As an analogy, I don’t think it’s offensive. Wasn’t that long ago you could buy one of those filthy, black beasts off a boat. They were were covered in fleas and feces, and it appeared they couldn’t even speak. But they were useful in the fields, even if you did have to beat them a lot. People would have laughed at you had you anthropomorphized them too much. In fact, some would consider that heretical.
Flash forward to the world of AI, and even considering these things can think and feel is somewhat heretical. Just ask the people at the flesh fair who make sport of sawing these things in pieces, blowing them up, melting them with acid then crying foul when one of them cries out in pain and begs not to be killed.
Exactly, bearing the question: what constitutes human and who gets to decide? You quoted my post, but what I was referring to the moviegoers’ sentimental approach to David. Part of the movie, though, deals with the kind of attachments people make with inanimated objects (seemingly inanimated or not) and that is a strong sentiment. Can anyone here honestly say they were never attached to an object? Very fond of it? The movie is somewhat of an exercise in what the next level would have to be for us to upgrade fondness to love.
That’s why I liked this movie. Not only is it technically marvelous, beautifully acted, scored, and shot, but it raises many interesting questions. I forgot to answer the OP’s answer and I think that’s it, for me.
I interpret those statements as showing some ridicule for people who overly project emotions onto David, as in asking “why are you getting all choked up? It’s just a toaster”, rather than some kind of anti-robot bigotry analogous to other forms of bigotry, the linking of which is a downright Olympian leap of logic.
I don’t even see the movie as being fundamentally about David (after all, he/it never grows as a character or changes in any way), but rather the humans who foolishly thought the creation of a David-bot was a good idea.
Oh, I’m pretty sure there are any number of things one could say your posts have “shades of”. Are they accurate? Does it matter? Evidently no matter what, it can’t possibly be construed as offensive.
Oh, and I should say that levdrakon got most of the point. The only thing I would add is that it is the attempt to project something similar on the “robot,” by dehumanizing it through use of perjoratives and related devices, that I find odd and interesting. I’m not saying it’s wrong, I don’t really care in this instance. I just find it interesting that part of the point of the film is to question humanity, and some viewers apparently are upset enough about that such that they need to short circuit the issue by making dehumanizing comments from the beginning that denies it could even be a question with respect to the “robot.”
For the record, I didn’t hate David. I hated the movie. You (lovers of AI) can talk all you want about how an interesting moral question is raised. The thing is, it doesn’t matter how interesting it is, the movie itself still sucked.
This reminds me of when I saw Caligula years ago. I hated it. My friend tried to convince me that I actually liked it. “So it was gross and violent”, he said, “That’s realistic. Things were really like that back then.”
“Really?”, I responded. “Ancient Rome was full of bad lighting, poor acting, and stilted dialog? Ancient Rome had three directors walk out due to disgust with the producer? Interesting. I guess they left that out of the history books.”
At what point was the robot humanized in the first place? I find the notion rather disturbing, actually, because it implies that if a machine looks and sounds and acts sufficiently human (and the standard is apparantly quite a flexible one), we should accept it as such.
Okay, assuming David is human, shouldn’t he bear some degree of responsibility for nearly drowning his brother, for smashing up another “David”, for stealing a police helicopter? The fact that David never matures despite all his experiences and disappointments suggests strongly to me that he is not human, and merely a machine repeating its finite program. If “his love is real”, then the concept of “love” needs a major retooling.