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.
IDK there's a trace of something here I'll revisit later
Obviously there's something Freudian about the way David transfers over his affection to his mother onto the icon of the Blue Fairy.