Chappie (left) meets his non-AI counterpart and contemplatesjust a littlewhat it is that distinguishes conscious matter from unconscious matter. (Credit: Sony Pictures)

What is consciousness?

That question has been fertile ground for millennia of philosophical debates, centuries of scientific research, and decades of juicy movie plots, going back at least to Fritz Langs Metropolis. This week it gets a workout yet again in Chappie, a new movie directed by Neill Blomkamp (District 9) and starring sci-fi stalwarts Sigourney Weaver and Hugh Jackman along withless predictablyDev Patel, best known as the star of Slumdog Millionaire.

Broadly speaking, there are three classes of machine intelligence fiction. Class One assumes that human consciousness is unique and can exist in a machine only if that machine is part human (RoboCop is a prime example). Class Two assumes that machines can mimic many aspects of human consciousness but lack the essential soul (the Terminator movies are a modern archetype). Class Three treats consciousness as a solvable programming problem: Put in the right code, or give the wrong code some kind of mysterious scramble, and a conscious machine emerges. Familiar examples of Class Three movies include Her, AI: Artificial Intelligence and, er, Short Circuit.

Chappie falls squarely into Class Three, with all of the dramatic potentials and conceptual pitfalls it entails. I spoke with Blomkamp and his cast about why they went down this path. Their commentary explains a lot about the movies take on artificial intelligence and its confusing scientific politics. Chappie turns out to be a great case study in the challenges of squeezing an expansive concept into the tight confines of mainstream Hollywood entertainment.

If youve seen the trailer you get the basic concept. Chappie is set in a near-future South Africa, where the government has decided to address rampant crime by introducing a squadron of robotic police officers. So far so good: This is a classic forward-spin on existing ideas and technologies. Simple battlefield robots already exist and have been tested in limited deployment, and the company that builds Chappie is patterned knowingly on South African arms company DENEL. I also note that the Chappie design looks similar to the humanoid robots that participated in an ongoing DARPA robotics challenge.

But in true Short Circuit style, a rogue element emerges: One of the military robots becomes self-aware, and takes off on a totally new mission to understand his identity. In this case, the change occurs not via a lightning strike, but through the deliberate actions of Deon Wilson, a genius computer programmer (Patel). And heres where Chappie goes intriguingly awry as it dips into some common sci-fi tropes.

Chappie and Deon, his creatora prime, improbable example of the lone genius at work. (Credit: Sony Pictures)

The lone genius. Its a common theme: A single man (and yes, its almost always a man), through sheer brilliance, solves one of the greatest science or technology puzzles in historyand does it with no help and, seemingly, without even consulting anyone else. In the case of Chappie, Deon not only develops a conscious computer program, he seemingly solves the problem in a single night of furious work. This kind of plot device serves an obvious cinematic function by creating a simple, solitary hero, but it doesnt have much relationship to the real practice of research and engineering.

I was curious what Blomkamp had in mind. Was this pure storytelling economy, or is Chappie intended as commentary on the nature of the creative process?

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