S
Sophia
Guest
52
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentSe...id=968867495754
They make mistakes --they're only inhuman
PETER HOWELL
It might be the best offer you'll hear all year, and also one of the creepiest.
&qu
ot;This is your life," a smooth male voice says, as images of quality consumer items glide past the screen.
"Everything you own is beautiful. Perfectly constructed. Ideally manufact
ured
. Everything you possess feels, thinks and responds as if you've had it made just for you. Isn't it time you had the ultimate in perfection?"
This seductive pitch is for The Stepford Wives, the new movie remake of the 1975 sci-fi thriller drawn from Ira Levin's book of the same name, and starring Nicole Kidman, Bette Midler and Matthew Broderick. The "ultima
te in perfection" referred to is a robot wife, one who will never nag and who will perform kitchen and bedroom chores with equal enthusiasm.
The artificial women of mythical Stepford would be right at home with the artificial men of I, Robot, another movie out this summer about a brave new world of people living with sentient machines. Starring Will Smith as a police detective investigating a murder caused by a robot
--something that isn't supposed to happen, according to the manual --I, Robot is the screen adaptation of Isaac Asimov's same-titled 1950 book of short stories.
The Stepford
Wives an
d I, Robot are cautionary tales of the perils of allowing humans to be stripped of their humanity, which happens when you replace emotional people with thinking but unfeeling machines. The concept of the perfect mechanical being has long both fascinated and repelled us. We swoon at the thought of creating humanoids that never get sick and do exactly what we tell them to. Yet we are also ter
rified at the thought they might one day get minds and wills of their own.
Call it fear of robots, and it's one of the most enduring of all sci-fi psychoses. Czech playwright Karel Capek first used the term "robot," in his 1921 work R.U.R. about mechanical humans who rebel against their masters. The popular play was an inspiration for George Orwell's classic dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four.
But long before Capek and Orwell, the concept of the non-human humanoid was on the mind of artists. The Greek poet Homer wrote in The Iliad, more than 2,500 years ago, about the crea
tion of the
female figure Pandora, a name meaning "all gifted." She is crafted out of clay at the instruction of the god Zeus, and appears to be a gift beyond compare. But Zeus wants to punish humans for stealing the secret of fire; he gives Pandora a box filled with plagues and other ills that become loosed upon the Earth. The message is that we must never drop our guard, even when in the presence of benign beings craft
ed in our own image.
I, Robot includes Asimov's famous Three Laws of Robotics, which posit the Utopian notion that robots must help humans and never harm them. Yet even Asimov would later amend his laws, and admit that they were "deliberately ambiguous" about what exactly constituted "harm" and "humans" --a bit of Orwellian doublethink that fuelled some of his fine
st sci-fi thrillers.
Movies have become our most popular way of dramatizing our fear of robots, and have long been so, even in the time before mini-computers and microp
rocessors made
artificial beings seem remotely plausible. Fritz Lang's silent classic Metropolis (1927) presents the iconic image of a sensuous silver robot named Maria, used by an evil overlord as a means of duping and controlling human drones.
Rare is the benevolent clanking creature that remains our friend by film's end, of which the Tin Man of The Wizard Of Oz (1939) is the most obvious example. And remember that the Tin Man longed to become human, which
was also the desire of Robin Williams' robot character Andrew in Bicentennial Man (1999) and Haley Joel Osment's mechanical boy David in Artificial Intelligence: A.I (2001).
Much more common is the scenario where the machine arrives friendly, turns hostile and has no intention whatsoever of becoming as imperfect as humans. The Matrix (1999) and its two s
equels are built around an alternative universe where humans live enslaved by machines that harvest our embryos as their power source.
Stanley Kubrick's 2001
: A Space Odyssey
(1968) brings a soothing human voice to HAL 9000, the all-knowing spaceship servant Cyclops with the unblinking red eye. HAL makes everything perfect --until one day human imperfection stands in its way.
The Matrix and 2001 have machines that clearly look like machines. Much more popular, and arguably more dangerous, are the robots that appear to be human, as in The Stepford Wives. We let our guard down when confronted with beings that seem to have the same feeli
ngs as we do, even when they do not.
