Modularity and Reuse: Spielberg's AI (Artificial Intelligence)
There is a scene in Spielberg's Artificial Intelligence where androids refurbish
themselves with used parts before being sacrificed in a prejudicial affair of
our future Earth. There are several things to notice in this scene. One is that
the androids immediately function more fully once they have new parts. This demonstrates
modularity and reuse. Modularity, in that the hand, the eye, physically fit the
new android owner, and reuse, in that these are used parts in a recycling or
garbage bin for robots
When an android in the film holds a new hand to his dismembered wrist, the wires
or veins of the hand are either compatible, or incompatible. If this were a computer
program of today it would involve, under the hood, the following scenario. How
the hand works, its programming, is hidden from the android. Its program has
specific functionality messages that it can send to its hand object, i.e. how
to do stuff. All hand objects deployed across different brand androids have the
same protocol: routines for handling the functionality messages. Only the original
programmer knows the specific implementation of a hand. It is in the hand itself,
rather than in the android, from which it is hidden.
The hand has the technological instructions on "how" it actually
makes a fist, grips a baseball bat, points its index finger. The Android
has a routine
through which it sends a make a fist instruction to the make a fist routine of
the hand. It only needs to know that it is asking for a fist. It does not need
to know the technological process behind the robot's pulling its fingers in towards
its palm.This allows any hand with a make fist routine to be used by an android.
Another thing to be considered: the meaning that results from the combination
of technology originally designed for contrasting, either in appearance or function,purposes. We see in AI a male android who substitutes a female jawbone for his
own worn mouth. It "works", but the connotation is of a lack of sexual
identity, or a lack of understanding of distinctions, cultural and biological,
of male and female, which references contemporary debates on gender. In a sense,
this event metaphorically acts as scientific "proof" of the conditions
of constructed gender. It also allows Spielberg to pose the question of
human like difference between the the male and female androids.
The idea behind the construction of gender in this scene of the android mouth
substitution is that the red lips of the new mouth on the male android also demonstrate
the concept of modularity: the definition of femininity based upon the tradition
of women of painting their lips is all contained within the new mouth or jawbone.
The male android simply has instructions for opening, closing and chewing. The
android mouth for the female robot was manufactured with the lips that way off
the production line at the robot factory, and it is because of the mechanical
components inside which are oblivious to gender, that the android is oblivious
to his appropriation of gender as well. This assembly-line construction of gender
in turn causes us to reflect on why nature creates beings in the way that it
does, and whether nature's beings have modular and reusable parts.
On the history of
modularity
