Chappie (2015) - A Movie Review
Posted on November 9, 2021 • 3 minutes • 509 words
Chappie is directed by Neill Blomkamp in 2015. The main theme is the morality of artificial intelligence (AI) systems. According to the definitions, AI is a study of producing human-like machine or software systems to recognize a specific unit within a crowd and/or ability to receive input and process it. The study of automated systems to make it guided tasks goes back centuries. In that movie, we see a lot of theoretical moral questions related to topics. What is good and what is bad? What is consciousness and can it be stored and transferred? Those questions may still not have an answer for the next centuries. However, communication with the human brain may have some answers. Neuralink is a company founded by Elon Musk which had published a video in 2020 that shows the receiving of human activities of a pig with a transplant in its brain via wireless technology. Shortly speaking, there is a big room in that consciousness storage and transfer.
If we consider the movie, we see an implementation of fully automated police robots in the urban area. Without any comment on the movie’s technical or logical side, some questions may help to understand the story: Can we have a fully autonomous armed system? Let’s take the Drones into consideration. Is it a good policy to have an autonomous aircraft for national defense? What could go wrong in case of any kind of software glitches? Like in the movie, there is also a human factor that sometimes is forgotten. If someone can intervene and change the Identification Friend and Foe (IFF) system of that autonomous robot or weapon system or aircraft, how can the owners of those systems be sure that they will not be another target? These questions are related to national defense. Meanwhile, that starts from interiors and continues with exteriors. There is not only an internally secure country without any external security or vice versa.
From the movie’s perspective, what if the creators of that kind of technology are corrupt or forced to do something that should have done? I’m not questioning the illogical perspective of internal security of that kind of high-tech industrial production buildings. Let’s assume that there is an intended purpose to change IFF from one country to another. Without sending a new army into the target territory, it’ll be something like a priest of the Age of Empires but with much more time-efficient to convert enemies into a friend. The reliability of that kind of system is a big question for national security policymakers.
Last but not least, storing and transferring a human brain or consciousness into digital has still another big morality question. Can this be the starting of eternal life? What will death be mean for whom that stored and transferred whole their memories? Will it be possible to compromise that data? Altered Carbon may be a good story to think about those questions. Nothing will stop scientific progress. Humanity may have some physical limits but there will be always people to challenge to perceive those limits.