Film I Am Mother: Is Motherness the Last Bastion of Humanity?
When we think of other intelligent life forms that could be as smart or even smarter than human beings, how do we imagine them? Xenophanes, an ancient Greek philosopher, once said that if animals had hands and could produce works of art as human beings do, they would, then, fashion their gods in their own image.
We cannot but conceive of other realities from our perspective.
For this reason, when we keep our minds busy thinking about how other intelligent life forms would look and behave, we inevitably conceive of creatures that resemble us significantly
Certainly, in their physical appearance they can look quite different from us, but most, if not all, of the times, they end up being portrayed as behaving, in certain regards, like us. It is as if, when we think of these intelligent beings, we projected ourselves onto them.
When we think of other intelligent life forms, we anthropologize them. That is, we think of them in human terms.
They are,unavoidably, portrayed from our human perspective.
These ideas came into my mind two days ago, when I watched I Am Mother. At this point, I must give you a SPOILER ALERT! If you still haven’t seen this film and you are planning or would like to watch it, I recommend you continuing reading this text after making your own opinion about the movie first.
That said, what about this movie then?
The film features a futuristic tragic world where human beings have been practically erradicated from the surface of the planet. Apparently, this disastrous situation would have been brought about by a sort of super AI, whose operating system, which works in a similar fashion to human consciousness, resides in multiple robotic creatures that are now in control of the world.
The central story unfolds describing how this super AI also resides within a nurse-like robotic creature which takes care of a human little girl. This AI tries to make sure that this girl can develop well. So, not only will food be provided, but also a good education,as well as a sort of mimic of human affection. For this reason, the girl, who eventually becomes an adolescent in the movie, calls her as mother. And, in turn, the AI refers to her as her daughter.
At this point, I guess some people could be horrified about the idea of a possible scenario in which techonological products end up obtaining independence from their creators, in this case us, so they can eventually perform activities that we would characterize, now, as epitomizing humanity. How far are we going to go with our technological progress? Some people might ask. Will technological objects, in this case AI, ever be able to acquire motherness?
Currently, it is well known that AI is already surpassing human beings in many activities that were once considered as being paradigmatically human. Not only is AI excelling at complex reasoning activities, but also it is starting to create works of art. And although this latter aspect is still an ongoing debate, it is, nonetheless, a fact that day by day this technological object seems to resemble us more and more.
Is it, then, the case that we are trying to create this object, the AI, in our own image?
In any case, so far it had seemed that motherness was something uniquely human and,therefore, natural. But, is it really so?
We should be wary, for, as in many ancient myths is presented, once the gods created the first human-like creatures in their own image, these latter became arrogant and attempted to overthrow them.
