The Human Machine: A.I. and Our Hunt for Perfection
It’s the late 21st Century and the world is no longer our own. The oceans have risen up and taken over the land. New York, once the summit of man’s achievements, is submerged, its skyscrapers barely peeking above the surface of the water and its amusement parks drowned like tacky Antlantises. But man has moved on, and is more interested in created something altogether more complicated: life. Buildings are easy — bricks and mortar moulded into an appropriate shape. What about flesh, bone and everything in between?
How do you construct a soul? How do you create an emotion? How do you build a human being?
These are the questions Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spielberg seek to answer in A.I. Artificial Intelligence, a film that confounded critics when released in 2001 but which is now slowly gathering a reputation as one of the most profound and important films of the last decade. It’s a deserved reputation too, because A.I. goes about answering its central questions (arguably among the most important questions we can ask) with a deeply affecting melancholy and moral ambiguity that’s uncomfortable to watch and difficult to process. No wonder it’s taken so long to come round to it.
For the instigator of the film’s events, brilliant scientist Professor Allen Hobby, humanity is a simple question of emotion. A.I. opens at a robotics seminar during which Hobby asks his audience to consider the existence of a robot who can love and feel. He exhibits the lack of progress on this issue by stabbing the hand of his robot secretary. She recoils, but can’t link the physical pain to any sort of emotion.
HOBBY:
How did that make you feel? Angry? Shocked?
SECRETARY:
I don’t understand.
HOBBY:
What did I do to your feelings?
SECRETARY:
You did it to my hand.
Hobby therefore creates something more sophisticated — a robot boy called David, who walks and talks and lives and breathes like a human being. He feels pain, and can process it on an emotional level, and once his parents activate his programming in full, he has the ability to love them unconditionally for the rest of time — until his software corrupts and his hardware erodes. More than simply creating emotion, more than just magicking up life, Hobby has engineered perfection.
But is perfection what humanity really is? A.I.’s organics cast doubt on that idea. Every one of the film’s humans is flawed, Hobby (ironically) more than most. We later discover that he’s a bereaved father who was in part motivated to create David to heal the hurt from losing his son. In doing so, he was working out of weakness, pain and tragedy; or rather, an attempt to purge those things. So David’s creation is, ultimately, an act of selfishness, not a pure attempt to create life. His adoption by his ‘parents’, Monica and Henry Swinton, is no different. Like Hobby, they’re grieving too — their son Martin is in a coma and his outlook’s bleak. David numbs the pain by giving the Swintons a replacement they can love and who can love them in return. He’s little more than an object created and adopted to serve human needs.
This point is underlined later in the film by Gigolo Joe, a mechanical sex worker David meets after being abandoned by the Swintons following Martin’s resuscitation. David is desperate to return to his mother, but Joe explains some harsh truths about humanity’s selfish, transactional relationship with their creations:
“She loves what you do for her, as my customers love what it is I do for them. But she does not love you David, she cannot love you. You are neither flesh, nor blood. You are not a dog, a cat, or a canary. You were designed and built specific, like the rest of us. And you are alone now only because they tired of you, or replaced you with a younger model, or were displeased with something you said, or broke. They made us too smart, too quick, and too many. We are suffering for the mistakes they made because when the end comes, all that will be left is us.”
In the film’s final act, humanity’s end eventually does come, and indeed the Mechas are the only ones left. The film’s conclusion is set hundreds of years into a future where humans have died out and the water that swept across the land has frozen into ice. Mechas have evolved, becoming hyper-intelligent Super Mechas who excavate the ice hoping to discover the remains of what came before them. It’s a bitter-sweet irony that defines the film. The Super Mechas are looking for their creators, just as we look for ours. But why are they so interested in finding us?
It’s a question that’s critical to understanding A.I. and one that loomed over Kubrick as he wrestled with the film’s script before passing it on to Spielberg. In the exhaustive making-of book A.I. Artificial Intelligence: From Stanley Kubrick to Steven Spielberg, notes sent between he and screenwriter Ian Watson are published, and they give the following reason for robotkind’s bid for humanity.
“A robot might live forever. Yet what was the worth of its existence? Robots had created no art, nor had they made any scientific discovery. No robot was a creator. No robot was a genius. If robots were to vanish from the Earth — banned, dismantled, destroyed due to some new decision on the part of their makers — what would remain to remember them by? Robots were the lost species. Robots were the cursed race, doomed to live forever yet to leave no enduring memory of themselves.”
