Which Movie About AI Is The Most Accurate?

Andrew is a robot butler who begins feeling emotions of connectedness to the family he serves. This is explained as a glitch in his programming, but the family decides to keep Andrew as he is.

Over the course of two hundred years, Andrew acquires several updates which make him appear more human, eventually swapping out his mechanical parts for synthetic organs, gradually becoming more humanlike (he even falls in love with the granddaughter of his first owner). Ultimately, the government rules that Andrew is a real human being.

Why It’s Partially Accurate

The first act of Bicentennial Man, in which an android serves as a housekeeper, is considered one of the best Hollywood representations of what scientists are striving for AI to become. We already have this to some degree with home operating systems like refrigerators that can order groceries and automatic vacuum cleaners.

Where Bicentennial Man gets it wrong, though, is the notion that Andrew would strive to become more human. While this is sentimental, it’s very implausible that an inorganic construct such as Andrew would see any benefit in transitioning into an organic life form. It would essentially be a downgrade.

The makers of Bicentennial Man made the same egocentric mistake as the makers of the film A.I.: Artificial Intelligence: the giant assumption that instead of androids seeing us and them as separate but equal species, they will see us as being better than them and therefore want to be more like us.