MOMMY DON'T LEAVE ME

So. Artificial Intelligence. Weird movie.

I guess I'll just come right out and say it. What makes us human? According to A.I., the ability to dream is what makes us human. The ability to have goals and work towards them. That makes us fundamentally different from machines, who can only repeat the same pattern over and over again.

So I decided, at the end of A.I., that David was human. Not literally; he was manufactured, not born. But he was human all the same. His love for his mother was genuine and real, because it carried him all the way to "The End of the World." If he hadn't truly loved her, if he hadn't truly wanted her to love him in return, then he wouldn't have bothered.

It seems clear to me that David was supposed to be something entirely different from the other machines in the movie. Nowhere is this made clearer than with the line, "Mecha don't plead for their lives! That's a boy!" Because it seemed to be very true. The robots didn't plead for their lives, because they had no goals. And because they had no goals they had no self-preservation instinct. Their lives didn't mean anything to themselves. But when David was staring "death" in the face, he pleaded. Why? Because he had to become a real boy. He couldn't let himself be killed before he had achieved his goal of being a good son. His love must have been true indeed.

Some critics called the character of Gigolo Joe "useless" but I think he was very necessary, so we could see the difference between mechanical "love" and the genuine, powerful love that David was capable of feeling. Joe was programmed to love and so he could only repeat a set pattern; David was different. He set his own pattern and followed it through to its conclusion. Even after his mother dumped him in the forest, he determined his own destiny. He made his own path. Whereas Joe was content to go wherever the wind blew him. He had no dreams. He didn't want anything more than to "please" girls physically; that's what he was made for. But David wanted much more than that: he wanted to exceed his programming. He wanted to exceed his own machine-ness and become human. He wanted to defy the limits placed upon him by his "birth."

No other mecha in the movie demonstrated this. That means that David was fundamentally different from "regular" machines, but not fundamentally different from humans. I'm going to go with human.