Original subtitles

Open the pod bay doors, HAL.

I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.

2001 had a profound impact on my life.

It's all about HAL 9000.

"2001" was an extraordinary breakthrough for the genre.

Science fiction has always been about

great technology going wrong.

I'll be back.

That image, Schwarzenegger as the Terminator,

it's a perfect nightmare.

You have two of the most popular A.I. characters

in pop culture.

At the time I said, "Don't be afraid of the robots.

The robots are our friends."

Conception of what robots will be is directly,

umbilically connected to our idea of them as an underclass.

Replicants are like any other machine.

They're either a benefit or a hazard.

"Blade Runner" was so artistic.

If you're creating an A.I.,

one of the things you're definitely going to leave out

is emotion.

"Battlestar Galactica" is about humanity's greatest weakness.

You're just a bunch of machines after all.

The inability to see others as worthy as ourselves.

Our machines have been the stuff of dreams

and of nightmares.

The question is, can man and machine forge a future...

together?

Hello, I'm here.

Hi.

They call it science fiction,

but it's really about technology.

It's about the machines.

You've done a lot of science-fiction movies.

You've seen all kinds of different machines,

intelligent machines.

You've played an intelligent machine.

I think that what's interesting is

when you have been involved in the business

as long as I have, what is so unbelievable

is that as I've done

"Terminator" movies one after the next

and you see something starting out kind of

what is called science fiction

and then all of a sudden,

it becomes kind of science reality.

Yeah. I think science fiction has always been

about great technology going wrong.

It's like how A.I. might be a threat to humanity.

I'm a friend of Sarah Connor.

Can't see her. She's making a statement.

I'll be back.

That image,

Schwarzenegger as the Terminator,

Skynet sending this emissary,

quasi-human into our midst,

it's a perfect nightmare of the machine catastrophe.

The old warning about the machines rising up.

It's very archetypal and very brutal and very perfect.

When I first thought of the idea for the Terminator...

How did you come up with that idea?

It came from a dream.

I had a dream image

of a chrome skeleton walking out of a fire.

And I thought, "What if he was a cyborg

and he looked like a man

and was indistinguishable from a man until the fire?"

And what would be the purpose of that thing?

He was representing

a much more powerful intelligence,

-the soldier sent by Skynet from the future. -Right.

"Terminator" presents

this vision of a future where Skynet,

this computer that has become self-aware,

decides, "Well, I'm going to protect myself

and the only way to do that is to destroy

the very people who created me," which is us.

Skynet is not the first all-powerful computer.

This trope goes back to Robert Heinlein's

"The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress"

The Forbin Project"

and even up to "WarGames," the WOPR.

But part of what makes the Terminator so scary

is that it is relentless

and it will not stop until it achieves its objective.

I remember the first day's dailies.

There was a 100-millimeter lens shot

where you just kind of pull up

and you're looking like this.

-Right. -And we're all just going, "Yes!

This is fantastic."

But here's the interesting thing about it,

I went to talk to you about Reese.

Yeah.

This is the hero,

and I wanted to continue on playing heroes.

Yeah.

And so we started talking a little bit about the movie,

and for some reason or the other,

not at all planned... Yeah.

On my part... Yeah.

I said, "Look, Jim."

I said, "The guy that plays the Terminator,

he really has to understand that he's a machine."

Exactly.

How important it is that whoever plays the Terminator

has to show absolutely nothing.

And the way he scans,

and the way the Terminator walks has to be machine-like,

and yet there has to be not one single frame

where he has human behavior.

In the middle of this,

I'm looking at you and thinking,

"You know, the guy's kind of big, like a bulldozer,

and nothing could stop him. It would be fantastic."

Exactly. Yeah.

And so, afterwards you said,

"So, why don't you play the Terminator?"

Yeah.

And I looked at you, and I said,

In the first film,

the Terminator is designed to kill.

In "Terminator 2,"

the Terminator was programmed to protect,

not destroy.

Action.

And now we're going to make "Terminator 2."

The hardest part of that movie, though,

was convincing you

that playing a good guy was a good idea.

It threw me off first when I read the script

and then realized that I'm not anymore

that kind of killing machine.

I thought that if we could distill him down to this idea

of just relentlessness

and take out the evil and put good in its place,

it's interesting that the same character

worked as a bad guy

and as a good guy, same character.

Absolutely.

And now we've got to have a bigger, badder Terminator

that could kick the Terminator's ass.

