Historical Film Nights presents "I'm Your Man"
As we continue to consider the WUmester theme of "Being Human," the limits of that question increasingly consider posthuman possibilities. Filmmakers have long been fascinated by the subject of artificially created human surrogates (think the robot Maria in Metropolis, or of course Frankenstein's "Monster" ), but recent innovations in artificial intelligence have given new direction to such thought experiments. German filmmaker Maria Schrader's work can be added to the growing list of explorations of robotic humans and the limits of AI consciousness: recent films like Her, Ex Machina, Wall-E, or (obviously) Robots; novels like Kazuo Ishiguru's Klara & the Sun, Ian McEwan's Machines Like Me, or Nnedi Okorafor's Death of the Author. As in all of them, perhaps inevitably, the question of robot consciousness becomes an interrogation of human consciousness as well. In this contest, it proves useful that human Alma's research argues for the origins of expressive art, not just accounting tabulations, in early cuneiform; equally useful that robot Tom insists, in the face of Alma's claim that she wouldn't pray on an airplane going down, that the impulse to do so is "simply human." Alma's final report twists that theme about how evaluating the robot is always also analyzing the human in an interesting way. And the film also features nice use of the city of Berlin and the Pergamon Museum as backdrops.