Skip to content
The Catholic Leader
  • Home
  • News
    • QLD
    • Australia
    • Regional
    • Education
    • World
    • Vatican
  • Features
  • Opinion
  • Life
    • Family
    • Relationships
    • Faith
  • Culture
  • People
  • Subscribe
  • Jobs
  • Contribute
No Result
View All Result
  • Home
  • News
    • QLD
    • Australia
    • Regional
    • Education
    • World
    • Vatican
  • Features
  • Opinion
  • Life
    • Family
    • Relationships
    • Faith
  • Culture
  • People
  • Subscribe
  • Jobs
  • Contribute
No Result
View All Result
The Catholic Leader
No Result
View All Result
Home Culture

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

byStaff writers
7 October 2001 - Updated on 25 March 2021
Reading Time: 3 mins read
AA
Share on FacebookShare on Twitter

Starring: Haley Joel Osment, Jude Law, Frances O’Connor
Director: Steven Spielberg
Rated: M15+

IN every respect AI is this year’s most ambitious film with good acting, a stylish look, dazzling special effects, intelligent direction and a very multi-layered screenplay.

Its moral scope is ambitious too, for there is not a small ethical issue to be found in this story. Unfortunately by the end of this long film, director Steven Spielberg cannot make all these elements come together in a wholly satisfying way.

Set in the near future, couples need permits to have children. They are only allowed one each. Families also have robots, but the makers have not yet been able to get them to ape human feelings.

Professor Hobby (William Hurt) develops David, brilliantly played by Joel Osment, a robotic boy who “is able to love”. Hobby’s question is, ‘Will human beings love him back?’

Henry (Sam Robards) and Monica’s (Frances O’Connor) only son is in danger of death. They are selected as David’s first foster parents. They grow to love him until their son recovers and comes home.

David is then abandoned and teams up with fellow robot Gigolo Joe (Jude Law) to avoid being violently dismantled at the local version of the Colosseum. David yearns to be reunited with Monica, the only person he has learned to love.

On the surface of it, AI is one of the most Freudian films we could ever wish to see. David’s whole life is about being reunited with his mother.

Spielberg’s screenplay has David call Monica ‘Mommy’ but his foster father ‘Henry’. To see his mother again, David becomes convinced he needs the intercession of the Blue Fairy, who looks like a kitsch statue of Mary, the Mother of God, and is invested with similar attributes.

David’s journey to fill the lack in him by trying to reclaim a primal unity with his mother could see AI become mandatory viewing for all Freudian psychotherapists!

Related Stories

‘For the moment, no,’ – Pope Francis dismisses resignation rumours in wide-ranging interview

Plans for indigenous elements, memorials to trauma, to complement Catholic liturgy

Called to share the message of Jesus at mission school

Psychology, however, is not AI’s main concern, ethics is. What constitutes a unique human person? What are the differences between spirit and matter? Can a created being, robot or otherwise, learn to hate as well as love? Just because science can achieve a breakthrough should it always do so?

This film might be set in the future, but it is a commentary on present debates about stem cells, DNA and cloning. In these regards AI can get a bit preachy.

Spielberg is clearly worried about some of the directions science is taking. The scientists in this film have mixed motivations – personal gain, testing the limits of their knowledge, the desire to create a ‘new human order’, and personal grief.

David is modelled on Professor Hobby’s dead son of the same name. David is sent to ‘replace’ a dying son too.

Spielberg is arguing that cloning will never replace the loss of a loved one. Why? It’s not because David cannot look and act like a human being. Henry and Monica come to love David. It is because David has no memory.

For Spielberg memory is ensoulment. It makes us who we are. It gives us our spirit, our human compass.

AI portrays David as a modern Pinocchio. AI, however, is much more a futuristic Frankenstein. It has a very grizzly scene where robots are executed because ‘they are an assault on our human dignity. They are meant to replace our children’. And so in retaliation the crowd hunts them down like animals and destroys them using fire, boiling oil, decapitation, quartering and firing squads.

They may be machines, but the point is made – as it is when we see Gigolo Joe in action, where sex with a robot is ‘the best a human can get’. Spielberg is asking moral questions of everything.

The reason the film does not work is that for us to address all these questions and issues, we need to be located in the centre of the drama. Setting the story initially in the near future, and then 2000 years after that, makes it hard for us to project ourselves into it, to locate our stance on the questions it raises.

