Dancin' Dan here to continue TFE's Artificial Intelligence Week with a little something on my favorite dancing robots.
If there’s a common thread in stories of artificial intelligence, it’s that we can think that we, the programmers/creators, can control it all we like, but if we’re truly successful - if we succeed in creating actual artificial intelligence - we can’t do a damn thing to control it. It will grow and learn and eventually decide things for itself.
In Pixar’s masterpiece WALL•E, we don’t know exactly how our hero gained what for lack of a better word we have to call a “personality,” but we can imagine. Human ingenuity can do a lot of things, but one thing it is notoriously terrible at, on the whole, is predicting the future correctly. Which, coincidentally, is one of the ideas at the heart of Pixar’s masterpiece. [More...]
The Buy ‘n’ Large corporate bigwigs probably should have known what would happen if they continued on their path of massive consumption, but they also probably couldn’t have known just how insatiable the public would become for more and bigger things. They also couldn’t have known that the planet they thought they had so thoroughly destroyed could indeed play host to life again one day.
So, no one could have known that long after all the other WALL•Es (Waste Allocation Load Lifters - Earth Class) had shut down there would be one left, still doing his thing, and doing it with a song in his heart. Literally. That song is “Put on Your Sunday Clothes” from the movie musical adaptation Hello, Dolly!
As it turns out, WALL•E’s personality is infectious; before either of them know it, the low-tech little guy has wormed his way into high-tech object of his affection EVE’s heart circuitry, and she starts seeing the universe through his eyes. In doing so, she opens herself up to decidedly non-robotic things: Emotions like happiness, fear, joy, and maybe even wonderment. When WALL•E presents her with the plant in a shoe which had gone missing, she collects it and hugs him with such joy. Just as if she was… a person. And then, as Thomas Newman’s beautiful Oscar-nominated score swells, she kisses him.
Well, she shocks him.
And for a second, WALL•E practically shuts down.
And here’s where I come to a loss of words, because the two of them play with each other around the Axiom spaceship, and there really isn’t a good word to describe it. They’re not really flying - WALL•E’s propelling himself using a fire extinguisher and thus has a choppy rhythm and path that one wouldn’t generally associate with flight - but it’s close. They leave trails behind them (EVE’s customary blue power and white from WALL•E’s fire extinguisher), and it’s gorgeous. Like watching two comets streak around a giant asteroid. And just when you decide to stop trying to define it and give in to the supreme pleasure of the moment, the Axiom’s captain (who has taken it upon himself to learn all he can about this magical place called Earth, where they used to grow pizza out of the ground on farms) whispers to his trusty computer:
Computer, define dancing”
And the computer gives the following immortal response:
Dancing: A series of movements involving two partners where speed and rhythm match harmoniously with music.”
Webster’s doesn’t define it this way - a good thing, since it seemingly does not allow for the possibility of dancing on one’s own - but I can hardly think of a more beautiful definition and visual representation of dancing than WALL•E and EVE flying through space around the Axiom spaceship. And you realize: That’s EXACTLY the right word to describe what’s going on. WALL•E and EVE are dancing with each other. And it begs the question: Do they even know it? The Captain’s computer, itself a form of artificial intelligence, might, but do these newly personality-filled robots? Can they even express themselves in such a way as to define what they’re doing?
I suspect they don’t know. And somehow, that makes this scene even more beautiful.