As an emotion thought-provoking movie we can analyse A.I. by Steven Spielberg as a true guide for everyone interested in emotion and computers.
A.I. makes us believe that the final frontier really separating us from "meca" stands in EMOTION. We can even evolve this to cloning arguments and assume the same about clones versus originals.
Emotion is the real and only identification of human individualism.
About the end of the movie, I’ve now thought about two different depicted situations:
a) We can see the final characters as aliens from outer space. Explorers in search of new forms of life, historians of the universe. The planet Earth is showed as a dead planet without anything alive. And these characters could be only reconstructing our planet history through DNA. David was the only delegate of our existence, and the unique persistent specimen able to unveil the secret of how a human mind worked in the past. In the end we were not alone; we weren’t unique in the universe and neither the most important thing alive in the universe but only a part of it, a race that have been extinct like all the animals that are now disappearing from the face of the earth.
b) The characters as the third generation of 'meca', 'living' alone on planet earth. No humans left. Human bodies were suppressed from the earth and only the minds transferred to 'meca' could have survived. Mind without organic bodies, the total liberation of mind could survive and became immortal. In the end, the 'meca' minds could be seen as the 'organa' minds. We can even think that our minds without our body could become peaceful, comprehensive, intelligent, sublime, supra-human as the depicted characters. Therefore our body is portrayed as the one to eliminate, our enemy, the great obstacle to human evolution. Against (a) we can see 'meca' as our unconscious development in order to avoid, even as mind only, the human race extinction nothing more than the most important biological function of species.
In (b) perspective we have a paradox, if we follow the state of the art of emotions studies. Emotions can’t exist in humans without body because emotions aren’t cerebral but bodily dependent.
This leads us to think that in the future AI must develop to a point in were it can be doable to create 'representations' of human body emotions and inject them in some container/memory inside a 'meca'.
But even if we do that, how can a 'meca' elaborate connections between representations o human body defences of life (emotions) and an artificial mind that doesn't need the body to survive or avoid extinction?
And now I arrived at my first thought about all this that in a way is in consonance with Schopenhauer philosophy.
Without death at the end of the lifeline, why exist?