Remember, It's Only a Movie ...

The celluloid fantasies of Steven Spielberg -- tyrannosaurus theme parks, retaliatory great whites, and "little squashy" space invaders -- have granted generations of moviegoers permission to imagine stranger, more thrilling realities for a quarter century. Though millions of would-be Elliots (myself included) wandered their backyards with flashlights and fistfuls of Reeses Pieces hoping to lure alien playmates during the summer of 1982, the American public likely never regarded a Spielberg illusion so believable as it did this weekend during the debut of A.I.

In the science-fiction epic, Spielberg channels his fairy-tale tendencies through the tangled, tainted ecosystem of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey and infuses the atmosphere with the scent of plausibility. The tale begins roughly 100 years in the future, when professor Allen Hobby challenges a team of scientists and engineers from Cybertronics Manufacturing to improve upon the company's core product: humanoid robots built for consumer purposes. The firm already does a thriving business in personal-assistant bots that clean house, care for children, and satisfy various corporeal desires. Hobby wants more. He wants to create an artificially intelligent robot that can "genuinely love with a mind."

Hence David is created -- an artificially intelligent boy who can emit and receive emotion from humans. He is a technological breakthrough who advances robot love from sensuality stimulators -- preprogrammed physical reactions designed to convey anger, happiness, and sorrow -- to bona fide subconscious emotion. Hobby says that he is able to produce this sentient child by "mapping the impulse pathways of a single neuron," thereby creating a neural network for love.

And sitting in the theater watching David come to life, I believed Hobby -- hook, line, and sinker.

Afterall, it is 2001. By Kubrick's timetable, we're way behind schedule on this robot stuff. By now, some version of the Jetsons' housekeeper, Rosey, should be cleaning my toilet and packing my lunch while I sleep. A more congenial HAL 900 should be chauffeuring me through rush hour. And Lieutenant Commander Data should be serving as governor of California. Right?!

Determined scientists have been working to perfect robotics and artificial intelligence for more than 50 years. Four years have passed since Deep Blue dethroned Garry Kasparov, the best (human) chess player of all time. Surely those scientists must be close. Surely Spielberg's forecast of a thinking, interacting, loving "mecha" (mechanism) can't be that far away. Even world-famous author and inventor Ray Kurzweil says that machines will be able to understand, receive, and return love within the next 30 years. So what's the problem? Where's my mecha masseuse? My cyber shrink?

I called Jordan Pollack, associate professor of computer science at Brandeis University, to ask when I could expect delivery on my stove-scrubbing bot. His reply: Cool your jets.

Pollack, who made headlines late last year with the news that he'd hatched a batch of robots that could reproduce themselves, is one of the leading lights in the artificial-intelligence community. Despite enormous progress in the field, he says that Spielberg and Kurzweil have underestimated the complexity of merging artificial intelligence with robotics. Even if technology continues to advance in leaps and bounds, the restrictive costs of designing and assembling mechas that look and move like a human will keep them out of the consumer market for another 200 to 300 years. And then the result is anyone's guess.