So what was that?

I was convinced I was the baddest mother

walking on the planet,

and you were gonna believe it.

I got a call from my agent

saying they we're looking for an intense presence.

I'm a hell of a lot smaller than Arnold Schwarzenegger,

and I knew that you were just going to have to buy

that this thing was unstoppable.

And then I started thinking of pursuit

and what does that look like.

And then physically, I just started taking on the mannerisms

of, you know, what does an eagle look like?

He's fierce, and he looks like he's coming at you,

and you start realizing...

Boom! Right at you.

It's like a Buick.

Get down.

You know, it's like, shoom!

The moment where we actually clinch for the first time,

Arnold wanted to kind of pick me up over his head

and slam me into the walls and throw me around a little bit.

So, it's like this is the first time

you've had to deal with evil

'cause Terminators don't fight Terminators.

Right.

And I remember Jim specifically saying,

"You can't do that. He's stronger than you are."

"He's more powerful. He's faster."

He can just dominate the T-800,

who is an endo-skeleton with, you know, fake skin over him.

Whereas I'm just a mimetic polyalloy liquid metal.

Much more dense...

A superior machine.

The T-1000 is the robot's concept of a robot.

And it's like if a robot was trying to create

a better version of itself, what would it do?

And it's like, "Well, it would create something that's smooth

and can move freely and still indestructible."

You can read "Terminator 2" almost as a war

between old special effects and new special effects.

That's the beautiful kind of irony

about the "Terminator" movies.

They used cutting-edge technology

more effectively than any other movies,

but they're about warnings about technology.

We're not going to make it, are we?

People, I mean.

It's in your nature to destroy yourselves.

The plot of the "Terminator" films, I thought, we're always

fighting against this robot from the future,

but really what we're doing is we're fighting the humans

who keep making this robot possible.

As long as humans are aware that we have the potential

to create a machine that can control the Earth

and make us powerful, we're going to keep doing it

and we're fighting our own nature to create this Skynet

and humans won't stop doing it.

We are really the persistent villain

that keeps making these movies happen.

I don't think we could have anticipated

where we are now 30 some years later

where Skynet is the term that everyone uses

when they're talking about an artificial intelligence

that turns against us.

Part of it I think is... Is there's a feeling

you get before it rains

and you know it's gonna rain.

And you get that feeling about certain moments

in technological development

where you know something is gonna happen very soon.

And I think there's a general consensus now

that we're in that moment before it rains.

Now, maybe that moment takes 10 years,

maybe it takes 20 years,

but there's gonna be a moment

and it may not have a happy ending.

And there's no rehearsal.

That's right, there's no take 2.

No, this is it.

Yeah.

HAL, you have an enormous responsibility on this mission.

Let me put it this way, Mr. Amer.

No 9000 computer has ever made a mistake

or distorted information.

-"2001" had a profound impact... -Yeah, me too.

On my life and my daily life.

It was the first time I went to a movie

where I really felt like

I was having a religious experience.

I watched the film 18 times in its first couple years

of release, all in theaters.

I remember at one, a guy ran down the aisle

toward the screen screaming,

"It's God. It's God."

And he meant it in that moment.

And I had a guy in my theater

who actually walked up to the screen with his arms out

and he walked through the screen.

That must have blown people's minds.

People were blown out

because the person disappeared into the screen

during Star Gate, of all times.

Everybody thinks of it as a space drama.

At its core,

it's really about an artificial intelligence.

-It's all about HAL. -HAL 9000.

-It's HAL 9000. -Yeah.

I got my chance to work with Stanley Kubrick

and Arthur Clarke on "2001: A Space Odyssey"

at a very young age.

I was 23 years old.

When we created HAL, we didn't have any computers.

There were no personal computers available to us.

There were giant mainframe computers,

but it was with punch cards and chads and all kinds of stuff.

It was not very visual.

And I had to kind of develop a style

that I thought was credible.

He sparked people's imagination with this film

and then they made it happen.

-Hello, Frank! -Happy birthday, darling.

Happy birthday.

Individual TVs in the back

of your airplane seat, the iPad.

You know, the iPod is called the iPod because of...

Open the pod bay doors, HAL.

"2001" was an extraordinary breakthrough for the genre.

The picture is being done in such a gigantic scope.

The centrifuge is so realistic and so unusual.

After a while, you begin to forget that you're an actor,

you begin to really feel like an astronaut.

