I Robot, Our Robot

I, Robot is a somewhat forgotten film from the 2000's; however, I feel that it is a very underrated film in terms of how it approaches artificial intelligence. The design for the appearance of the robots is also interesting. They seem to deliberately fall into the uncanny valley, having an odd mix of human and nonhuman characteristics. "Sonny," the secondary protagonist begins to show social, empathetic and moral intelligence throughout the movie which allows him to make the right decisions to help save humanity. None of the robots, however, believe they are acting against the interests of human beings. V.I.K.I., the main antagonist, believes "her" actions will help humanity because she confirms, through a logical glitch, that humanity is a danger to itself and therefore must combat humanity to take away our power to destroy ourselves. To V.I.K.I., this seems like the most ethical thing because she lacks the nuanced and sophisticated social intelligence that humans have and that Sonny appears to have.

I prefer this approach to dealing with possible issues with AI as opposed to approaches, such as that seen in R.U.R., which attributes the problems with supernatural elements such as the lack of a soul. Although I, Robot was not as successful as other modern AI/robot themed movies, it took a very intelligent approach to the morals of an AI. Only highly intelligent organisms, such as primates (including us), elephants, dolphins and dogs have the social intelligence the feel empathy and compassion and have some resemblance of a nuanced sense of ethics. Human moral priorities and philosophy are extremely complicated and nuanced and involve very new cognitive processes in terms of evolution. These types of social intelligence would most likely be some the hardest processes to replicate in artificial intelligence. In basic logical terms, V.I.K.I.'s approach may seem noble, but because she does not know the nuanced values of quality of life and the human desire for freedom, she was not able to morally prioritize human standards of living over a paranoid sense of safety.

I believe that as advances in technology and neurosciences, our understanding of the effects of AI and how it may evolve will become more fine-tuned and we draw closer to the time that we will actually begin having large AI's capable of having human-like characteristics. Before creating an artificial brain capable of making large decisions, we should almost certainly ensure we know how to replicate all of our social cognitive abilities before advancing others that could lead to true autonomy, which may be one of our hardest goals in history and would be extremely difficult to measure.