MAS330

Short Essay

Short Essay
The Dichotomy of the Human vs. the Inanimate in
Steven Spielberg’s Artificial Intelligence
Steven Spielberg brilliantly represents a unique portraiture of technology in

his dichotomous foresight of the future within his science fiction film,

Artificial Intelligence: A.I. Within his masterwork, Spielberg creates a

representation of technology fostering ambiguity between its status as an

inanimate extension of human invention or as the implicit child of human

compulsions. Spielberg does this by purposefully confusing the values of the cold

mechanical and robotic, with the warm organic and emotional. Through his

fictional work the human becomes autonomous, the programmed is transformed

into the emotional and the genesis of the human condition challenged in the

ultimate question of consciousness. This essay will follow Spielberg's efforts to

represent a dichotomous struggle, between how inanimate technology is

represented and the values placed on humanity, in pursuit of dissolving it.

Following the opening credits we are quickly re-familiarised with the more

traditional representations of technology within science-fiction. We move from

images of oceans which have engulfed civilisation to the clinical interiors of a

robot manufacturing corporation. The cold tone of the image, by convention,

denotes a clinical separation from human elements; while our Dr. Frankenstein

analogue Professor Hobby demonstrates the unemotional nature of the

company’s current robot models. Instantly Spielberg portrays a classical

‘Frankensteinian’ view of technology as the inanimate machinery and device

born out of the science-fiction genre (Murphie & Potts, 2003:97). The robots

harbour no more connection to humanity as a standard household appliance and,

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with the exception of appearance, hold none of the values attributed to

humanity.

Consequently, our protagonist is painted as an inanimate technological pacifier

for an innate human need. The protagonist David, a ‘mecha’ robot, is unveiled

through an unearthly overexposed shot as a packaged product of the

Cybertronics Corporation. Downed in purely generic white clothing upon his

arrival to the Swinton household, the character David serves as a prime example

of Spielberg’s effort to attribute values of purpose-based design within

technology through a diligently clinical aesthetic in costume and set. Thus, David

is portrayed as a material automaton brought forth to satisfy a mother’s need for

a child’s love within a torn family, whose organic biological son Martin Swinton,

remains suspended in indefinite cryogenic suspension due to an unspecified

illness.

However these material or artificial values attached to David’s character quickly

begin to melt as the mother, Monica Swinton, begins to grow an attachment to

him. David Levy points out that humans have a bewildering alibility to foster

relationships with material possessions in his book: Love + Sex With Robots

(2007: 28). In the same way, Monica cannot resist her innate human desire to

activate David’s love circuitry intrinsically binding his love to her forever.

Consequently, our first doubts of David’s status as a machined commodity are

awakened when he addresses her as, “Mummy” for the first time. With that

word the first signs of empathy from a non-human being begin to unravel.

Likewise, the penultimate reversal occurs when Martin Swinton emerges from his

comatose stasis through the means of life enabling technology. Unable to

survive without the aid of mechanised leg braces and saved by breathing

apparatus, Martin’s place on the mechanical-organic dichotomy is about as

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ambiguous as that of David’s, who sports the incontestable appearance of a

human child. The distinguishing filmic representations between technological

and human agents are blurred. Instead we begin to turn our attention to the

underlying values we attribute to humans and machinery; love, emotional

understanding, organic social sensibility versus mischievous conspiring, pre-

programmed responses, or innate awkwardness. Spielberg’s choice to have the

two opposing characters as children is very important because children respond

on primordial impulse and unconscious emotions. Moravec argues that the

unconscious aspects of human emotion are the key to forming artificial

intelligence (1988: 16). All these values become interchangeable as David and

Martin are forced to interact with each other like bickering children, all the while

seeing the uncontrollable development of jealousy within Martin towards his

parent’s attachment to an object nothing more than a new mechanical toy.

Nevertheless, Spielberg’s hostile representation of humans begins to re-align the

values which we use to govern what is human and what is artificiality. Monica’s

decision to abandon David in the forest can almost be seen as monstrous. David

begs not to be left alone, just as any human child might. However his cries are

ignored. Thus, Spielberg begins to carefully reverse the values we traditionally

assign to the inanimate and the human. Monica’s character begins to lack

humane elements such as mercy, empathy and love while all the while David

begins to demonstrate an increasingly developed sense of these fundamental

human values.

