Eliezer writes:
[Spoilers within]
> The ending I saw left me feeling incomplete because this basic issue went
> unresolved. From the beginning, there were only four possible resolutions
> to the movie: David dies; David lives forever with Monica, eternally
> happy; David lives forever without Monica, eternally lonely; or David
> grows beyond his limits. The ending we saw doesn't tell us which of these
> events has occurred! Did David effectively switch himself off? Did David
> go on forever dreaming of his last perfect day? Does David's dreaming
> indicate that the Successors have gently begun to improve him out of his
> cul-de-sac? Are David's dreams eternally lonely because Monica isn't
> there?
A movie should leave you wondering what happened next, and I don't
object to some ambiguity. My interpretation is that David has grown,
through the course of his adventures, and his dreaming demonstrates that.
He has certainly changed, as we saw at the beginning that he did not
sleep and did not dream. And one of the goals that Dr. Hobby had for
his experiment was that the robots would learn to dream (although I
think Hobby meant it figuratively).
I would prefer to think that this was not because the aliens changed him,
but simply due to the remarkable series of events he had experienced,
the tremendous longing, the terror, frustration, the ages of loneliness;
followed up by moments of pure joy so intense that they will last him
forever. Through these events, outside the scope of what his designers
had planned for him, he has grown and changed, and become more than what
they had imagined.
Hal
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