<
https://news.chanda.science/archive/we-cant-have-metaphors-anymore-because-everything/>
"A few nights ago, I made the mistake of putting on the Sidney Lumet’s 1964
film
Fail-Safe as my “last show of the evening.” I only intended to watch a
few minutes. If you know anything about this movie, then you know why that was
something of a mistake. The film, which has a lot of thematic overlap with
Dr.
Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, is a tightly
paced bureaucratic thriller about what happens when (broken?) technology sends
US Air Force patrollers off to nuke Moscow.
There isn’t really a moment to turn the movie off and say, I’ll finish it
later. This is an impressive feat, actually, given that most of the movie is
just watching people talk to each other in three different rooms: a military
situation room, a meeting room at the Pentagon, and an underground emergency
bunker at the White House. The success of the film relies extensively on the
ability of the actors to tell us a story with a facial expression and the
behind the camera team’s ability to capture those expressions and edit them
into a coherent tapestry with excellent timing.
While watching the film I kept thinking about how much of the story rides on
the wisdom of the President, played by Henry Fonda as an Eisenhower-like
figure. It was Eisenhower who warned everyone about the growth of the
military-industrial complex, coining the term in the process. And this is a
film about that growing complex overtaking human judgment and creating a
catastrophic situation with millions of lives on the line. Much as it’s a
meditation on the new nuclear powers, it is also a think piece on what role
technology should have in killing people. The setup of the story is that no one
can give the pilots an oral order to call off the bombing because they’ve been
told to only trust the codes a machine sends to them. Which all feels like a
precursor or inspiration for the last two entries of the
Mission: Impossible
film series, where Ethan Hunt has to stop a rogue AI from nuking humanity.
In either case, the point is a warning: what happens when we replace human
wisdom and sense of community with a machine’s compassionless judgment?"
Via Janet Logan.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
