In surfing around among the sites in the “A.I.” online game (see yesterday’s entry), I’ve become fascinated with the idea of androids. There have been a lot of predictions of future societies and what they would look like, and most of the time we laugh at the “Logan’s Run” vision of the future. But just imagine if you could buy an android, outwardly indistinguishable from a human being, for, say, the price of a Lexus? It could be any race, sex, size, etc. that you wanted, and it would behave in exactly the way you specified to the manufacturer. The societal, ethical, legal and economic implications would be truly mindboggling. You would own a thing, an object, a possession that could look, act and feel just like a human being. Since it’s technically an object, you could use it for any purpose you wanted. No one would have to know that this was an android – even maybe the android itself. This stuff makes cloning seem easy and clearcut.
I can only hope that the movie deals with at least a few of these concepts. We’ll see.