David A. Harding
Tuesday, 23 Oct 2007
In I, Robot, Will Smith fights an army of humanoid robots. I gleaned that from the theatrical trailer, but I know Issac Asimov, author of I, Robot (the book), wrote nothing so campy, and I rejected seeing the movie.
I own no TV nor do I rent or download movies, and rarely when I reject a movie am I deterred. But two weekends ago I used my parents TV and VCR to watch three movies I only have in videocassette format: the original unaltered Star Wars Trilogy. I flipped channels while The Empire Strikes Back rewound and came upon Will Smith interrogating a robot. I guessed the movie title immediately, but I kept watching.
The movie is made of the usual mediocre big-budget Hollywood elements: a cliche plot, expensive CGI, technobabble, race jokes, and lots of violence1. The lead character is a stubborn hot-blooded emotional man who believes robots are evil. The second lead is a stubborn coolly logical woman who argues robots are safe. In Hollywood, and only in Hollywood, the man wins the argument. The slippery CEO of the robot manufacturing company orders the robots to take control of the world. In Hollywood, and only in Hollywood, the CEO is actually innocent; the real villain is a communist supercomputer. To prevent the supercomputer from destroying human free will, the two heros kill it with technobabble and fall in love. In Hollywood, and only in Hollywood, normalcy immediately returns once the communist dies, and in the background, an American flag waves.
Society in the I, Robot movie depends on robots. One company controls all the robots. A person within that company uses the robots to control society.
Replace robots with computers and software and you arrive at a another man's prophecy: computers depend on software, and when society depends on computers, the people who control software will control society.
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