MORE AT LINK:
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentSe...id=968867495754
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentSe...id=968867495754
They make mistakes --they're only inhuman
PETER HOWELL
It might be the best offer you'll hear all year, and also one of the creepiest.
&qu
ot;This is your life," a smooth male voice says, as images of quality consumer items glide past the screen.
"Everything you own is beautiful. Perfectly constructed. Ideally manufact
ured
. Everything you possess feels, thinks and responds as if you've had it made just for you. Isn't it time you had the ultimate in perfection?"
This seductive pitch is for The Stepford Wives, the new movie remake of the 1975 sci-fi thriller drawn from Ira Levin's book of the same name, and starring Nicole Kidman, Bette Midler and Matthew Broderick. The "ultima
te in perfection" referred to is a robot wife, one who will never nag and who will perform kitchen and bedroom chores with equal enthusiasm.
The artificial women of mythical Stepford would be right at home with the artificial men of I, Robot, another movie out this summer about a brave new world of people living with sentient machines. Starring Will Smith as a police detective investigating a murder caused by a robot
--something that isn't supposed to happen, according to the manual --I, Robot is the screen adaptation of Isaac Asimov's same-titled 1950 book of short stories.
The Stepford
Wives an
d I, Robot are cautionary tales of the perils of allowing humans to be stripped of their humanity, which happens when you replace emotional people with thinking but unfeeling machines. The concept of the perfect mechanical being has long both fascinated and repelled us. We swoon at the thought of creating humanoids that never get sick and do exactly what we tell them to. Yet we are also ter
rified at the thought they might one day get minds and wills of their own.
Call it fear of robots, and it's one of the most enduring of all sci-fi psychoses. Czech playwright Karel Capek first used the term "robot," in his 1921 work R.U.R. about mechanical humans who rebel against their masters. The popular play was an inspiration for George Orwell's classic dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four.
But long before Capek and Orwell, the concept of the non-human humanoid was on the mind of artists. The Greek poet Homer wrote in The Iliad, more than 2,500 years ago, about the crea
tion of the
female figure Pandora, a name meaning "all gifted." She is crafted out of clay at the instruction of the god Zeus, and appears to be a gift beyond compare. But Zeus wants to punish humans for stealing the secret of fire; he gives Pandora a box filled with plagues and other ills that become loosed upon the Earth. The message is that we must never drop our guard, even when in the presence of benign beings craft
ed in our own image.
I, Robot includes Asimov's famous Three Laws of Robotics, which posit the Utopian notion that robots must help humans and never harm them. Yet even Asimov would later amend his laws, and admit that they were "deliberately ambiguous" about what exactly constituted "harm" and "humans" --a bit of Orwellian doublethink that fuelled some of his fine
st sci-fi thrillers.
Movies have become our most popular way of dramatizing our fear of robots, and have long been so, even in the time before mini-computers and microp
rocessors made
artificial beings seem remotely plausible. Fritz Lang's silent classic Metropolis (1927) presents the iconic image of a sensuous silver robot named Maria, used by an evil overlord as a means of duping and controlling human drones.
Rare is the benevolent clanking creature that remains our friend by film's end, of which the Tin Man of The Wizard Of Oz (1939) is the most obvious example. And remember that the Tin Man longed to become human, which
was also the desire of Robin Williams' robot character Andrew in Bicentennial Man (1999) and Haley Joel Osment's mechanical boy David in Artificial Intelligence: A.I (2001).
Much more common is the scenario where the machine arrives friendly, turns hostile and has no intention whatsoever of becoming as imperfect as humans. The Matrix (1999) and its two s
equels are built around an alternative universe where humans live enslaved by machines that harvest our embryos as their power source.
Stanley Kubrick's 2001
: A Space Odyssey
(1968) brings a soothing human voice to HAL 9000, the all-knowing spaceship servant Cyclops with the unblinking red eye. HAL makes everything perfect --until one day human imperfection stands in its way.
The Matrix and 2001 have machines that clearly look like machines. Much more popular, and arguably more dangerous, are the robots that appear to be human, as in The Stepford Wives. We let our guard down when confronted with beings that seem to have the same feeli
ngs as we do, even when they do not.
MORE AT LINK:
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentSe...id=968867495754