The Adventures of Pinocchio was one of the inspirations for Stanley Kubrick during the development of A.I. Pinocchio, the wooden puppet, dreamed of becoming a human boy.

2001

SPIELBERG’S A.I. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

The film A.I. Artificial Intelligence, directed by Steven Spielberg (b. 1946), is a provocative drama that makes us question the future of AI and the capabilities of an AI android boy named David, given as a gift to a mother because she misses her human son. The movie is based on the 1969 story “Supertoys Last All Summer Long” by English author Brian Aldiss (1925–2017). Although the film was not released until 2001, its development began in the 1970s, when director Stanley Kubrick acquired the film rights.

Much of the film follows David after his separation from his mother and his attempt to return to her. He is accompanied on his quest by Teddy, an AI teddy bear, as he seeks a Blue Fairy (inspired by the Disney film Pinocchio), who David believes can turn him into a “real” human being. In one part of the journey, David’s engineer creator explains to David that the “Blue Fairy is part of the great human flaw to wish for things that don’t exist, or the greatest single human gift—the ability to chase down our dreams. And that is something no machine has ever done until you.”

Viewers of the film debated whether an android could truly love, with film critic Roger Ebert (1942–2013) writing that an android is merely “a puppet with a computer program pulling its strings.” Toward the end of the film, after two thousand years in suspended animation, David encounters spindly alien AIs that have evolved from androids like him and who have taken a particular interest in David, because he is the last being who has actually ever encountered humans. They allow him to spend one last day with a clone of his long-dead human mother in a virtual dream-state. Reflecting on the sad but thought-provoking film, Empire of Dreams author Andrew Gordon writes: “We measure ourselves against the robot, trying to define what makes us human, fearing that even as we become more robotic, our creations become more human and may ultimately surpass or replace us. . . . A robot has become ‘human’ by attaining the ability to dream, yet dreams of the human are all that is left of humanity.”