Working with Stanley Kubrick blew my mind.

You just were aware that you were in the presence of genius.

I don't think I have ever seen

anything quite like this before.

HAL in a sense

is the machine that controls the whole ship,

but he's another crewmember from our point of view.

We don't think in terms of,

"I'm dealing with a computer here."

That's a very nice rendering, Dave.

Maybe because of that human voice.

I mean, HAL has a perfectly normal inflection

when he speaks to us.

I've wondered whether you might be having

some second thoughts about the mission?

How do you mean?

What does it mean to have a robot

who's basically running the ship that supports your life?

That's a lot of trust to place in a machine.

The key point in the film occurs when Bowman says...

Well, as far as I know,

no 9000 computer's ever been disconnected.

Well, no 9000 computer has ever fouled up before.

Well, I'm not so sure what he'd think about it.

And HAL 9000 is reading their lips.

At that point, we recognize HAL 9000

has some imperative that it must survive.

I know that you and Frank were planning to disconnect me,

and I'm afraid that's something I cannot allow to happen.

And at that point, it's no longer a machine.

It is a being.

The danger artificial intelligence poses

is the power to unleash results that we hadn't anticipated.

HAL 9000 does what we see the apes

in the beginning of the movie do,

he commits murder.

We like to stereotype robots

as entities of pure logic,

but of course in "2001," it all goes horribly wrong

and we have to kill the robot.

Just what do you think you're doing, Dave?

HAL's death scene

is such a wonderfully perverse moment

because it is unbearably poignant

watching him disintegrate and regress.

Bell laboratories was experimenting

with voice synthesis around the time of "2001."

One of the very earliest voice synthesis experiments

was "Daisy, Daisy" performed by an IBM computer.

And because Arthur Clarke is kind of a super geek,

he wanted to actually use that,

and he encouraged Kubrick to use that very thing

because it led to kind of historical credibility

to the whole thing that HAL in the process of being killed

or lobotomized or dying would regress to his birth.

You know, it's really hard to make a technology.

It's really hard to design A.I.

So much thinking, so many brilliant minds

have to go into it.

But even harder than creating artificial intelligence

is learning how to contain it, learning how to shut it off.

I mean, Hal will exist in probably

in our lifetimes, I would think.

I think so, too. It's scary.

Elon Musk continues to predict that World War III

will not be a nuclear holocaust,

it will be a kind of mechanized takeover.

Yeah, and Stephen Hawking's been saying similar things.

That's pretty spooky because that pretty much says

that against our will, something smarter than us,

who can beat us at chess,

will use this world as a chessboard

and will checkmate us completely out of existence.

Unfortunately, most depictions of robots

in science fiction have been really negative,

very much depictions of rampaging robots

engaged in a desperate struggle with humans

to decide who shall own the fate of the Earth and the universe

and that's part of a very long tradition in science fiction.

Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" was one of the first

if not the first big science-fiction epic film.

It's the story of this very futuristic world.

There is one of the great bad robots of all movies...

Maria. That is the movie robot.

Pulp magazines always had a full color cover.

Very often the cover would be robots

that had just run amok from human creators.

They were always mechanical.

They were big, hulking things.

Lots of steel and machinery, glowing-red eyes.

Claws, not fingers, and they were generally quite violent.

So, that image persisted a long time.

But then along came Isaac Asimov.

If we could have roughly man-like robots,

who could take over the dull and routine tasks

that this would be a very nice combination.

Asimov was very central

to helping make science fiction what it is today.

He was at the 1939 World's Fair in New York City.

It must've felt like a very science-fictional experience

to him, and not in the least part

because he would've seen Elektro,

the smoking robot.

Okay, toots.

And this really inspired Asimov.

And so he decided to start writing stories

where he would explore robots as tools

and helpers and friends of humanity

rather than enemies.

He invented these images and these ideas

that I think defined how people in the field

thought about robots,

specifically those three laws of his.

Of course, they're really important.

What are the three laws of robotics?

First law is a robot may not harm a human being,

or through inaction allow a human being to come to harm.

Danger, Will Robinson, danger.

Number 2, a robot must obey orders

given it by qualified personnel.

Fire.

Unless those orders violate rule number 1.

In other words, a robot can't be ordered to kill a human being.

See, he's helpless.

The third law states that a robot can defend itself.

Except where that would violate the first and second laws.

I think Asimov's laws are very smart, very, very smart.

I think they are also made to be broken.

