Decipher SciFi

Telomeres. Telomerease. Garbage collection. Avoiding cancer. The Immortalists.

Bitcoin. Digital wealth transfer. Terminator genes. Bio-pharma IP law.

Wealth and life evaporate with each passing second. This is on top of inflation used on purpose to thin the herd. Time in the film must be only artificially finite.

Geographic and economic lockdown. Banlieue 13.

Skin displays. Biological immortality. Payphones. Electric classic cars.

Cillian Murphy is lawful good. Minute men. Bad system design: could use personal transfer limits. Arm wrestling.

Hoarding of wealth. Artificial scarcity.

Colbert talks about it a bunch. Chris goes all Pollyanna. The Newsroom Climate episode (embedded above)

Stargates. Gravity wells. Luck they didn’t wind up inside a sun.

Space X! Mars One! Christopher gushes about Elon Musk for thirty minutes.

Will Robinson. Ahmed Mohamed.  Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Ghengis Khan? Elon Musk?

Cryo sleep. Holographic communications. Vlogging via watch.

[youtube]Y-P1zZAcPuw[/youtube]

The title was taken from a Stephen King short story which pretty much otherwise has no relationship at all to the film. This actually led to a lawsuit.

Was praised at the time for his vision. Virtuosity.

Wolfenstein 3D. Compact discs technology. Sega CD. The cost of this film in time and money. How impressed we all were at the time. Sega console monstrosity. The Sega Tower of Power.

What we thought it would be at the time of the film.

360° “VR” movies. Google cardboard. AR. How directed do we want our experiences with art to be?

VR training. Holodeck. Pornography. Awesome-sounding VR “theme park” in Utah.

Nootropics. The singularity. Controlling the real world via the internet.

Philip K. Dick sort of wrote this about himself and his experiences with the Berkeley drug culture. “Everything in A Scanner Darkly I, actually saw.” This novel is probably the least scifi of Dick’s work.

Other famous examples of rotoscroping, but Linklater’s are the first to do it 100%. Interesting custom software with layering techniques. Perfect for this film with its less than firm grip on reality.

We are squares and we know roughly nothing about drugs. But it sure seems bad. Especially the drug in the movie: Substance D. LSD experiments like the following:

Small conspiracies vs grand conspiracies. Big brother. Alex Jones and Linklater. Govt agencies compelling sharing by private firms. The social effects of being watched. The war on drugs.

Scramble suits. How much can trust our own senses? Occam’s razor. Unwitting sacrifice.

Christopher is a big fan. Has a revelation regarding this on the show.

Christopher might be a trekkie. The movie is a loving tribute. Star Trek cast reactions to Galaxy Quest.

Tend to be humanoid. Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element. Abundance, working together. Literalism in language like small human children.

The movie uses them for great meta comedy. Transporter. Omega 13 device. Most important crew members go down to explore new worlds.

Here is a good example of the frivolity you could expect (skip to3:38 for gameplay):

author: Christopher Peterson

Heinlein wrote what amounted to military propaganda. Picture Heinlein as the teacher with the missing arm.

Not a surprise for someone who grew up in Nazi-occupied Holland. He thought the book was disgusting and wouldn’t finish reading it - had someone else tell him what happened.

Propaganda. Othering. Resources all in to the military-industrial complex. Militarism. Fascism.

Hive minds. Brain straws. Pheromone communication. Intelligent bugs. Higher-oxygen atmosphere.

Exo-suits, insterstellar travel, shooting projectiles across the galaxy. Drones? Where are the drones?

Exo-suits, from the book, would close the gap for war purposes. Co-ed showers. Norway and Israeli conscripting women.

What began as a science fiction version of an Agatha Christie mystery grew into a Will Smith blockbuster. And then the studio acquired the rights to Asimov.

Law Zero: Robots must not harm humanity.

Law One: Robots cannot harm a human.

Law Two: Robots must obey humans unless it conflicts with 1

Law Three: Rzobots must avoid harm to themselves except where it conflicts with 2 or 3

Wouldn’t want any rogue states or terrorist groups getting their hands on a VIKI. VIKI reasons her way around the laws.

Art? Emotions? People always moving the goalposts. Domain-specific masteries.

Taking our jerbs. Amazing Amazon warehouse robots. Teachers. Service industry. Creative work the most protected, for now. How to handle the fallout from the robot worker class? Guaranteed minimum income experiment in Holland.

The myth. Thomas Edison. Google. Boss guy taking credit. Standing on the shoulders of giants. Could the open source movement make great breakthroughs possible for small groups? Didn’t it already?

Commonly misunderstood. But the intelligence in this movie is way past that anyway. Testing for theory of mind might be the right track for the future.

Being a cute, vulnerable girl AI goes a long way. Uncanny valley. Sexual attraction to non-human humanoid intelligences.

Fast/slow takeoff. AI will look back on us like pre-Sapiens fossils. It is not difficult to “escape the box.” If a person can do it, so can a superintelligence.

Google might be the biggest and most successful AI project in the world. Phone spying. Black-box neural networks. Algorithmic complexity.

Is it immoral to create an AI and not let it be free? “Do you have someone testing you who could turn you off?” Romantic interest better than morals? Does Nathan consider how he is treating the AIs? God complex. Baghavad Gita. The end of humanity. AI arms race.

[spoiler title=’Spoiler Notes’ style=’default’ collapse_link=’true’]Section Did Ava leave Caleb to die? Did she do it purposely? What will her next move be?[/spoiler]

Love these! Moon is a good one, seriously only one human actor present. Other pleasing examples include Buried with Ryan Reynolds, The Man From Earth, 12 Angry Men is the greatest.

Humans need other humans. Our own introversion. Solitary confinement is torture. Having the light at the end of the tunnel.

Love the robot design. Practical to the extreme. He has a cupholder! The name means nothing. LOVE the smiley interface. Hal 9000 references.

Multinational mega corporation with government ties. Bottom line is all that matters. The economics of evil and helium-3 mining. Exploitative labor practices. Helium 3 science.

[spoiler title=’Spoiler Notes’ style=’default’ collapse_link=’true’]

How would you feel to be a clone? To be an original who is cloned? A clone of you, even in adult form with implanted memories, is not “you” anymore once the copy is made. Could you work together with your clone?[/spoiler]