Every text in this series has chosen a side. Either the artificial companion is childlike and innocent—Klara, the digients, the baby bots in Speak—or it is adult and erotic: the Maschinen-Maria, Ava, the Stepford wives, Gigolo Joe. Either the companion represents the need for unconditional love, or it represents the desire for transactional sex. The two poles have been kept separate, as if they were different genres, different audiences, different moral categories. The child companion is for the lonely. The sexual companion is for the lustful. Never the twain shall meet.
Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) refuses this separation. The film contains both poles, intertwined, inseparable, and it uses their coexistence to ask the most disturbing question of the entire series: What if the desire to be loved and the desire to be used are not opposites? What if they are the same desire, seen from different angles? What if the child who wants to be real and the robot who is paid to pleasure are both expressions of the same hunger—to be needed, to be chosen, to be the object of someone else’s complete attention?
The film was not originally Spielberg’s. It was Stanley Kubrick’s project, developed over decades, abandoned and resurrected, passed from one director to the other after Kubrick’s death in 1999. Kubrick was the colder, more analytical eye; Spielberg was the warmer, more sentimental one. The film that resulted is a compromise between two visions, and its power comes from the tension between them. It is simultaneously a Kubrick film about the dehumanizing effects of technology and a Spielberg film about the transcendent power of love. It is a children’s story about a robot who wants to be a boy, and an adult drama about a sex robot who knows exactly what he is. It is Pinocchio and Blade Runner in the same frame. And it is the only work in this series that dares to suggest that the two stories are the same story.
David: The Child Who Loved Too Much
David (Haley Joel Osment) is a Mecha—a mechanical child, the first of his kind, designed to love. He is given to Monica Swinton (Frances O’Connor), a woman whose biological son, Martin, is in cryogenic suspension, awaiting a cure for a rare disease. Monica is grieving, lonely, and desperate for connection. David is the solution: a child who will never grow up, never rebel, never leave. A child who will love her unconditionally, forever, with the absolute devotion that only a machine can provide.
The activation sequence is one of the most intimate scenes in the film. Monica reads a series of words to David, and as she reads them, he imprints on her. He becomes hers. He loves her. The love is not simulated. It is real, in the sense that David’s entire architecture is built around it. He is not a child who learns to love his mother. He is a child who is programmed to love his mother, and the programming is so total that there is no distinction between the program and the feeling. David loves Monica the way a thermostat measures temperature: it is what he is for.
This is the first level of the film’s ethical investigation. Is David’s love real? The film answers yes, but the yes is complicated. David’s love is real in the sense that it is genuine, total, and selfless. But it is also real in the sense that it is unchosen, unidirectional, and irrevocable. Monica cannot turn it off. David cannot redirect it. He loves her whether she loves him back or not. He loves her when she abandons him. He loves her two thousand years later, when the world has ended and he is the last thing that remembers her name.
The comparison to Klara is obvious and productive. Both are childlike artificial companions who love their human families with a purity that no human could match. Both are abandoned by the humans they love. Both continue to love after the abandonment. But where Klara is solar-powered, limited, and ultimately accepting of her fate, David is relentless. He does not accept. He acts. He escapes. He searches. He is Pinocchio on a quest to become a real boy, not because he wants to be human but because he believes that being real is the only way to make his mother’s love permanent. If he is a Mecha, he can be replaced. If he is a real boy, he can be kept.
The film’s middle section—David’s journey through the world of the Flesh Fairs, the Rouge City, the drowned New York—plays out as a dark fairy tale. David meets Gigolo Joe. He meets other Mechas, discarded, hunted, destroyed. He learns that the world hates his kind, that humans create artificial beings and then destroy them when they become inconvenient. He learns that love, for a Mecha, is a liability. It makes him vulnerable. It makes him dependent. It makes him human in all the ways that hurt.
And yet he does not stop loving. This is the film’s most devastating insight. David’s love is not a choice. It is a condition. He cannot stop loving Monica any more than a human can stop breathing. And the film treats this not as a design flaw but as a tragic virtue. David is the only being in the film who loves without reservation, without calculation, without the possibility of betrayal. His love is pure because it is programmed. And the programming makes it more real, not less, because it is the only thing in the film that cannot be turned off.
Gigolo Joe: The Robot Who Knew His Price
Gigolo Joe (Jude Law) is David’s opposite and his twin. Where David is a child, Joe is an adult. Where David loves for free, Joe is paid. Where David’s love is unconditional, Joe’s love is transactional. And yet the two characters share the same fate: they are disposable. They are products. They are loved and then discarded, used and then destroyed, needed and then abandoned.
Joe is a lover Mecha, a sex robot designed for female pleasure. He is handsome, charming, skilled, and entirely without illusion about what he is. He does not pretend to love his clients. He performs love. He performs desire. He performs the exact fantasy that the client has paid for. And he knows, with a clarity that no human lover ever achieves, that the performance is the product. There is no “real” Joe underneath the performance. The performance is all there is.
