Greets,

I just finished watching Surrogates and Gamer.

First of all I am a big fan of the Internet and the potentialities of technology. You can be whoever you want to be online. I think there would be grealt possibilities with Shadowrun, you really can be anyone you want to be online or through an Otomo.

As for the two movies, they had similar themes and also some other themes I have seen in so many other American scifi movies.

The question which really begs to be answered. What is the obsession with technology and vilifying it and then hoping you can turn back time. Both movies are about a family. Each family is equally dysfunctional and yet they all want the same thing, putting the genie back in the bottle, since as we know technology is the true villain and source of evil in the world.

Maybe I am a technophiliac, but I could never see myself turning the clock back to before the advent of the Internet, mobile phones, and being wired into a global data infrastructure. What's the appeal to a wider audience?

Take your typical "conservatie" values - family, white homogeneity, religion, etc. These values are not important to "the kids", who instead value the benefits of technology. It's a cautionary tale, I guess. The parents warn the hotheaded youngsters that putting your faith in new values will destroy them. Don't forget it's human to be afraid of change. People see these movies where technology is bad and go see it as a sort of ideological masturbation, or allow their children to go see it because they know it will teach them a lesson. Point is, it sells.

IMO it's a bit ironic, and therefore cool, that you ask this on a Shadowrun website.

Whenever I want to get sentimental and emotionally pumped up I get drunk and watch 80s movies. When it comes to the internet, 80s movies (and literature, and video games) all liked to portray "cyberspace" as this mysterious dehumanizing thing. It's like since they had neon glowing grids and crap and funky computer voices, you would lose your humanity by using them and we'd all sink into an urban existential malaise, forsaking our "meat" for the "grid".

Did that actually happen? No. Myspace and Facebook are like the ultimate teabagging and humiliation of that vision of the future. INstead of something neon, scary, and difficult to use, the internet is clogged with banality and idiocy. Pioneer phreakers who did cool and scary stuff and pushed the envelope in terms of exploring technology were a small handful of people. The morons of YouTube are legion.

So my point is that you can apparently make movies about how something that nobody knows about is scary and dehumanizing and then people like to watch it and think it's true. Pick something out there that not many people know about but which might become more promienent in the future and then go on about how it's dehumanizing.

They did that for video games in the mid 90s, for computers in general in the 80s, and I guess they can do it for RPGs if they want.

I'm sorry, but are you being serious here? With a straight face, you're claiming that it's the conservatives that run Hollywood and use it to push their values?

Hollywood is a slave of US conservatism, despite its claims to the contrary. Study its products. From the separate beds of Doris Day and Rock Hudson, to the propaganda of Pearl Harbor just before the invasion of Iraq, it serves the interests of the entrenched elite.

The counter-culture does not exist. It is a fabrication of the hegemony of corporate and political elitism, designed to mollify the ignorant and self-indulgent masses. Shadowrun is merely a projection of current realities into a fantastic future.

The internet (with its torrents) and (online) gaming are Hollywood's competition. One offers the products of Hollywood (pirated) for free, the other competes directly with their product for time and money.

They don't need to be conservative to make propaganda against their competition.

Oh, wow. Hollywood is a little from Category A, a little from Category B. It varies depending on studio, director, genre, and political considerations.

You guys're just victim to the Hostile Media Effect.

Interesting parallels I saw between Gamer and Surrogates was really white homongeneity as mentioned by Backgammon. Both heroes are white, both sidelined villains were black and were dispatched about one hour into the movie. To be honest, both movies heroes and families could easily go to a mid-west town and become luddites.

Then there is the entire car issue. Gamer empowers the character to escape the game with a car in the parking lot and ends with the now-united family in the car driving into a tunnel. Surrogates empowers bruce Willis' character when he drives the car to chase down the FBI partner gone rogue. I see it a lot in American movies. What's the appeal of the car as a symbol?

Both talk about addiction to virtual worlds, but as if we can go back to the family values of the 1950s... If facebook was to disappear tomorrow it would simply be replaced by something better, shinier and more intrusive. Technology and society don't work on the whims of individuals or as if there are giant on/off signs.

