

Reflections on Avatar by Ray Kurzweil - limist
http://www.kurzweilai.net/news/frame.html?main=/news/news_single.html?id%3D11907

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megaduck
I think he largely misses the point. Like many other sci-fi pieces, Avatar is
a fantasia and not a serious look at our possible future.

Much of the human technology was obviously modeled after current American
military tech, and that was a deliberate choice. This approach allowed Cameron
to tap into current feelings and cultural currents. If things had been more
'realistic', then it would have been alien to modern audiences. Really,
properly modeling the future would have made the story far more difficult to
tell.

It's darned hard to make a story that's universally accessible. 'Avatar' is a
pretty decent sci-fi movie that's understandable to people all over the world.
It will also revolutionize cinematography and filmmaking from this point
onward. Any proper analysis of the film should keep those points in mind.

~~~
mclin
It reminds me of this article from little while ago.
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1169875>

_Nerds want every question answered with a reason, even if that question
shouldn't have one. Why is Superman strong? He gets his powers from the sun.
Why does he get powers from the sun? Because his skin is a solar battery.
Well, why is he still strong at night? Well, he's charged up for years as an
adolescent, he has a lot of stored power. Ah ha! Well, in issue #626, the
Parasite drained him of all energy before Batman saved him - shouldn't he be
back to zero and weak by dawn? No, they say, because of..._

~~~
derefr
Well, yeah—that's what it means for something to be "science fiction." SF is
fiction that not only _feels_ scientific, but can be expected to hold up to
genuine, in-depth scientific inquiry on its concepts and progression. If you
didn't write a movie/book/whatever that will stand up to such nerdery, you
should really stop calling it sci-fi.

~~~
tree_of_item
I feel as if it's the exact opposite.

Do any of Asimov's books on "positronic brains" hold up to genuine, in-depth
scientific inquiry? He just glossed over the details of their workings. Does
this mean they're not sci-fi?

~~~
derefr
It's not the _setting_ that needs to be scientific for a work to be SF,
though, but rather the _conflict_. The conflict in the Robot books isn't about
"positronic brains," it's about robotic interactions with humanity. The
science being employed is sociology.

To put it another way—the initial state of the universe when the book starts
can be anything you like, with any _rules_ you like. SF is just a strict
dedication setting up those rules and following them wherever they may lead.
("Hard" sci-fi additionally requires that those rules be a superset of the
rules of our own universe.)

~~~
rbanffy
> The science being employed is sociology.

Perhaps in the case of Avatar, the science would be anthropology with a small
bite of psychology and history mixed in.

A lot of good sci-fi stories gloss over the details of several sciences (and
often violate them in ways that would make a screenwriter turn red) to have
the opportunity to examine one specific idea.

Or, to put it more concisely, they tell one story while pretending to tell
another.

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CWuestefeld
While I agree with the thrust of Kurzweil's criticism, there are a couple of
things he missed.

First, I too was disappointed by the simple, anti-corporate picture it
painted. But it wasn't 100% black-and-white. There was a short scene in which
Ribisi's character is reluctant to attack, and the army guy bullies him into
it. I think the story would have benefited greatly just by expanding and
amplifying that scene (although it was already a rather long movie).

Kurzweil criticizes that the technology a century hence ought to be more
advanced. He says the only revolutionary thing shown in the movie is the
avatar tech itself. First, he misses the obvious fact of star travel and the
hibernation that it relied on.

But more significantly, I think he misses that while things advance, the form
they take tends to ape what we're used to. Thus, our automobiles are very much
"horseless carriages". Tablet computers are named that for their resemblance
to zillion-year-old stone tablets. Since the tech in the movie was largely
part of the scenery and not really highlighted, I think it's entirely to be
expected that we wouldn't recognize how advanced it is.

~~~
10ren
The characters were more filled out in the original, even longer, screenplay
[http://chud.com/articles/articles/21969/1/PROJECT-880-THE-
AV...](http://chud.com/articles/articles/21969/1/PROJECT-880-THE-AVATAR-THAT-
ALMOST-WAS/Page1.html)

------
jcl
I thought the "networked tree" thing was actually quite clever. Think of it
this way: Suppose you were living in Kurzweil's post-Singularity future, where
you have absolute command over biological and nanotechnological mechanics, and
you wanted to set up a world-wide communications platform that will last
forever. You wouldn't mine precious metals and sling fragile fibers as we have
done. Instead, you'd engineer it into the fauna: self-repairing, self-
sustaining, global.

"The spirits of your ancestors living in the trees" sounds mystical and
backward, but "copying your brain to the internet to be saved forever" sounds
wonderfully Kurzweillian. Cameron bridges the two, but the technology was too
advanced for Kurzweil to identify it as such. :)

One thing I thought was neat about the original Avatar script that got left
out of the movie was a closing threat from the Na'vi to the humans: Our giant
biological computer has analyzed you and engineered a virus that will destroy
you, should you return to Pandora.

~~~
yesbabyyes
My feelings exactly. I am quite surprised that Kurzweil misses that. After
watching the film, I thought the Na'vi had pretty much mastered the whole
"hooking everything to the Internet" thing.

Kurzweil sounds like a child, angry because Cameron didn't let the humans have
that advanced technology.

In fact, it's rather Kurzweil who fails to see "beyond" today's technology,
and envision a world where technology doesn't look like it does today, but is
fused with nature.

And Cameron didn't show that nature can be brutal? Dude, it was full of
monsters. The Na'vi could be brutal.

It was a badly written review, and Kurzweil didn't seem to grasp the film at
all. He also seems to have a personal grudge with nature. Not cool.

