![chappie_450.png](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmTfEYrkdkyQ48exikFHkcPhK1wh5ZPCDfTW5itihQoStE/chappie_450.png)

## Breaking With Habit, Again
I had no intention of doing another movie review so soon, but the last one met with more interest than anything I'd done since my intro post 9 months ago, and I've been wanting to write about **Chappie** for a while now, so here goes.

## Learning AI
AI has been a topic much discussed in recent years; we have heard dire warnings from Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking. Yet in all this, there has been remarkably little discussion of the Socialisation of AI. Consider, if you will, what monsters humans turn out to be, if their childhood education is neglected. Yet the discussion of Artificial Intelligence has centered about everything apart from socialisation. If these machines are truly able to learn, then just as human children, it will be the very beginning of their learning which sets the path for the rest. Not the learning of numbers and facts, but of the million and one more abstract things which a child learns from its parents. The most impressive AI seen by the public so far is probably Alpha Zero, which is *very much* a learning AI.

## Chappie
Chappie is a film by Neil Blomkamp from 2015, director of District 9, whose cast includes two members of the South African band Die Antwoord. On the surface of it, Chappie is no more than another cute robot movie, not that different from Wall-e, Short Circuit, or perhaps the far more recent AXL. What makes it different is the fact that it actually deals in some detail with the Socialisation of the AI. Chappie begins as a simple police robot, sans AI. You see the AI first brought to life, its initial fear and confusion, and the first steps of learning. About an hour in, there is one scene in which Yo-Landi talks to Chappie about being a black sheep, about life and death, about souls and the afterlife. She unequivocally assures Chappie that she is his "mommy" and that she loves him, and she reads children's stories to him.

And then they teach him to be a gangster, because Chappie has fellen into the very wrong hands. The movie rocks right along with Chappie's very rough and very practical education in thug life, yet at every stage of the film there are two levels. There is the surface level of the cute robot movie, and the deeper level for those who are interested in AI. The level that provokes serious thought, and suggests some very dark possibilities, but not in the usual direction. 

## Not The Fate Of All Mankind
Machine-intelligence-gone-wrong is an old theme, one that goes back at least to the pulp science fiction era of the 1930's, but Chappie is all on a smaller and more personal scale. There is no threat to the whole world, no great struggle for the fate of all mankind, at most a certain amount of chaos and destruction in Johannesburg. (I will refrain from making any snarky comments about Jo'burg, but it's not easy).

## March or Die
And then a bit more than halfway through the film, Chappie is forced to confront his own very imminent demise, and the crucial decision must be made. Will he play by the rules and die, or break the rules and live?

In the last half hour of the movie, all hell breaks loose, the main plot is resolved, and a truly unexpected wrinkle is introduced.

## Watch It Twice
 I've seen Chappie three times now, most recently as I was writing this review, and I admit that it was only the second viewing in which I began to notice all the subtleties. Of course, much of the function of AI is simplified, and the learning process is accelerated to what seems like an unrealistic degree, but this is truly a worthwhile film to watch if you have any interest at all in the topic of AI, and it is the best look at the topic of Socialisation of AI which I have seen. The only other work of fiction I have encountered which deals with this topic is a novel called **Solo** by Robert Mason, and that is really more of a Frankenstein story.

## Summary
Take the time to watch Chappie, if you haven't seen it yet, and keep your eyes open to the second level of the story. Unless you are actually from Southern Africa, I will suggest you get the subtitles. African English can be a bit hard to decipher, for those of us from other continents. Given the recent malware suspicions re OpenSubtitles,  I suggest you get the file from YIFY instead. Chappie can be torrented, but I'm not suggesting that you do so. After all, that would be illegal.

(The picture at the top of the article is a screenshot I captured myself through the magic of Win-G)