“If a robot could genuinely love a
person, what responsibility does that person hold toward that mecha in return?”
If
Bruno Latour had been dead at the moment of this quote’s inception, he would
have rolled over in his grave. The
question that develops and gains traction throughout the film is that of
Frankensteinian abandonment: it lingers, not as a question of whether or not
the robots are human, but of whether or not we are willing to take
responsibility and care for our creations in a world “when science and nature
and technology and politics become so confused and mixed up as to be impossible
to untangle” (Latour). While there is a
split within the film between characters that accept and reject the humanity of
“mechas”, the unromantic patterns that emerge are, one, the prevailing of
pathos over logos and ethos (in other words, love conquering all) and, two, the unrequited desire to
organize life into binary structures.
Whether
they are crimes of passion or committed in cold blood, love motivates the
construction of binary worldviews through destructive actions in the world of Artificial Intelligence. Henry takes on the roll of the pot when he
calls David, the kettle, black and queries:
“If he was
created to love, then it’s reasonable to assume he knows how to hate. And if
pushed to those extremes, what is he really capable of?”
Everyone capable
of love is capable of hatred and jealousy-fueled acts of passion. Artificial
Intelligence deploys parallelism, a relatively simple principle of film
form, through the motif of human possession (ie humans belonging to one another in relationships).
This not only denotes a fundamentally human quality and a reference
point for “orga”/”mecha” comparisons, but enables the film to create a sense of
ambiguity in distinguishing the organic from the mechanical. This ambiguity, or ‘resourcefulness,’ arises
in one main area: the inconsistent and paradoxical blaming of “mechas” for
territorial encroachment.
I.
Henry
and Martin find no fault in the actions of Monica, but instead blame
David. This implies a burden of
responsibility that can’t be placed on a mechanical being, but at the same time
dismisses the significance of his potential “death.”
II.
Mr.
Bevans finds no fault in the actions of Gigolo Joe, murdering his wife and
simultaneously recognizing that Joe isn’t human by sparing him any sliver of blame
and recognizing that his wife betrayed him by sleeping with another man (aka,
human).
III.
David
finds fault in the first David 2.0 that he encounters, believing that he is
threatening to steal Monica. David yells
“You can’t have her! She’s MINE!” In attempting to establish his own humanity,
he refutes that of the other David and himself.
In
all of these scenarios, those who consider themselves “orgas” are willing to
blame “mechas” for human faults without recognizing their humanity. They fail to recognize that they have been
trespassed on a significantly human level in regards to love, that “mechas” now
mirror the interior and exterior human life.
Even when Henry tries to deconstruct and dismiss David’s humanity by
stating he is composed of “a hundred miles of fiber,” he fails to comprehend
that he developed and expressed his thought through the complex interaction of
the 600 miles of neurons that utilize electrical impulses in his own body. The only remaining barrier is the human
ideological construction of the organic vs. inorganic binary: the collection of
information is not inadequate, rather the categories in which they are intended
to be placed are inadequate.
Nodding
to its Blade Runner predecessor, Artificial Intelligence purposefully aims
at creating a multitude of perplexing scenarios and ambiguities that cannot be
placed into the provided strata.
Why? To what particular end does
this serve as a mean? It appears that
both films take a page from I.A. Richards in exploring the matters of the universe
(pun). Richards says:
“Neither this
book nor any other can say how a page should be read-if by that we mean that it
can give a recipe for discovering what the page really says.”
This principle
extends beyond the written word and the crafted sculpture. This principle extends beyond the way in
which we interact with and interpret these artistic renderings of our world,
and speaks to the way we with interact and interpret our actual world. We become frustrated as viewers of Artificial Intelligence because we have
developed desires to neatly sort these images into rigid social
constructs. These films work because of our
fundamentally incorrect notions of reading art and reading life. These films work because we are two year olds
trying to pick between the circle and square hole to place the triangle. From there, we claim we are seeing grey
matter that can’t be categorized. Grey
matter is a pessimistic view, and renders the objects we are interacting with inoperable as we forfeit
to the pre-determined categorizations. Perhaps there is another way for us to consider information instead of enslaving ourselves to these binaries.
PS - this conclusion was quite paradoxical in the sense that it set up another binary
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