"Robots will take over the world." It's a familiar refrain from movie scientists, conspiracy theorists, or your paranoid friend after he saw a TV special on autonomous cars. As artificial intelligence research accelerates in sophistication, it has also set off alarm bells and calls for caution from some of the brightest minds in the world, such as Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking.

For South African filmmaker Neill Blomkamp, however, optimism overpowers the concerns. His new movie Chappie maintains the cyberpunk styling of his previous films District 9 and Elysium while addressing new thematic areas with a comedic undertone. It offers a look into the possibilities of artificial intelligence in the near future, set against the backdrop of a mob-run, gangsta rap-infused Johannesburg. Chappie grapples with such age-old sci-fi themes as human consciousness, the future of war, and the continued struggle between man and machine.

"I'm not sure humans will be capable of giving birth to AI in the way that films fictionalize it."

Chappie follows its titular character (played by Sharlto Copley in a form-fitting motion capture suit), a defective robot who once served as a scout in an autonomous police force employed by the Johannesburg Police Department. Deon Wilson (Dev Patel), the genius robot designer behind the scouts, thinks he's written a firmware upgrade that would make robots sentient, so before Chappie (then known as Scout 22) is sent away to be scrapped for his parts, Wilson steals him. As he pulls away from the facility, however, he's carjacked and kidnapped by drug dealers (including eccentric South African rappers Die Antwoord) who make him resurrect the robot and teach it to help them pull off a grand heist.

We spoke to Blomkamp about his views on artificial intelligence and what inspired him to make Chappie the way he did.

Popular Mechanics: How did the idea for Chappie come about?

In 2003 I made a short, and I just wanted to see this weird autonomous real-looking robot controlling South Africa. Chappie was sort of inspired by that short.

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The Moose, the other main robot in the movie, is unrealistic and over-the-top. Why did you want Chappie to be more realistic?

Well Chappie was also a little over-the-top. The way that I like to think of it is that it feels to the audience that it's real. It doesn't necessarily mean that it is actually real. It has to be convincing and the audience has to go along with it. What design techniques are you going to use to try to convince them that this is actually a robot that is able to walk around and stand next to these actors? And I feel like the design and the surfacing—we got [that] right, because he looks totally real to me. But then you start getting into fiction a little bit, you start twisting reality a little bit; like his eyes and his ears and this other stuff.

"It's the most fundamental question humans can ask, and I think that's the reason we keep asking it."

[Ricardo href='http://www.theshadowleague.com/' target='_blank">Shadow League: Thematically, the film draws upon consciousness, and what it is to be alive. That\'s something humans have been questioning since Pinocchio, and all the way up through Real Steel and AI. Why do you feel these things keep resonating with humanity as we advance?

My point of view on artificial intelligence—which ties into the nature for humans constantly looking into the reasons for why we exist and why consciousness exists—changed during the making of Chappie. I\'m not actually completely sure that humans will be capable of giving birth to AI in the way that films fictionalize it.

So, you have weak artificial intelligence, which is like a robot or a computer system that follows a list of protocols. It gives \'yes,\' or \'no\' answers that can be as complex as you want. And then you have strong AI, which is basically like a human. Like something that can think up a thought that\'s never been thought up, or paint a painting, or write a poem.

In the realm of strong AI, or in the realm of human consciousness, I think that it\'s been something that troubles humans or forces us to look at it over and over for millennia, for as long as we\'ve really been conscious, because there is no answer. There is no explanation for us to grip on to, so we just don\'t know why we\'re here. We don\'t know how consciousness is created, and we don\'t know the nature of consciousness, whether it becomes a spiritual and philosophical discussion or whether it\'s simply running electrical currents through synapses and it leads to consciousness. It\'s probably the most core fundamental question that humans can all ask, and I think that\'s the reason that we constantly keep asking it.

PM: How do you feel about the current state of robotics? Do you think that artificial intelligence will advance to something similar to the level shown by the autonomous robot police force in Chappie?

I definitely think it'll get there. That's not even a debate. It will get there within a decade or less. Like if you take Petman or [other robots] from Boston Dynamics and look at what they're doing, you mix that with some sort of complex code that has a bunch of protocols about how to react to certain situations. We will absolutely make that. That's scarier to me, weirdly, than real AI. That actually bothers me more.

Why is that?

Because if it really is strong AI—if it really is intelligence like us or beyond us, then maybe it wipes us out, but it's going to be a binary thing. It's either just going to wipe us out and we won't know, or it's going to not do that at all and it's going to be something that may actually make life better for everyone, and it may enlighten us in a way that humans can't.

It's the intermediary that scares me. It's the phase where we let a bunch of Boston Dynamics robots loose that have some sort of poorly written protocols about kicking in doors and raiding houses.

© 2015 CTMG/Columbia Pictures

How do you think AI will ultimately be used in the future? Will it be used for good or for bad?

I don't think the word "used" is correct. I think it will do what it wants to do. We can have whatever idea we want about what it should be used for, and it will not do that. We'll make it and then we'll enter a paradigm shift where nothing will be the same. It'll either solve all of our problems or it will declare war on us, which personally I think it's not going to do.

Why not?

Natural selection, for the time that's it's been around on the planet, has been a very organic-based situation. We have RNA and DNA governing higher levels of thought processes even in highly advanced multi-cellular organisms like humans. We're still making decisions ultimately based on a very simple line of code from a system that's billions of years old, which is this RNA/DNA thing. When it's saying that procreation, defense of young, fight any intruder into your perimeter; it's essentially survival [is what matters]—but not of the human, survival of the strain of DNA that goes back billions of years. It's kind of looking out for itself more than it's looking out for the human.

"It's either just going to wipe us out and we won't know, or it's going to not do that at all."

So there are a whole bunch of questions in artificial intelligence like, if you remove the organic part of it, is altruistic behavior genetically innate in humans or is it a learned procedure? Can we encode AI to think ethically and morally or is that encoded on a level that's biological? So, it goes both ways.

In the Stephen Hawking argument, survival of the fittest is also based on the same system. So with the removal of it, is it just pure supercomputer intelligence where it can empathize and rationalize with us? It isn't governed by these chemicals and hormones. What's governing it then? So it's not as cut and dry to me as they make those arguments sound.

© 2015 CTMG/Stephanie Blomkamp

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