Movie Review – Artificial Intelligence (What does the idea of eternity mean?)

After watching Steven Spielberg’s movie Artificial Intelligence, we reflect on the idea of eternity.

 

In the American science fiction film Artificial Intelligence (A.I.), directed by Steven Spielberg, the main character David is a robot, but he is capable of love. He doesn’t just mimic the emotions associated with human love; he retains memories of his loved ones and can actually feel the emotions associated with love. There is no difference in every aspect of what happens to a human being when they love. Rather, the nature of his artificial circuitry allows David to preserve all the things associated with love longer than a human would. The flip side of this ability to make love last longer is that David’s love has a fatal flaw: once it’s imprinted on him, it can never be erased. In the movie, David is adopted by Monica, who has an only son who is barely surviving on medical technology. David’s love for his adoptive mother, Monica, is inputted as intended, but soon afterward, Monica’s only son miraculously recovers and returns home, only to be abandoned by the Monicas. One day, David remembers the story of Pinocchio, a fairy tale Monica once told him, and he begins to search for the Blue Fairy, hoping that if she can turn him into a human boy, he can be loved by Monica again, just as the Blue Fairy turned Pinocchio into a human boy. Unfortunately, all David can find is a statue of the Blue Fairy in an old amusement park that has been submerged under the sea. But as David stares at the statue, he whispers to it, asking it to make him human. For 2000 years.
You wouldn’t believe it if it wasn’t a movie, but David does see Monica again 2000 years later. In fact, it’s his decision that brings him back to her. David is forced to make a choice. If he chooses to see Monica, he can spend only one day with her, after which she will cease to exist and he will never see her again. If you choose not to see Monica, you will not be able to see her in that moment, but her existence will remain in the fabric of space-time. Given the choice, which is by no means an easy one, David chooses to spend the day with Monica, and the rest is history. He spends the day with Monica, alone with her, and then closes his eyes beside her as she falls asleep, never to wake up again. And that’s how the movie ends.

 

 

If I had to choose the best scene of the movie for me, I would definitely choose the last scene of the movie I just mentioned, because I don’t think I’ve ever watched a movie where the image of an eternal moment was as strong as in this scene. But when I tried to think about the context in which I felt the image of eternity in this scene, I couldn’t come up with a clear answer, and at this point I questioned whether I really had a clear perception of eternity and what I could say about it.
Many people are familiar with the basic meaning of the word eternity, which is ‘timeless’. However, when we look at human life, there is no part of it that can be said to be timeless. As living beings, we have a lifespan. And, of course, it can’t exceed a finite amount of time. Therefore, everything that has to do with a human being can only have real meaning within the time scale of a human lifespan. In other words, the idea of timelessness has no meaning for a human being in terms of physical time. At the level of humanity as a whole, even if we were to extend the length of time as much as possible, one human life after another, there is no guarantee that we will reach the end of finite time, let alone infinite time. Instead, it would be much more effective to mention specific numbers like 50 years, 1000 years, or 3000 years, which are large enough, but still have practical meaning for humans.
Given this situation from the perspective of physical time, how did the word eternity come about and how did humans come to have the idea of eternity? To get some clues, I looked up words that are often used in conjunction with the word eternity, and the first word that comes to mind is love. In fact, if you remove the element of love between David and Monica in the final scene of A.I., I might not have gotten such a strong impression from the scene. But isn’t love usually one of the most prominent emotional aspects of the word, and can we assume that the idea of eternity is deeply emotional? If we relate the idea of eternity and the word eternity to the emotional aspect, we can say that the idea of eternity is associated with a state of indescribable emotion, and the word eternity is an adverb that indicates the indescribable magnitude of emotion.
From a biological perspective, it seems reasonable that the idea of eternity is closely related to emotions. When one entity communicates its deepest feelings (as long as they are positive) to another entity, it can serve to strengthen the relationship between the two. And as the relationship between the two entities strengthens, both entities benefit biologically by increasing their chances of survival. The idea of eternity was invented as a way to communicate one’s deepest feelings. Whether or not those feelings will actually last for a very long time afterward is a matter for another time. In other words, it doesn’t really matter whether or not time is actually infinite as long as the idea of eternity is used at that moment.
Starting with a question about the impression a movie made on me, I ended up arbitrarily defining the idea of eternity. My conclusion is that “eternity” is a concept that relies on the idea of time to express emotional intensity. And according to this, the pure and great love between David and Monica expressed in the final scene of A.I. is the direct context in which I got the impression of an eternal moment from that scene.