Humanity for Kubrick and Watson then is partly about creation, which here they link to free will (a recurring theme for Kubrick). If robots were born out of a functional purpose — to give humans an object to love, a servant to perform household chores, an escort to satisfy them sexually - then they lack that free will. By creating something, robots would be able to break out of this purely functional role and carve out something inconsequential: draw a picture just because it’s pretty or write a story just because it’s entertaining. The only way they can achieve that is to seek out their creators and learn from them, so they excavate the world that came before them.
Yet there’s also more egotistical reasoning behind this desire to create. Kubrick and Watson note that their inability to create means robots can’t form a legacy. That’s what Hobby did when he built David. Perhaps that’s even what humans do when they have children. They’re our legacy, and in a sense a form of immortality: the assurance that our bloodline will continue even after we’ve died. It’s certainly not a nice way for humanity to view itself, and Spielberg crafts images throughout A.I. that are designed to position David, and children as a whole, as the alien and unnerving representations of this ego and selfishness.
With humans gone, robotkind has had to show some kind of invention by creating tools, vehicles and maybe even more robots to keep their society going. However, true emotion, emotion without programming or software or code, still eludes them. So when they find David (one of the final few pure representations of man’s achievements and legacy) frozen in the ice of Coney Island, they dig him up and use his memories of Monica to revive her. Finally, David gets his wish. He and Monica spend the day together and with no-one else around, he’s able to be the sole recipient of her unconditional love.
It’s a seemingly happy ending and one that proved to be the lightning rod for most of the film’s critics, who deemed it a feel-good Spielbergian warping of a Kubrickian tragedy. However, there’s a complexity and ambiguity at play that’s entirely in sync with Kubrick’s film-making. The Super Mechas (and David himself) have become like Hobby and the Swintons — creating with good intentions, but also selfish ones. By bringing Monica, they’ve exploited a living being: given life not to imbue it with free will, but to serve a specific purpose that benefits them more than Monica. In this case, it’s securing the legacy Kubrick and Watson spoke of by learning about and from those who came before them.
This, the film argues in its most troubling twist of fate, is what humanity is. It’s not the perfection that Hobby seeks at the start of the film, but imperfection, moral ambiguity and irony: a man giving life to heal his hurts, a robot giving life to understand its creator, a child giving life to earn the love of its mother. In both cases with sympathise, but are also repulsed, and as he did when drawing out the film’s uneasy relationship with children, Spielberg finds a perfect collection of images to close the film out with — images that not only encapsulate the film, but also trade on his cinematic history.
As David and Monica lie on the bed together in a vision of perfect maternal happiness, we’re reminded of the many similar moments Spielberg has used throughout his cinema. We recall the warmth of Elliott and E.T. watching Elliott’s mother read Peter Pan to Gertie. We think of the scene from Empire of the Sun where Jamie’s mother and father tuck him into bed, a shot that intentionally homages Norman Rockwell’s ‘Freedom From Fear’. We remember the closing sequences of Hook, where Peter Banning is reunited with his family in Kensington and declares that “to live will be the greatest adventure.”
Monica, of course, won’t get the chance to live as her new lifespan is limited to a single day, and David was never given free will enough to really live anyway. Spielberg nods to moments from his previous films to remind us that what we’re watching is a fiction — a depiction of a dream, which is all that this bond between artificial mother and artificial son really can be. As Spielberg slowly draws his camera away from this ‘perfect’ moment, the scene takes on an unnerving, glacial quality far removed from the sentimental warmth the lighting and set up, and the moments they represent, suggest. How much we’re willing to accept that as ‘real’ love, and how much we accept this cloning and creation as a good or bad thing, is left entirely up to the viewer. Which is exactly why the film is so very difficult to comprehend.
As technology continues to develop and our lives become ever more streamlined — and ever more perfect — because of it, A.I. serves as a timely reminder of what humanity really is. We’re not the perfect beings we aspire to be or the infallible computerised systems we hope to build. We’re selfish and flawed creatures, small and vulnerable and capable of acts of tremendous moral evil even as we seek to do good. Whether it’s Hobby creating David, Monica adopting David, or David and the Super Mechas reviving Monica, the machine we’re constantly looking to perfect is broken and its software is malfunctioning. Our love makes us hate, our goodness makes us bad, our humanity makes us inhumane.
The human machine is far from perfect. And maybe that’s what makes it perfect.