We end up admiring nearly everything about it, but it is so ‘out there’ that this is where it stays. Given the important challenges it poses, however, Steven Spielberg may be as disappointed with this response as I am.

ShareTweet
Previous Post

FACING THE MUSIC

Next Post

Disadvantaged Like Refugees

Staff writers

Related Posts

‘For the moment, no,’ – Pope Francis dismisses resignation rumours in wide-ranging interview
Vatican

‘For the moment, no,’ – Pope Francis dismisses resignation rumours in wide-ranging interview

5 July 2022
Plans for indigenous elements, memorials to trauma, to complement Catholic liturgy
News

Plans for indigenous elements, memorials to trauma, to complement Catholic liturgy

5 July 2022
Spirit of Mission: A group of young people including university students, seminarians and ministry workers present at the Xavier School of Mission held June 20 to 24. The mission school hosted guest speakers and workshops to encourage people to go out and proclaim the Word. Photo: Joe Higgins
QLD

Called to share the message of Jesus at mission school

4 July 2022
Next Post

Disadvantaged Like Refugees

Church's Response to Attacks

Synod Debates Power

Popular News

  • Plans for indigenous elements, memorials to trauma, to complement Catholic liturgy

    Plans for indigenous elements, memorials to trauma, to complement Catholic liturgy

    0 shares
    Share 0 Tweet 0
  • Mass with signs of indigenous respect launch historic Plenary Council assembly

    0 shares
    Share 0 Tweet 0
  • ‘For the moment, no,’ – Pope Francis dismisses resignation rumours in wide-ranging interview

    0 shares
    Share 0 Tweet 0
  • Called to share the message of Jesus at mission school

    0 shares
    Share 0 Tweet 0
  • Future First Nations teachers honoured with Rome scholarship

    0 shares
    Share 0 Tweet 0
Search our job finder
No Result
View All Result

Latest News

‘For the moment, no,’ – Pope Francis dismisses resignation rumours in wide-ranging interview
Vatican

‘For the moment, no,’ – Pope Francis dismisses resignation rumours in wide-ranging interview

by Catholic News Agency
5 July 2022
0

POPE Francis has said he has no plans to resign soon and that his knee injury is...

Plans for indigenous elements, memorials to trauma, to complement Catholic liturgy

Plans for indigenous elements, memorials to trauma, to complement Catholic liturgy

5 July 2022
Spirit of Mission: A group of young people including university students, seminarians and ministry workers present at the Xavier School of Mission held June 20 to 24. The mission school hosted guest speakers and workshops to encourage people to go out and proclaim the Word. Photo: Joe Higgins

Called to share the message of Jesus at mission school

4 July 2022
Cathedral green packed with families for festival day

Cathedral green packed with families for festival day

4 July 2022
Fr Mike Schmitz’s next podcast Catechism in a Year starts New Year’s Day

Fr Mike Schmitz’s next podcast Catechism in a Year starts New Year’s Day

4 July 2022

Never miss a story. Sign up to the Weekly Round-Up
eNewsletter now to receive headlines directly in your email.

Sign up to eNews
  • About
  • Advertise
  • Contact
  • Contribute
  • Jobs
  • Subscribe

The Catholic Leader is an Australian award-winning Catholic newspaper that has been published by the Archdiocese of Brisbane since 1929. Our journalism seeks to provide a full, accurate and balanced Catholic perspective of local, national and international news while upholding the dignity of the human person.

Copyright © All Rights Reserved The Catholic Leader
Accessibility Information | Privacy Policy | Archdiocese of Brisbane

The Catholic Leader acknowledges Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people as the First Peoples of this country and especially acknowledge the traditional owners on whose lands we live and work throughout the Catholic Archdiocese of Brisbane.

No Result
View All Result
  • Home
  • News
    • QLD
    • Australia
    • Regional
    • Education
    • World
    • Vatican
  • Features
  • Opinion
  • Life
    • Family
    • Relationships
    • Faith
  • Culture
  • People
  • Subscribe
  • Jobs
  • Contribute

Copyright © All Rights Reserved The Catholic Leader

0
    0
    Your Cart
    Your cart is emptyChoose another Subscription
    Continue Shopping