Blog 1 Ethics and Safety of AI with WALL-E

The world-building of Wall-E requires a lot of inferences, especially ones we can make with the knowledge we have as computer scientists because the story is told mostly through the narrative of these 2 robots that have very limited speech patterns. Of the 2 characters, Eve has the most ability to speak, but Wall-E struggles to learn words that Eve says. This gives us our first look at the fact that the designer of these robots, the corporation Buy N Large developed sentience in these machines. Every robot we come across does do its intended job, but the robots we follow show an early level of autonomy that I don’t think the developers accounted for. This isn’t something that could have been an accidental inclusion in a robot’s code though, as that would be significantly difficult to just accidentally add let alone include in a machine. Realistically these robots wouldn’t have much personality either as the politics of the movie has this major corporation that we can very clearly just label as Amazon has taken over the earth and sent humans to space to survive on a cruise ship because the earth has become so inhospitable. That’s potentially where these robots were able to develop personalities from the need to survive on this planet that is now very hostile to any signs of life. The first 20 minutes is just dead earth where thousands of dead Wall-E robots line the streets as our overly adorable last remaining one continues its job. As our Wall-E continues its job however we do see that it has developed a sense of kleptomania or hoarding, these items it finds only progress its learning what we could assume have been implemented to improve survivability on a hostile planet is now being used to develop quirks and personality traits. Eventually, it is shown our little robot also understands the concept of love being holding hands, as the entire movie Wall-E wants to show Eve their love by holding hands. This is a concept Eve learns later when watching back their memories to see that Wall-E took care of Eve after finding a sign of living plant life on Earth. This is an idea I would like to propose being that Wall-E and Eve share the same base code. The way Wall-E is meant to use the cube hole in its body to cube garbage and the way Eve has internal storage for a plant has a similar main usage. Wall-E has a physical main recording device and Eve has a digital one. Wall-E has an eye laser and Eve has an arm cannon. One interesting thing that the robots shared was the need to emote. Wall-e’s eyes do emote and move but so do Eve’s. We know that the Eve bots were being sent out in the early years of the cruise ship being in space, but does that mean that Eve and Wall-E had the same developers? Later in the movie, we do see a larger version of the main robot as shown to be a Wall-A that stop their jobs to shine a light on Wall-E in a time of need. This extends further to show that maybe sentience could be what is considered a defection too? Any robot that is shown not doing its job properly is broken and sent to a reprogramming day spa. This is only emphasized when we see a little cleaner robot named MO become terrified to jump off the movement rails, we see function as a road system. Do these robots know fear? Do they experience pain? We see Wall-E take quite a beating the whole movie but it always reacts annoyed that it has to fix something or that it has been impeded by a stack of pipes, but never really saw them experience pain. We do see that Eve was enjoying their time in the day spa as it got massaged, however knowing the answer to that pain question would re-contextualize the ethics of creating a learning, loving, and evolving life form only to allow it to know true suffering. As a segway from true suffering to emotional suffering, Wall-E’s death. Anyone who has seen the movie I am sure can remember that Wall-e’s circuit board is fried, and Wall-E is slowly fading as systems begin to slowly shut down. This urgency has Eve want to get the ship back to Earth to get to Wall-E’s horde so that they can repair Wall-E. This is only compounded later as Wall-E is crushed trying to hold open the machine that needs the plant sample to set a course for Earth. Once on Earth Eve repairs Wall-E only to find that it does its job as if a full system reboot had been performed but after Eve shocks Wall-E and holds its hand we see that Wall-E is back to its original personality. Wall-E could have been reloading a potential previously saved evolution state after repair knowing that it failed to survive after being rebuilt and reloading its software its current state had learned of its past failures in a way AI uses machine learning to develop upon the previous iterations. As much humanity this movie brings to the table, some of the behavior can be explained with general concepts of AI, not ruining any movie magic, but adding a new appreciation to how well written the story is. The movie doesn’t even need talking characters to express those ideas or feelings and potentially the expressiveness of the robots is how they can communicate with each other while keeping autonomy. To have a robot reflect an organic emotion helps humans understand it while also letting other robots view those reflected emotions. Ethically the movie is a nightmare. We see other robots kill each other. We watch them suffer. We see Wall-E use limbs from dead other bots to replace its own body. Whoever invented these robots deserves life in prison for sure. They made these robots with personalities and lives and feeling be task bots and slaves to a human master race while the humans are these disgusting mounds of flesh. Eve and Wall-E would treat Earth better than humans, yet they must work for them in some twisted way. The ethics of the film calls into question many design decisions that are only glossed over and barely resolved in the end credit 2D animated sketches.