~~~
eagleal
He looked over the Na'vi bio-networking quite superficially. But his point was
that how can a rhinoceros destroy a robot like that. It's like you take an
armored elephant against an M1A2 Abrams.

~~~
sliverstorm
We're talking about technology and life forms that don't exist, but imho:

The rhinoceros was huge. A couple bullets, even from the robots, will not stop
something that size in it's tracks.

The robots are smaller, flimsier, and seemed to posses lesser firepower than
tanks.

Elephants have armor and defense nowhere in their body. The rhinoceros in
Avatar looked like they had a veritable carapace to me.

~~~
eagleal
I'm not saying that elephants have armor; I made the analogy of elephants
covered with armor.

The rhinoceros was about 2 times the mass of the robots (even they seem light,
in realty they shouldn't, different composition, eg. man and a humanoid). The
gun was at least a .50 cal. With all this advancement in technology, AI should
guide the gun to Aim at the knees (technology that exists today, evaluation of
damage trough pre-imposted data).

And yes, you're right, it's just a movie.

~~~
sliverstorm
No, I understood that, but it's massively not the same. Metal armor has a lot
of problems, like chinks and deformation crushing the flesh below. Plus the
rest of your body needs to be geared for it. If you donned a metal helm and
started butting heads with a mountain goat, you'd loose. The metal stops your
head from cracking open, but that's about it, and you wind up with a host of
other problems. The goat has an entire body built for the shock.

There's a ton more I want to interject with, but yes. Just a movie.

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Jim72
What bunk. He tries to say that riding the backs of the birds is a rip of
Harry Potter. Does the guy know nothing of Greek Mythology? Did he not see
Clash of the Titans with Persius riding the back of Pegasus; which clearly
predates Potter.

~~~
Confusion
_He tries to say that_

You are putting words into his mouth to support your interpretation of those
images. I interpreted those images as simply another demonstration of the lack
of imagination the movie displays. Whether riding a big flying animal is
derived from Greek mythology or from Harry Potter is irrelevant.

Before flinging the first criticism that comes to your mind at him, be
critical of your own criticism. Supposing 'the guy know nothing of Greek
Mythology' is a vast and unnecessary underestimation of his intelligence and
credentials. If you'd bother to look him up, you'd see that he is probably
quite aware of the mythological origins of these images.

~~~
Jim72
I put no words in his mouth. You apparently failed to read the article.

"... and the flying birds were derivative of Potter creatures, including
mastering flying on the back of big bird creatures."

And I am sure Kurzweil knows about Pegasus. All the more the reason his
article was bunk!

~~~
Confusion
I completely missed that line when I first read the article and I even missed
it when I read it again, to figure out what you were talking about. I guess
that shows how relevant the point about the flying thing is to the content of
the article.

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seldo
Is there anything in this that has not been mentioned about Avatar by a
hundred other commentators? I'm seeing: derivative plot, suspiciously human
aliens, big plot hole surrounding the ending. Is there anything new here? I'm
genuinely asking; I may have missed it.

~~~
elblanco
Well he _did_ mention that he thought we'd be a bit further along the
technology track by then.

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philh
I liked the technology. It looked plausible, not primitive. Exoskeletons that
are "beginning to be deployed" can plausibly be widespread in the future. I
can believe that guns will continue to operate on the same principals as they
have done for a thousand years.

They didn't show the same restraint with the nature, unfortunately. Why did
everything need six legs and four eyes, and why didn't Na'vi hair evolve to be
prehensile when they started needing to shove it down the data tubes of irate
wildlife?

As an aside, having all those links in the text is very distracting.

~~~
gnaritas
> Why did everything need six legs and four eyes

For the same reason most animals on earth have 4 legs and two eyes, common
genetic ancestry; It was actually a nice touch.

> and why didn't Na'vi hair evolve to be prehensile when they started needing
> to shove it down the data tubes of irate wildlife

They already had hands, a prehensile hair connection wouldn't likely offer
enough advantage to become a primary trait.

~~~
cracki
four eyes might actually benefit the owner. with 2 eyes, you can cover 360
degrees _without_ stereo vision, or half that with stereo vision.

two pairs of eyes should give the owner superior awareness of its
surroundings.

six legs... the na'vi didn't have 6 limbs. they're an exception. that should
have been continued, to maybe 4 arms, like the tree monkeys did.

showing the use of 6 legs isn't a problem. enough things on earth already do
that.

humanoids with 4 legs might have worked... they'd have looked less human
though. also, i can't imagine why a 4-legged humanoid would ride a 6-legged
horse. Kurzweil pointed out that this film is meant to make money, so 4 legs
wouldn't have worked so well.

humanoids with 4 arms, that's already difficult from a practical standpoint.
what does a 4-armed humanoid use its arms for? the bow and arrow for a 4-armed
creature might just be too hard to extrapolate.

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lurkinggrue
One bit of background that gets missed with Avatar is the military contractors
are the low bidders and were using outdated military surplus.

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steveplace
When the singularity comes, I hope we can get a new designer for him.

