Abstract

Steven Spielberg’s AI – Artificial Intelligence, and Alex Proyas’s neo-noir, I, Robot, may both be understood as attempts to answer the question: ‘What conditions doesartificial intelligence research have to satisfy before it can justly claim to have producedsomething which truly simulates a human being?’1I would like to show that, farfrom construing this question simply in terms of intelligence, the films in questiondemonstrate that far more than this is at stake, and each articulates the ‘more’ in different,but related, terms. Moreover, contrary to what viewers may suspect, neither film claimsthat the achievement of this goal is actualisable; rather, it posits a goal for artificialintelligence research by which it could measure its progress.2.