Similarly, the continued dehumanisation of humans within Spielberg’s

representation begins to challenge the concept of technology being exclusively

separate to the notion of humanity. The ‘Flesh Fair,’ which sees humans

systemically hunt down stray robots and rip them to pieces for their pleasure,

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works as an insight to how mindlessly programmed our own sadistic behaviour

can become. Spielberg’s question to the audience is no longer where the

boundary between technology and humanity lie but rather where the boundary

of human values exists in both organic and mechanical technologies. Some film

analysts believe that the film is thematically split across a three-act structure

encapsulating three corresponding groups of values through which we define

humanness: heart, body and consciousness (Bernstein, 2006). It is within the

second act of ‘the body’ where we begin to realise that human values and ideas

traverse the shell in which they live, be it in a mechanical or organic being.

Nevertheless, Bert Olivier points out, the story of Spielberg’s A.I. increasingly

comes to be about the simulacra of human beings in mechanical machinery akin

to the Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein from the 19th century (2008: 30). For

Olivier the transmission of human values is likened to the concept of the

‘Dasein’, a type of conscious presence, from the philosophical thoughts of

Heidegger (Heidegger 1978: 238 As cited in Olivier, 2008: 34). When the human

creator assembles a robot in his own image there is an innate transmission of

human values that transgress the technological boundary. Technology is no

longer a utility of humanity, and perhaps not even an extension but rather an

adopted part of the intrinsic human body.

However this transformation towards becoming human does not come without

an ultimate price: mortality. While Spielberg migrates these human values into

the realm of technological embodiment, it is almost as if this translation cannot

occur without technology losing its timeless attributes. While technologies

develop and expire, their implementation is often what survives human fragility

and mortality; books, sculptures, writings, or any constructed artefacts of the

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past remain timeless. The dialogue of the mecha character Gigolo Joe is used to

comment on this established notion.

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... We are suffering

for the mistakes they made because when the end comes, all that will be

left is us. That's why they hate us.

In this case, the very transposition of human values unto a mechanical

construction, in our case David and the rest of the mechas, becomes what

endows them with an understanding of their own mortality even if they are

artificially constructed. Ray Kurzwell explains that even technology has an

inescapable life cycle living through the stages of development to maturity and

finally obsolescence alongside several more (1999: 19). Therefore, the question

of mortality endangers the dichotomous relationship between humanity and its

utility over technology.

Inversely, the mecha's recognition of the inevitable and their own understanding

of degradation and mortality destroys humanity's exclusive state of being.

Rather, the organic becomes as much a technology and utility to the mechas as

they once were to humans. In the last act of the film , having advanced 2000

years into the future, we see advanced robots utilise organic elements to

resurrect Monica for one day purely for David's internally programmed child like

love for her. Furthermore, this advanced ‘breed’ of robots that recovers David

from his slumber, work to discover the secrets of the universe through the

archaeological study of the now long extinct lives of humans. Heidegger’s

‘Dasein,’ even if on a purely allegorical level, becomes present within both types

of entities, if not more predominantly within the mecha's. The human condition,

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along with its body, becomes a collection of tissue, expired space-time pathways

in history and void values. Not by violent victory or conflict with an opposing

being, but simply through slow self-inflicted extinction.

In conclusion, Spielberg’s representation of technology within his masterwork

Artificial Intelligence intentionally mixes the values we associate with technology

and humanity. Through the dissolution of this dichotomy he unravels questions

of consciousness exposing how even our own sense of self is a product of our

innate programming. Thus, the status of technology has shifted away from the

notions of being humanity’s mere creation for our own utility. Instead, Spielberg

unearths the possibility that we are all organic technology; robotic organisms

existing in a complex state of consciousness with our own set of responsibilities.

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Short Essay

Bibliography
Heidegger, M. 1978. Being and Time. Tr. Macquarie, J. & Robinson, E. Oxford:

Basil Blackwell.

Kurzweil, R. 1999. The Age of Spiritual Machines: When computers exceed

human intelligence. New York: Penguin Group.

Levy, D. 2007. Love + Sex with Robots. New York: HarperCollins Publications.

Moravec, H. 1988. Mind Children: The future of Robot and Human Intelligence.

London: Cambridge University Press.

Murphie, A. & Potts, J. 2003. Culture and Technology. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

Olivier, B. (2008). When Robots Would Really Be Human Simulacra: Love and the

Ethical in Spielberg's AI and Proyas's I, Robot. Film-Philosophy, 12(2), 30-44.

Retrieved from MLA International Bibliography database.

Websites

Bernstein, J. 2006. A Three-Part Thematic Structure of A.I.: Artificial Intelligence.

[Online] http://www.jeffreyscottbernstein.com/kubrick/ Accessed 16th September

2010.

Filmography

Artificial Intelligence: A.I., 2002. Directed by Steven Spielberg.

USA: Warner Bros.

Mario Brce