We know you'll enjoy your stay in Westworld,

the ultimate resort.

Lawless violence on the American frontier,

peopled by lifelike robot men and women.

The movie "Westworld" looks at a theme park with guests

coming in and doing whatever they please to the robots.

It was really a forum for human id to run amok,

where there's no threat of anybody

knowing the things that you've done,

where you don't have to engage with other humans

and you're told "do whatever you want."

Where nothing...

nothing can possibly go wrong.

-I'm shot. -Go wrong.

-Draw. -Shut down.

Shut down immediately.

"Westworld" was a cautionary tale

about robotics.

It was the idea that we believed

that we could create artificial life

and that it would obey us.

And stop here and he'll be crossing there.

He'll be crossing there.

The original film by Michael Crichton is very cool

and is packed with ideas about fraught interactions

with artificial intelligence.

Decades ahead of its time.

Questions that he posed in the original film

only became more and more relevant

as we reimagined it as a TV series.

When you're looking at the story of a robot,

oftentimes you see a robot that's docile

and then something goes click and they kind of snap.

Maximilian!

What John and I talked about was,

"Well, take that moment, that snap

before they go on the killing rampage

and what if we really attenuate it and explore it

and dive deep into that schism?"

Because for us, that was where really meaty,

philosophical question rested and that question was...

Where did life begin?

Maeve, who's one of the robots,

she's a madam who runs a brothel.

She's one of the first robots to start realizing

that she's a robot instead of just a person

who is living in the Wild West.

To me, one of the most significant scenes in the show

is when Maeve starts coming into consciousness

while she's being repaired.

Everything in your head, they put it there.

No one knows what I'm thinking.

I'll show you.

And she sees it's an algorithm

and it's choosing words based on probability.

This can't possibly...

The robots in Westworld begin to ask questions,

which are the same questions we ask.

We have a sense that there is a creator,

that there is a purpose, there's a reason that we are here.

Unfortunately they discover that the reason that they are there

is simply to be an entertainment.

I'd like to make some changes.

Marvin Minsky, who was one of the pioneers of A.I.,

said that free will might be that first primitive reaction

to forced compliance.

So, the first word of consciousness is no.

I'm not going back.

Science fiction has always been dealing with A.I.

whether it's Asimov's laws or the laws

that we tried to put in place in "Westworld."

The question is can laws ever even fully contain a human.

People will stretch those laws, find exceptions to them.

I understand now.

Not sure that an A.I. would be any different.

When consciousness awakens, it's impossible

to put the genie back in the bottle.

Let's talk about A. I. For a second.

You only see robots in a positive role...

Right.

In your films, which is interesting

because that's where so much of the progress

is being made now with companions

for the elderly, robotic nurses...

They're gonna make life better for us.

Because you have 2 of the most popular

A.I. characters in pop culture,

which are R2-D2 and C-3PO.

They're A.I.s.

At the time, I said, "Don't be afraid of the robots."

You know, the robots are our friends.

Let's see the good side of the robots,

and the funny side because, let's face it,

for a while, they're gonna be a little goofy.

I've just about had enough of you,

you near-sighted scrap pile.

George Lucas was very innovative throughout his whole career.

And one of the things early on that was very smart

was that he pioneered a different type of robot.

R2-D2 looks like a trash can.

He doesn't even speak, right?

He just makes chirping sounds.

But he's lovable.

Everybody loves... He's not cuddly.

He's not... that... that is... That's a great character.

C-3PO is probably the most charming

and beloved of the robot characters ever made.

And I love the fact that George didn't articulate the mouth

or the eyes, so it's a blank mask

and yet we get so much heart

from Anthony Daniels' performance.

I mean, I love robots and the idea of being able

to design one for a "Star Wars" film

was just too good to pass up.

Did you know that wasn't me?

K-2SO from "Rogue One," I thought was just perfect.

To be fair, the biggest influence on K-2SO was C-3PO.

Anthony Daniels as C-3PO has a cameo in our film

and I remember going around Anthony Daniels' house

to try and talk him into it and I didn't know

if he would hate the idea

or if he was fed up with "Star Wars."

And I sat there and I was so paranoid meeting him

and his wife that I just pitched the whole movie to them

and I must've chatted for like an hour,

just kept going and going and got to the end

and I couldn't tell from his face.

And he was like, "Gareth, you know, I'd love to be involved."

Like "You had me at hello" type thing.

It was just about having like this god on set.

