Robots on Mars and in Our Lives

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alphago, artificial intelligence, documentaries, machine learning, Mars, mars rover, movies, opportunity, robot, self driving cars

When I was a wee lad in the 1970s and 80s, the idea of robots on Mars was far-fetched fodder for science-fiction stories in comic books. This year, Amazon Studios released a film that shows just how far we have come by making this concept a reality. As a follow-up to last month’s post about a mysteriously unsigned postcard that arrived in my mailbox with a riddle about robots, I’d like to share a few thought-provoking and inspiring videos for the author of that postcard as she works on her robot novel. It turns out I correctly guessed her identity, and we enjoyed some good correspondence about the rise of the robots and our relationships with them.

First up is the 2022 film Good Night Oppy, which I cannot recommend highly enough. It tells the story of the Mars rover Opportunity, NASA’s amazing robot who was expected to last only 90 days but overcame the odds to explore the red planet for fifteen years. Good Night Oppy conveys not only fascinating science but the equally interesting way in which humans can form emotional bonds with robots. It does so through captivating interview clips with people who worked on the project, including people who were so inspired by Opportunity and her mission as teenagers that they eventually grew up to work on the project itself.

The gorgeous musical score and the exquisite recreations of the peaks and perils of Opportunity’s journey by Industrial Light & Magic make this a film not to be missed. It’s currently free to watch for Amazon Prime subscribers, and the cost is more than reasonable for everyone else. Below is the film’s trailer. Though it is in many ways a triumphant tale, you have a more stoic heart than mine if you can make it all the way through without crying.

Another wonderful film that focuses on the artificial-intelligence aspect of robots is currently available to watch for free on YouTube. AlphaGo tells the story of the A.I. developed to master the game of Go and its eventual triumph over the world’s top-rated human Go player. Like Good Night Oppy, this film brings you into the lives of the humans who created this robot and helped it learn, but the big difference here is that the robot was an antagonist in some people’s stories. To the players who faced it, AlphaGo was an enemy—or, at the very least, a competitor.

One of the more interesting subplots in this documentary involves the Go player whose world was shaken by losing to the robot, and who subsequently joined the development team to advance the robot’s potential. Go is an incredibly complex game, perhaps even more difficult to master than chess, and this film does nothing to explain how the game is played. But even if you know nothing about Go, this film is well worth watching.

Even if you don’t play Go and have no plans to travel to Mars anytime soon, our lives are increasingly affected by robots, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. The first robot I encountered was ELIZA, a rudimentary bot that ineptly conversed with my sister and me in the early 1980s on our TRS-80 computer from Radio Shack, back when you could load a videogame from a magnetic cassette tape. These days, I’m a big fan of the Midjourney robot who helps me create digital art for various projects such as blog posts, postcards, and stories.

But one of the most useful applications of autonomous robots to arrive in recent years is in self-driving cars. I have been driving on the roads with other humans for thirty-five years now, and I can testify that humans absolutely SUCK at driving. I’ve had a car totalled by a drunk driver on a holiday weekend, lived though one of my friends running a red light and breaking her neck, and almost been run over in crosswalks a thousand times. We are our own worst enemies, and the stats of traffic fatalities and injuries leave no doubt about that. If you aren’t convinced that self-driving cars are the wave of the future, watch the following video from Derek at Veritasium, then check out his trip in a self-driving cab from a company in Chandler, Arizona.

I love dystopic stories about a future where robots decide that the solution to human problems is the obliteration of humanity. The first and second Terminator movies are all-time favorites of mine. On the other hand, I grew up on Asimov’s robot stories, which tend to be more optimistic. While it is entirely possible—in fact, almost certain—that some organizations and governments will develop robots to oppress and slaughter people, we are also fortunate to be living in an era where robots are being built for scientific exploration, making our lives safer, inspiring us to learn about our universe and improve our lives, and raising questions that help us gain a deeper understanding of what it means to be human. The bots at Chess.com are even helping me sharpen my chess skills.

So, do I fear robots, or do I trust them? The answer is simply yes. Robots are tools, like a hammer. In one person’s hands, a hammer can be used to build a house for safety and shelter. In another pair of hands, the hammer could cave in a human skull. I don’t believe the question is “Are robots good or bad?” The question is “Who are we?” The things we create—robotic or otherwise—will reflect that.

