How realistic is the film’s artificial intelligence

By Rachelle Riddle

《超能查派》是一部人工智能的电影，展示了人类对人工智能未来的看法。

The new film Chappie features an artificially intelligent（人工智能的）robot that becomes self-aware and must learn to distinguish the competing forces of kindness and dishonesty in a human world.Directed by Neill Blomkamp,the film takes place in the South African city o f Johannesburg.The movie's events occur when the city has organized a force of police robots to fight crime.One of these robots,named“Chappie”,receives an upgrade that makes him self-aware.

Existing AI computer systems modeled on the human brain are able to learn from experience,but Chappie goes beyond what current systems can do,because he has human's feelings.There's a moment during the film when he says, “I am Chappie.” “That statement,if that's truly result of a reasoning process and not trained,is huge,”Wolfgang Fink,a physicist and AI expert at Caltech and the University of Arizona,said. “The machine would be able to distinguish between self and nonself,which is a key quality of any truly self－governing system,” Fink said.

To create Chappie, actor Sharlto Copley performed the part,and a team of animators“painted” the robot over his performance.But unlike many other films with special effects,Chappie did not use motion capture,which involves an actor wearing a special suit with reflective markers attached and having cameras capture the performer's movements.Instead,the animators did that by hand.Because Chappie is a robot.Chappie is given an expressive pair of “ears”,a forehead bar and a jaw bar,which could express a fairly wide range of emotions.

In the film,Chappie's “humanity” is sharply different from the cruelty of Hugh Jackman's character Vincent Moore,who is developing a robot called the“Moose” in opposition to artificial intelligence.Jackman himself takes a more positive view of AI.“I'm a firm believer that the pull for human beings is toward the good generally outweighing （超过） the bad,”Jackman said.But Stephen Hawking have sounded alarms about the dangers of artificial intelligence,calling it humanity's “biggest threat”.If it gets out of control,we will have created a monster.