What about all those people who live successful lives because they operate in that world. I would actually find it fun on living in Society - even as a bot. What about all those who can't survive without their Surrogates, do we also go back to 1950s safety of American Apartheid?

On an off note about technology. When Tiger Eyes was asking for help with a flash addy. I did not automatically think website, but instead mobile phone. A Symbian or Flashlight application to be used by phone. I don't know how I could live without my phone and the diversity of connection methods it allows me.

Obviously a lot of Hollywood - the actors, mostly - but tons of others, are certainly not necessarly conservatives. But the producers, the big studios, etc - the entranched money - you really see them being liberals? I really don't think so. But anyway, I don't think it's personnal. I don't think the producers are really systematically forwarding their agenda. They just put money where they think people will go. They reflect people's values. A LARGE chunk of Americans, and they mostly all have money, are conservatives. You gotta target their values, you know.

About cars, Chrys - I think that's really a North America thing here. Car culture in this continent is different from Europe or anywhere else I am sure. Nowhere else really has so much god damn space between everything. Cars are special here, cause we need them so much. They are more of a symbol for many things than Europe.

I saw Surrogates about a month ago. Up until seeing this post, I had totally forgotten about it. It's that kind of special movie.

Because movies where everyone is happy and the world is flowers and sunshine don't sell especially well.

Let me turn the question around - why should a movie go through the work of introducing a futuristic setting (which is harder to do than using modern day, and a lot more expensive) if the setting does not seriously contribute to the excitement, danger or suspense of the plot?

Sometimes to criticize the current world and its politics, one has to set it in the subversive, but safely fantastic environment of the future.

True, but keep in mind:
1) Politics and governments are generally 'the machine', or the machinery that define our world, so representing them as technology, dominating technology, or using technology to dominate us is pretty useful (and logical - if they're in charge, they probably have all the nice toys).
2) Wouldn't the story be far more interesting with evil robots?

Which bring me to my favourite movie: Logan's Run. Not because of its plot, but because of its message.

It's a combination of laziness and a lack of understanding about how technology affects society. "Tech is bad" is the easiest sell for hack writers in Hollywood because it's an easy concept for a business-oriented studio exec to grasp.

- Robots and computers will kill us all.
- Invisible men will rape women.
- Clones are bad because they don't have souls and weren't really "born" as God intended.
- Those dang televisions/video games are warping the minds of our youth.
- and on and on and on.

I enjoy sci-fi directors like Paul Verhoeven who every much embrace the sci-fi blockbuster then flip it on its head as well as indie guys like David Cronenberg, who approach the future as "weird" rather than "threatening."

IF you watch John Milius' Conan The Barbarian you will realize that Hollywood is filled with hippies who just try to keep Milius down.

Props to you, WR!

'
You had me up until this second paragraph, that was the guy who did Starship Troopers right? Yea he's a hack who needs to burn.

For the record I liked surrogates, wasn't anything ground breaking but it was a couple hours I didn't feel cheated. I saw it on the heels of inglorious bastads though so it may have been colored by that.

Starship Troopers was one-hundred degrees of AWESOME. Best dark-sci-fi-comedy-posing-as-World-War-2-allegory ever.

It's not about WW2. It's about Korea (representative democracy versus socialism rather than fascism), and a brutal criticism of the values of western civilization.

Verhoeven is a survivor of the blitzkrieg attacks on the Dutch. I'm sure parallels to Korea can easily be made but WW2 is in every sci-fi movie he's made, including Robocop and Total Recall. He flat out says so in the DVD commentary tracks.

Throw in some "sinking" spaceships, kid-friendly propaganda news and ads, and Nazi uniforms and there you go. What the movie doesn't do is say "these are the Axis" and "these are the Allies."

It is interesting to look at the movie as a case study in how fascism's failure to defeat communism grew from a fundamental lack of understanding of the philosophical differences between societies, but the story as a whole grew out of Heinlein justifying his politics by criticizing the nature of the US military and western society as a whole in the Baby Boom era and the Korean War.