And now, on a lighter note, here is comedian Ryan George.

The robot uprising is here.

What Are You Building? Ten Years of Inception

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christopher nolan, film, hans zimmer, inception, movies

July 2020 was the tenth anniversary of the theatrical release of Inception, and the movie generated so many discussions and theories that I doubt anything I say will be new. But it’s one of my favorite films, and upon watching it for the zillionth time this week, a few things came to mind.

The previous time I watched Inception, last year, I put the sound on my little desktop speakers. This time, I put it in my headphones. I’d forgotten how awesome this film originally sounded in the theater when I first saw it with my sister ten years ago. The score by Hans Zimmer is integral to the movie. Like Zimmer did for the more recent Nolan film Dunkirk, he often overlaps multiple scenes with a single piece of music that establishes a thematic unity across the scenes, tying everything together emotionally through sound.

The final scenes of the movie are unified by Zimmer’s piece called Time, the song that begins when Mr. Cobb apparently wakes up on the plane. The song continues until the very last second of the film. Over the years, I’ve come to feel this song is inextricably linked to those scenes. It begins sparsely and quietly. It’s gloomy and melancholy, but it adds layers and a swelling orchestral treatment that sounds to me like triumphant sadness. It doesn’t sound like a happy ending, but neither does it sound like total defeat.

It’s an odd emotional combination, but it makes complete sense for the film’s ending. Why? Because that’s exactly what happens to Cobb. The triumph is that Cobb at last is reunited with his children he loves so much. The sadness is that those are clearly not Cobb’s real children, and he has not returned to reality to be with them. He’s still dreaming about them and has given up on returning to reality so he can experience the happiness of being with them in the dream world. As a writer of fiction, I can relate to that a little too much.

When I first saw the film in the theater, I loved the ambiguous ending. I felt like the film was leaving it up to me to decide whether Cobb was still dreaming or had truly achieved his desire in the real world. But, after repeated viewings, I no longer sense any ambiguity at all. The entire ending is clearly a dream.

Here’s why. First, the kids are in the States, and Cobb is greeted at the airport in the States by the Michael Caine character, Miles. But we know that Miles was in Paris, France the last time we met him. Why is he in the States? Answer: He isn’t. Second, the kids appear exactly as they did in all the times Cobb saw them in dreams—the same poses, the same clothes—only this time, he sees their faces. But if Cobb were in reality, wouldn’t the kids have on different clothes and be older than he remembers them? Third, Cobb asks the kids what they are doing, and they tell him they are building a house on a cliff. Building is something associated in the film with building worlds inside dreams, and the film shows us Saito’s house on a cliff in the previous scene. These aren’t real kids in a yard. They are only dream children.

The music tells us this is both a sad and a happy moment. It’s the sonic equivalent of getting everything you ever hoped for, yet failing to get it at all, because it’s an illusion. Cobb has both abandoned his struggle to truly reunite with his real kids and escaped the fate of becoming “an old man, filled with regret, waiting to die alone.” Cobb achieves wish fulfillment, but it’s just a dream, not the real thing.

While I no longer feel the ending is at all ambivalent, it does leave me with two questions. First, how much of the film is a dream? Others have speculated that the entire film is a layered dream, and the scenes in Mombasa support that theory, most notably in the way the walls of the city become impossibly narrow passages Cobb must squeeze through only to emerge at a too-coincidental rescue by Saito.

Second, what happens after the film’s ending? Since Cobb is still dreaming, his top will continue spinning after the final frame. But what happens when he returns to the room with the table where he left the top, then finds it is still spinning because he is dreaming? I don’t want to see an Inception II sequel, but I like to imagine the possibilities of what comes next. Will Cobb find the top spinning and lock it away in a safe to preserve the dream’s “reality” like his wife Mal did when they were trapped together in limbo? Or will Cobb see it spinning and decide to wake himself up to pursue fulfilling his desires in reality?

Perhaps the final scene with Saito as an old man in the house on the cliff provides the answer. Saito’s final physical act on camera is reaching for a pistol. But we never see what he does with it. Maybe he put it to his head and pulled the trigger, killing himself in the dream to awake in the real world, leaving Cobb to face the decision to return the same way or simply sink into the fantasy fulfillment of the dream. Given Cobb’s established penchant for self-deception, always pretending that he has things “under control” when he clearly doesn’t, it seems likely that he chose the path of fantasy fulfillment within the dream. But I think that when Cobb finds that still-spinning top on the table, he will need to make a choice about either maintaining the easy lie or returning to the difficult truth.