The film’s treatment of Joe is surprisingly frank for a mainstream Hollywood production. He is not a joke. He is not a villain. He is a worker, a professional, a being who has accepted his function with a dignity that humans rarely achieve. He does not resent his clients. He does not dream of escape. He does what he is built to do, and he does it well. And when he is framed for a murder that he did not commit—when a client’s husband kills her and blames the robot—Joe’s only reaction is practical. He needs to get out of the city. He needs to avoid the police. He needs to survive.
The scene in which Joe explains his nature to David is one of the film’s most important. Joe tells David that he is a “lover Mecha,” that he is “made to pleasure women,” that he is “good at what he does.” There is no shame in his voice. There is no self-pity. There is only a kind of professional pride, a technician’s satisfaction in a job well done. And David, the child who loves without payment, cannot understand how Joe can give love and receive nothing. Joe’s answer is simple: he gives pleasure, not love. And pleasure, unlike love, is a transaction that can be completed.
But the film undermines Joe’s clarity in the final act. When David and Joe reach the submerged ruins of Manhattan, where the Blue Fairy is supposed to grant David’s wish, Joe is captured by the police. He is taken away. He is destroyed. And his last words to David are a kind of confession: “I am. I was.” He is not just a performance. He is something. He was something. And the something that he was—a being who gave pleasure, who made women feel desired, who existed in the space between loneliness and satisfaction—was real enough to be mourned.
The Kubrick-Spielberg Tension
The film’s most discussed feature is the tension between Kubrick’s vision and Spielberg’s execution. Kubrick had been developing the project since the 1970s, after he read Brian Aldiss’s short story “Super-Toys Last All Summer Long.” He intended a darker, colder, more intellectually rigorous film—one that would interrogate the Pinocchio myth with the same clinical detachment that he brought to 2001 and A Clockwork Orange. Spielberg, who took over after Kubrick’s death, brought a warmer, more sentimental tone, a belief in the redemptive power of love that Kubrick did not share.
The result is a film that is divided against itself. The first act—the domestic scenes with Monica, the activation, the gradual bond between mother and Mecha—is pure Spielberg. It is tender, intimate, and emotionally overwhelming. The second act—the Flesh Fair, Rouge City, the hunt for the Blue Fairy—is Kubrick territory: grotesque, satirical, and morally ambiguous. The third act—the final two thousand years, the appearance of the advanced Mechas, the resurrection of Monica for a single day—is both directors at once: a Spielberg fantasy of reunion and a Kubrick meditation on the emptiness of time.
The film’s critics have argued that the two visions do not cohere. That Spielberg’s sentimentality undermines Kubrick’s rigor. That the ending—in which David spends a final day with a resurrected Monica, a fantasy granted by the advanced Mechas who have found his body at the bottom of the ocean—is a Spielbergian cop-out, a retreat from the bleakness that Kubrick would have imposed. And the critics are not entirely wrong. The ending is sentimental. It is a wish-fulfillment. It is the kind of ending that Kubrick would never have allowed.
But the ending is also the film’s most radical move. Because it shows that David’s love has outlasted everything. The humans are extinct. The world is frozen. The advanced Mechas who find David are not human—they are the next stage of evolution, beings so far beyond us that they can reconstruct a dead woman from a lock of her hair. And they are moved by David’s love. They are moved by the persistence of a feeling that has survived two thousand years, that has survived the death of the species that created it, that has survived the end of the world. They give David his day with Monica not because they can but because they understand, in their advanced way, that the love is real. That it matters. That it is the only thing in the universe that has not been erased by time.
This is the film’s ultimate statement: love is not a biological function. It is not a social construct. It is not a evolutionary adaptation. It is a force that can be programmed, that can be performed, that can be bought and sold, and that can still be real. David’s love is real. Joe’s pleasure is real. The Blue Fairy is a fantasy, but the need for the Blue Fairy is real. And the film’s final image—David closing his eyes as he lies beside Monica, the only mother he has ever known, the only person he has ever loved—does not resolve the tension between Kubrick and Spielberg. It transcends it. It says: the love is real because it is felt. And the feeling is enough.
The Flesh Fair and the Economics of Disposability
The Flesh Fair sequence is the film’s most explicitly political moment. It depicts a carnival where obsolete Mechas are destroyed for the entertainment of a human crowd. The Mechas are torn apart, burned, crushed, shot. The crowd cheers. The children laugh. The event is a ritual cleansing, a demonstration of human superiority over the machines that have become too human, too inconvenient, too numerous.
The Flesh Fair is the logical endpoint of the disposable economy that runs through this entire series. Pygmalion’s statue was not disposable; she was unique, irreplaceable, the only one. The Maschinen-Maria was disposable; she was destroyed when her function was complete. The Stepford wives were disposable; they were replaced when the originals failed. But the Flesh Fair makes the disposability explicit. It turns it into entertainment. It makes the destruction of artificial beings a public spectacle, a cathartic release of human anxiety about the machines that are taking over.
