The name is absent

manufactured and reproduced. Thus, as Baudrillard (1994b) points out, the
distinction between the original and the copy has disappeared irreversibly.
Digitalization is the perfect way to reproduce the general, the repeatable and
the representable, the quantifying characteristics of objects and people; in
short, everything that can be expressed with 0s and 1s.

The film AI: Artificial Intelligence (Spielberg, 2001) offers a different
perspective, a more humanistic vision of the future of technology. In the film,
a perfect reproduction of a child is discriminated against and persecuted by
humans because of his artificiality. The film describes a future where the
ability of machines to interact with humans has developed to such an extent
that we can admit the presence of feelings and ‘uniqueness’ in them.
Ironically, this is not an obstacle for most of the humans in the films who
hunt the replicas as they recognize in them a danger to humanity.⁷ Hence,
according to the interpretation of the future that we find in AI, machines are
merely servants and entertainment for humans. AI and The Matrix have
diametrically opposed connotations, yet, paradoxically, the moral of the
story is similar in both: the extinction of humankind (almost successfully
extinguished in the Wachowski brothers’ film) and the survival of the
machines. Probably the most notable difference between these films is that
in AI, machines are portrayed from a benevolent perspective: they are
artificially human, with their feelings, fears, desires and memories, while
humans are revealed as cold beings who want to defend the status quo and
refuse to accept and understand their own creations.⁸

Today, the form of technology that has gained most relevance in
western societies and is producing a profound social impact is the Internet
and the ‘universe’ it has created, Cyberspace. Cyberspace is an artificial ‘no-
space’, inhabited by humans but technologically mediated that appeared in
our lives in the 80s when William Gibson created it in Neuromancer (1984).
Cyberspace is a world where, in theory at least, everybody can enter without
prejudice or privilege, where ethnic origin, religion, economic power or

⁷ There is a parallel with Blade Runner (Scott, 1982), where the artificiality of the replicas is being
persecuted despite the machines being certain about their own humanity. This blurs the boundary
between machines and humans.

⁸ We can find similar conclusions and visions of machines in the film The Bicentennial Man (Columbus,
1999).

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