A.I. Artificial Intelligence [Blu-ray]

“A.I. Artificial Intelligence”, or “A.I.”, is a Steven Spielberg American science fiction fantasy drama film, released June 29, 2001, loosely based on the 1969 short story “Supertoys Last All Summer Long” by Brian Aldiss; hailed as one of Spielberg’s best works and one of the greatest films of all time; set in a futuristic society, the film stars Haley Joel Osment as ‘David’, a childlike ten-year-old sentient android uniquely programmed with the ability to love who, like ‘Pinocchio’, wishes to become a ‘real boy’; also starring William Hurt as ‘Professor Allen Hobby’, mastermind of A.I. and David’s creator; ‘Teddy’, an animatronic puppet robotic teddy bear, who serves as David’s sidekick; Frances O’Connor as ‘Monica Swinton’, David’s adoptive mother; Jude Law as ‘Gigolo Joe’, a true ‘love machine’ sex-toy android; and Jake Thomas as ‘Martin Swinton’, David’s stepbrother.

At the time this movie came out and was first released on DVD, I purchased the 2-disc special edition on March 5, 2002. This is a wonderful and extremely interesting movie, which I have watched many times. The story still fascinates, and it is timeless. This review discusses “spoilers” intended for viewers who have seen the movie and now contemplate its present relevance, with this recommendation to watch the film again.

In today’s world, more than 20 years later, I now see everything in a new light, the light of thought-provoking relevance and a message. Now that Artificial Intelligence has become a reality in the forefront of today’s news, with Google’s and Microsoft’s recent implementations; with Turing laureates Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, and physicist Stephen Hawking and business magnate Elon Musk, and dozens of artificial intelligence experts signing open letters on artificial intelligence, calling for research on how to prevent certain potential “pitfalls”; I see in the movie “A.I. Artificial Intelligence” a tacit revelation of biases of which we are not even aware; elusive flaws in character, committed unwittingly, not by choice; rather, a weakness from an excess of virtue, a guilt of hubris, an overstep in limitations; and I see the concept of potential “pitfalls” in developing artificial intelligence algorithms in the same light as edified by those preeminent experts – Hawking, Hinton and Musk. Moreover, I now view notable science fiction in the light of such luminaries as Jules Verne (Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, pub. 1871), George Orwell (1984, pub. 1949), Isaac Asimov (The Evitable Conflict and I, Robot, pub. 1950), H.G. Wells (World Brain, 1936 – 1938), and Aldous Huxley (Brave New World, pub. 1932), who’s olden fiction actually imagined what you might recognize today, as giving credence to a subliminal if not an implied notion of flawed algorithm, prophetically conjured in Spielberg’s “A.I.”. In a recent interview, Spielberg said of artificial intelligence, “It’s got me very nervous; the soul is unimaginable and ineffable; the soul cannot be created by any algorithm; it is just something that exists in all of us; and to lose that because it is being written by machines that we created… that terrifies me.”

The story takes place in the distant future of the 22nd century, when rising sea levels from global warming have wiped out 99% of existing cities, reducing the world’s population, and mechanical (aka ‘mecha’) humanoid robots, capable of complex assignments but lacking emotions, have been created as replacements. The movie “AI: Artificial Intelligence” begins with the brilliant scientist ‘Professor Allen Hobby’ saying, “I believe that my work on mapping the impulse pathways in a single neuron can enable us to construct a mecha of a qualitatively different order. “I propose that we build a robot who can love,” and he tells his Cybertronics Corp engineers, “You see, what I’m suggesting is that love will be the key by which they acquire a kind of subconscious never before achieved. An inner world of metaphor, of intuition, of self-motivated reasoning. Of dreams. “Ours will be a perfect child caught in a freeze-frame – always loving, never ill, never changing. With all the childless couples yearning in vain for a license, our little mecha would not only open an entirely new market, it will fill a great human need.”