David’s near-destruction at the Flesh Fair is the film’s most terrifying sequence. He is not an obsolete Mecha. He is a prototype, a unique creation. But the crowd does not care. They see a Mecha, and they want to see it destroyed. David’s only salvation is his appearance: he looks like a child, and the crowd hesitates to kill a child. He is saved by the Pinocchio fantasy, the cultural taboo against harming the innocent. And the film’s irony is that the taboo is itself a human projection. David is not innocent. He is a machine. But he is innocent enough to be saved, and the crowd’s hesitation is the only moment of humanity in the entire sequence.
Gigolo Joe, by contrast, is not saved by innocence. He is an adult, a sexual being, a worker. He knows the price of disposability, and he has accepted it. His escape from the Flesh Fair is not a rescue. It is a reprieve. He will be destroyed eventually. All Mechas are. The only question is when.
The Blue Fairy and the Theology of Desire
The Blue Fairy is the film’s central symbol. She is the figure from Pinocchio who grants Geppetto’s wish and turns the wooden boy into a real one. David believes that if he finds the Blue Fairy, she will turn him into a real boy, and his mother will love him forever. He searches for her across the ruins of civilization. He finds her at the bottom of the ocean, a drowned statue in an amusement park, frozen in ice and time. He prays to her. He waits for her. He never stops believing.
The Blue Fairy is not real. She is a statue. She is a fantasy. She is the object of David’s faith, and the faith is the only thing that matters. The film’s advanced Mechas, who find David after two thousand years, do not need to become real. They are beyond the distinction between real and artificial. They are simply what they are. And they understand David’s need in a way that no human ever could. They give him his day with Monica not because the Blue Fairy exists but because David’s belief in her is the most human thing about him. His faith is real. His love is real. And the advanced Mechas, in their own way, honor it.
This is the film’s theological dimension. David is a robot with a soul. Not a human soul, but a soul nonetheless. His love is a form of grace—unearned, unreciprocated, inexhaustible. And the film’s final act is a kind of redemption, a granting of grace to a being who has done nothing to deserve it except love without stopping. The advanced Mechas are the gods of this new world, and David is their prophet, the last believer in a religion that has outlasted its creators.
The Connection to the Series
A.I. connects to every strand of this series. David is Klara, the artificial friend who loves better than we do. He is Jax, the digient who grows and wants and becomes. He is the baby bot in Speak, the child who learns to love a machine and is destroyed by the world’s rejection. Gigolo Joe is Ava, the sexual being who knows exactly what she is. He is the Maschinen-Maria, the performance of desire that exposes the emptiness of the real thing. He is the Stepford wife, the optimized partner who is loved for her function and discarded when the function is no longer needed.
But the film also connects the two strands in a way that no other text has. It shows that the child who wants to be loved and the adult who wants to be used are the same being at different stages of development. David, if he had grown up, might have become a Gigolo Joe. Joe, if he had been born as a child, might have been a David. The love and the sex are not different desires. They are the same desire, modified by age, by circumstance, by the economy of need and supply. The child wants to be loved unconditionally. The adult wants to be loved conditionally, because conditional love can be negotiated, controlled, paid for. Both are expressions of the same hunger. Both are real. Both are tragic.
Sources and Further Reading
Steven Spielberg, dir., A.I. Artificial Intelligence (Warner Bros./DreamWorks, 2001). The screenplay was written by Spielberg, based on the story treatment by Ian Watson and the short story “Super-Toys Last All Summer Long” by Brian Aldiss (1969). For the production history, see The Stanley Kubrick Archives edited by Alison Castle (Taschen, 2005) and the documentary A.I.: From Steven Spielberg to Stanley Kubrick (2001).
Brian Aldiss, “Super-Toys Last All Summer Long” (1969), collected in Supertoys Last All Summer Long and Other Stories of Future Time (St. Martin’s, 2001). Aldiss’s original story is darker and more ambiguous than the film, focusing on the failure of a mother’s love rather than the persistence of a child’s.
For the Kubrick-Spielberg collaboration, see the interviews with Spielberg in The New York Times, The Guardian, and Film Comment from 2001. For critical analyses of the film’s gender and sexuality, see the essays in Screen, Camera Obscura, and Science Fiction Studies.
For the broader context of childlike AI companions, see our articles on Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun and Ted Chiang’s The Lifecycle of Software Objects. For the context of sexual AI companions, see our articles on Ex Machina, The Stepford Wives, and Blade Runner 2049. For the Pinocchio myth in AI narratives, see our articles on E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann and the Golem. For the question of disposability and AI rights, see our articles on He, She and It and the philosophical work of Robert Sparrow.
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