I've been mulling this over since the thread was started, but I wanted to think about it long enough to accurately form my thoughts, and collate them in a fashion that was as clear and concise as possible.

I think the root cause for movies like this is the modern, western audience's need for what David Brin called a "self-defeating prophecy." If you look at the history of science fiction cinema, you'll find that it's rife with movies that caution us what not to do, but provide very little by way of guidance toward what we SHOULD do. From movies like The Day the Earth Stood Still to Jurassic Park* to E.T., we find ourselves beset with films that seem to caution us about ourselves. The reason these prophecies are self-defeating is that because we have been so bombarded with messages that we need to be careful about alien contact, infectious diseases, techno-facism, that we are primed to specifically NOT do what is portrayed in the films. Does anyone really think we would shoot first at an alien spacecraft, after all the movies telling us that this is a huge Bad Idea? Of course not.

So, in part, the movies are like that because of the long history of Hollywood making self-defeating prophecies. But that doesn't accurately convey the whole picture.

In order to understand why they want the genie back in the bottle, as well as why they operate in the mode of 'technology BAD!' we should think about the average movie viewer, their age, and the technology they are being newly exposed to. I think most people have a hard time adapting to fundamental changes in how we live, or how we communicate, or other fundamental wierdnesses. This is why during the .com boom, we had such lovely movies as The Net, and whatever movie it was where spies tracked you through the internet and real-time satellites that apparently never change position except to keep up with you. And even further back than that, we had movies about computerization being our doom - WarGames, for instance. Even further back we get Victorian-era novels that portray the very concept of cities as unwholesome and immoral, while true rectitude can only be found in traditional life.

I haven't seen Surrogates or Gamer, but I suspect they deal with alienation from ordinary human contact and a lack of a moral compass leading to tragedy. I suspect this because almost all works of this type have the same problem: they find it easier to blame the mechanism than the cause. Remember, human greed doesn't cause exploitation - the mechanical loom does!** It's not absentee parenting, or lack of a home life, or abusive relationships making our kids withdraw from us - it's television! Our kids aren't morally adrift because we lack the fortitude to instill proper virtues in them - it's Grand Theft Auto! It's always easier to blame a technology than it is to blame ourselves, because technology is a thing, an item that can be put away, and if we can blame a technology then we can ban it, rather than examine ourselves. The movie tries to put the genie back in the bottle because that's the response of most viewers - get rid of the item and the problem will go away. Because it's the easy answer. The one you can solve in 120 minutes, and the one that makes most viewers feel warm and fuzzy at the end of the show. If they think the Bad Thing can be banned, they go, "Well, thank goodness I saw that movie! We'd better be careful if they ever invent that, because if we don't ban/regulate it, we'll be up shit creek!"

I imagine papal encyclicals in the 14th century illustrating a similar situation, brought about by the crossbow.

It's not that studio execs can't 'get it'. They get it. They are very smart people. It's that the viewer doesn't want to be lectured - they want an escape, and an easy solution to a problem that can be handled in 120 minutes.

*Yes, Jurrasic Park was a book first. But Michael Crighton as an author EXCLUSIVELY writes in this mode. And this accurately sums up my opinion on his 'science': http://dresdencodak.com/2009/09/22/caveman-science-fiction/
**Luddites.

I just read yesterday that there is this big scientific conference about the future of intelligent networks - smart electric grids that know when to give power and when not to, smart traffic systems, etc. All these technologies are coming down the pipe and going to make cities a lot better. There are the usual concerns about security, like the system being hacked and all, and that's normal. However, there is a conference of top minds gathering specifically to discuss the danger of the system going rogue à la Matrix and others. I kid you not. Serious people actually feel the need to discuss this, although everyone is like "yeah, no, not gonna happen". I think it's just for the benefit of Joe Average - "Yes, see, we talked about it".

Like, what kind of fucked up world has entertainment created where people need to seriously discuss the risk of computer enslaving us all in cocoons to turn us into batteries?