Scholars write that “in the real world, an algorithm is not an objective tool; algorithms are a computer-simulated reflection of encoded human expectations; it is as human as the programmer who codes it, and humans are biased. Algorithms in the real world cannot act on their own. These algorithms are built and designed by humans, and all the input is curated, selected, and created by humans. And they bear the humans’ faults. Algorithms are the literal manifestation of “playing by someone else’s rules.” So, algorithms, the underlying process of decision-making in artificial intelligence systems, are imperfect, prone to bias, and make unpredictable decisions that impact the future. The first challenge is implicit bias, which is the unconscious perceptions people have that cloud their thoughts and actions.”

In the introduction, rationalizing his creation of an android capable of love, Professor Hobby says, “But in the beginning, didn’t God create Adam to love him?” and this gives us a euphemistic glimpse of his hubris in the creation of an idealized love. As his creation, ‘David’, a ten-year-old child-like sentient android (mecha) uniquely programmed with the ability to love, becomes self-aware and self-improving, we come to see in retrospect that he is no different from his maker, that Doctor Hobby’s subconscious biases are manifest in David’s algorithm characteristics of love as egocentric, selfish, adaptive, and obsessive, to the detriment of all else, elusive of every virtue, not by design but by assimilation of the character flaws inherent in the implicit bias corrupting the algorithm written by his maker. David’s egoism, resting solely on self-interest, is unmistakably obvious near the conclusion of his quest for love. David finds his way back to Cybertronics and, wandering about, he finds another mecha that looks just like him. Disturbed, David wildly destroys it in a confused and jealous psychopathic rage. Continuing to look around, he finds the different mechanical items that were instrumental in his creation, as well as fully-boxed ‘David’ and ‘Darlene’ units for consumer purchase. Confronting Professor Hobby upon discovery, David says, “I thought I was one of a kind,” to which Hobby replies, “My son was one of a kind,” a reference to modeling David in the exact likeness of Hobby’s real-life son that died, “You are the first of a kind,” to which David replies, “My brain is falling out,” giving further evidence of the instability inherent in the algorithm written by Professor Hobby. We recognize this flawed artificial intelligence only in hindsight because we are beguiled by the illusion of unrequited love. The moral is this, “We must recognize our limits and respect them.”

Apropos: The name of Professor Hobby’s artificial intelligence engineering firm, ‘Cybertronics’, has an obscure literary connotation with cryptic allusion to cognitive bias in developing artificial intelligence, raising the question of whether the movie’s story is fiction or prescience. Notably, Jules Verne’s 1871 classic ‘Nautilus submarine’ from his novel “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas” became a reality 80 years later in the form of the USS Nautilus (SSN-571) commissioned in 1954. There are many previously mentioned examples of so-called fiction that have become reality. More relevant is the portent of implicit or cognitive bias algorithm given by science fiction writer Isaac Asimov (1920 – 1992) in “The Evitable Conflict” and the “I, Robot” series, both published in 1950, in which the sentient artificial intelligent “Machine” reason that their necessity to humanity is to take control to protect humanity from itself. A prescient warning.

One of the more interesting aspects of Leonardo Da Vinci’s inventions and discoveries is that they had no real influence on future generations because they were trapped and kept hidden from everyone until hundreds of years later, after they had already been “re-discovered.” He never published any of his findings because some would be considered “heresy” and “blasphemous,” and others because he did not want them to fall into the wrong hands. Others because he knew they would not be possible until the far future. A precursor to what Galileo would later undergo, for Galileo was not so wise and was condemned for heresy in 1633 because the Church held that heliocentrism was a “foolish and absurd philosophy, and formally heretical since it explicitly contradicts in many places the sense of Holy Scripture.”

“All our knowledge hast its origins in our perceptions … In nature there is no effect without a cause … Experience never errs; it is only your judgments that err by promising themselves effects such as are not caused by your experiments … Science is the observation of things possible, whether present or past; prescience is the knowledge of things which may come to pass.”

