Once upon a time I used to be fairly ignorant about computers. In many areas of computing I would still be considered a novice, but I do have a good grounding in the basics and that has served me well lo these many years. Back when I was less knowledgeable about the inner workings of the silicon mind I was understandably impressed by Hollywood's presentation of computer science. Computers, I thought at the time, can do anything that a hero needs them to unless they are evil computers in which case they can still do anything, but only the things that evil computers want to do...like kill all humanity using an army of vat-grown Arnold Schwarzeneggers.
As I grew in my technological knowledge, or tech-understandery, it seemed that many of the abilities of movie computers were vastly overstated. You can't actually launch nukes against Russia using a TRS-80 and a dial-up modem connecting at 2600 baud. Sure, some kid in the 80's hacked the Pentagon using one, but he didn't even know what he was looking at and he certainly couldn't have killed us all with a key stroke. I'm pretty sure that guy works at Wendy's these days replacing the light bulbs on the drive-thru menu board. Nor can you upload a virus from a Mac Power Book to an entirely unknown Extraterrestrial data system. Systems are not as interconnected as we are led to believe on television and in the movies. A program that adversely effects my workstation won't hurt my server. A virus that might destroy the email system wouldn't harm even one byte of internet pornography that I in no way have backup up on three hard drives...at work. The password is not "Tallywacker".
Technology is a wonderful plot device and I'm not disputing that. Without incomprehensible science stuff we wouldn't have more than a handful of episodes of Star Trek or any episode of CSI, CSI: Miami, CSI: New York, NCIS, or Bones, Crossing Jordan, Law and Order SVU, Law and Order Criminal Intent, Law and Order Orignal Recipe or House. None of these fine shows could withstand even one script read-through without the complicated and bewildering array of printed-circuit B.S. that allows a detective\hero\doctor\part-time samurai to solve a mystery in 44 minutes. Sometimes you need to be across the galaxy in less than 12 parsecs (wink) so you can fight a guy in a mobile iron lung using an ancient martial art based on your feelings. In that rarefied situation I'll spot you the faster-than-light travel because the whole thing is absurd anyway. Plus, it lets me use extra hyphens. And I'll grant you ray guns, artificial gravity and everybody wearing their pajamas all the time. The future is a sleepy place and we, the sci-fi viewers, accept this as part of the genre that we love so well. But when it comes to computers, the interactive aspect of sci-fi, I call shenanigans on the whole of Hollywood's offerings.
What it boils down to, the consomme of the situation, is this: You must play by your own rules and those rules must make some sort of sense to begin with. In my office I have a telephone and a stapler and a workstation. There are programs that I could run on my desktop to eliminate the phone. The phone could use some software that might eliminate the need for certain aspects of the computer. The stapler is irreplaceable. The point is, I can't just take pieces of one and make the other. If I have a broken monitor, two AAA batteries and some hand lotion I cannot make a spreadsheet in Excel out of it. In the past certain learned men were shown to make radios out of coconuts when the need arose, but that was just a television show and a perfect example of crazy Hollywood technology. My physics professor used to say that "Parts is Parts" and while that makes sense at the subatomic level, it won't help you build a transport out of your old blender and a pair of heinouslly smelly tennis shoes. You just can't. So, when our friends on Star Trek crash land on a planet and must find a way to contact their compatriots or make a laser beam or a whole new ship, it makes no sense that they could just take a piece of this and a reactor from that and snap it all together like some sort of glowing space-lego set. But what is worse is the completly inconsistent way that the computers work in the first place. Sometimes they can just ask the computer what the likelyhood of some crazy plan working might be and she sings it right out. Other times she gets confused by simple requests for rare foods or music selections. If she's a super-smart AI with unlimited, or seemingly unlimited, processing power such that she can calculate the odds of surviving a trip through an asteroid field despite the protestations of the pilot, why can't she find Styx II in the ships archives? Count the pop-culture references there. Yeah, I know. Sad.
