I'm watching Spielberg-Kubrick's AI and I'm reminded of something I read yesterday from Wm. Empson. It seems like the menace of the movie is that the experience of David, who is convincingly tortured and abused, might be mass-produced.
In "Some Versions of the Pastoral" Empson argues that humans' capacity for language allows us to abstract away the real character of something. The reduction of human pathos to mass-producable circuits and programming threatens the triumph of abstract language
... over what GH Mead saw in language -- as a constantly-refined tool for collective meaning-making, among generations of creative situations, that we occasionally direct inward for (originally social) problem-solving.
The repetition of the Pinocchio narrative in AI is like a threat that our stories will outlive us, will be taken up by others who will not understand the situations that created them.
Obviously there's something Freudian about the way David transfers over his affection to his mother onto the icon of the Blue Fairy.
IDK there's a trace of something here I'll revisit later