A.I.: Artificial Intelligence/Headscratchers

• The Specialist at submerged Manhattan (also the worst place to distribute robots ever) was totally wrong. David never grew, he never evolved. He was still just following his root programing: Love and be loved. Whether or not he felt love is irrelevant, that's what he's supposed to do. The specialist said that until David came along, Robots didn't desire unless they were told to do so. Well guess what! David was only doing what he was told to do! Albeit he got rather confused as how to achieve that, but he was still trying to earn "mommy's" love; just as he was programed to do. I never felt that David was moving beyond his design to earn mommy's love. Thus I can't see him getting that as anything other than the fulfillment of a program, the balancing of an equation, the end result of an algorithm. I felt as much emotion towards David as I did to a particularly loyal dog.
  • David isn't supposed to grow and improve and develop. The specialist, the guy who designed him, was ascribing too much to his creation because David was made in the image of his dead son. The idea is that, like the humans in the story, David is in pursuit of some lost part of themselves. They all latch onto imperfect replacements. The only thing that separates the humans from the robots is that the humans are unable to be content with their imperfect copies. It's a bit more ambiguous in Spielberg's version than it would have been had Kubrick seen it through.
  • I thought it wasn't so much the 'I want Mommy' thing, as making the leap from 'I want Mommy' to 'Mommy wants a real boy, therefor I want to be a real boy', and then making another leap to 'the blue fairy made Pinochio a real boy, therefore I want to find the blue fairy', and then believing that the blue fairy, a fictional character, was real. The initial 'wanting Mommy' part was programmed, but David came up with searching for the blue fairy all by himself.
  • I think the key word here is desire. All of the robots shown onscreen do not actively pursue any goal, and do not show any compulsion or drive to do anything except perform their function, to the extent current environment allows them. The only exception is survival - we do know that robots "wish" to survive and "fear" death, although the very nature of these "feelings" is vague (they complain that they still can be OF USE); but if anything, their "survival instinct" is a given, not their choice. They also can "like" someone or something, if it is there for them. Specialist says the same thing: robots in the film's universe can't develop conscious wishes and motives or make decisions that fall out of the routine functioning. Note that the most "humane" robot except David, Joe, accepts their adventures rather calmly. He's curious and partial to David, and he has to run from authorities, that's all. Only the prospect of death makes him feel and somewhat rebel against it - in a kinda philosophical way. David, on the other hand, makes a series of decisions, driven by an exceptionally strong feelings. He is furious at the obstacles and afraid of failure. The existential questions that almost don't visit other robots are central to him (because of the unique instruction to love - i.e. be the only one). So I think plot covers it pretty thorough, and Specialist definitely has a point.

• Is it me or was Henry somewhat hypocritical when he practically pushed David onto Monica and then he disliked how close David and Monica became. Remember, Henry started acted that way just after Monica had "imprinted" herself onto David and long before Martin got well and came home.
  • He's just uneasy. Remember, he wanted to "cure" Monica's grief with David, partly for his own sake of course, because her grief pained him. But after that, Monica began to genuinely love David almost like she would a new baby, once again somewhat turning away from Henry - the turn he didn't anticipate. So in crude terms, he wanted to "fix" Monica and instead created a rival for himself and Martin.

• Did Teddy die too at the end along with David and Monica? We see him climb onto the bed, see their lifeless bodies, and then just sit down and.... did Teddy live years and years afterward without his owners? Or did he "die" after sitting down? I wish the movie made this part more clear. It kind of ruins the, otherwise, great ending.
  • Well, it is possible that he did "die" after sitting down. He could have run out of "battery juice" like David at that point. Teddy might have computer code programmed in him that will cause him to "die" if he finds out his owners died. You are right, that part should not have been made ambiguous. It would make more sense for him to "die" after sitting down than to live years and years afterward.
• Did the Ancients from Stargate build David? How would it be possible for a machine to be usable after spending 10-20,000 YEARS in salt water? Even if it was low saline ice,metal would corrode after les0s than 100 years.
  • The new robots had to wave their hand in front of David in order to jumpstart him back up. It's pretty clear that David was non-functional when they first arrived.
• No humans survived until the Ice Age? Even w/ modern technology? Really?
  • Who knows how they died? They could have very well wiped themselves out.
  • Or it could've been a robot war. Things were clearly hostile between the two groups.
  • Or the humans and robots could've merged. With the advancement of robots, transhumanism wouldn't be far behind. Those super robots at the end looked at least semi-organic.

• Am I the only one who noticed that David is basically just one big construction error that would never have made it through the planning stage in the form wee see in the movie? He especially couldn't be marketed to parents who are looking for a child replacement, since he doesn't really act human. He has a few moments where he seems more human, but generally it is painfully obvious that he isn't (Teddy seemed more human, actually). And then there is the whole "never blinks, never sleeps, never eats, doesn't have bodily functions" thing, which seems kinda hard to ignore. I mean, would YOU believe that he is human? And, of course, why the hell is there no barrier in his throat that prevents things like that spinach incident from happening? Well, apparently, there is some sort of barrier that prevents water from entering his torso but fails at preventing a thick substance like spinach from doing so.
  • And why is he only imprinted with one parent? Don't parents normally come in twos?