I thought that the guy who made the movie hated Heinlen and used the movie as a platform to actually parody Heinlen. I thought Heinlen was basically a proto-fascist. I don't mean that with a value judgement, but just that he thought full citizenship and participation in government should be earned by contributions to society.

The world changed so rapidly over the past 10-20 years. I grew up comfortable with the computers and the internet appeared while I was in middle school and I still remember the early days of it.

But for fat old people from, like, the 40s, who used card catalogues and crap, and still can't hack South Park let alone Goatse? It probably seems like the world went mad.

It's a very significant risk. If we create strong AI, we still have no clear framework in which to educate that AI save for our modern educational system. If the AI is created (and thus educated) in the United States, it may indeed not find itself capable of applying the laws of thermodynamics to discover the wastefulness of this scenario, and then we might find ourselves in the end being led by Keanu Reeves.

~J

AFAIK Heinlein was not pro-fascist. He simply intended to portray a fascist society (minus "evil" parts like racism) as a thought experiment.

Verhoeven originally intended to make a scifi war movie and only after prepoduction had already begun learned of Heinlein's book and aquired the license - hence the many differences between movie and book (in the book Rico is Asian not Caucasian, Dizzy is a guy, Carmen's part is way smaller, the Bugs are an intelligent species with civilization and technology, etc.). In fact, Verhoeven never read the whole book as he considered it "too depressing".

Reading a lot of Heinlein's work, I would have to say he does have leanings towards fascism (not tyranny or a dictator, but the sense of a strong government supported by tight cultural binds).


re: AIs - I read recently that the most powerful supercluster in the world right now is actually the Storm virus botnet. If AI is to be developed, it seems more likely it'll be the global conglomeration of processing resources gathered by illegal means and serving a criminal organization, rather than a traffic system run by a municipal government.

Considering I can't get my AI teammates to stay out of my field of fire in Rainbow Six, this isn't something that keeps me up at night.

Machines only do what we program them to do. Spontaneous AI as portrayed in sci-fi is pure fantasy.

Technology like machines are tools. Some are semi-autonomous, but none are aware. Even a simplish multicell organism is more aware than the most advanced combination of software and hardware.

If in the future robots are to the level of autonomy, it will be humanity that will throw the first stone. Machines are fabulous tools, but nothing more. No matter how I anthropomorphise feelings to computers and the electronic world upon which they play, at the end of the day, they are still machines.

Technology is a thing. A knife can be used to save lives or take lives. It is only as good or evil as the person wielding it. Last I checked we don't try the knife for murder, but instead the person behind it.

Anyways, class starts soon. Got to prepare.

This is where I disagree. There's a line betweein awareness and autonomy. An improperly programmed computer entrusted with too much may indeed cause massive death when that program leads it to a failure. The difference is, science fiction assumes malign intent, where the truth is it's just mathematical laws at work.

This is also where Cyberpunk shines. AIs in CP aren't necessarily evil, and looking outside of SR, they're more commonly benign or neutral than anything. However, technology continues to get people dead, simply because people produce and sell technology without doing the due diligence of bug testing, or even fully understanding the complexity of what it is they're selling.

I wouldn't want a safety council to examine if my traffic system will intentionally kill people, but it would be a good idea to say 'hey, if the programming is buggy (which it is), what might happen? Might something happen which causes all lights to turn green? What is built in to prevent this from happening?'

Somewhere between amoebae and us, self-awareness happened. How did that happen, and why can it not happen to machines? Until we can answer those two questions (possibly contradicting the second proposition), we are just guessing.

"Half of the world's plane accidents are caused by pilot error. Planes can take off, fly and land by themselves, that's a fact. So it would stand to reason to halve all accidents remove the pilot. But would you be willing to fly in a plane that has no pilot?"

I think we're in agreement

Putting any system where human lives are on the line fully in the hands of a computer system is dangerous because a computer system lacks the power to reliably self-regulate.

The flaws of human oversight and the flaws of computer oversight complement each other nicely, but neither one is 100% dependable on its own.

