qz thoughtsChappie (2015)
Chappie is the third film from Neill Blomkamp, and his second set in South Africa. (The aliens as Apartheid allegory District 9 (2009) was the first.) This one started out reminding me of a SA "Robocop" (1987), with but with robot humanoids (instead of cyborgs) and a remote piloted "Moose" taking the place of the ED-209 robot, then the stories diverge.
There is a large corporation building machines for crime fighting, and the C-staff are very driven to boost sales to police forces. A software engineer is very interested in a project to make the robots self-aware and fully "intelligent" but he gets nixed for business reasons. So he steals a robot intended for recycling after getting damaged and installs his software on it anyway.
"Chappie" is the name that robot gets.
In a parallel story, some drug dealers whose business has been impacted by robot police, have a plan to kidnap an engineer from the robot manufacturer in order to get an advantage on the robot cops. They grab our AI focused engineer while he has the stolen droid in his car. (The core pair of drug dealers, at least core to story, are played by the duo from South African zef-rap-rave group Die Antwoord. They sort-of play themselves, using their stagenames as character names and Die Antwoord style art around their lair.)
As Chappie first starts to learn, the learning is shown as an accellerated human baby might pick up things. Imitation, discernment of items (eg a wrist "watch" pointed out) in a complex settings, learning that people lie from experiencing it, etc.
These are important innate skills of humans (and probably other mammals) that have no parallel in the present AI tech world. Large Language Models (LLMs) like Chatgpt do not have innate immitation. They do not have feedback loops to learn deceit from observed contradictions. They do not have acces to empathy to feel bad for hurting people, or people just hurt.
The movie glosses over how the robot got these traits, and I think the AI advocates in the modern tech world have glossed over the importance themselves. Throwing a bunch of structured text at a matrix generating program fails to consider how a matrix would identify text visually, how human brains are wired for grammar natively, how humans adjust their learning based on day to day activities (and not just structured "training").
By failing to understand how computers store data, the movie script just has the robot learn like a huan. By failing to understand how humans actually learn, techbros imagine stored data is learning.
After that the movie just becomes fantasy, to me.
Side note: I remember before this came out how famous the band Die Antwoord had become, and watching it I started to wonder, "what became of them?" So I looked at the Die Antwoord Wikipedia page and, "oh my", "oh dear", and "yikes".