Posted by Do you remember the movie called AI Artificial Intelligence, directed by Steven Spielberg? It’s been 22 years since its release, but I watched it only now, and I guess it’s the right time to understand what message the director sent us more than 20 years ago. Although the film has been criticized for its rather banal script and the simple emotions it evokes, it gives the viewer a lot to think about, especially now that ChatGPT has been hailed as a revolution on par with the wheel, electricity or the Internet.
The film is set in the 21st century (from today’s point of view in its later decades), when robots have replaced most workers and are supposed to give people pleasure, serve them and make people’s lives easier. This is quite the opposite of the vision that Elon Musk or Steve Wozniak have been preaching in recent months, but let’s believe it – after all (for now) you can always turn off the power source to artificial intelligence. A consequence of the development of technology, however, is that people are increasingly unable to have children. To meet this need, Cybertronics Manufacturing has produced a robot it has named David. He is a robot boy who was programmed to love and adopted by a Cybertronics employee and his wife. The natural child became ill and was hibernated while waiting for a cure to be invented. David finds himself in a real home and slowly begins to love….
David’s story can raise many dilemmas, such as how much we are able to forgive a human and how much a robot, whether a robot who loves can be trusted, whether we can get rid of a robot we love… In David, as in a mirror, we also see the feelings of our own children.
The question that occurred to me after watching the films, which concerns the artificial manager, is this. What will happen when the artificial manager is given such broad general intelligence that it begins to have feelings for its subordinates? I believe that three elements of this phenomenon can be mentioned here.
First, how these feelings of the artificial manager will affect his decisions toward his team members. It may be that the artificial manager will become more emotional than its human predecessor (or perhaps its prototype).
Second, whether the artificial manager feeling anger, sadness or joy will be able to self-restrain in terms of its response to the stimuli that trigger these feelings. In other words, won’t it get so angry that it knocks out the office with a swivel chair or, in euphoria, buys all the employees each a sporty BMW.
Third, once the artificial manager falls in love with his employee, will he be able to fall out of love? Spielberg’s film evokes associations of what such a reaction might look like when human beings come into contact with sentient robots.
And finally, the question can be asked whether we can reciprocate the feelings of the artificial manager. Some of you may associate such a situation with the movie titled Her, but that’s another story altogether….