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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