thanks for the ram
a question got asked in the comments recently, about wiping memory for robots. basically, trying to ‘unsee’ the current scene. i think it’s an ability we’ve all wished we had at one point or another, but is it relatable?
it’s an interesting question, that i think alot of writers and creative types have to ask themselves. ‘am i making a story that’s sci fi, or am i exploring sci fi, with a story’. it may be a subtle difference, but for me it’s the same distance between your pc manual, and a nursery rhyme. and i’m not slaggin hardcore science fiction, but it can be a little dry. then again, go too far the other way, and ‘love’ is the 5th element, or you can will yourself into another dimension outside of time, to send notes back to your daughter through a wormhole….. and maybe science isn’t THAT forgiving just cause you’re the protagonist. i digress.
where am i going with all this. well, if you’ve noticed in my story, some people and robots, have advantages over one another. but, to an extent, i like the lines a little blurry. robots aren’t necessarily stronger than humans, nor do they run around saying stuff like ‘what is…. love?’ and i think this makes them more relatable.
the way i see it, emotions are a shorthand for logic. tell someone exactly why you love your friend, you may not have a quick and clear answer. maybe they helped you out of a jam or two, or you shared something private. maybe it’s completely ineffable and they are all you know, and that bond is mutual. if an AI was limited, as in they didn’t have complete lightning quick access to all their memories at any one given time, as are humans, they might develop the same sort of subroutines. ram vs rom. ‘i remember that day in the park, and that was nice’, but instead of feeling the entire thing at once, i’ll just remember you’re important to me. +1 affection. i see this kind of sketchy logic as essential to feelings. and while it might seem a little illogical for machines to adopt the sort of things we do to make quicker decisions, i think it’s a likely first step to actual artificial intelligence.
and bonus, it’s imperfect. they’d fit right in.
and, as i consider the complexities of human thought, and how that might compare with how a robot might process it’s ‘thoughts’, it’s an odd coincidence that i’m having computer problems right now. you see, i updated a driver on my drawing tablet tonight. that didn’t go well. the installed software went 50 ways, and without realizing it, made itself so integral to my machine, that i thought i might have to reinstall the OS. i didn’t, but just trying to get my machine to see that it was hooked into a tablet was a major effort. and if something that simple turned out to be that difficult, maybe scrubbing a robot of a single memory wouldn’t be any easier than trying to get someone to control a bad habit. and we’re not that good at that either.
so, to wrap up this thought, i suppose i’ll just say that i use the complexity of science fiction to make robots more relatable. because if anything will make you feel akin to something else, it’s the feeling of being out of control, in over your head, and it’s half your own fault for not being able to process what’s going on.
not recommending this movie. thing is, i was trying to think of an example of when AI seemed very relateable to me, but i couldn’t think of an instance. comment below if you think of one. i spent all of 2 minutes, so, i really didn’t put alot of work into it. sooooo, i decided to go the other way, and point out a movie where it totally did not work, and maybe why sci fi geeks freaked out at what hollywood did to the work of isaac asimov.
first off, robots in this movie are clearly physically superior. that’s just a given, and being that they have superhuman strength, strike one. secondly, only one robot displays the burgeoning sentience that they keep prattling on about, and he was programmed that way, to lead unevolved robots like some sort of mechanical jesus, but again, he didn’t evolve, he was gifted his sentience. and what does he do with it? he’s manipulated into a plot to kill his creator in some lazy plan to make a point. like a machine, not a character.
sonny, the main Ai character seems to be written to point out all the ways in which humans and robots are different, undermining the main point. drawing constant differences between characters that are working towards a unifying goal seems counterproductive to me, and if the character has no growth, or realization, or arc, then he’s still an object, and the movie has contradicted it’s own point. then again, will smith didn’t exactly break out of his comfort zone on this one. still, i guess hollywood gives us what we demand. a movie about robots becoming self aware, so will smith can mow down hundreds of them for a runtime of 115 minutes, and a budget of $150 000 000.
I always seem to think of Gibson’s Sprawl series first when it comes to AI’s, maybe some of Charles Stross’s stuff, not really sure why other then that they along with Larry Niven and Neal Stephenson make up the core authors whose I still enjoy reading again no matter how many times I’ve read them,
that’s a strong endorsement. REreading something? you don’t see that alot. you have piqued my interest, sir.
