Rant in D minor: The age of spiritual machines

I took the youngsters to Wall-E on its opening weekend and came away feeling like Johnny Mnemonic after a heavy night’s downloading.

You’ll know the bones of the story already. Wall-E (Waste Allocation Load Lifter-Earth-Class) is a trash-compacting robot charged with the task of cleaning up and cubing mountains of industrial crap until the end of time, or his batteries go flat. His Sisyphean existence is disrupted by the arrival of Eve, an iPod-contoured interplanetary probe. When this shiny piece of love interest rumbles the first photosynthesized plant life to appear on earth in 700 years, she scoops it up for incubation and falls into a Sleeping Beauty coma until she’s recalled to the great mothership in the sky.

It gets weirder. The smitten Wall-E limpets himself to her shuttle and is deposited on an offworld resort cruiser where humans have devolved into an obese, boneless, slurpy-sucking species trapped in a recreational stasis maintained by AI-regulated life support systems – a barely disguised riff on the fatted-cattle Western consumerist strip-mall nightmare. When a Hal 3000-style rogue computer refuses to get with the Return to Earth pre-programme triggered by the discovery of the regenerated plant life, the resulting conflict propels the human hordes out of their sloth.

Apart from being a good yarn, Wall-E is also an unlikely fusion of James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, post-apocalyptic Last Man (or rather, Last Machine) saga, and Vonnegut speculative satire, all wrapped in a U-rated multiplex-friendly package.

But it isn’t Luddite. Our friends electric are largely portrayed as benign, the bipeds, bovine. This viewer was reminded of another thinly-veiled consumerism allegory, The Matrix, specifically the speech delivered by arch-AI-baddie Agent Smith, in which he declares that human behaviour is not mammalian, as one would expect, but viral or parasitic, sucking the planet’s resource centres dry before moving onto the next patch.

The other week I finally got around to buying the (Honest Injun, This Really Is The Absolute, Final) Director’s Cut of Blade Runner. Watching the restored print, one realises that the old two-legs-good/androids-bad paradigm never existed: Rutger Hauer’s replicant Roy Batty really was the angel of the piece, his rooftop-in-the-rain monologue being one of the most poetic scenes in the history of cinema.

The subtext of Blade Runner was not Philip K Dick’s recurring riddle ‘What is Real?’, but ‘What is Human?’ A friend recently sent me a copy of inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil’s mind-boggling 1999 book The Age Of Spiritual Machines – When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (Penguin), which projects a 100-year timeline towards a point where soul and circuitry become indistinguishable. Far fetched? Two words: Stephen Hawking, a man who told Charlie Rose that humanity’s only hope of avoiding extinction through eco-disaster lies in space – Wall-E’s central theme.

Maybe Lovelock and Agent Smith were right. Maybe humans are malevolent bugs fit to be burned off the face of the planet by a fever of global warming. Maybe the machines will inherit the earth. Let’s hope they don’t trash the joint as badly as the previous tenants.