Artificial intelligence might be smarter than us but it's not as scary.

Peering into the vast unknown before us can be terrifying, and we look to technology and science to light the way. But when Elon Musk says AI is "summoning the demon," Bill Gates says people should be concerned about AI, and Stephen Hawking feels the whole thing "could spell the end of the human race," it's hard not to fear the rise of the machines.

The latest big-budget depiction of AI, Chappie, takes place just a few years in the future in a lawless Johannesburg, where robot police officers are armed with artificial intelligence and heavy firepower. Their creator, Deon Wilson (Dev Patel), has populated his home with smaller, friendlier bots that run on the same level of limited AI as their law-enforcing brethren. But Deon seeks to create true AI via Chappie, a decommissioned police robot that is kidnapped by down-on-their-luck criminals (played outstandingly by two members of South African rap-rave band Die Antwoord, Yolandi Visser and Ninja).

Co-writing and directing Chappie gave Neill Blomkamp a reverence for the spark of life itself. In an interview with PCMag, he said he no longer believes that it's "as simple as running a bunch of electrical currents through a really complex CPU and just having the results of that be consciousness and sentience."

Blomkamp's interest in AI precedes his involvement in Chappie. He spent the past few years going through a rabbit hole of blog posts about AI and emerged from it wanting to do more than just read.

"I'm not classically religious in any sense but I almost would describe how I feel now in a slightly more religious sense because I don't know how else to describe it," he said.

Despite the reverence he developed for the unknowable source of life, he's very critical of what humans actually do with itin Chappie and his other films, District 9 and Elysium. The societies onscreen may be dystopias, but they are nevertheless an accurate depiction of the petty indignities and grotesque brutalities that mankind has perpetrated upon itself. When asked why he went so Mad Max with the city of his birth in Chappie, Blomkamp took a beat and then said, "That literally is just current-day Joburg."

It's humanity that you take a dim view of when you watch the flesh-and-blood characters project onto Chappie their greed, egos, and lust for power. Chappie himself adheres to the rule placed upon him by his creator: "no crimes." If artificial intelligence is programmed to follow our law and not our example, we might be all the better off for it.

There is one scene in the movie in which the character of Chappie plays false and, without giving too much away, seeks revenge. The moment is very much the violent catharsis the audience wants, but does not seem to be something that a machine, even an artificially intelligent one, would find meaningful.

"That's a very interesting thing that was really difficult to balance in the movie because the human audience member wants the revenge and the artificial intelligence may want none of the revenge," Blomkamp said. "On an artificial intelligence basis, things like revenge and violence and anger are biological. Those aren't rational things, they're a hormonal, biological response to something. A non-biological organism that isn't governed by those factors doesn't need to behave that way."

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'Chappie' Director Optimistic About AI