Several technologies featured in upgrade require incredible levels of reliability for use as seen in the film. Several antagonists have weapons implanted in their arms, and failure by one of these devices would have potentially fatal consequences. Fully automatic cars roam the roads alongside cars driven by humans, implying these automatic cars are trusted to be less error prone than human drivers. The police's systems for listed suspects in a case independently decides whether or not an individual should be a suspect suggesting this system is trusted to prevent officers from making mistakes.
Upgrade demonstrates that computer reliability is never perfect and to expect it to be perfect is to invite disaster. Multiple technologies shown in the film are implemented in methods that suggest they are not expected to ever fail or develop errors. There are no convenient manual overrides for the cars, and there is no method to enter suspects into the police's system without the system's approval. These errors allow Grey to become paralyzed after an accident, and prevent the police force from dedicating the necessary attention to Grey afterwards. This emphasizes that computers and software should not be trusted implicitly and there needs to be clear methods and interfaces to diagnose problems and correct them when computers behave incorrectly. This issue is also present today as in 2019 two plane crashes were caused by automatic systems behaving properly but being fed incorrect information, similar to how the police system in Upgrade disregarded Grey as a suspect due to his paralysis [1]. The message in Upgrade is that computers will never be 100% reliable and we need to plan for situations where they malfunction, not situations where they behave as expected.
Schaper, D. (2019, December 26). How Pilots Interact With Automation. Retrieved May 4, 2020, from https://www.npr.org/2019/12/26/791414982/how-pilots-interact-with-automation
Daniel Stusalitus