A. I: Artificial Intelligence

In the movie, A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, by Steven Spielberg, there are two dominant groups of beings: flesh-and-blood humans, and nuts-and-bolts humans (also known as mechas, or mechanical people). In this dystopian future-world, humans produce and destroy mechas as they like because to some, a mecha is only a machine and cannot feel emotions or pain, even if they can show outward manifestations of emotions and pain. David is a mechanical child that is programmed to not have this limitation; he is programmed to imprint on one person and love them unconditionally (A.I.: Artificial Intelligence; ~5 mins). David imprints on a woman named Monica. David, though programmed to seem like he loves Monica, seems to truly love her as much as any …show more content…
By conscious, I mean that David is aware of himself and of his thoughts and emotions. Thinking implies processing and reacting to information, and being able to make decisions based off of that information, which David consistently does, and sometimes in deciding to do something goes against his programming. Due to the limits of space, I’m going to focus only on the actions of David, and so will not be directly addressing the actions of the humans, or the other mechas in the movie A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, other than when they relate to David. My central claim is two-faceted: first, that David is proven conscious because he is able to respond to situations with emotion, and then act on those emotions; second, that David proves his ability to think by going beyond or against what the assumed limits of his programming …show more content…
David is aware that he has no need to eat food, but one night at dinner he decides to eat spinach after being wordlessly challenged by Martin to do so, despite being warned by Teddy (an old mecha teddy-bear that Martin used to play with) that doing so would break his mechanics (A.I.: Artificial Intelligence; 36 mins). This scene to me is both an example of David being conscious and thinking on his own instead of just relying on programing. David seems to believe that if he is more like Martin, then Monica will love him more, and having Monica love him more is his ultimate goal in life. By eating food like Martin, despite knowing he is a mecha and so eating food is problematic, David actively decides to eat food in order to seem human. David is showing that he is conscious of the fact that he is different from a flesh-and-blood human, and is also showing his conscious desire to be more like a flesh-and-blood human. David is also showing that he is capable of thinking on his own, apart from his programming and in this case, in opposition to his programming – having a mecha that is programmed to put itself in a state where it needs repair would be like having a person who does things intentionally to break a bone, I just