Artificial Intelligence, the movie

I saw a movie called Artificial Intelligence. We have been discussing machine intelligence in a series of posts, that lately included https://gordon-feil-practical-living.blogspot.ca/2017/01/machine-sentience.html. This movie explored some of the issues that might attend the development of a machine with personality. It is loosely based on the tale of Pinocchio. A machine is programmed to love unconditionally and to learn from its experience as a simulated boy. Not only does he love, but he also needs to BE loved. He needs security. He pleads for his life. He pleads for his human “mom” to love him. The movie explores this psychology.

It also explores machine rights, or rather, the lack of them. No matter how adaptive a machine is, no matter how intelligent and teachable, it is regarded as programming in action. The viewer observes that machines exist at manifold places on the continuum that ranges from single purpose appliance type machines to incredibly imitative and creative multi-functional units that definitely would pass any version of the Turing test.

One thing the movie missed, in my opinion, was the notion that when machines become that adaptive and sophisticated, it would lead to machines designing and building machines, and to move from one generation to the next would likely take hours, not months. Development would explode, and humans who have not merged with machines would become to the new machines as ants are to us.  A scary thought.