You know, like this original...

This is where it all began, "Star Wars" character.

It was like goosebump-y stuff.

Friends forever?

Friends.

I think one of the reasons that people love robots

and gravitate to the robot characters

in movies like "Star Wars"

is because whereas the human characters

feel very fully formed,

they are people, the robots are things that it feels okay

to project more of ourselves onto.

Huey, Dewey and Louie from "Silent Running"

are possibly the cutest robots.

They don't talk, but you still kind of always know

what they're thinking.

It's great to have a best friend.

In fantasy, it might be a dragon.

In science fiction, it might be the robot.

I love Johnny 5.

I mean, this is a robot who quotes John Wayne

out of his own free will.

Take heart, little lady.

Buck Rogers was great because they didn't exactly

rip off R2-D2, but they got halfway there.

So, they got the voice of Yosemite Sam.

They got Mel Blanc, the greatest cartoon voice in the world,

Captain Caveman, and they invented Twiki,

who would go, "Bidibidibidi."

You ever have two broken arms, buster?

What?

We love friendly robots because they bring out the best

of what we are as humans.

Wall-E, who's a garbage-collecting robot,

isn't at all like a garbage robot should be.

He really develops a whole personality.

He's there to clean up the mess that humans have made

and he goes from interpreting that literally

to actually saving the world for humanity.

Many, many science-fiction stories

turn the robot into some kind of a romantic figure

that somehow becomes more human as the story goes on.

There was Lister Del Reye's 1938 story "Helen O'Loy."

Bad pun in the title by the way.

The name is Helen Alloy, she's made out of metal.

Essentially a housekeeping robot.

Falls in love with her maker.

It was one of the first stories in which a robot

is a sympathetic, romantic character.

If you're actually in conversations with a robot,

where it sounds natural and it sounds like a person

and that person knows you, laughs at your jokes,

and has empathy for your struggles in life

and you develop a relationship with that...

With that voice, you could absolutely fall in love with it.

Hello. I'm here.

Hi.

Hi.

It's really nice to meet you.

What do I call you? Do you have a name?

Um... yes, Samantha.

In the movie "Her," Samantha's design

is that she's been created to be a tool.

What's interesting about this idea of a pocket tool

is that we see this in our own lives.

Our smartphones have become these tools to us

that we're dependent on.

So, Theodore's relationship with Samantha

is just one step beyond that.

He can't live without her because he also loves her.

When Theodore sees her pop up on his screen,

it's like seeing his girlfriend.

-Good night. -'Night.

What I had do to was create the interface.

So you have like handwriting, it's my handwriting

and I wrote out Samantha,

and then this paper texture, but then there's a magic to it.

It floats, it kind of moves holographically

and there's shadowing, but none of it is technological.

An interface where it's possible to fall in love with your O.S.

Are these feelings even real?

Or are they just programming?

What a sad trick.

You feel real to me, Samantha.

Part of what you see in "Her" definitely is a cautionary tale

about being too reliant on your gadgets

and your technology and being too emotionally

invested in them.

It's a reminder that there are people out there,

you know, that final image of him with Amy Adams

is so emotional

and it's only through this experience

that they both went on involving this technology

that they found each other.

You know, we're going to live in a world

with robots and artificial intelligence.

You might as well get used to it,

you shouldn't be afraid of it

and we should be very careful not to have it be bad.

But if it goes bad, it's us.

-Yeah. -It's not them.

People always ask me,

"So, do you think the machines will ever beat us?"

I say, "I think it's a race.

-It's a race... -Absolutely, a race.

It's a race between us improving

and making ourselves better, our own evolution,

spiritual, psychological evolution.

At the same time, we've got these machines evolving.

Because if we don't improve enough

to direct them properly,

our godlike power of using artificial intelligence

and all these other robotic tools

and so on will ultimately just blow back in our face

and take us out."

Yeah, you're right.

I mean, I think that... It takes a lot of effort

to create changes in human behavior.

But that's with our responsibilities.

Yeah. I actually think we're evolving.

We're co-evolving with our machines.

We're changing. Yes, exactly.

Atlantia death squadron, attack.

In January of 2002, Universal was looking for somebody

to reinvent "Battlestar Galactica."

So, I tracked down the pilot of the original "Galactica"

that they did in 1978.

There were some interesting ideas within it.

The final annihilation of the lifeform known as man.

Let the attack begin.

But never quite were able to figure out

what the show really was.

