Steven Spielberg may be garnering rave reviews for his work with the movie “A.I.”, but the film has brought several technical and even a few ethical questions to the attention of a worldwide audience curious about the science of artificial intelligence.

Vasant Honavar, associate professor of computer science, has been working with artificial intelligence at Iowa State for 10 years.

“My initial motivation is trying to understand what makes us tick,” Honavar said.

According to his Web site, the primary goal of artificial intelligence research is “to increase our understanding of perceptual reasoning, learning, linguistic and creative processes.”

Spielberg’s motion picture details a boy robot who shows emotion to a woman he loves as his mother.

Whether it is possible to create such a machine is still questionable.

“We don’t know whether it’s possible,” Honavar said. “The basic working hypothesis is how cognition of thought can be modeled by computation.”

Honavar said limits in artificial intelligence research are yet to be estimated. For now his main focus is modeling learning, such as designing a program which would enable a computer to look at an image of a piece of fruit and tell what specific fruit it is.

He acknowledged that some sensory tasks, such as describing how a rose smells, would be increasingly complicated to program.

The beginning of studies in artificial intelligence dates back to 5th century B.C., according to information provided on Honavar’s Web site.

Aristotle invented syllogistic logic, the first formal deductive reasoning system, a term that was first used in 1956 by John McCarthy. McCarthy coined the term at Dartmouth College; consequently, the first running program demonstration of artificial intelligence ran later that year at Carnegie Mellon University.

The world has come a long way since then.

In 2000, KISMET, a robot with capabilities of expressing facial emotions was described as an interactive robot. Robotic pets became available on the commercial market as well.

However, not all people think the movement is a positive one.

The idea of having robots constructed to imitate humans is a widely controversial issue, said Kevin de Laplante, associate professor of philosophy and religious studies.

“There is no consensus on the criteria for being considered a person,” he said.

De Laplante said creating such a being brings about questions as to whether the robot has crossed the threshold to becoming a human.

If so, he asked, after the robot has been turned on, do humans have the right to turn its mechanisms off?

De Laplante said this tension is quite evident in the movie “A.I.”

He said the biggest question raised in the movie is, “What does it mean to be human, and what’s so valuable about it?”

Questions about how society would treat robotic beings are also an issue.

“There are some similarities and some differences between artificial intelligence and cloning,” he said.

While in cloning there is no quandary to determine if clones are worthy of moral respect, in the case of a robot, de Laplante said, they might never have that status.