Modularity and Reuse:Analysis of a Scene in Spielberg’s AI

There is a scene in Spielberg's Artificial Intelligence where androids refurbish themselves with used parts before being sacrificed in a prejudicial affair of our future Earth. There are several things to notice in this scene. One is that the androids immediately function more fully once they have new parts. This demonstrates modularity and reuse. Modularity, in that the hand, the eye, physically fit the new android owner, and reuse, in that these are used parts in a recycling or garbage bin for robots

When an android in the film holds a new hand to his dismembered wrist, the wires or veins of the hand are either compatible, or incompatible. If this were a computer program of today it would involve, under the hood, the following scenario. How the hand works, its programming, is hidden from the android. Its program has specific functionality messages that it can send to its hand object, i.e. how to do stuff. All hand objects deployed across different brand androids have the same protocol: routines for handling the functionality messages. Only the original programmer knows the specific implementation of a hand. It is in the hand itself, rather than in the android, from which it is hidden.

The hand has the technological instructions on "how" it actually makes a fist, grips a baseball bat, points its index finger. The Android has a routine through which it sends a make a fist instruction to the make a fist routine of the hand. It only needs to know that it is asking for a fist. It does not need to know the technological process behind the robot's pulling its fingers in towards its palm.This allows any hand with a make fist routine to be used by an android.

Another thing to be considered: the meaning that results from the combination of technology originally designed for contrasting, either in appearance or function, purposes. We see in AI a male android who substitutes a female jawbone for his own worn mouth. It "works", but the connotation is of a lack of sexual identity, or a lack of understanding of distinctions, cultural and biological, of male and female, which references contemporary debates on gender. In a sense, this event metaphorically acts as scientific "proof" of the conditions of constructed gender. It also allows Spielberg to pose the question of
human like difference between the the male and female androids.

The idea behind the construction of gender in this scene of the android mouth substitution is that the red lips of the new mouth on the male android also demonstrate the concept of modularity: the definition of femininity based upon the tradition of women of painting their lips is all contained within the new mouth or jawbone. The male android simply has instructions for opening, closing and chewing. The android mouth for the female robot was manufactured with the lips that way off the production line at the robot factory, and it is because of the mechanical components inside which are oblivious to gender, that the android is oblivious to his appropriation of gender as well. This assembly-line construction of gender in turn causes us to reflect on why nature creates beings in the way that it does, and whether nature's beings have modular and reusable parts.

On the history of modularity