Chaos Program

Tonight I watched the pilot of the Battlestar Galactica “prequel” (what language sadist invented that word?) Caprica. It seemed to start a little slow but eventually got going and had some interesting features. In no particular order, here are my thoughts (note: there are spoilers)

The terrorists are teenagers. Historically, it takes a little longer to become radicalized to the point of blowing yourself up. In the real world terrorists are more likely to be college age or older.  However, just as we’ve seen the average age of violent gang members decrease (and the sex of violent offenders widen to include a greater portion of females than used to be the case) in an advanced society where young people have access to sex and death clubs (albeit only as virtual reality) this is certainly possible. It is still different from reality at the current time.

The hedonistic virtual club shown a couple times in there, where bored teenagers (and presumably a lot of older people) went is not possible with current technology. In real life, clubs are not (to the best of my knowledge) this depraved. Close on the sex end maybe, but rarely if ever are there human sacrifices. But when technology makes this sort of thing possible, can anyone doubt they will come into existence? What kind of world will we have when teenager’s avatars lose their virginity before their physical selves do? This may not be more than a decade or two off.
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So someone thought it would be a good idea to remake Patrick McGoohan’s 1960s classic The Prisoner. Why? My current favorite candidate for a reason is that Hollywood hates creativity. They also remade V, after all and that was a show that was crying out to be forgotten (while the remake – which I’ve stopped watching – performed the amazing and unforgivable feat of making Morena Baccarin boring).

I could criticize the casting of The Prisoner but what would be the point? Jim Caviezel seems to be a competent enough actor but no where near Patrick McGoohan’s caliber. But then, who is there alive today who is of that caliber? But my problem with the show isn’t with the acting. It’s with the entire show.

Did I mention they’ve also canceled Dollhouse? (See here and here) This was a somewhat creative show that had all the interesting stuff leached out of most of the first season and all of the second season that had aired before its cancellation. The rumor is that the creator of the show, the brilliant and always interesting Joss Whedon, was not allowed by the network to do the show the way he wanted except for a few (brilliant) episodes in the first season. Whether this is true of not, the resulting show was dull. It’s a shame to lose a show with such an interesting premise (programmable people) but the execution was so poor, I guess it’s no great loss.

The Prisoner didn’t have the advantages of a brilliantly creative creator or an interesting new premise. It’s had a lot of hype, though, and of course Ian McKellen. And it has lots of feelings.
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One of the things that makes being a fan of science fiction a little difficult is the traditional absence of creativity in Hollywood products. That is, even on the rare occasions when Hollywood tries to do science fiction, they don’t generally try very hard to make it good or interesting. An even worse problem is the traditional ignorance of science in Hollywood and journalism. But that’s not what I want to talk about today. What I want to talk about is that staple of TV science fiction: The Genius.

Notice that the word is capitalized. Not mere genius but more like Super Genius. The person with an intellect so enormous that he (usually, though sometimes a she, as characters Amanda Tapping played very well in Stargate: SG1 and much less convincingly in the deeply inferior Sanctuary) is a master of every science and all technology. Often these people are so brilliant they not only understand everything, they go far beyond what the rest of the world knows, inventing whole new sciences and extending existing ones to unimagined new heights.

In stories, these people have two functions. Those are to explain what is going on to the audience (and incidentally to the folks around them) and to come up with the one great idea that can save the day, or save the world, or at least save the story from a depressing ending.

The third, often unintended function, is to annoy the living hell out of the audience, especially those of us who know that that’s just not the way things work.
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Robots are in the future. They are in the present, of course, but most people today don’t consider some preprogrammed floating arm on an assembly line to be a true “robot.” We learned what a robot is from science fiction and that’s what we’re all waiting for, often with dread (Don’t think so? Try googling “robot apocalypse.” Wait, let me try it first. 139,000 results. Hey, cool! T-shirts!)

Anyway, in anticipation of the day when robots are the smart, helpful servants/terminators of science fiction fame, lots of people have tried to come up with rules that robots could be programmed to follow to make everything better. Obviously the trend began with Isaac Asimov’s infamous 3 laws of robotics (Follow the link. I’m not going to repeat them here).

Asimov’s laws were pretty good, though his own stories involving them pointed out some flaws at least in potential implementations. Speaking as a programmer, believe me that implementation is an important point with any software. Give 2 programmers the same 3 rules to implement in a very complex system and you will find the two systems do not act quite the same. One programmer checks for compliance at the beginning of a decision, the other checks afterwards. Maybe they have different ways of checking, besides. The outcomes are often the same but there may be huge differences in some situations.

