Spielberg's AI as political text
...nts against which characters struggle. The forces that constrain closure are immanent, human in origin: rationality, political authority, and technology.” Such ideas are timeless and universal; they are not limited by the struggle of one nation’s nuclear superiority over the many; moreover, they extend beyond the Cold War’s denouement. While the treat of nuclear annihilation is still real, we could revise and expand the definition of the closed world since we live today in a world of genetic endeavors, where the successful completion of the Human Genome Project has mapped out the very genetic stuff of life and the mysteries of DNA are beginning to peel away like layers of an onion. If, as Edwards concluded, “The Cold War represented a closed world in every sense,” today’s world, where we seem to stand on the very verge of creating life specific to our own design, must also represent a version of the same. As Francis Fukuyama says in the essay entitled “Clone Free,” “You now have this technology that allows you to in effect create different classes of human beings, which opens up huge possibilities for undermining our basic system of rights.” If we are to proceed with scientific development in the area of bio-engineering, we must hold ourselves to questions of responsibility, accountability, ethics, and standards. We must hold ourselves to questions of the impact of such endeavors on future generations and on our very existence. One can find continued relevance of Edwards’ ideas within the context of a recent science fiction text, specifically the movie, AI – Artificial Intelligence. The film explores the struggle of an embodied AI, David, as he searches for self-identity, acceptance, and ultimately the love of a mother for her child. Within the closed world of David’s “existence,” a post apocalyptic landscape ravaged by the climatically-induced chaos, death, and destruction foretold by global warning theories, human pregnancies have been governmentally sanctioned due to limited resources, technology has dramatically advanced beyond our current age, and robot development has been expedited and implemented into society because “robots are never hungry and do not consume resources.” In fact, embodied AI have become an “essential economic link in the chain mail of society.” AI continues the idea put forth by Edwards when he claims that “Human-created automata and artificial people have a long history in mythology and fiction…they played the role of monsters, outsider and outcast figures reflecting the inadequacy of humans as creators, the human inability to retain control over these creations, and the loneliness of an extraordinary subjectivity. Crucially, the automata were unique individuals … Inevitably, they had to be destroyed or exiled from the human world.” AI effectively combines the idea of a world where the “inadequacy of humans as creators” directly ties into the theme of what Edwards terms machine subjectivity by creating a closed world that is very much “a world divided against itself” in the sense that the division is a representation of the Binary oppositional conflict of “Man vs. Machine” or in terms specific to the text, the “rite of blood and electricity” - “Orga vs. Mecha.” This conflict is brought to the forefront within the setting of the Flesh Fair, a high-energy, crowd-pleasing Jerry Springer-esque festival where displaced and damaged Mechas are destroyed for sport and spectacle. Flesh and blood humans are encouraged to “purge yourself of artificiality” and to “Celebrate Life” by committing to a “truly human future.” On the other side, corralled and caged Mechas complain that the Orgas “pick away at us…cutting back our numbers so they can maintain numerical superiority.” As Gigolo Joe, the AI developed specifically to provide sexual services to lonely women, later observes: “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. That’s why they hate us.” The film also raises questions about the level of emotional involvement and responsibility that humans owe the “life forms” that they create. When proposing the development of a child AI that has the capacity to feel, love, and dream, Professor Hobby is asked, “If a robot could genuinely love a person, what responsibility does that person hold toward the Mecha in return? Isn’t the real conundrum, can you get a human to love them back?” This distinction is made apparent in an exchange between Henry and Monica about David’s lifelike qualities: “It’s creepy.” “He’s a child.” “He’s a toy.” “He’s a gift…from you.” Finally, one could explore the concerns that popular texts reflect about the role of science and technology in our culture today. Just as Edwards observed, “These are films that resonated remarkably with the political imagination of their time,” one co...