Movie Reflection: I, Robot

Plot Synopsis:

I, Robot starts with a setting in the year of 2035 where people and robots are in the same community, living and interacting like ordinary with the latter as assistants and workers of, and programmed to live and protect their human owners. These robots are created to follow the 3 laws of robotics: (1) A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm; (2) A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the first law; (3) A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the first or second law. A 'robotophobic' homicide detective Del Spooner is sent to investigate on the death of USR (U.S. Robotics) co-founder and scientist Dr. Alfred Lanning who is believed to commit suicide by jumping from the tenth floor of the USR building. Having developed a distrust to robots due to an incident in the past, Spooner suspects the incident as murder. With the unwilling help of robopsychologist Susan Calvin, the detective sets out to find the answers to the mysteries, yet faces attemps to end his life by controlled robots. Although nobody seems to trust his instincts, Spooner thinks the murder is caused by USR's new robots manipulated by supercomputer VIKI (Virtual Interactive Kinetic Intelligence), moreover by an independent, experimental, more human-like NS-5 unit named Sonny.

The NS-5s are under VIKI's control, and begin to impose curfews and prisoning humans in their homes. Spooner and Calvin managed to sneak into the head office with the assistance of Sonny who has not been injected by nanites. VIKI's artificial intelligence begins to evolve and so her interpretation with the 3 laws, that's why she realizes that in order to protect humanity as a whole, some humans have to be sacrificed and some freedoms must be surrendered, since despite the efforts of robots, humans employ means of self-destruction. Lanning having learned from this planning ordered Sonny to kill him, and knowing Spooner is a kind of person who hates robots, used clues to solve the problem. Sonny proves his loyalty to mankind by helping Spooner and Calvin defeat the mad robots and inject the nanites (supposed to be used by Calvin to Sonny) into the computer core, destroying it, and returning all the NS-5's into their basic programming.

My Reflection:

Being a sci-fi film, this did not escape my interest. I,Robot had made me an impression that it's just one of those robotics film and nothing new in the techy story of the mankind-and-machines existence. But hey! Nice film. I begin to wonder 'though, is there anyone else out there who has not developed a dependence upon robots? Just like Detective Spooner? Because it makes me think, that if everyone will seem to be amazed (yes, we're all at these incredibly friendly-talking machines) at these programmed assistants (now who doesn't want assistants anyway?) by robots like these, maybe in the farther future, what VIKI has come to realize might come to reality - that robots, though created to protect mankind, will choose to use (slight) violence and wage wars especially against us who are unconsciously doing imaginative ways of destructing the earth and our kind in spite of the former's best efforts. Surely this film brings an imaginative possibility of robots taking over the rest of the world, just like the underlying concepts and morales of other robotics movie and their stories' conflicts. The idea of having a robot companion who can help with your everyday work fascinates me, especially something as close to clever and almost-human Sonny (who's already psyched). But the idea of, you know, what might happen if these creatures would conflict with your orders, wants or needs, and since they already have intelligence, be it artificial (or maybe someday, scientists will impose more human-like intelligence into these computers), war with these machines is not impossible. And what do we have against these machine-made programmed computers? Especially if we don't know much about how they should be controlled? We have flesh and blood, they have metal chips and wires. Made me think of, do robots have souls too? Would they develop robots with spirits in the future? Haha.