Well I’m not a big fan of winter but live where its cold out still so 5 months of the year are spent reading anything that looks interesting, even with about 5 to 7 years between readings there’s quite a lotof books that have been read 5 or 6 times. Actually the best current example of an AI (More of a Von Neumann machine in my opinion) in currant media would be from the expanse series by James S Corey I think. The sy-fi channel is doing a great job with the tv show but I still think the books are better. For AI as comic relief I would need to go with the ennsby character over at the schlock mercenaries web comic. (sorry to plug but Howard does a great job). As far as the Gits controversy I really enjoyed the whole franchise when it came out and have a bunch on the shelves but I think the live action will probably wait till I’m bored and notice it on netflix.
No worries about the plug. It’s good karma. Maybe someone out there right now is plugging my comic. Haha
I’ll have to check that one out. Thanks! And yeah, netflix is great for catching thibgs as they slide off the radar.
As another old-timey anime fan who saw the original GiTS (on VHS, when that was the only means available), I’m not unhappy with the live action, as Brian is (and many others as well). Not wild about it either, but it still deserves some defending. It’s a real stretch to call what passes between the girl who would become the Major and her friend a “love interest”, especially since they both have a high percentage of amnesia regarding that time of their lives. That description sounds like an already-made-up mind jamming the thing into the box preconceived for it. Not taking away from the fact that Hollywood all too often does that kind of boxing, I’m just saying that’s not 100% the case here. Most live adaptations/reboots take far worse liberties, and ignore the source material altogether. The changes made in GiTS do diverge from the main animated “universe”, but they’re not dealbreakers for me, the way JJ’s changes to Trek were. GiTS live acknowledged the Major’s classic name, and also explains why they don’t use it. Yes, fewer Robocop parallels would have been nice, but the original Robocop movie was actually a decent story (something the rest of that series caused many to forget). I would have preferred the technology to be established and mature, as it was in the original, but not a dealbreaker. Changes happen with any adaptation; the depiction of the Major was decidedly different in the manga, the various animated movies, S.A.C., etc.
well, if you got something out of it, it’s not for me to take that away from you. i never saw it, and i don’t really plan to. it might just be one of those cases where the original becomes untouchable, even if there are improvements. and that’s completely subjective. it’s funny you mention the jj abrams star trek, cause i didn’t mind his reboot. well, the first one. so, it’s up to the individual.
i wonder how many fans of the GITS comic were as upset with the adaption to anime? i guess you choose to defend the way you come to find a thing, not it’s original content.
From what I remember of some of the fan reviews, they were miffed that it didn’t divulge far enough. IIRC, it was kind of a similar problem with anime to live action, but the anime retained more of the original comics.
The first GitS anime movie was OK, and I think that it stood on its own. The things that really got me in the live action GitS were things like the light rope network cables (trope), everybody hides out in abandoned industrial sites (trope), corporations are evil (trope), 270-deg right turn to go left, and a lot of other silly things. Sure the movie wasn’t as bad as “American Cyborg” (which I saw in the theater, and we laughed, oh, we laughed!), it’s just that it could have been so much better.
i just looked up american cyborg. i know what i’m doing this weekend! can’t be worse than canadian cyborg. guy just walks around the snow without a gun, being polite ‘n shit. i’m canadian. i can make that joke. you can’t.
i can see fans of the comic feeling like alot got left out of the anime. i mean, how could they do it otherwise? a 13 part series on how she woke up one day? i joke, but comic series like that are hard to pare down, due to to the volume of the material. then again, that might be reason enough not to bother. who knows. some people were upset that tom bombadil was left out of the lord of the rings….. even good decisions catch derision.
good call on the tropes, i never mind a good trope alert. but i get your point. i’m sure it could have been better, and that’s what’s sad. for the money spent, the time invested, you would think that they wouldn’t stumble on something critical, but they always do.
Virgil will be played by someone doing motion-capture CGI.
Well, a big reason The Passion of the Christ worked is because the script was written 2000 years ago, and has been proven successful in that time. Yes, it’s possible to botch it, and there have been lame adaptations. But Gibson did a good job, and for not too much money.
A number of years ago I saw Open Water, about a couple who were left behind on a scuba dive. It was a low-budget indie film, and it was pretty good. What I would like to see is a good low-budget indie sci-fi movie, with lots of concepts borrowed from GitS. In the TV anime, there was a scene were a drug dealer left his body guards behind to deal with the incoming Kusanagi. I thought that I would get to see an interesting cybernetic battle. Nope. I’d like to see a fight scene where at least ten seconds of action is shown at real speed, no slow motion. I want to see two cyber frames going full speed, destroying an entire room!
So what is the future like? Good question. How many stories in the 1950s got 50 years in the future approximately right? I know of one, A Logic Named Joe, by Murray Leinster. Imagine that instead of server farms, all of the computing was distributed between nodes in people’s homes. When you asked a question of your terminal, the question would be answered by a node somewhere in the network. Well, one node malfunctioned, and began answering questions that it shouldn’t! How to game the stock market, how to kill someone, etc. Very interesting short story.
well, i would say that the christ story resonates with some of us as much as it does because we grew up with it. individually, or as a culture. but that’s beside the point. if it worked better than most, that’ all you can ask for. they did the most they could with the source material. and that’s a franchise that’s seen a reboot or two!
i’ll have to check that story out. i think short stories are always going to be the purest form of sci fi experimentation. a comic always has the hook of visual art. and that can be good, but it can also be superficial. and you might not know it up front. then again, with writing, you might not even give it a chance. it’s hard to snake new people into your material.
I read “I, Robot” when I was in high school, oh so many moons before the movie. The movie had the title and a few character names in common with what Asimov wrote. Nothing further than that.
Hollywood does not give us the films we want. Citizen Kane was not a Hollywood film, it was simply slipped through their budgets and processes. How Orson Welles did it, I don’t know, but I’m grateful he did. I saw it in the theaters in the early 1990’s, during a rerelease. Oh, it was fabulous!
I recently saw Ghost in the Shell. Yes, I’ve read the manga and seen the anime. No, it’s not like them, just uses characters and scenes from them. The three writers who wrote the screenplay took Shirow Masamune’s ideas, and then simply ran them through their Hollywood script template. GitS is, essentially, a thoughtful set of ideas about what the future may hold in store for us. Unfortunately, the writing team churned out another action movie, with a love interest, all based on their templates of what is successful in the theaters.
No, Hollywood does not give us the movies we want. They give us movies that are marginally acceptable, and we go see them because Hollywood dominates the theaters. Did you see Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ? Gibson financed all of it himself, and put it in the theaters on his own dime. That’s what it takes: $30M of independent money and a vision. And Gibson reaped over $300M gross.
Could there be another Citizen Kane? Or a The Passion of the Christ? I don’t know. I think that something would have to be done on a shoestring budget, and released on Vimeo or YouTube. Actually, there is a lot of independent content on both of them, but it’s not easy to find it.
i never read it, but from what people told me, it missed the mark completely. i read some asimov, i thought his work would be difficult to adapt to the silver screen, which might be reason enough to let it go, and let it be what it is without massing with it.
i really liked citizen kane as well, and while i never saw passion of the christ, i know what you mean. i believe they call it ‘auteur directiong’. i worked for a guy like that. difference was, he was an idiot, and an auteur director thinks he’s right, has a vision, and then IS correct. it doesn’t work if the director is not actually a genius, and since so many people think they are, you still get people taking that approach, and producing mediocre product.
but i have a feeling these days, the approach to producing movies is the exact opposite. people with money, get together to launch a product. the advertisers want to know their product will be prominently featured, you lock down the actors that would push whatever you’re going to make to the forefront in the box office that summer, and only then do you write a single word. and, because so much is invested already, you can’t take a single chance, so, you get safe crap.
but there’s people tryin. my comic is ‘different’… can’t wait to sell out though. who’ll play virgil in the movie? i’m thinking someone skinny……
*Giggles*
Books, in no particular order:
– Valentina: Soul in Sapphire
– The Adolescence of P-1
– When HARLIE Was One
Although I must admit that P-1 ended pretty much as most AI stories do. The AI is perceived as a threat, and is (theoretically) destroyed. (Just how do you destroy something that can leave backup copies of itself all over the world, just waiting for a signal, or the lack of one, to restart itself?)
i will check those out! actually, i should be more of a reader. thing about making a thing, you don’t have as much thing to check other people’s stuff out. but, ya gotta put in the effort!
I really like how you laid that out. Makes perfect sense to me! *+1 admiration*
+1 gratitude. haha, thanks for saying so.
I feel like I’m going to have a friendly disposition toward both of you in the future but I won’t know why.
ahh, +1 respect all around!