― Leonardo da Vinci (b. April 15, 1452, Anchiano, Italy; d. May 2, 1519, Château du Clos Lucé, Chapel of Saint-Hubert, Amboise, France)

Source: The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883): published by Jean Paul Richter (1883),
as translated into English by Mrs. R. C. Bell and Edward John Poynter,
XIX Philosophical Maxims. Morals. Polemics and Speculations.

“Artificial Intelligence” is the best film of 2001. The magic melding of Kubrick and Spielberg works perfectly, bringing a haunting, touching, thought provoking, and experimental film to life.
“A.I.” will haunt you for days after you see it; it is a powerful film with amazing preformances, especially from the stunningly accomplished Haley Joel Osment.
“A.I” will touch your emotions and bring you to the brink and perhaps over. Spielberg returned to the three act structure of “Empire of the Sun” that worked so well in his other masterpiece. The end of each act is emotionally grinding, the moments when David is abandoned by his mother or reacts to the other David robots, or the touchign ending to the final third act, will wrench you apart emotionally.
“A.I.” isn’t content to remain constrained by emotion and disturbing images, it seriously deals with many different themes and concepts foreign to blockbuster cinema. “A.I.” is that rare science fiction film that lives up to the potential of science fiction literature…”A.I.” lives up to that potential, you will be thining about the film for days, even weeks and monthes afterwards. There are many themes and concepts dealt with in the film, either as asides … or openly addressed. A scathign retoric against racism, can be found in the flesh fair sequence, human fallibility and callousness are derided by the offhand way david is dismissed. David himself displays many different human characterisics, often taking a single trait to extremes as he tries to understand and learn to be human: Especially telling are the sequences where David learns jealousy (spinach), or fear, humor, and protection (the pool scene), he also displays obsession clearly throughout the entire film. The last act of the film is so startlingly dark that most people think it is schmaltzy. It is extremly disturbing that humans will die and our creations will replace us, the way David is so carefully manipulated by them as they try to see how humans act is terrifying, but because this seems to be a happy thing for David most people mistake it for a happy ‘Spielberg’ ending, nothing could be further from the truth.
A word should perhaps be said about fairy tales. Fairy Tales are the main motif drawing the different segments of the film together. David’s Quest is inspired by a fairy tale, Pinochhio. But his journey more closely resembles _The Wizard of Oz_ with numerous references in the film to that more modern of fairy tales. The entire film is infact a fairy tale being told to a ‘child’ of the future. This is indeed a fairy tale for adults, it has fantastical imagery can characters, with a moral message (however as mentioned above, there is much more to the film as well). The fairy tale motif of “A.I.” is one of the amazing touches that make this such a special film.
Like every great Kubrick film “A.I.” pushes cinema to be more. Traditional filmmaking says that you can’t have three endings, you can’t break your acts up so completely, you can’t be so dark or say so much in a single film. Spielberg and Kubrick took all those tradtional rules and rejected them, the result was an astoundingly powerful film that by no means adheres to any specific rules of filmmaking. Spielberg has often been criticized for the artistic license he takes to make stories more cinematic, his films celebrate the human spirit (for the most part), this film is a dark departure from what he traditionally produces. Spielberg, over the past twentyfive years has delivered soem of the greatest motionpictures ever. His storytelling was always within the bounds of the ‘rules’ and he excelled at it; his cinematography may have had new tricks or older, obscure tricks made popular, but he was always focused on telling the best possible story. That is why his films resonate with so many people. But with “A.I.” Spielberg is pushing himself in new and interesting artistic directions, he is experimenting with how that peculair canvas of film can be used to tell stories in new ways, his achievement in “A.I.” only serves to illustrate that before you can break the rules, you have to know them first.

Même si le film n’est plus tout récent, j’ai vraiment apprécié.

Glad to find this old gem. Love the movie and the quality of the disc. It was reasonably priced as well.