Predicting the future is always a hit and miss proposition, writes Kevin Anderson. In the 1940s, Thomas Watson, the head of IBM, famously predicted the world demand for computers might be as high as five. And artificial intelligence has had its share of off-target predictions. AI researchers in the 1950s predicted that a computer would be the world chess champion by 1968. It took a few more decades than that.

The seeds of the film were sown by celebrated British science fiction writer Brian Aldiss in 1969 when he penned a futuristic tale of a child android given the capacity to love. The short story Super Toys Last All Summer Long set in motion a chain of events that lasted more than three decades and if the final result is considerably different from the origin of the species then one must consider the journey the original idea has taken. "I wrote that story in 1969 when computers were not the household toys, pleasures and working tools they are now - they were lodged in laboratories," explains Aldiss from his Oxford home. "If that was the case, it was quite easy to imagine that one might create an android boy and program him to believe (a) that he was a real boy, and (b) he loved his mother. "The gist of the story is that however the boy android David tried to please his mother, he could never do it - the essence of the story is about love and the failure of love.

When I first saw Aibo come out of his box, a huge smile broke out across my face. This robot seamlessly became a him, not an it. He made me want to play with him. It helps that Aibo is one handsome looking robot dog. Roughly the size of a large puppy, Aibo is sleek and polished, and his movements are recognisably canine.

To its credit the picture is a quite dark and disturbing story of an abandoned robotic child, the first in the world programmed to love, searching desperately to reunite with his adoptive human mother. The unequivocal winner in this film is 13-year-old actor Haley Joel Osment who gives an outstanding performance as David, the robotic child who can love. Osment appears in nearly every scene and his screen portrayal is every bit as riveting as his haunting performance in The Sixth Sense, which won him an Oscar nomination. Osment provides the emotional core to the story. Audiences may find they strongly connect with this Spielberg-fashioned child yearning for the unavailable love of his mother.

If you believed everything you saw in the movies, you could be forgiven for thinking that artificial intelligence (AI) research had not moved on since the late 1950s. In almost all the Hollywood movies that feature AI or explore its implications, the unspoken assumption is that all researchers in the field are out to create surrogate humans or computerised brains that threaten our existence with their utterly impersonal view of events. This is true even of Spielberg's film AI which, despite being set in the future, takes a decidedly old-fashioned view of artificial intelligence. It is perhaps no surprise that it does, given that its screenplay is based on a short story published in 1969. But many other Hollywood movies persist in pushing this view of AI.