• I'm sorry, but there is no parent in the world, no matter how desperate, who would want to take care of a young child forever. Even my parents, who love me a lot, wouldn't want to take care of young-me for the rest of their lives. Because having a forever-young child would get seriously old after a while; drawing with crayons might be fun for a few years, but can you imagine doing it for decades? I imagine that these robots tanked really hard really fast when the parents realized what they were in for.
  • I thought this at first too, but after thinking about it longer, the Davids make more and more sense. The David-bot is there to be used as a coping mechanism for a parent who has lost their child. It's not really meant to be with you forever, it's meant to be there for until the parent basically gets bored of it (the imprinting feature is there just to delay the parent from getting bored). Does the company really care if the parent keeps the child forever and ever? Not really, they already made a sale. After the parent is bored, David is thrown out like all other robots eventually are. And since I can't imagine a family buying more than one, this is a successful business model.
    Essentially, I imagine the fate we saw David meet (loved until eventually thrown out) would pretty much happen if Davids were to be sold en masse.
  • A genuine Kubrick-style crazy premise, made to experiment on character's minds. Look at his other films! All the "errors" on part of David's designers and marketing people, who churned out scores of child robots BEFORE the conclusion of the field test, and didn't "reality proofed" him, are made to this purpose.
  • From a more cynical point of view, this makes sense. The company doesn't care about how long it lasts, only if they make a sale. So they don't really care if a greiving parent throws out their David after being bored of its childishness. David has a temporary lifespan, like all the other robots.
• At some point in the movie it was stated that if the parents want the child to leave they send it back to Cybertronics, where he gets destroyed. Why would they destroy the boy completely, when they could just as good switch brains and reuse the seemingly indestructible body? Would be more eco-friendly, especially considering those robots only get build instead of real people because they never need any recources after being build.
  • Maybe that's what they mean by "destroyed". The robot would have wear and tear on it, so maybe they disassemble him, wipe the hard drive and refurbish the parts into a new David.
• Why didn't the robots clone the clone of Monica, and so on and so forth?
  • Have you ever watched a video that was a copy of a copy? Maybe cloning works like that.
    • It probably does. For that matter, ordinary cellular division is known to work like that, which is a big part of the aging process.
    • No, it does not. Cloning works just like child birth, but with only one genome instead of two mixed ones. Think of making babies as cloning two people into one.
• In the first part of the film, Manhattan is under water presumably due to melting icecaps. Fine, but... at the end of the film, the water is frozen at the same level. It should have reformed the ice caps first, causing the water to recede before it got cold enough to freeze the ocean at New York.
  • Possibly the freezing happened because of a sudden disaster, like a massive asteroid impact, rather than a gradual shift in climate.
• David's manufacturers were obviously anxious to get him back. Why did they not pull him out of the water within a few hours, at most, after he found the Blue Fairy at sunken Coney Island?
  • Well, a ferris wheel did land on his copter, maybe they couldn't find it under all the debris? Maybe the only reason the mecha descendants 2000 years later found it was because they were part of a detailed archeological expedition.
• What was the deal with Gigolo Joe and the whole "bad trouble" thing? Joe walks in on a client of his who was clearly murdered, and believes that he has to run away or be destroyed? Why? Are the cops stupid enough to pin any crime on the next robot that they see? And Joe has to belong to somebody, so what about his owner?
  • Possibly disassembling a robot witness for analysis is standard practice when it's impounded as evidence, much like checking a confiscated laptop for signs of tampering is common for computer crimes. This could be devastating or fatal for the robot's personality, even if it's just an innocent bystander.
    • Given that the husband deliberately waited around for Joe, and clearly doesn't see him as a threatening witness, it's quite possible that Joe is being set up for the murder. Why bother chasing a human suspect when you've got a compliant robot right there? If you read the scene as Joe being framed, the clerk's "helpful" suggestion about the operating license also sounds a lot more suspicious.
• Why couldn't the evolved robots just clone the clone of Monica every day?
  • The process could not be repeated.
  • Why can eating tons of spinach essentially short David out, requiring a professional cleaning, but being completely submerged in water does nothing to him whatsoever? Especially at the end when the water is debris-ridden??
    • A robot replica of a small child needs a mouth, but not a stomach. It is logical from a design standpoint for that mouth to also serve as an easy limited-access port to internal workings. It is also logical for there to be an automatic seal or artificial sphincter that opens and closes to prevent water from getting inside to damage those delicate workings. Unfortunately, it is also "logical" for a robot attempting imitative behavior to notice that the humans around him are putting all that food somewhere inside them, and open up that sphincter, clogging its works with spinach.
  • David only wanted to back to his mother, not his dad or brother. They never went through the bonding sequence with him... No wonder they were creeped out.