Some Clear Thoughts on AI--MUST READ!


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Posted by ButlerGoalie37 at iefw.ingramentertainment.com on July 10, 2001 at 10:48:13:

In Reply to: Your "A.I." answers (SPOILERS) posted by Vincent on July 09, 2001 at 00:39:30:

: : I ask this as well. To what end did Jude Law serve?

: As for the "connection" between Gigolo Joe and David, it's more a matter of circumstance, of the two of them being in the right place at the right time.

While I will give you that indeed there is a certain amount of right place at the right time involved, Vincent, I challenge you to look deeper. Or to subscribe for a moment that there is no such thing as coincidence. Gigolo Joe is very important to the plot of the movie and to the maturation of David. Basically, David is the first artificial being created to be sentient (to have feelings). He is programmed to love. However, over the course of the movie his love evolves (check out Hobby's last speech about exceeding our expectations) to include other emotions/feelings such as jealousy, rage, and hate-all evident in David's brutal beating of David 2 (eerily reminiscent of Holden kicking Brodie's ass in the back hallway of the mall, but I digress). So where does Gigolo Joe fit in? Well, he is the missing link so to speak. Moreso than David. He is the first robot to have "naturally" evolved into a sentient being. At the end, his last words are "I am. I was." A clear reference to Descartes: "I think therefore I am." You also see traces of this evolution throughout the movie. Knowing that he is being set up for murder and going on the lam. His passionate speech (and foreshadowing as you so wonderfully pointed out above) about how Mecha were the future and how when man destroyed themselves, all that would be left are Mecha. So, in essence, the highly evolved Mecha at the end evolved directly, or indirectly, from Gigolo Joe, not David. David is important and the key to humanity, but I'll get to that later. The reason David isn't the key to the evolutionary track is that David was at the bottom of the ocean and the other Davids and Darlenes never made it to market. I know this because this is revealed in the AI online game (damn, I never thought those four months I wasted playing that stupid thing would ever come in handy). Basically, the game is set 40 years after David plunges to the bottom of the ocean. Machines have evolved into sentient beings, but not through programming...through the "natural" evolution that Gigolo Joe went through. The baby bots never made it into the mainstream. In fact, Cybertronics went to great lengths to cover up the whole project. They even went so far as to lock Monica up in some Mental hospital in the Catskills. The main thrust of the game is that an engineer found something amiss and he was murdered for it. What did he find? Well, there are numerous theories, but the one I like is that he found out that someone was manipulating the TP net (the AI phytoplankton web that controls the weather after the Ozone became depleted) to either destroy humanity or to get rid of AIs. Either way, the ultimate result of this manipulation was to cause the global freeze that you see in the movie. Did AIs kill humans? Did we kill ourselves? If AIs killed humans, it would set up an interesting analogy. God created Man. Man destoyed God. Man created AI. AIs destroyed Man. If we ultimately killed ourselves, that sets up the whole "we're the purveyors of our own apocalypse stuff." And at the end, well, I felt the end was much akin to Hooper's take on Jedi. They destroyed David's robot visage to reveal a crusty, old human. They were trying to say that deep down, all AIs wanted to be human. Ok...that was a stretch, but hey, maybe Kevin was in cahoots with Kubrick and Spielberg all this time...hehe.

Just my thoughts and plenty of them (sorry) after seeing the movie twice and playing the stupid game for the last four months.

John Couture





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