That different people approach the same problem in different ways is just a fact of life that may result in great differences between robot behavior, too. Anyway, because of these and other considerations there have been numerous attempts to update Asimov’s laws. For example a hliarious one I found a few years ago (and can’t seem to find the link for anymore) expanded the 3 laws to 10 (I think) and claimed to have patented them – thus ensuring no one would ever have the slightest interest in using them, even if they turned out to be perfect.

No set of robotics laws could possibly be perfect (see above) and personally I question whether such laws, themeslves are even possible. But it’s an important exercise to try to figure out how to make robots safe and controllable, you know, to avoid the robot apocalypse. An interesting attempt to update Asimov’s laws came out of Ohio State University recently, where some researchers reformulated the laws to make less sense and have even more loopholes than in the original version.

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One of my simple yardsticks for whether or not I like a TV show is the question, “Do I like the main character(s)?” This is not a hard and fast rule. I hated most of the characters in Battlestar Galactica – and most of the stories, especially that ridiculous lame ending! – yet kept watching the show. It’s an important factor, though. If I’m rooting for the characters to get killed or maimed, I’m probably not enjoying the action, either. Especially when they win.

This at least partially explains why Torchwood has never been one of my favorite shows. I just don’t much like the main character, Captain Jack Harkness. He’s too full of himself, too smarmy, and the way every story has to relate to his personal narrative strikes me as hackneyed and unnecessarily limiting.

How many shows have you seen where a mysterious female (not a given in Torchwood but never mind that) appears who turns out to be the hero’s long lost love and she has a child who may or may not be the hero’s? This sort of fake character development is a TV staple that gets exercised far too much in shows that take themselves too seriously (like Torchwood, or the execrable Sanctuary). Rather than revealing anything about the character it just provides contrived and manipulative melodrama that got old back when Gunsmoke still had smoking guns and Little Joe was still alive (I know he was on a different show. That’s how staples work. They bind multiple things).

Still, it’s science fiction and I’ll usually give science fiction a try, even after all the times I’ve been disappointed (such as EVERY Star Trek series made after the original). Besides. It’s summer and there’s even less on worth watching than usual.
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I read a few articles this week about the 60th anniversary of the George Orwell novel 1984 (including this interesting one at National Review Online) and one thing that struck me is that very few literary works get reviewed 60 years after their publication. Even fewer good ones get reviewed/taught/discussed 60 years later. Everybody knows at least a little about 1984, even those of us who have not yet read it (In school, I was in the class that was assigned Animal Farm instead. Interesting book. Hated the pigs).

But this is not a review of 1984. That would be silly since I just admitted I haven’t read it! But it seems I should. Traditionally, reading has been seen as a way of passing on culture – not the kind of culture that causes people to donate money to the opera or spend time at museums but the kind that shapes the way people think. That’s why an old fashioned Classical Education valued Socrates and Thomas Aquinas among others. Agree with them or not, these were smart people and excellent teachers.

Well, that’s the official story, anyway.
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For some people, one of the things that makes science fiction interesting is the way it deals with ideas. I’m one of the old school that prefers the scientific and technological ideas over philosophical ones, as I find most philosophy (particularly when it’s in the context of science fiction) to be pretentious and illogical. Technology is a tool for building things and making people’s lives longer and more comfortable. It can’t change who we are (which could be a reference to the exceptional TV show Dollhouse or it could just be a segue into the discussion that follows. Don’t ask me which. I just write this stuff, I don’t analyze it).

Lately, due to the release of the new Terminator movie (Terminator: Salvation – a title apparently chosen more for dramatic impact than for anything that happens in the movie), there has been a slew of articles about how technology – especially robots – will shape the future of the human race. Usually the headline is something like, “Real life Terminators: How much time do we have?”

I’m not going to link to any of those articles because they are, almost without exception, not worth the paper that no one is bothering to print them out on (Sorry. This isn’t supposed to be a “what’s wrong with newspapers” post). For the moment it should be enough to say that the technology to build terminators doesn’t yet exist. Not the hardware and not the software. The robot apocalypse proposed by the Terminator movies is not just around the corner. Those movies came out of a different time and a different generation that grew up with the idea that some kind of apocalypse (probably a nuclear one) was always around the corner.
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