Thursday, February 15, 2007

On the topic of killer robots.

I have recently been viewing several futuristic, mostly robot based movies and have become disturbed by a few commonalities. First, many of this genre of film, take a robot and give said robot a human personality, then they give the robot the ability to adapt and learn. The creators of the automated thing-a-majig and this is a text book example of these films, always overlook some flaw in the robots super computer brain, that eventually fissles out and the robot goes all berserko and then, killing spree. Why stop at hyper-intellegent psychopath though? No point in it, no indeed. To make a good robot killer movie you have to do one last thing, you have to give the robot a super strong, metal body. That is the thing that really gets me in these movies. Did the world not learn from Frankenstien? If you are going to make, especially, a prototype robot with human intellegence, would it not be prudent to make its body from styrofoam or a meltible plastic, at least until you got the kinks worked out? No, they always have to go and make the robot out of some super durable, light weight, non-magnetic sort of metal. The robots circuitry is also either not effected by water or it is all inside of some water proof, bullet proof container. This all so stupid and predictable, I never feel sorry for them, those humans deserve to be crushed under the feet of their killer robot. Do the scientists who build these things really think it through? mabye they are just being lazy and trying to avoid problems such as rusting of wear and tear later on down the line but get real. They could at least try and use one of the new plastic polymers that are just as strong as metals but are also meltible, just in case, or how about just a good old off switch? Then, when the robot freaked out and attacked you you could just flick the switch and rework its brain. Hey, I got it, a light board in the robots forehead that spells out what it is thinking, IE. "get humans coffee", or "kill humans now", I don't think that would really be too expesive an addition. How about just really slow robots? If you are gonna make them sentient, why also make them fast? Knowing what I already know about people and how horrible they are, I gotta say that taking a person and giving them super human abilities as well as a metal exo-skeleton would be pretty damned stupid, it would be like putting Pat Robertsons brain in a rhino's body then covering it with a bullet proof shield and letting it loose at a gay rights parade during the democratic national convention. Yes I realize that the entertainment value of this is immeasurable, who can't enjoy a good goaring? but it still doesn't rank up their with the best ideas ever. Well that is just my view on the matter, I hope someone in Hollywood, one day finds the wisdom in all this and writes a new script, instead of just reusing the same one over and over again.

4 comments:

martybob said...

this is what happens when joe is drunk and bored

Xymyl said...

You may or may not be right about Joes medical condition at the time of this writing, but if so, he was in prime condition to witness a robot attack. So his writing about bad plots may have been somewhat autorobotronobiographical. Killer robots always wait until you are drunk and bored to attack, otherwise the obvious plot lines they follow would be too easy to thwart (even with the superroboheavytronoduty exopolytronoroboskeleton). That's also why only drunk and stoned people are abducted by aliens. And that is how philosophers are born. Come on, Marty! Read a book! Seriously, almost every book I've ever read has all this information in the preface. Seriously.

Xymyl said...

I have a question that I'm hoping you'll answer in a future blog. What about merpeople? You hear a lot about mermaids and a little about mermen, other than that there is not much (if any) mention of mergrandpas and grandmas, merchildren, or mertradespeople. I realize that these are fictional characters and this question is totally contrived, but what exactly do these little bastards do? Do they have jobs?

JeremyRocksU said...

Yeah, xymyl, they probably clean the mertoilet in merdonalds or take out the mertrash for their shellfish masters.