I am still mad about what they did to I, Robot.
It's a film based on a short story collection, so they could have made it about anything. They did read the stories, clearly, there are aesthetics and bits of plotlines from them. They might have read Caves of Steel, too. Anyway they looked at that, and in particular the character of Dr. Susan Calvin, and said fuck it, let's make a movie about Will Smith fighting HAL and its army of Terminators.
I get that many of the original stories stand completely alone and are mostly setup for a just so punchline. It also came out before the currently expiring age of prestige television. In the age of Black Mirror it would be impossible to sell I, Robot as high-concept because its ideas were foundational to everything that came since and would be primitive by comparison today.
I understand all of that. It doesn't change the fact that instead of a story of a female engineer at the top of her field giving the message that robots and AI are tools that can work to enhance the capabilities of humanity, we got a standard "inhuman AI is scary but anthropomorphized robots are conditionally OK" story.
Now here we are in the middle of a surge of statistical models that are being called "AI" for marketing reasons. I think that the message that we could use such tools as tools and not replacements for humans would be very valuable. Of course, in practice there are lots of capitalists who would love nothing more than to replace humans with statistical models that can't unionize, but that's a social problem, not a problem with "AI". The fear and anger is being directed at the wrong target, and it's at least in part because of a long history of fiction like the film of I, Robot.