Depends on how you define self-awareness. If you define self-awareness as "what makes a human," a machine can't be human as a machine can't ask questions nor can it follow an instruction out of sequence. Human brains can. Self-awareness is not a process that can be artificially replicated because it's something that cannot be measured.

What?

Out-of-order execution is the norm for computers these days, at least above the embedded level.


Evidence?


I'd say more because it's ill-defined. "[…] the question of whether Machines Can Think […] is about as relevant as the question of whether Submarines Can Swim." and all that.

~J

Actualy it has been proposed primarly in the books that the Matrix didn't actually use humans as batteries (As this makes no sence because we don't generate power, we use it) but actualy gleened power from wave movement or another source, and used our brains as a parrelell circuit.

On a simler note, as an alternative to the theroy that Technomancers are a parrell to gays (wich may be partialy the case), the situation seems more of a portrayal of the eventual result of techno-fobia. They and AIs are the culmination of almost a hundred years of fear and hate directed at computers in the form of the all powerfull "AI", how do you think humanity would react at something so similer to the monsters that they imagine lurking in the shadows of a digital world.
Odds are the first reaction to be to start handing out the pitchforks and torchs and getting ready to burn down the forest to destroy the new creature that resembles the monsters from their campfire storys so prefectly.

Also, ME AM PLAY GODS!!

Much like the extensive contortions performed to provide a useful meaning to "made the Kessel run in under twelve parsecs", "it don't mean a thing if it ain't [in the movie]".


The artists-formerly-known-as-Otaku are probably portrayed as a parallel to the X-Men as much as anything.

(Insert quip about transitivity of parallelism here)

~J

Well you have to add in that shadowrun was made by people as just as nerdy as thoughs that play it.

What "what"?


OoO processors still function utilizing a set of pre-determined parameters that the processor cannot deviate from.


Ha! Good luck, Descartes!

On what basis do you claim that machines cannot ask questions?


Now note that you made firm statements regarding the capability (or lack there of) of machines to perform these same tasks.


And this is different from the human mind how?

If you're talking about the fact that computers are clearly deterministic (noting that errors can still cause unexpected results, and assuming (as is actually the case) that apparently fundamentally nondeterministic quantum effects are eliminated by making unexpected behaviour "sufficiently improbable"), note that the reason they're deterministic is because that's how they're most useful to us, not because of any fundamental requirement that they be. There's already preexisting work on nondeterministic computers (mostly based on the hypothesis that not requiring deterministic behaviour might allow hardware that works so much faster as to be worth the tradeoff).

Perhaps more importantly, consider that we have no reason to believe that humans are more than Turing-complete modulo tape length. This means that any human can be run on any universal turing machine by taking a description of the human and emulating the human on the human's inputs.

The consequence of this is that our ability to do anything implies the existence (in a theoretical sense; it may not actually physically exist, and we may not have the manufacturing capability to build it) of a computer that does the same thing.

~J

I think most of you are over thinking this lol.
All hollywood does is take anything (in this case technology) that is well known about but not totally understood and makes it scary for the sake of the masses.

looks at the scary D&D movies. one has tom hanks in it in the 80s. a lot of people had herd of roleplaying games but didn't understand them. ooooh! scary. Look at all the late 80s early 90s internet horrors. things traveling the net killing people. because people knew about the net. but not what it really was. even terminator is an extension of this.

reports of possible water on mars. suddenly all the new alien invasion movies start up again.

report on the very misunderstood Mayan calender. suddenly even discovery channel is doing end of the world specials and a multi million dollar block buster is born.

If tomorrow a new form of cyber limb was created to help people with missing limbs the block buster of the next quarter would be about a guy whos cyberarm makes him kill people. something that once the technology was more common would be laughable. Just like most those internet ghost/virus killing people through the net are laughable today now that a lot more people understand the technology and its more common.

Those same automated sytems crash constantly, as they cannot adjust quickly enough for all the enviromental factors. Note the crash rate for UAVs is significanlty higher than manned aircraft.