[Nick Zwar]

Yeah, very good dialog. “Can you?” Nailed that. 🙂

(I saw the movie when it came out; maybe I should revisit it one of these days. I remember there were some things I really liked about it — like the robot design and basic setup and concept of the film — but I also do remember that it was back in the day quite puzzling to see a movie that was both called and based on Isaac Asimov’s “I, Robot” just to tell exactly the type of story (robots as a menace turning against the creator) that Asimov explicitly tried to get away from in his book and stories. Nevertheless, the movie retained several Asimov ideas and concepts.)

The interesting thing is, of course we all knew lots of robots from science fiction stories… take, for example, C3PO. I always wondered how a machine that can communicate in millions of forms of communication, including Bocce, cannot do some simple task, like impersonating a deity, because it goes against its programming. It’s amazing that many of these age old sci-fi tropes of computers doing this or that and conversing fluently in English suddenly cannot do a simple task because it goes against their “programming”, but now that I work more extensively with A.I., I find that it reacts exactly like all these old robots and computers predicted they would react.