Shell Shocked: Artificial intelligence
There was a wonderful movie directed by Steven Spielberg about twenty years ago called “A.I. — Artificial Intelligence,” a term we’ve heard a lot more about in recent years. The movie took place many years in the future.
The movie was about how scientists developed life looking robots for a variety of uses. In the movie, a married woman who was unable to have children ordered a custom built ten-year-old boy robot to raise as the son she never had.
But then, miraculously, the woman did indeed conceive a child and a baby boy was the result. There were now two boys at home — one real one and one boy robot. The boy robot was so advanced in its technology that it was difficult to distinguish it from a real life boy.
One day the woman drove the boy robot far into the woods many miles away and left him to fend for himself on the side of a country road. She had banished the boy robot because her real son didn’t want a boy robot as a brother.
From that point on the boy robot’s main obsession in life was to become a real boy. And so he does for a brief time many, many years later. He had never been happier.
The theme of this movie hit home when a stuffed cat I kept on top of my dresser mysteriously began to show up in different parts of my house without the benefit of my having moved him there. This stuffed cat was very lifelike and at a distance truly looked like a real cat.
But it wasn’t. I wasn’t quite ready to own a real cat and the stuffed version suited me fine — until these mysterious events began to occur. And then it became even more bizarre. As I was sleeping one night I awakened to the sound of purring. I thought I was dreaming at first but the purring got so loud that I had to blink several times.
The purring was coming from — believe it or not — my stuffed cat. He was sitting next to my face and was staring intently at me. And he began to meow. Was I going nuts?
But somehow his meowing got translated in my head into “I want to be a real cat. Please make me a real cat.”
And the next thing I knew was that I was on my way to the veterinarian to attempt to explain that a stuffed cat was now communicating with me to become a real cat. Shades of A.I. Maybe my veterinarian can figure all this out.
Art Stevens is a long-time columnist for the Islander. His tongue-in-cheek humor is always offered with a smile.