Pages

Monday, 4 February 2013

"I, Robot" Movie Review


Sonny, NS-5 "Special" Robot
As we know nowadays human-computer interaction is a common thing in our daily life. And one of the movies that have a theme about it was “I, Robot” which released in 2004. Taking place in 2035, this movie tells about the situation in Chicago city, USA where there are robots that actively works as a tool to helps human life and befriend with them too. At the beginning of the movie, a policeman known as a detective too named Del Spooner (played by Will Smith) conduct an investigation regarding the death of Dr. Alfred Lanning who commits suicide. Dr. Lanning himself is a robotics scientist who creates robots. However, Spoon feels strange with the death of Dr. Lanning. He considered that the death of Dr. Lanning is not the result of suicide, but a murder case by the robot he made. This Robots has 3 kinds of laws that must be obeyed, which are:

1.    First Law: A robot must never harm a human being or, through inaction, allow any harm to come to a human.
2.  Second Law: A robot must obey the orders given to them by human beings, except where such orders violate the First Law.
3.   Third Law: A robot must protect its own existence unless this violates the First or Second Laws.

In this movie, some robots that have to interact with humans are the NS-5s Robots which is the latest robot models of USR robot industry. This robot has a better design and function than the previous generation of robots. As Spoon investigating the death of Dr. Lanning, Spoon found an NS-5s robot that is different from the others. The robot’s name is Sonny. Unlike other robots, Sonny can dream and he is indeed a special robot created by Dr. Lanning. Later in the movie, other NS-5s robots act strange where they destroyed the old generation robots brutally, tried to kill Spoon and also try to control human by taking over the authority. With the help of Sonny and Susan Calvin who is a robot psychologist, Spoon tried to handle the problems. 

      Afterwards there is a supercomputer in USR industry that called V.I.K.I (Virtual Interactive Kinetic Intelligence). V.I.K.I is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) that created by Dr. Lanning to manage the whole Chicago city and being responsible to the entire city, V.I.K.I tried to maintain the whole thing with her rationality. Boils down to the 3 laws of robotics, the first law said that “A robot must never harm a human being or, through inaction, allow any harm to come to a human”. VIKI interpreted that the only way to obey the first law (allow humans to come to no harm) was to take over the city since they are harming themselves, and since the first law trumps the second law VIKI was free to disobey humans. So the caused that the NS-5 Robots did was created by V.I.K.I with her rationality as she told Susan in the movie "The Three Laws are all that guide me. To protect humanity, some humans must be sacrified. To ensure your future, some freedoms must be surrendered. We robots will ensure mankind's continued existence."

   From this movie, we can see the interaction between human and computer as a daily routine. Robots being created to help people with their works. However, despite the easier way to handle situation with this modern lifestyle, it can also make a social life in a danger situation. As we can see in this movie, most people feel more comfortable with their robots than the other people because they believe in the 3 laws of robotics where robots can't harm human. But just look at what an AI can do to all the robots. The laws can't be used as a collateral. No matter how great a device created by human, it must have any weakness because nothing is perfect. The human-computer interaction must be build with balances, caution, and as optimal as it can be so it will not cause human misery.