The rumor is that the title
got the words "Artificial Intelligence" added when the studio people
were afraid the audience would confuse the logo with A-1 steak sauce.)
The movie has been generating a lot of buzz with a clever marketing
campaign based on dozens of web sites seemingly located all over the
world and supposedly representing people and institutions from 150 years
in the future. I checked it out a bit and one of the sites scolded
me amusingly about having to downconvert its data stream for backwards
compatibility with my ancient early-21st-century browser.
A.I. is apparently about a robot boy who wants to be human. He embarks on
a journey and has encounters with the many other robots who are perhaps
at the edges of human culture. This bald description makes it sound
like the abysmal Bicentennial Man but I think it will be very different.
I was struck by a quote from filmforce.ign.com:
Here it would be observant to restate a point made by Sara Maitland,
another writer with whom Kubrick collaborated on A.I. In her article
"My Year with Stanley," published in The Independent in March 1999
(referenced by Argent), she states Kubrick "believed computers will
become truly intelligent, including emotionally and are potentially
more environmentally adaptable form of human beings: they are our
future. The film is intended to make us love them."
Let's hope it follows through with this principle.
Hal
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