I happened to watch a film on the Sundance Channel last night. It was a love story involving a young woman and two computer programmers who have designed an artificial intelligence life form named Koy Koy.
The plot was quite sophisticated. Koy Koy was a charming little animated bird who was being developed so lonely and homebound folks could have the equivalent of an electronic pet. Children could talk to Koy Koy and ask him to sing them a song and Koy Koy would do just that. Koy Koy was "their friend".
The twist came when the programmers had different opinions as to whether their new electronic pet should have company and romantic instincts like people and some other mammals. Their debate revolved around whether "love" and "romance" was simply a product of dopamine or something more.
The film description I printed out earlier in the month is more detailed than the one available now. It went as follows:
[B]DOPAMINE
directed by Mark Decena
Feature
DOPAMINE, named after the natural amphetamine our bodies produce when we're falling in love, is a romantic drama for the hi-tech age. Rand (John Livingston), and his two friends Winston (Bruno Campos) and Johnson (Rueben Grundy) are passionate and driven computer programmers who have designed an artificial intelligence life form named Koy Koy. When forced by their investors to test Koy Koy in a kindergarten classroom, Rand meets Sarah (Sabrina Lloyd, "SPORTS NIGHT", "ED"), the teacher to whom he was inexplicably drawn to at his favorite bar one evening. Sparks fly, and Koy Koy becomes the catalyst for Sarah and Rand's spirited dialogue on the nature of romantic attraction and attachment, all the while getting to the root of whether love is chemical or chemistry. DOPAMINE is the first film ever to go through every phase of the Sundance support network from the Sundance Institute Labs, to the Sundance Film Festival and on to the Film Series, Sundance Channel Home Entertainment and finally the Sundance Channel. Shot on high-definition video, DOPAMINE appeared at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival and was awarded the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation prize at Sundance for outstanding independent films featuring science and technology (2003).
The last listed broadcast scheduled for this month is for Sunday, January 30, 2005, at 10:00 AM.
This is the kind of positive portrayal innovative technology needs in the media and the arts. It would be nice to have an "Arts" section here. The last film I saw a few days ago demonized "Life Extension" and cryonics so I posted a discussion of it under "Cryonics".