~~~
Legion
Indeed. It's QUITE annoying to read HYPERTEXT where every fourth WORD or so is
a BOLDED link to some silly TOPIC map.

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goodgoblin
What is great about this movie review, for me, isn't the exact point-by-point
analysis that the author makes, but the fact that author is noted futurist Ray
Kurzweil. It would be like having Colin Powell review the Hurt Locker - its
just kind of cool.

~~~
jpwagner
I literally laughed out loud at that analogy. Thank you.

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Tycho
I'm surprised I didn't read more commentary about the Christian symbolism in
Avatar - Garden of Eden, Tree of Life, etc. Maybe people no longer look at
those symbols as predominantly/exclusively Judeo-Christian?

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teilo
You can find "Christian" symbolism in anything. For crying out loud, people
found it in the Lion King, the Matrix, and even the Ten Commandments! (The
last one was a joke.)

For it to be "Christian" symbolism, it would have to be quite a bit more
explicit than general themes like gardens and trees. Once you start turning
fiction into symbolism you can make anything out of everything.

~~~
Tycho
general themes like trees and gardens? in what way, and in what works, are
these things themes?

Christian mythology shares a lot of common ideas with other mythology,
according to scholars. The Garden of Eden was a paradisiacal forest where
humans lived in harmony with nature, where the Tree of Life gave them
immortality, so long as they ignored the Tree of Knowledge (at peril of being
cast out). In Avatar, the Na'vi live in harmony with nature in a paradisiacal
forest with a Great Tree, afforded quasi-immortality by 'spiritual-uplink' to
the tree, and in the complete absence of technology. Then along come the evil,
technologically advanced humans who of course have been cast out of their own
paradisiacal habitat (or destroyed it).

It doesn't sound like the loosest connect ever to me. one of the characters is
called 'Grace Augustine'

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Adam503
I think Kurzweil completely missed the very important set up point that the
campaign on Avavar was not being conducted by the most modern military forces
of that time on Earth. It was being conducted entirely by a corporate entity
and it's ex-military hirelings (think Blackwater).

I thought this point was particularly well though out.

No profit-driven model of an corporate military campaign to put down a native
uprising would send state-of-the-art anything. They'd send on-hand dated
military surplus weapons and equipment and troops to fire full auto machine
guns, flamethrowers, napalm, white phosphorus rounds, field artillery, and
lots of ammo.

State of the art military vs. peasant uprisings are useless. Watch the movie
"Zulu Dawn" sometime.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zulu_Dawn>

Like the gatling guns on the front of A-10s and A-10s themselves the Air Force
kept pulling out of retirement. Some situations just don't require anything
more sophisticated than a gatling gun and something well armored and
maneuverable to hang a gatling gun on the front of.

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barmstrong
Kurzweil probably has no room to criticize given that he has never attempted
to make a film like that and probably couldn't do better himself - but I agree
with his general point that the movie was anti-technology and anti-
corporation. This is a disturbing and misinformed viewpoint held by many
people in Hollywood for some reason.

~~~
sliverstorm
disturbing? misinformed? To a certain degree, the detractors are a positive
thing. They are like the brakes on a train, preventing it from becoming a
runaway train.

For example, Skynet... imho, that will NEVER happen, cause everybody is so
fscking scared of it. We'll get to the point where it _could_ have happened,
but fear will probably ensure we have safeguards and such.

~~~
hollerith
You haven't talked to many AGI (artificial general intelligence) researchers,
have you?

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mmphosis
_The basic story was taken right from Dances with Wolves._

No, the basic story is taken right from FernGully.

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jawsh
Ray missed the forest for the trees. No movie de-others the other more than
this one. More importantly, he utterly misses the tonality, as if he were
watching without a heart. Ray, how is it that your analysis explains nothing
of the continued appeal of this movie?

~~~
philwelch
The "continued appeal" of Cameron's last blockbuster (Titanic) lasted about a
year longer than this one and then everyone forgot about it. Avatar's gonna go
in the history of film for popularizing 3-D, but it's remaining to see whether
there's any continued appeal in it.

~~~
jawsh
Fair enough. The point I put poorly there was that many people who like the
movie are drawn in/back by the emotive landscape; usually one of the main
things they have to say about it. Obviously that's supported by the 3-D, but I
have a hunch that it has much more to do w/ my first point re: making the
strange familiar. But you're right; that remains to be seen.

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RevRal
Full paged, not framed, not cluttered with hyperlinks, and non-annoying
version of the article:

<http://www.kurzweilai.net/news/news_printable.html?id=11907>

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hendler
I think it's the only review I've read where keywords are highlighted with a
javascript function that says:

javascript:loadBrain('Technology')

