Two words bring glee to the heart of every sci-fan: killer robots.
If the words are nudged into italics and trailed by an exclamation point — Killer robots! — as if they are a frantic warning from a hysterical scientist who stands amid the broken beakers and shattered flasks of a laboratory recently destroyed by power-crazed automatons, well, so much the better.
— Killer robots! — as if they are a frantic warning from a hysterical scientist who stands amid the broken beakers and shattered flasks of a laboratory recently destroyed by power-crazed automatons, well, so much the better.
The delight in envisioning an army of clanking, rampaging monsters is, I am afraid, one of the chief reasons that Bill Joy’s article in the current issue of Wired magazine is attracting so much attention. I would like to chalk it up to Joy’s thoughtful analysis of a society increasingly dependent on technology, but alas, it’s probably those killer robots, the ones that may, Joy warns, show up in the next few decades in a very, very bad mood.
But if it isn’t the killer robots that people find so compelling, then what is it?
Virtually everything Joy says in his article (available at www.wired.com) has been said before, and in some cases, said more eloquently and cogently. Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, argues that technology is on the verge of running amok, that what lies ahead may be nothing less than the extinction of the human species. Robots, he writes, may soon be smarter than we are and able to reproduce themselves without our say-so.
News of the article spread like a virtual virus last week, showing up in stories in major newspapers and magazines. Joy was interviewed on national news programs such as ABC’s “Good Morning America.” He is an attractive, low-key guy, capable of positing the most flamboyantly dire high-tech scenario without sounding drunk or crazy, which is quite a feat.
But again, where’s the news?
Part of the news, of course, is that Joy is an insider. He helped create the information culture by his work at Sun, where he continues as chief scientist. He cannot be dismissed as a Luddite, which is how a great many people who dare to question technology are characterized, shortly before they are given the heave-ho.
Why, though, should we automatically pay more heed to a software developer’s warning about unchecked technology than we do to the same cautionary murmurs from a professor, farmer or kindergarten teacher? Joy obviously knows a great deal more about information systems than do those other folks, but I cannot accept, without further proof, that he knows a great deal more about life.
The attention lavished on Joy’s prediction — again, a prediction previously made elsewhere by others — strikes me as yet another example of our genuflection before the sacred altar of technology. When a regular, garden-variety, earnest citizen says, “Hmm. Wonder where all these fancy machines are taking us?” we yawn. Yet when a certified techie says “Whoa!” then we stop — because of course the techie knows best.
It’s the same cockeyed theory that often is used in reference to sports broadcasters: Only ex-athletes, this line of thought goes, can tell you what’s really going on in a game.
For years now, writers such as Wendell Berry, Sven Birkerts and Neil Postman have been offering closely reasoned, passionately felt books and essays about the dubious benefits of technology’s quick-time ascension. They aren’t software billionaires. They don’t have Web home pages.
They simply ask us to stop and consider how a wired world is affecting the ultimate home page: the soul.
It’s nice that Joy has come around to asking the same question, but I still don’t quite understand why his ruminations are any more newsworthy than theirs. Could it be those killer robots, after all?
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I don’t get it.
I don’t get “American Beauty,” the film that is a favorite to nab the Oscar for Best Picture in Sunday’s televised ceremony.
I found its creepy misogyny, corrosive cynicism, showy and pointless visual stunts and smug pseudo-critique of middle-class American class almost revolting.
So I hated it. Big deal. Opinions on everything — movies, books, TV shows, Web sites, newspaper columns — are manifold.
Here, though, is what troubles me about the wide gap between my view of “American Beauty” and almost everybody else’s: the fact that it troubles me.
That is, even in an age remarkable for its range and variety of opinions and perspectives, an age in which any maverick with a modem can be a critic with an audience greater than Aristotle or William Hazlitt (to name but two great literary critics) ever enjoyed, we still seem fixated on fitting in. Prevailing opinion — the mainstream — still exerts an irresistible lure. Everybody wants to know what somebody else thinks about everything.
I ought to be saucy and heedless about my contrary estimation of “American Beauty”; I ought to assume that, like the guy marching in military formation who goes one way while 9,999 soldiers go the other way, I’m right and they’re wrong.
So why do I feel so empty and confused?
Virtually everyone whose judgment I respect absolutely adores “American Beauty.” They revere it. They worship it. They love it so much that they would, if they could, yank the actual film of “American Beauty” out of its flat round canister and roll around naked in the celluloid strips, beneath a shower of torn ticket stubs from the matinee screening. (That image, as “American Beauty” fans will recognize, is an adaptation of a familiar scene in the movie.)
So what’s the matter with me? Can millions of moviegoers, hundreds of film critics, dozens of colleagues and the folks who nominate films for Academy Awards all be wrong?
And if they’re right, then I’m wrong. But how can I be so wrong?
Last week, the Chicago Film Critics Award for best picture was handed to “American Beauty.” New York Times critic Janet Maslin called the movie “brilliantly staged.” Washington Post critic Desson Howe termed it “one of the year’s finest pictures.” In Newsweek, David Ansen gushed that “American Beauty” is “a very funny film that packs an unexpected emotional wallop.” And — this is the topper, because I love his work almost as much as he seemed to love “American Beauty” — David Denby in The New Yorker described it as “an amazing and impassioned fantasia about American loneliness.”
Hey, Dave. You want to talk about loneliness? Try not liking “American Beauty.”
