Monday, January 19, 2015

i, Robot

  I was clearing out some old file on my laptop and I came across a short paper I did in a college class years ago on i, Robot. It talked about one of the major messages in the movie and decided to share it here. Let me know what you think, and if I should do more posts like this one, going more into the message of the film, or stick more on the review side. Here's the paper below.



                The movie I, Robot seemed to have messages that almost countered each other. There were instances of technology saving us, and there were also instances of technology hurting, and even killing us. That makes it sound like the movie had a weird mental bi-polar issue, and needs some sort of medication. Obviously that isn’t what’s actually going on.  I believe that I, Robot was trying to tell us that technology is alright as long as we limit its use. One extreme or the other can be bad, but if we keep it all on a middle ground, and be careful as to how we use technology it can be great!
                I, Robot is a movie that tells us a story about Officer Spooner, a cop who seems to have a major issue with robots, and how the world seems to rely on them too much in his opinion, and a robot with true artificial intelligence named Sonny, who is trying to figure out, who he is, what he’s meant to do in life, and why he was created. At the beginning Spooner looks like a lunatic blaming Sonny, a robot, for murdering a scientist. By the end you find out that Spooner was right, but by that point, Spooner and Sonny has actually teamed up like a super duo to fight against the real threat VIKI. VIKI was an Artificial Intelligence that had taken the three laws of robotics to an extreme, where VIKI ended up commanding robots to injure, or even kill humans, if the humans didn’t comply with orders for the humans own safety.  Spooner was a character who had to grow to trust a piece of technology to win in the climactic battle in the end. That piece of technology was Sonny, and as stated above, a robot that had actually murdered a human. The same story also has the ideas of technology becoming dangerous for us, thus how VIKI, an A.I. that has the three law of robotics, was actually the real threat to humanity. You see even though Sonny had actually murdered the scientist, it was actually a situation where he had been asked by the scientist himself to be murdered by Sonny. Sonny was programmed to actually have emotional feelings including love, and he has moral values, and on top of that he has dreams. That is why Sonny is the one Spooner had to trust, and partner up with to fight the real threat, VIKI.
                In conclusion you can see how the movie I, Robot is actually a movie that was telling us both messages that,  technology can be both good and/or evil. Spooner, a cop, who doesn’t like, nor trust robots, who actually ended up having to trust, and partner up with Sonny, a robot who can ignore the three laws, if he wanted, to fight VIKI an artificial intelligence who ended up taking the three laws of robotics to the extreme, almost creating a militarized state, ruled by robots. It tells us that technology is good in smaller and controlled doses. We can use technology as long as we keep an eye over it, keep the power in our hands, and take measures to make sure it stays in our hands.

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