I, ROBOT
Alex Proyas

Kathleen Richardson

Hollywood's latest major science fiction movie is set in Chicago in 2035, where robots help humans with their everyday tasks, looking after their children, doing their housework and running their errands. In this futuristic world, where every other person has a robot helper, Detective Del Spooner (Will Smith) plays an anti-technology cop, who loathes robots, goes with his emotions and prefers old time things. The clichés do not end there.

Spooner's feelings about robots are expressed in an initial scene in which he observes an NS-4 robot running with a woman's purse through the streets of Chicago. A chase ensues, but then Spooner discovers the robot is taking some vital medication to its owner. Spooner is later reprimanded by his superintendent, who asks if he ever knew of any robot committing a crime. A certain 'no' is the response.

In this robotic future, Detective Spooner is called to a crime scene at US Robotics. This multinational produces the NS-4 and its new update, the NS-5 robot. Detective Spooner arrives to find an old friend, robot inventor Dr Alfred Lanning (James Cromwell), dead, and he is immediately dissatisfied with the suicide explanation provided by the company boss Lawrence Robertson (Bruce Greenwood). Spooner begins to investigate the real cause of the death, determined to confirm his prejudices about robots. He pursues a robot called Sonny, virtually played by Alan Tudyk, and meets up with robot psychiatrist Dr Susan Calvin (Bridget Moynahan). Together Calvin and Spooner set about uncovering the mystery behind Dr Lanning's death, indeed finding a robot conspiracy against humans.

The film is a mystery of sorts, a mechanical 'whatdunnit'. The suspicious and overly emotional Detective Spooner's desire to prove that robots are a problem is shaped by an experience in his past. Spooner was saved from an underwater car wreck by a robot that calculated he had higher chance of surviving than a little girl, whom he had to watch drown. In one scene, Spooner declares in disgust that the robot only gave her an 11% chance of surviving. Detective Spooner rebuffs robots because of their lack of emotional capacity. Indeed, nearly one hundred years of popular depictions of robots generally characterise them as logical and compelled to act on the basis of probability and without regard for human emotion.

In essence, then, the film is not a tale of man versus machine, but of emotion versus rationality, impulse and prejudice versus logic and reason. The characters that display emotion and impulse, be they machine or human, are elevated above those who do not, be they human or machine. Hence, the anti-robot Detective Spooner and the 'special' NS-5 robot are exalted and aligned for their shared qualities, while the rational characters, the chairman of US Robotics, the superintendent, Dr Susan Calvin and the super computer V.I.K.I are all depicted as rational and logical and hence prone to errors of judgment. In I, ROBOT, it does not matter if you are a human or a machine, it matters if you are emotional.

Will Smith explains his interest in the story 'What attracted me to this film is the concept that the robots aren't the problem. The technology is not the problem. It's the limits of human logic that is the problem, and essentially we are our own worst enemy'. Tudyk describes Sonny, created by a visual effects team, as being like a child, in distinction to the NS-4s, NS-5 robots and V.I.K.I, the super-computer. 'Sonny is highly intelligent, but his emotions - that distinguish him from the rest of the robots - are as highly attenuated as those of a child'.

This distinction between reason and emotion, impulse versus logic is further drawn out by Smith. 'He [Spooner] doesn't like the robots, so he's really the perfect detective to investigate this murder, because he already wants to find something wrong'. Dr Susan Calvin is, by contrast, 'very focused and rational'. Moynahan explained of her character 'Susan's struggling to stay committed to logic, because that is what she has based her life on. But as the story progresses, she hits a scientific and emotional 'wall' that really changes her and her beliefs'.

The differences between humans and machines are key themes in science fiction. A central feature of the discourse of human and machine difference is characterised as the emotional element. The point is that the emotional element, particularly in humans, is not so drastically subordinated to other elements of human cognition, such as reason. Detective Spooner's mission is to confirm his prejudice rather than investigate a crime.

The movie is a tenuous adaptation of a science fiction novel of the same name, written by Isaac Asimov in the 1950s. The film however, does not draw on any of the sophisticated conundrums facing robots, a theme Asimov explored in his Robot Stories. I, ROBOT, does, however, adopt the three rules that Asimov hardwired into his robots.

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.

These three laws demarcate the boundaries of behavior for the NS-4s and NS-5s, and help Spooner unravel the mystery. Though the film-makers claim Asimov's three laws 'govern the way real roboticists and researchers tackle artificial intelligence', this is a hugely misleading claim and I know of no roboticist in the field who can seriously use these rules as a model for humanoid robotics, this would require the field of humanoid robotics to be significantly more advanced than it is at present.

Promoters claim I,ROBOT reflects contemporary scientific developments. The publicity asks us to, 'Imagine a world where motorcycles drive themselves, robots conduct symphony orchestras and an animal's thought patterns can move a robot. No, these aren't projections into the distant future..they're headlines from today's newspapers'.

Though I welcome a future in which humanoid robots do our daily chores, that future is still in the realm of science fiction - though changing. The making of humanoid robots is a challenging task, a goal that will require a number of major breakthroughs in engineering and artificial intelligence before we can have robots doing our ironing and shopping. Nonetheless, director Alex Proyas insists that 'I described I, ROBOT early on having an almost documentary feel of the future'. The question at the heart of I, ROBOT is 'Given these advances, there's little doubt that in the near future robots will be a trusted part of our everyday life. Every family will have one, or more. They will clean our homes, deliver our packages, walk our pets - even care for our children. But what if that trust were shattered?' film promoters speculate.

The great thing about science fiction is that it does not have to correspond to reality, it can dream and speculate about the future. But the film-makers undermine the film by trying to derive authority for its depiction of robots from contemporary scientific events.

Maybe if the film-makers relied more on their imagination and less on their emotions about the state of the art of robotics today, they might have made a better film.

Kathleen Richardson is a PhD student at the University of Cambridge, studying what the making of robots can tell us about what it means to be human. Kathleen is conducting her fieldwork at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA.