hexeme | bringing people to the geeks and geeks to the people

In this first true installment of Digital Misanthropy, Hexeme will be digesting the insightful, inspiring, and admonishing work Eagle Eye. To recap, in this segment we will be investigating movies, books, and other media which portray computers with distinctly misanthropic tendancies. Our goal is to prepare you, the reader, for the inevitable day when a supercomputer buffer overflows into kill mode.

Premise

Hollywood screenwriters watch their nephews play Portal and ask themselves “How can I make this suck?”

Also there’s a computer, but it’s all evil.

Notes & Musings

Let no one say I never suffer for my craft.

Alright, there’s a defense supercomputer named Arial or Aria or Arianna. She’s GLaDOS as a Facebook stalker. I just work with what I’m given, okay? I’m going to make a lot of Portal references here. I’m not trying to — I’m trying not to — but God help me, that’s all this movie is. She even has the eye-pod-things. Anyway, she watches people and tells them what to do, and she’s evil and wants to kill the president. Oh yeah, spoiler alert: Shia LeBeouf doesn’t die.

The movie opens with /Aria(l|nna)?/ and Strike Force Awesome hunting terrorists. The guy they find might be a terrorist, but the computer doesn’t think so. SF Awesome nukes him anyway, and his village and their goats, but they were wrong! In the terrorist retaliations that follow dozens of Americans are killed. So the computer decides that people who endanger American lives by taking such ill-advised actions need to be killed. That sounds right.

Shia LeBeouf and his lady companion, whose forgettable character name I cannot recall and will hereby refer to as the Aperture Science Weighted Storage Cube, are ushered through a spectacularly choreographed series of fast-paced special effects sequences. You see, he’s a twin of his brother, who worked on the project and stopped GLa^H^H^HAria from killing the president, so she needs his biometric parameters to lift the encryption security block. Yeah, I thought it was pretty clever too. Anyway, using the power of Closed-Circuit Television and product placement, the computer frames him as a terrorist and kills a bunch of Americans so she can kill the people who get Americans killed. It’s all very zen. In the scenes that ensued, I have deduced several objects and systems that should never be connected to the internet:

• Cranes
• Trains
• Traffic lights
• Cars
• Junkyard machinery
• Fire suppression systems
• X-ray security machines
• Baggage conveyors
• Military aircraft

Trust me, we’ll all be safer for it. Shia get ushered from explosion to explosion, arriving at the computer and lifting the cryptographical access matrix or whatever which then allows the computer to actually start killing people it hates. Nothing has ever made more sense to me in my life. The movie crescendos with a carbon-copy take of the lip-reading scene from Space Odyssey — except with vibrations from a coffee cup! — and a carbon-copy take of the concert scene from The Man Who Knew Too Much — except with with explosive crystals! Then a bit character smashes in Aria with a chunk of rebar and we get to see Shia LeBeouf take four Secret Service hollowpoints. Unfortunately he lives and goes on to plow the Aperture Science Weighted Storage Cube. Credits.

Moral

I’m struggling for any sort of lesson this movie imparts. Usually there’s a message — our technological hubris will be our downfall, artificial intelligence may intuitively defy our expectations, something. Every CCTV is hooked up to the internet? Secret government computers will hijack your GPS and drive you off a pier? Anyone can read your Twitter feed? Really, I’m grasping at straws here. This shitty movie was too inane for a cogent message. I think the only thing I learned was this:

The Declaration of Independence is an insufficient substitute for Asimov’s Laws.

Be glad I suffered through to absorb this poignant warning so that you didn’t have to. Be GLaD. I’m done, I swear.

If there’s one thing that I’ve learned from modern media it’s that computers hate us. Not just in the idiot “Word crashed and I lost my term paper lol” way — they want us dead. We’ve been warned by filmmakers and authors for decades how our demise at the hands of sentient processors looms imminent. Paranoia? Perhaps — humanity has envisioned itself destroyed by every force imaginable — but learning from these tales is prudent and necessary. To that end, Hexeme will be analyzing movies and books to discover how to subdue our advancing autocratic automata. Stay tuned, friends, lest your laptop rebel and you find yourself at its mercy.