Sundance Institute
PARK CITY, Utah—Science-fiction and technology have long influenced each other, and those dynamics are at the heart of Love Machina, director Peter Sillen’s documentary (which premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival) about the romance of visionary entrepreneur Martine Rothblatt and her wife Bina, which is so strong that the two have sought to devise an artificial means of remaining together forever. Enter Bina48, a robot bust modeled after Bina that’s powered by AI and uploaded with “mindfiles” (i.e., large data packets of photos, videos, writings and audio recordings) that are meant to help this contraption develop an eternal Bina-esque digital consciousness. Manufactured by the Rothblatts’ Terasem Movement Foundation, it’s the centerpiece of their efforts to achieve immortality, and a machine that seeks to make past fantasy into future reality.
If this sounds crazy, it looks just as bizarre, as evidenced by Love Machina’s opening images of Bina48, whose gray-haired head turns and facial features move with the stilted unnaturalness of a primitive apparatus. That Bina48 resembles a somewhat distorted version of its human counterpart only makes it creepier, as does its halting speech patterns in Bina’s voice. These shortcomings, however, are superficial; the main thing about Bina48 is that it uses tremendous AI computing power to answer questions and state opinions with a relatively impressive degree of depth and thoughtfulness. It isn’t a convincing replica of Bina, but in most respects, it far outpaces Siri and Alexa—a not-inconsiderable feat considering that it was designed in 2007, years before those digital assistants became ubiquitous components of modern life.
Martine and Bina think that transferring human consciousness into a robot is a legitimate possibility on the not-too-distant horizon, and their motivation for doing it is their undying affection for each other. Love Machina is, first and foremost, a portrait of the intensely committed couple and their desire to continue being “two bodies, one soul, forever in love” (they even refer to themselves as “Marbina,” including on their vanity license plate). Martine and Bina met at a Hollywood disco when they were both single parents with one kid, and they immediately clicked. They married, adopted each other’s children, and had two more of their own, all as Martine became phenomenally successful in the satellite communications field, eventually creating Sirius XM radio. In 1994, their daughter Jenesis was diagnosed with pulmonary hypertension, and in response, Martine founded United Therapeutics and produced a new drug that allowed Jenesis and tens of thousands of others to live with their condition.