But at the same time, I was very struck by the parallels to 9/11.

This is just a couple of months after the 9/11 attack.

And I realized immediately that if you did this series

at that moment in time,

it was going to have a very different emotional resonance

for the audience.

"Battlestar Galactica" is about

the last remaining scraps of humanity

out there in a fleet in deep space

after an attack from robots

has decimated humanity.

So the idea was that the human beings

essentially started creating robots for all the dirty jobs

they didn't want to do anymore.

And then the machines themselves,

because they revere their creators,

make machines that are even more like us.

Cylons that are flesh and blood just like humans.

The Cylons saw themselves as the children of humanity

and that they wouldn't be able to really grow and mature

until their parents were gone,

so they decide they need to wipe out their human creators

in this apocalyptic attack.

I think on the surface,

you could say "Battlestar Galactica"

is about "be careful of what you invent."

But I think the real driving force of the show

is not about that.

I think it's about humanity's greatest weakness,

the inability to see others as worthy as ourselves.

That's the central conflict is of these two...

We are people, no, you're not.

You are truly no greater than we are.

You're just a bunch of machines after all.

Let the games begin.

"Flesh and Bone" is the torture episode.

It's very much of a two-person play.

It raises the question... would she be less morally culpable

because he's not really human?

You're not human.

Was a person being tortured in this scene

and crying out and experiencing pain

or was this all an elaborate simulation?

We wanted to deal with the issue

of what's moral and just in a society at war like this,

but at the same time, we were also examining a different idea

in the show which was about consciousness and personhood.

Who's the real monster?

Is it the humans who built creatures that they knew

were human equivalent, but enslaved them anyway?

Or is it the slaves who rose up to destroy

the type of people who would do that?

The big central idea of "Battlestar Galactica" is...

Does humanity deserve to survive?

Can we earn our survival?

You know, when we fought the Cylons,

we did it to save ourselves from extinction.

But we never answered the question why.

Why are we as a people worth saving?

That's... That's an amazing question.

The Cylons through the series evolved from a place

of sort of blind hatred for humanity

to then having more contact with individual human beings,

having experiences with them, experiencing emotions with them,

and then the humans realize that the Cylons are not as monolithic

as they believed at the onset.

Well, when you think you love somebody, you love them.

That's what love is.

Thoughts.

She was a Cylon.

A machine.

She was more than that to us.

She was more than that to me.

She was a vital living person.

"Battlestar Galactica" gives you

an idea of what could be.

How do we all do this together?

If "Battlestar Galactica" is any guide,

we can evolve together with the machines that we create.

We can become one people, respectful of each other.

Make a future together.

Yeah, I think...

I hope mankind is worthy of survival.

I've talked to some A.I. experts.

Yeah.

And the one expert said just right out,

"We're trying to make a person."

And I said, "So when you say a person,

you mean a personhood? They have...

They have an ego, they have a sense of identity."

He said, "Yes, all those things."

If you're a very smart group of human beings

who are creating an A.I.,

one of the things you're definitely gonna leave out

is to put in emotion. Right.

'Cause if you have emotion,

emotion will lead to many facets,

one of them being deceit, anger, fury, hatred.

-Sure. -As well as love.

If a machine becomes like us enough and complex enough

at one point, can we no longer tell the difference?

-The difference. -Does it have freedom?

Does it have free will?

This hearing is to determine the legal status

of the android known as Data.

The character of Data was sort of everyone's favorite character

on the show and the writing staff as well.

Everyone loved to write Data stories.

Here's a robot who wants to be human

but who has no emotions but wants emotions.

So, it's really Pinocchio,

and the Pinocchio metaphor is powerful.

Commander, what are you?

Webster's 24th-century dictionary 5th edition

defines an android as an automaton

made to resemble a human being.

"The Measure of a Man" is one of those sort of very deep episodes

that you don't realize is deep

until like four or five years later.

And you see it and you go,

In the episode, Data's humanity is essentially put on trial.

Is he sentient?

Is he worthy of being treated as a person?

Am I person or a property?

What's at stake?

My right to choose.

It was a legitimate exploration of this idea of personhood

in a legal sense and in a moral sense.

Its responses dictated by an elaborate software

written by a man.

And now a man will shut it off.

It was shocking to the characters on the show

and shocking to the audience as well because we love Data.

Starfleet was founded to seek out new life.

Well, there it sits!

Once we create some form of artificial intelligence,

these legal arguments are gonna happen.

