
Watching the sixties and seventies through 2001 and Alien - benbreen
http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/01/09/hal-mother-and-father/
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mikerichards
Heh, I loved the term "truckers in space", which pretty accurately described
some of the characters in Alien - Brett, Parker, Dallas.

Speaking of Ridley Scott, my favorite movie of all time is Blade Runner. I was
watching it the other day, and noticed that the incept dates of some of
replicants were 2016. Oh boy, Ridley got that one wrong. But they still used
payphones too, like in Alien. Remember Deckard calling Rachel from the video
pay phone at the bar?

So it seems like filmmakers predictions either grossly mispredict the amount
of technological progress at the big scale. Everybody thought there would be
moon colonies by now, or advanced cyborgs. Or they don't see the technological
innovation at the small scale. They can't see things like cell phones, the
internet, etc..

I have seen several movies with the 70s or so, with flat screens hanging on
the wall. So I guess they ocassionally get things right

~~~
lifeformed
I kind of like all the anachronistic elements in old sci-fi movies. It doesn't
really feel like an error; it feels more like a stylistic choice. The chunky
CRTs and grimy machinery gives the world character, and makes the world feel
tangible. I'd take that over a sterile, Apple-eque vision of the future any
day (in my fiction, at least).

~~~
olavk
The sf movie 'Her' has a very Apple-like feel in the production design. Great
movie, but of course a totally different feel.

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rexignis
If imdb's movie /year/1979/ list is to be believed, there was a lot of self
loathing going on in films in the late 70s (i.e. Vietnam).

~~~
tjradcliffe
You have no idea.

One of my favourite 70's quotes is from the quite brilliant book "The Medieval
Machine" by the Anglo-French historian Jean Gimpel, published in 1976 (which
really is a very good history of Medieval technology):

"The economic depression that struck Europe in the fourteenth century was
followed ultimately by economic and technological recovery. But the depression
we have moved into will have no end. We can anticipate centuries of decline
and exhaustion. There will be no further industrial revolution in the cycles
of our Western civilization."

These words were written _at the same time_ as Jobs, Wozniak, Gates and Allen
were all hard at work. This smug bastard was just one voice amongst many
telling the world that we were in the grip of a permanent, inexorable
"malaise" that could at best be accepted passively, which there was no point
in fighting, which had to be simply taken as given, unstoppable, forever.

At the same time people like me were being told by teachers that we would
never be able to image the disk of extra-solar stars or discover extra-solar
planets, and so on [1]. Gleeful murderers of hope were desperately trying to
crush any spark of innovation, creativity or freedom. And it was happening the
world over. A relentless, ruthless, assault on the Enlightenment, the rule of
law, and the industrial revolution.

They failed.

A lot of it was funded, ultimately, by the Soviets, who generated an enormous
amount of propaganda that was intended to make people believe these things.
One of the notable things that happened after the collapse of the Soviet
Empire was the stunning pall of silence that fell over the Left in the West.
It was almost as if the lifeblood of the whole enterprise had been cut off.

Part of that was simple empiricism: it was hard for Leftists to hold up their
pathologically insane ideas as "better" when their poster-child had just
endured a complete and spectacular collapse, including the freeing of a large
number of vassal states, all because some shipyard workers in Poland had laid
down tools a decade before.

But part of it was also that funding for a bunch of stuff that Comintern paid
for (mostly by indirect means, in the same way the US government funds stuff
through NGOs today) vanished.

Today, hyper-capitalist brands like Naomi Klein are attempting to resurrect
some of the old zombie Soviet ideas, but it's a pretty pathetic effort, full
of contradictions and gibberish. They won't have a lot of influence, at the
end of the day, and it is my firm belief that we are entering into a century
of progress that will make the 19th century look staid and the 20th century
look stupid. Having lived through the '70's, this is a good thing to see.

[1] We have done both, and more:
[http://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/astronomers-image-
lowest...](http://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/astronomers-image-lowest-mass-
exoplanet-around-a-sun-like-star/)

~~~
Vivtek
This screed is essentially pure-quill mental imbalance. I was in school in
America in 1979, too. I subscribed to BYTE, Science 80, the whole nine yards.
My teachers were ecstatic about my love for science, not even once trying to
dissuade me from my eager pursuit of the future.

So right on the face of it, you're just flat wrong. And then you go _right_
off the rails screeching about Communist influence as though this were
anything but raving paranoia.

I'm a liberal Quaker (Quakerism _far_ predates Communism) and - you know what?
- I seem to have been left off the distribution list from Moscow.