Picking on Star Trek or Wars or Man is easy. They're all based not on good science but on story telling and adventure. Bully for them. Droids are AI that think and feel and say wacky things during combat. They can fix complex systems on the fly. They always have the needed tool handy tucked away in their little metallic bodies, but they communicate with beeps and whistles or just say "ROGER ROGER" to everything. Really? I guess what put me on this tangent of computational criticism was a conversation my wife and I had about "The Fly". Dig this, in "The Fly" with Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis, a scientist is working on teleportation. Now that falls soundly into my "silly technology forgiveness" safety zone. It's crazytalk to begin with so I have no beef with it. However, in order for his teleportation system to work he has had to create a complex computer mind that can break down the human form, interpret that being as data and then put it all back together again in another place. Having done some limited programming myself I can tell you that the logic required to make a computer program that intuitive would be worth much more than the teleportation system. Just having the tools necessary to create the OS needed to run the whole thing would be a veritable goldmine of computer science. But in true Hollywood form this is all cast aside. We've got to get Goldblum in that pod with a fly and scramble his DNA, stat! To that end, the computer is suddenly a special needs computer. It got confused when it saw, GASP!, two different patterns in the chamber. What to do? What to do? My assumption would be that the program would break, like when I try to query a database using the wrong syntax or I ask the system for data that doesn't exist. In the really-real world a computer can only do what it is told. Tell it anything new or unexpected and it just stops doing anything until you tell it different. Such is not the case with "The Fly". Now we have a system that can't make a simple decision, a logical decision, so it forumates a much more complicated plan. When faced with a new situation, one that I can't believe that any programmer in his right mind would not have thought of waaaay in advance, the computer does not choose option A: Shut down. Nor does it choose option B: Just teleport both beings seperately. No, it chooses option C: Meld the two beings together at the molecular level creating a whole new being that will be horrible. Too dumb to know what to do with some extra DNA, smart enough to reprogram itself to do something it had never done before or been told to do by anybody...ever. That's some movie stupidity if ever I saw it. An analog "I'm having trouble cutting down this tree with my chainsaw. Hmmm, I know! I'll create interstellar travel so that I can fly to a planet that doesn't have trees. Problem solved."
In "2001" the computer HAL is fully self aware and has something of a nervous breakdown. I buy that. He's not a thing, he's a he. People get upset and conflicted and unhappy. If I was a big metal ship floating through space having to look after a couple of shedding, stinking, eating, pooping bossy humans for months on end, I might get a little cranky. If a couple of guys, who could not exist without my constant intervention on their behalf, started talking smack about me inside a space-pod...somebody might have to die. Accidents happen, so watch your step during your spacewalk Dr. Poole. It makes sense, plays by its own rules and is exactly what you would expect from Arthur C. Clarke. It also makes sense that nobody in Hollywood got this movie when it came out and it was a commercial flop during its initial release. Now, had the computer made unbelievable leaps of logic, produced completely unfounded results from the flimsiest of hypothesis and talked in a kooky Jamaican patois the film would have been hyped from coast to coast and sold out every seat in every movie house from New York to other parts of New York. There were fewer cinemas in the sixties.
It was Mr. Clarke who once opined that any level of technology, sufficiently advanced, was indistinguishable from magic. Our movie making friends have taken this to mean that computers can be used in place of magic when mages, alchemists and such just don't fit the story. You need a hero to learn something he couldn't possibly know? The internet tells him. Do you have an unknown killer on the loose hacking up prostitutes and cab drivers? Just ask your semi-sentient PC who did it. We accept these absurdities because we largely don't know any better. But I submit that the reverse substitution would not be so easily accepted. Imagine a sword and sorcery movie where the loin-cloth-clad warrior must employ FORTRAN to stop the mad King Humassivious. "You must travel through the Misted Plains of Aronak, beyond the Foothills of Perpetual Sundays until you come to the...I T Department. There you will find Mark, the savvy PERL programmer who instructed me." Sort of loses something, doesn't it?
If we wouldn't stand for sloppy plot contrivances in the former, we shouldn't allow them in the latter. I know that a realistic depiction of programming or research would be tedious and uninteresting to almost everyone. But there must be some middle ground. Maybe a training montage ala Rocky IV. Just shots inter-cut of typing, back-spacing, drinking Mountain Dew, eating Doritos and more typing while a suitable rock anthem blares in the background. Until such time as the movie studios see fit to give us a real computer movie or a movie that at least portrays computing in a sensible way, I'll just have to cringe when I see a computer used supernaturally in a movie. I'll just close my eyes and pretend that it's not happening. That or get over myself and drink my $3.00 cherry coke.
