>>211972300
>>211978685
>>211981117
I think you all are overthinking it. First accept that this is ultimately Spielberg, who makes fairy tales, not Kubrick's bleakness even if that was the starting point.

It's very interesting and poignant taken at face value, and that is a bittersweet ending, not a horrifically bleak one. The mecha at the end are not interested in David for any nefarious ulterior motive, but for the straightforward reason Ben Kingsley-bot describes: thousands of years after the people who build the first generation of robots that built them have perished, they're still trying to figure out the meaning of their creation and their own purpose of existing. It's foreshadowed by Gigolo Joe's description of religion ("Those who created us are always looking for who created them.") It's a very resonant, human motivation, an astonishing vulnerability for such powerful beings much more interesting than "They dug this primitive robot out of the ice to put him in a zoo to mess with him."