A.I. Artificial Intelligence. The need to be loved.

This was in reply to a comment on IMDb. I posted it here first, because forums on IMDb sometimes tend to be cleaned up from threads.

I'd assume the makers of androids managed to gather and digitize some amount of brainwaves from humans, which data were then either constricted, or made free within certain baseline contexts (such as love, as in the case of David, or only a simulation of it, as it was with Gigolo Joe).

What you might be asking for is either the level of self-awareness of androids, or the extent to which their programming was free enough to be unpredictable in their actions to explore that self-awareness.

The movie offers what I see to be a dichotomy between the unique David's apparently self-serving and self-aware purpose of [wanting to be] "a real boy, so Mother can love me", that of needing to be loved; and the other less self-aware androids' selfless purpose of service to others. And how all this correlates with the human condition, which can vacillate around variations of these options: Most (well, nearly all) of us want to be loved, but what is the extent of service we are willing to give to others?

The story reveals that several androids became increasingly self-aware and were through various misshaps (intentional or otherwise) forced to become "free agents", but the hardware and programming of the less fortunate ones was limited; imagine people from the autistic spectrum, where their social skills are to some extent or other known to be less adaptive.

Here, Gigolo Joe was one of the few lucky ones to be not just self-aware but also reasonably adaptive. While David was all those things more by an order of magnitude, then the differentiator between David and Joe were experience, skills (both social and practical), heritage, and purpose. What held Joe back were heritage and somewhat constricted social skills which gave him so easily away; while David was aided by the 'more human' fortune of being in these respects a clean slate, and importantly, having an existential and non-materialistic purpose towards the person he related to.

David's primary uniqueness stood in having a (self-aware) purpose, wherein he was not aware of the fact that his being was there to satisfy a very similar (if not exactly the same) human desire — out of which happiness could ultimately be derived. Whereas Gigolo Joe knew precisely what women wanted, and even what would happen to humanity in the longer term.

The juxtaposition of the two shows the differences in how they sought to derive happiness from others. Incidentally, the happiness that either were wired to seek was also different.

While thinking more of it, the future androids in their evolution seemed to have found that very fine balance of satisfying the needs of one (David) and the many, without putting said needs into conflict with one another. This would follow how the early androids' relation to others, despite their being hardwired for service to others, was more, well, binary.

What was lacking in androids, both past and future, was consciousness, or how we humans understand it. Suppose the evolved androids finally managed to reach a level of primary consciousness, but not the subconsciousness, as some cosmological lore has it that in humans this is connected to upper densities of existence. (Not that real-life academics would take seriously or even corroborate, so you can consider it as crackpot science. I might as well add that religion often falls into that same place.)

That is why human consciousness was envied by future androids, so they needed David.