The Revealingly Flawed AI of "Chappie"

Chappie (left) meets his non-AI counterpart and contemplates--just a little--what it is that distinguishes conscious matter from unconscious matter. (Credit: Sony Pictures) What is consciousness? That question has been fertile ground for millennia of philosophical debates, centuries of scientific research, and decades of juicy movie plots, going back at least to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. This week it gets a workout yet again in Chappie, a new movie directed by Neill Blomkamp (District 9) and starring sci-fi stalwarts Sigourney Weaver and Hugh Jackman along with—less predictably—Dev Patel, best known as the star of Slumdog Millionaire. Broadly speaking, there are three classes of machine intelligence fiction. Class One assumes that human consciousness is unique and can exist in a machine only if that machine is part human (RoboCop is a prime example). Class Two assumes that machines can mimic many aspects of human consciousness but lack the essential soul (the Terminator movies are a modern archetype). Class Three treats consciousness as a solvable programming problem: Put in the right code, or give the wrong code some kind of mysterious scramble, and a conscious machine emerges. Familiar examples of Class Three movies include Her, AI: Artificial Intelligence and, er, Short Circuit. Chappie falls squarely into Class Three, with all of the dramatic potentials and conceptual pitfalls it entails. I spoke with Blomkamp and his cast about why they went down this path. Their commentary explains a lot about the movie's take on artificial intelligence and its confusing scientific politics. Chappie turns out to be a great case study in the challenges of squeezing an expansive concept into the tight confines of mainstream Hollywood entertainment. If you’ve seen the trailer you get the basic concept. Chappie is set in a near-future South Africa, where the government has decided to address rampant crime by introducing a squadron of robotic police officers. So far so good: This is a classic forward-spin on existing ideas and technologies. Simple battlefield robots already exist and have been tested in limited deployment, and the company that builds Chappie is patterned knowingly on South African arms company DENEL. I also note that the Chappie design looks similar to the humanoid robots that participated in an ongoing DARPA robotics challenge. But in true Short Circuit style, a rogue element emerges: One of the military robots becomes self-aware, and takes off on a totally new mission to understand his identity. In this case, the change occurs not via a lightning strike, but through the deliberate actions of Deon Wilson, a genius computer programmer (Patel). And here's where Chappie goes intriguingly awry, as it dips into some common sci-fi tropes.