Basically, all I can think when I read this is that you need to get back on
your meds. "Pathologically insane ideas," my ass. How anybody can view
_liberalism_ as an attack on the Enlightenment - when it _is_ the
Enlightenment - is frankly flabbergasting.

~~~
RyJones
I miss OMNI. I keep hoping they issue a DVD of all the issues.

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ArkyBeagle
In the sequel, "2010", it's revealed that HAL has essentially had a "nervous
breakdown" because he'd been lied to. This is apparently true for both the
novel and the film.

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beloch
\------

"The U.S. is not waging the Cold War in outer space. We have no moon colonies,
and our supercomputers are not nearly as super as the murderous HAL. "

2001 was a prescient film, but the details have turned out somewhat
differently than Kubrick and Clarke imagined. HAL was portrayed as truly
sentient. The same cannot be said of any AI existing today. However, HAL was
also immensely limited. He was like a servant or child in his abilities. He
was not the the oracle and gateway to the sum of all human knowledge, as the
computers of today have become. If you asked HAL how to build a boat or how to
score a date with a beautiful woman, he'd have been baffled. Google, on the
other hand... HAL also had a large central core that could be attacked. If we
built a true AI today, it's possible that the brains of such a beast could be
the size of a pocket watch and the software copied and transferred freely. If
such a viral consciousness had infested the Discovery, Dave would truly have
had nothing to strike back against. HAL would not have been a single
consciousness, but a legion!

Meanwhile, the U.S. is very much still engaged in a struggle for control of
space. Other challengers have appeared, but Russia hasn't gone anywhere, and
that particular war seems to be getting colder by the minute. However, the
commercialization of space has been late in coming. Pan Am's collapse must
have delayed things somewhat. However, it's finally starting to happen.

\------

"Mother, on the other hand, spends the whole movie like a fated southern belle
hooked on laudanum, locked in her room. She can’t even advise on how to defeat
the monster. The computer cannot help. No costly investment in heavy capital
will keep nature at bay. "

Alien does indeed present a very different view of technology. Where, in 2001,
technology was the tool of humanity, uplifting it to greater and greater
heights, in Alien technology cannot overcome the base nature of humans. The
people in space aren't heroes or explorers, but working-class stiffs trying to
make a living. Technology serves its owners first and foremost. The
corporation's interests reign supreme, even over the space workers very lives.
This vision too is both wrong yet prescient. The computers of today are of
tremendous help, but are also tools of control. You can ask google how to do
practically anything, but you have to accept the fact that your request will
be logged by the NSA (and probably other organizations) for future reference
should you ever be naughty. Computers do not directly control us, but other
humans use computers to tell us how to do things. For example, look up why UPS
drivers are trained to avoid turning left. Computers and automation have
eliminated many jobs, but always seem to create even more in the process.

\-------

The last few years have greatly increased my optimism for the future. It seems
that we're finally pulling out of the cyberpunk dystopian funk of the last
decade or so and trying to do "big" things once again. Electric cars are
finally a practical reality. Self driving cars are close at hand. Private
space flight is taking off. People are talking about capturing and bringing
asteroids down to Earth for their resources. Space elevators that will make
getting bulk quantities of material off of Earth seem almost possible. Quantum
cryptology is currently in limited use and expanding, and may one day offer us
all security from the NSA's of the world, even should they gain the tremendous
power of quantum computers, which themselves will offer humanity fantastic new
abilities. 3D printing is rapidly improving and making new things possible,
and our advances in nanotechnology will only amplify and ramify their
capabilities. It's an exciting time to be alive, even in spite of all the
nicks and cuts we receive from the other side of every new sword we invent.
Humanity needs to keep its ideals and be on guard against the darker half of
it's nature, but there are many great reasons to think we might just surprise
ourselves and turn out okay after all.

~~~
nnq
> Quantum cryptology is currently in limited use and expanding, and may one
> day offer us all security from the NSA's of the world

..."classic" cryptography done right, and software done right, with verifiable
versions of critical components like compilers and kernels, and a few more
pieces of technology we already have, but simply "done right", would give all
the unbreakable security anyone would need. But "doing things right" is simply
suicide (business-wise) in the current economy. Technologies "done right" and
"maintained right" from a security perspective have negative economic value
for whoever would develop them in the current market system, so unless you're
an institution big enough to be both the researcher and the producer and the
consumer of such technology you'll never have it.

...and if you are big enough, let's say a big army system, the inefficiencies
that make any such big closed systems underperform (bureaucracy, internal
corruption, lack of employee motivation etc.) would make security flaws appear
into the system.

So the thing to have hope in is this: even if all systems have flaws that your
boggie-man (the NSA, let's say) can exploit, the boggie-man himself has flaws
that can be exploited.

 _...so the best guarantee of freedom is a perpetual world-wide cyberwar
intense enough to guarantee anyone 's secrets and private information always
have a certain risk of getting exposed so that no one can afford to keep truly
horrible secrets (like torturing people in secret prisons, or routinely
violating everyone's privacy!) because they would know that information
leakage is at some point inevitable._

~~~
Retra
This reminds me of the reality of 'criminal convenience.' A criminal isn't
going to plan the perfect attack so that they don't get caught; they'll just
smash and grab. Firstly, 'doing it right' is expensive. Secondly, there is
enough uncertainty in the world and the bottlenecks of human concern are so
over-saturated with confusion that nobody will likely catch you anyway.

>...so the best guarantee of freedom is a perpetual world-wide cyberwar
intense enough to guarantee anyone's secrets and private information always
have a certain risk of getting exposed [...]

I feel like this would just entrench cynicism as a way of life. Kind of like
it already is: everyone expects bad things to happen and they feel they are
inevitable. It doesn't improve anything because so few people believe real
improvement is possible. Admittedly, I think that things are getting better.

