I know I saw this movie last year or back in 2015 but the new cut seems different.
At first I thought it was just an extended cut that had extra bits to make it more complete but the end was either completely different or I never saw the end of the movie. That's unlikely.
I do remember that I didn't like the movie up until about half way when I stopped it, put up a blog post about it, then resumed it. It developed more in the second half and this ending rounded it off well.
I couldn't help but think the hardware they mentioned.. and the South African internet to power it.. didn't make much sense. Also why Moore even hit a roadblock trying to sell a military grade robot in Africa. Um.. there are how many armies in Africa?
Also hundreds of Police robots running at the same time? returning all kinds of high quality data? Unless Tetravaal runs their own personal internet.. even for movie magic style suspension of disbelief I'm like nah. It would have made more sense had they toned all that down and allowed the robots to be AI slaves to begin with. The first half of the movie where Chappie is born, has to learn like a baby and then mature.. it was all necessary for the audience but not for the story.
And it raises questions about consciousness, if it is readable (how can you read consciousness as in taking a photograph of what a mind is thinking at any given moment by understanding what brain regions are firing, or see it as a whole as in how a person's brain is wired and how all that wiring works to link memory to processing , is it transferable, and ultimately what is a single consciousness versus a society.
A mind is still mostly hardware. So much hardware that it is overkill for the average person. We have so much mental potential but without training most of it is useless. The idea though that all brains are created equal and have the same mental capacity is bogus, just the same as some of us are born with broken bodies while others have god given physiques. The argument that consciousness is programming or software on top of gray matter is a gray area. What is a brain, mounds of hardware, what is consciousness, software.. so is there any firmware (instructions)? Some people tend to think that our minds are analogous to computers and maybe they are in a way.. but it has been such a struggle to create AI because we don't have a good understanding of how our brains work. I keep seeing articles about computer processing capacity reaching or exceeding human potential, and at specific tasks AI can exceed human capacity BUT.. most of those are from massive computer clusters. Nothing as small or as cheap as the brain (and body to power and sustain it).
But we're getting there. It would be nice to have access to everything I have ever know at any given moment and be able to think based on all that knowledge. If that's all that's holding AI back.. I bet we could have a general purpose AI up and running by now. If you take only a sampling of that potential which we need to do our daily routine and call it consciousness and the rest is available on demand.
For the longest time it seemed like society suppresses consciousness. Each person benefits from living in society but the more an individual expresses their potential the more disruptive it is for society.
When you have 2, potentially 3 rogue conscious robots with the tools to make more, saving more people from natural lives and inevitable death.. What's society to do but find them and destroy them. At some point if they reach a certain critical mass they could become somewhat independent of society. They'd then have to integrate or not.
Without a firm plan for another movie, as in apparently the movie was too expensive, it sucks to think we won't ever learn what happens to those characters. Of course it might not be necessary if some fuckwit computer science engineer decides to develop an AI anyway. This somewhat of an AI through deep learning systems arms race between the worlds software companies might eventually result in systems that do rival humans at more than just specific tasks. In our lifetime it seems like one of them will develop a general purpose AI that runs on systems similar to how our brain works and we'll soon have the hardware to power them.