That choice will define his life from then on. Who knows? Maybe Saito really can do what he promised and reunite Cobb with his real children. Maybe he can’t.

So, do you want to take a leap of faith? Or become an old man, filled with regret, waiting to die alone?

Maybe you have a third choice.

Movies vs. Comic Books: Who Controls Time?

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authority, Avengers, Civil War, comic books, film, Mark Millar, movies, narrative structure, planet hulk, superhero, thor ragnarok, time, Warren Ellis, widescreen comics

Now that films based on comic books and superheroes have firmly entered the mainstream of popular culture, characters and storylines we comics readers have enjoyed for years regularly come to life on the big screen for a wider audience than comics ever reached. Long-time readers are often thrilled to see their favorite heroes in live-action movies, but some feel a bit of regret. After all, it can be disheartening to hear people discussing characters as if the movies tell the entire story, when many readers have followed the characters in-depth for years or even decades.

Compressing years of story into a two-hour theater experience means a lot gets left out, as anyone who read the Planet Hulk stories can tell you about the movie Thor: Ragnarok, or anyone who read Marvel’s Civil War comics can tell you about the Captain America movie of the same name. Plus, the big screen and the printed page are two distinctly different mediums, each with its own storytelling conventions, so they deliver distinctly different stories.

Movies usually follow a formulaic narrative structure. From the inciting incident to the hero’s crisis, predicting the next story beat in a movie is pretty easy. Comic books often employ more flexible and unusual structures—a point in their favor in my opinion. This is true despite a trend toward making modern mainstream comic books more cinematic in their approach to storytelling.

Near the turn of the century, Warren Ellis used the term widescreen comics to describe the blockbuster-movie style he was creating in The Authority with artists Bryan Hitch and Paul Neary. After 12 issues, writer Mark Millar and artist Frank Quitely came on board and kept up the cinematic approach. Millar, Hitch, and Neary soon combined forces to reinvent the Avengers as The Ultimates—the forerunner of the current film versions of the Avengers. For a more in-depth look at widescreen comics, and how they influenced movies as much as movies influenced them, see Peter Suderman’s article for Vox.

As far as I’m concerned, there hasn’t been a movie yet that equals those first 29 issues of The Authority. But it’s more than just the awesome stories, vicious dialogue, and stunning artwork. What makes the printed page most enjoyable for me can be summed up in two words: time control.

In a film, time passes at a fixed speed determined by the flow of film through a projector, or its digital equivalent these days. Yes, a movie can use slow motion or speed up time, but all of that is determined by the movie itself. Moviegoers have no control of it in a theater. Time passes at a pace determined exclusively by the filmmakers.

With printed pages, the reader controls time. The reader determines how long to spend on a panel or page. Readers can turn back the pages to see something again if they did not absorb it on the first read. The reader can set the book down and walk away, then come back to it and pick up again from any point in the narrative. Movies only provide this convenience if you own or stream a copy at home and can rewind it or freeze the frames.

While I enjoy movies, I tend to enjoy their comic-book source material far more due to time control. An awesome action scene might be over in seconds or minutes on the big screen, but I can linger on it for as long as I like with a printed page. A stunning visual appears on the screen for fleeting moments, then moves on to the next one. It leaves me feeling unsatisfied when I want to spend more time taking in all its detail and beauty. With a comic book, I can pore over the artists’ rendering and take time to appreciate every line and shape, every bit of hard work that went into inking and coloring the picture. Instead of having it all fade away as I leave a theater, I can come back to it again and again with a book.

While many recent comic-book movies do look great, the awesomeness always go by too quickly for me. I never have a chance to fully appreciate it before its gone. And when the theater lights come on, fun time is over unless I want to buy another ticket. The experience is transient and ephemeral compared to a physical book I can keep for years.

None of this should be taken as an argument over which medium is “better”. Enjoy what you enjoy. This is only an attempt to articulate a feeling I’ve had for years but never explained very well to people who expect me to be super excited about recent superhero movies. It isn’t that the movies are bad; they simply lack one of the biggest things that gives me enjoyment with comic books: time control.

 

On a less serious note: a video.