When Robots would really be Human Simulacra: Love and the Ethical in Spielberg's <i>AI and Proyas's I, Robot</i>

摘要

[First paragraph]:Steven Spielberg’s AI – Artificial Intelligence (2001), and Alex Proyas’s neo-noir, I, Robot (2004), may both be understood as attempts to answer the question: ‘What conditions does artificial intelligence research have to satisfy before it can justly claim to have produced something (a ‘robot’) which truly simulates a human being?’ I would like to show that, far from construing this question simply in terms of intelligence, the films in question demonstrate that far more than this is at stake, and each articulates the ‘more’ in different, but related, terms. Moreover, contrary to what viewers may suspect, neither film claims that the achievement of this goal is actualisable; rather, it posits a goal for artificial intelligence research by which it could measure its (lack of) progress.