Director Neil Blomkamp’s Chappie, about robot who becomes a high-tech version of Pinocchio, officially hits theaters today. He’s a robot who can think and feel—and a far more humane depiction of artificial intelligence than we see in, say, The Terminator.
But in a way, this sort of AI actually bothers me more.
The raging self-aware machines in the Terminator movies or maybe the upcoming Avengers: Age of Ultron are bad robots. They may have some sort of cognitive awareness, but they lack that complicated stew of emotion and morality that seems intrinsic to a human soul.
But Chappie—at least from what I can tell in the trailers—is different. He processes the world like a toddler at first, learning from the humans around him. “He’s just a kid,” someone says. “He could be the next step in evolution,” his creator insists. “I am alive,” Chappie himself tells us. And that forces us to ask what, exactly, alive means. And that notion can be pretty challenging.
Spirituality is an integral part of consciousness for most of us. Even many atheists and agnostics say they feel like spiritual beings. And most of us have a need to ask the big questions: Why am I here? Who made me? Where do I go after I die? We’ve asked these questions for thousands of years.
For Chappie, those questions seem to have some pretty basic answers: He was “made” as a police robot, and then remade through the programming of Deon Wilson. And when he dies, his body will probably be recycled like an old iPad or something. And the same could be said of us. Atheists will say there’s no great mystery to us. Biologically, our bodies are a bunch of chemicals and electrical currents. Those bodies will eventually stop working, and they’ll be taken care of in some pragmatic manner.
And yet, we’re not satisfied with such answers. We know there’s more to it than that. We enjoy things we have no biological business enjoying: music, art, a good joke. We love when it makes no logical sense to love. We feel a keen sense of right and wrong that extends beyond society and culture. And we feel a hunger for a truth unseen.
This is the stuff of a soul, I think—especially that hunger. That yearning to know and love and be loved by our Creator.
And I wonder … would Chappie look beyond Deon Wilson, the mortal and imperfect instrument of his making, and search for a meaning and purpose beyond his programming? And if so, what does that mean? Would Chappie find meaning in a church? Would he wonder about God? Where would his questing mind take him?
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