(Jett and Gareth are at the Full Frame Documentary Festival in Durham, North Carolina. For the next few days these posts are their first impressions of films screened there)
Mechanical Love / Directed by Phie Ambo
Am I alive? Am I sentient? Can I love, and be loved in returned? These are some of the many questions that ‘Mechanical Love’, the astounding documentary about robot research and development in Japan, provoked in me.
I say astounding not for the qualities of the documentary itself, (which is well shot and cut, through could benefit from some trimming – it’s an hour long film that feels padded at seventy-nine minutes), but for the subject matter. This is the world of A.I. and Blade Runner come to life.
The pic alternates between two strands:
* the development of a near-human looking ‘telepresence’ machine being developed by Adaptive Machine Systems’ Professor Ishiguro at Osaka University that does not seem to be successful at communicating a real sense of life to humans that interact with it, (which is fine – it’s a work in a progress – a machine for creating questions rather than answering them).
* the deployment and use in German and Danish nursing homes of ‘Paro‘, (see images in this post), an artificial seal designed to provide comfort, and healing interaction to children and patients with dementia.
You will come away from ‘Mechanical Love’ absolutely convinced of two things:
* in our lifetimes robots will surrounds us, becoming our companions and caretakers
* we will identify with, and project upon these machines human or animal like emotions and intentions
What will this mean for us? How will the coming personal robot revolution change our interactions with each other and what responsibilities will we have to these machines? This is the territory explored in our fiction: In 2001, in Blade Runner and in A.I. ‘Machine Love’ shows us that we need to be asking these questions now – with our aging population, (for the first time the elderly will outnumber the young in many of our technologically advanced cultures), the future is fast, fast, fast rushing in.
Stanley Kubrick believed that computers were our natural and eventual offspring/replacements. Watching ‘Machine Love’ I began to get a strange prickly feeling – the feeling that he was right.
‘Mechanical Love’ may never come to a theatre near you but if you have any interest in the future, (or is it non-future?), of our species that you should find a way to see it.
