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Spielberg's AI: another cuddly no-brainer

Spielberg's AI: another cuddly no-brainer
Spielberg's AI: another cuddly no-brainer
AI is about a "robot" boy who is "programmed" to love his adoptive human mother but is discriminated against because he is just a robot. There would have been ways to make this film less of a no-brainer. The ambiguity could have been about something much deeper than metal: It could have been about whether other systems really do feel, or just act as if they feel, and how we could possibly know that, or tell the difference, and what difference that difference could really make -- but that film would have had to be called "TT" (for Turing Test) rather than "AI" or "ET," and it would have had to show (while keeping in touch with our "cuddly" feelings) how we are exactly in the same boat when we ask this question about one another as when we ask it about "robots."
consciousness, robotics, mind/body problem, other minds problem, turing test, symbol grounding, feeling
Harnad, Stevan
442ee520-71a1-4283-8e01-106693487d8b
Harnad, Stevan
442ee520-71a1-4283-8e01-106693487d8b

Stevan Harnad (Author) (2003) Spielberg's AI: another cuddly no-brainer

Record type: Website

Abstract

AI is about a "robot" boy who is "programmed" to love his adoptive human mother but is discriminated against because he is just a robot. There would have been ways to make this film less of a no-brainer. The ambiguity could have been about something much deeper than metal: It could have been about whether other systems really do feel, or just act as if they feel, and how we could possibly know that, or tell the difference, and what difference that difference could really make -- but that film would have had to be called "TT" (for Turing Test) rather than "AI" or "ET," and it would have had to show (while keeping in touch with our "cuddly" feelings) how we are exactly in the same boat when we ask this question about one another as when we ask it about "robots."

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More information

Published date: 2003
Keywords: consciousness, robotics, mind/body problem, other minds problem, turing test, symbol grounding, feeling
Organisations: Web & Internet Science

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 256469
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/256469
PURE UUID: ddec04ac-b06b-4aa1-a532-4adcd7c14980
ORCID for Stevan Harnad: ORCID iD orcid.org/0000-0001-6153-1129

Catalogue record

Date deposited: 02 Apr 2002
Last modified: 18 Mar 2024 02:40

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Author: Stevan Harnad ORCID iD

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