Wall-e and the Issues with A.I.

First off, Pixar excelled with Wall-E. For those who haven't seen it, here's a synopsis: The human race, after having polluted the Earth, tried to have robots clean it up whilst they all lived in a gigantic spaceship called the "Axiom," which is entirely run by computers. Humans become so lazy that they float around in chairs, nom fast-food, and are surrounded by entertaining screens all day-- the bone structure, over these hundreds of years, has nearly entirely vanishes, as it's no longer necessary.

All the humans think that they're just waiting until the clean-up is finished-- they'll return eventually. Wall-E, the last clean-up robot, brings before the captain a plant from planet Earth, to show that it is again inhabitable. However, hundreds of years earlier, the main auto-pilot computer, named "Otto," received an order not to return...

Here's a 3-minute scene showing Otto's interaction with the squishy human Captain:

Otto's comportment in the above video is concerning, and I think of it immediately when talking about Artificial Intelligence. One blatant flaw of A.I. is the lack of human reason. Computers, at least within our imagination, can still only do what we program them to do. When the President ordered/programmed Otto, hundreds of years ago, not to return to Earth, this was unchangeable. Although the Captain argues that he wants to "live," rather than merely "surviving," Otto sees this as "irrelevant." Otto lacks the capacity of rationale in the face of morality/sentimentality, which society seems to portray all A.I. as such (cue cold, computerized voices).

This kid's movie showed me that singular, important concept: A.I. cannot equal the human mind. Even if all intelligence of the scholastic/functional kind reaches it, it cannot cope with basic moral/sentimental concepts (or, at the very least, we don't portray A.I. as such). This is because morality is not truly systematic-- different people value different things and different outcomes may be correct with different rationalization. It is not something that one can simply program into a computer because you cannot calculate it.