Alive in Jo'Berg

Hat tip to a commenter on Ta-Nehisi Coates's Atlantic blog for bringing this to my attention. Here's the six minute short Neil Blomkamp made in 2005, four years before the release of District 9:

Singularity U.

From yesterday's Financial Times, "Google and Nasa back new school for futurists". Excerpt:

Google and Nasa are throwing their weight behind a new school for futurists in Silicon Valley to prepare scientists for an era when machines become cleverer than people.

The new institution, known as “Singularity University”, is to be headed by Ray Kurzweil, whose predictions about the exponential pace of technological change have made him a controversial figure in technology circles.

Google and Nasa’s backing demonstrates the growing mainstream acceptance of Mr Kurzweil’s views, which include a claim that before the middle of this century artificial intelligence will outstrip human beings, ushering in a new era of civilisation.

To be housed at Nasa’s Ames Research Center, a stone’s-throw from the Googleplex, the Singularity University will offer courses on biotechnology, nano-technology and artificial intelligence.

The so-called “singularity” is a theorised period of rapid technological progress in the near future. Mr Kurzweil, an American inventor, popularised the term in his 2005 book “The Singularity is Near”.

Proponents say that during the singularity, machines will be able to improve themselves using artificial intelligence and that smarter-than-human computers will solve problems including energy scarcity, climate change and hunger.

So much for the good news. The article continues:

Yet many critics call the singularity dangerous. Some worry that a malicious artificial intelligence might annihilate the human race.

After numerous sci-fi movies and TV shows have dramatized this scenario, from 1970's Colossus: The Forbin Project (the subject of the movie poster above) to current TV shows Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles^1,2 and Battlestar Galactica¹, we won't be able to say that we weren't warned.

The image of the movie poster above is from Rodney-Martin.com


¹Critically acclaimed.
²Consistently entertaining.

Preoccupied with 1985

One of the endlessly entertaining aspects of the Internet is that, no matter how obscure your interests, someone else probably shares them. For some reason, I found myself thinking of a short-lived sci-fi TV show a few days ago, called Otherworld. In the show, pitched as a "Lost in Space" on earth, the Sterling family (pictured above) accidentally passes through a portal in the Great Pyramid of Giza into an alternate dimension version of earth. Although the show only ran for 8 episodes in 1985, it turns out there's a fan site, OtherWorldonline.org, where you can watch all eight episodes online. I've been re-watching them this week. A couple of cultural/historical notes about the show:

- The actor who played the Sterling's teenage son, Tony O’Dell, was born Anthony Dell'Aquila. Interesting that he'd change his name to an Irish one, rather than something more generic (why not just "Dell"?).

- The show's second episode, "The Zone Troopers Build Men", reminded me of John Kerry's faux pas about how if you don't do well in school, "you end up in Iraq". In this episode, the character played by Tony O'Dell, Trace Sterling, gets automatically drafted into the Zone Troopers, the alternate dimension's state trooper-like paramilitary organization, when he slacks off in high school and his grades start dropping. Perhaps this episode's writers shared Kerry's attitude toward the military. There were a couple more interesting footnotes about this episode.

- The second episode guest starred the late Mark Lenard, the actor perhaps best known for portraying Spock's father Sarek in various Star Trek episodes and movies.

- Even though a rudimentary idea of Internet hacking was introduced into pop culture by the early 1980s in movies such as Tron (1982) and War Games (1983) (although the term "Internet" wasn't), the second episode of Otherworld takes a more primitive approach. When Trace Sterling's parents want to find out the terms of his enlistment in the Zone Troopers, rather than hacking into the Zone Troopers' computer system remotely, they break in and steal the Zone Troopers' computer.

Below is the title/credit sequence for the show, which summarizes its premise.