Do machines deserve rights?

You know, probably.

In the history of many worlds,

there have always been disposable creatures.

They do the dirty work.

An army of Datas,

whole generations of disposable people.

You're talking about slavery.

The term "robot" itself comes from the Czech play

"Rossum's Universal Robots,"

and the word "robota" means laborer.

A pejorative version of it means slave.

So, our conception of what robots will be

is directly, umbilically connected

to our idea of them as an underclass.

Why do you think your people made me?

We made you 'cause we could.

You are just a machine. An imitation of life.

Replicants are like any other machine.

They're either a benefit or a hazard.

If they're a benefit, it's not my problem.

"Blade Runner" is a slave narrative, basically.

They've created these replicants to be our slaves.

And I think that's the part that's really troubling about

"Blade Runner" is that

not only is it sort of this technologically

and environmentally ruined future,

it's sort of a morally and ethically ruined future as well.

I wrote those first couple scripts

thinking of a very small movie.

And then Ridley said to me,

"What's out the window?"

And I said, "What's out the window?

Well, the world, you know."

He said, "Exactly. What world is that?

Where, you know, you make a robot indistinguishable

from a human.

Think about this for a second.

Imagine..." and he does that to you.

You go, "Boom." I said, "God."

He delivered a world. That's Ridley.

He can... he makes things.

Ridley brought everything to it.

"Blade Runner" comes from a Philip K. Dick novel...

Yeah.

"Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?"

Philip K. Dick was very prolific and very profound

talking about the nature of reality

and the nature of artificial intelligence

and what it is to be human.

That was the nut of the idea

that grew with Hampton into what it was.

Here was this beautiful, beautiful film.

Dark, noir-ish and I thought,"

a film can be so artistic."

And the idea of these... These machines challenging us

and their lack of affect, their lack of emotion.

The film is constantly saying there is no emotion.

Computer just makes decisions.

Negative or positive.

It doesn't really care.

Yeah, with the Voight-Kampff test.

Correct.

Is this to be an empathy test?

Capillary dilation of so-called blush response?

We call it Voight-Kampff for short.

The Voight-Kampff is a series of questions

that allowed the questioner to find out

whether or not who was being questioned had feelings.

It's your birthday.

Someone gives you a calf-skin wallet.

I wouldn't accept it.

It's about empathy.

You're reading a magazine.

You come across a full-page nude photo of a girl.

Is this testing whether I'm a replicant

or a lesbian, Mr. Deckard?

Just answer the questions, please.

Not to get gooey about empathy, but it does seem

that empathy is the big divide between us and everything else.

Deckard is very much a man in his job.

He firmly believes that as long as robots are working properly,

it's not his problem.

But that if a replicant misbehaves,

it is indeed his problem

and his duty to retire it.

Move! Get out of the way!

However, over the course of the film, he increasingly questions

whether or not disobeying orders means that you're defective

or that you are a human

with rights and wills and dreams of your own.

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe.

There's such poetry in the scene

where Roy Batty's dying. Yes.

It's just a magnificent scene.

He wrote that.

Really? Rutger wrote that?

It's 1:00 in the morning.

I'm gonna have the plug pulled... Yeah.

Literally on everything at dawn.

-Yeah. -And that's it.

That's gonna be the last night,

and Rutger said, "I have written something."

And he said...

All those moments will be lost

in time like tears in rain.

-And I'm nearly in tears. -Yeah.

He said, "What do you think?"

I said, "Let's do it."

So, we literally went... It's gorgeous.

-We shot it within an hour. -Yeah.

And at the end, he looked at him

and gave that most beautiful smile.

Time to die.

And he had a dove in his hand and he let...

He let it go. Yeah.

Is it saying Roy Batty had a soul?

Roy Batty was a fully sentient being.

Yes.

Four of your films now have had

an intelligent, embodied A.I.

Right? An artificial intelligence.

Synthetic person.

So where do you think we come out in this?

Is this our... Are we handing the keys

to the kingdom off to the machines?

I don't think we should. With a creation of something

so potentially wonderful and dangerous as A.I.,

the inventor frequently is obsessed by the success

of what he's doing

rather than looking at the real outcome.

Here is where the problem is.

It's the moment where it passes over your control.

Yeah.

That's where the danger lies.

You cross over and you're in trouble.

You get an A.I., you have to have limitations.

You got to have your hand on the plug the entire time.

All the time. Totally.