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| Re: Transcendence (massive spoilers) by blackwater 04/01/2015, 12:47am PDT | ||||
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| Just a warning, this post has massive spoilers!
OK, so the basic plot of Transcendence is that a terrorist organization attacks a bunch of AI researchers. One of them survives, but is fatally poisoned. In his remaining time, his wife helps him to upload his brain to a computer and become the first AI. As an AI, he gets a lot of money from the stock market, builds a huge underground lair, and does sciency things there. He continues to dote on his wife, who can no longer experience him in his physical form, but still is in love with him. People come to his underground lair to be healed of various diseases and join his group of workers to who are building... solar panels and stuff. For some reason he experiments with implanting stuff in people's brains and "collective consciousness." His wife falls out of love with him and joins up with the remaining terrorists to upload a virus to his systems. In the meantime, he has been releasing nanotech nanobots into the atmosphere to connect all the computers in the world together. Eventually he gets destroyed by the virus and something happens with the nanobots... it's not entirely clear. The world has no electricity or computers at the end of the movie. So, for me, the problems start when the AI is not able to completely wipe out the terrorists. OK, so they show him reporting a few of them to the FBI, but shouldn't he be able to get all of them? You're telling me that if you had access to all the information on the internet-- who people's friends were on Facebook, what they said and did there, their purchase histories, and so forth-- coupled with his demonstrated ability to use cameras to see who was associated with whom... you still couldn't get these guys? I think that's kind of naive. And even if I buy that, the AI can still set up security around its own building and just find the terrorists when they approach? Remember, these are the people who killed most of his friends, and tried to kill him. Finding these guys should be a personal mission. Even someone who is nonviolent and peaceful will want to see justice done. The next question is, how can an AI possibly be in love with a human woman? How does this relationship work exactly? He can come up with a cure for cancer, develop a new branch of mathematics, and compose a symphony in the time it takes her to watch a TV episode. Why wouldn't she just upload herself if they wanted a real relationship? The difference in intelligence between them is more than between her and her pet cat. Related to that, if he wanted to keep her happy, how could he possibly fail at that? OK, ordinary smart guys fail at keeping women happy all the time. But this is someone with the power of god, as the movie explains. He can probably predict exactly how she will react to pretty much anything. It's like if you could see 100 moves ahead, but you lose to someone who has never played chess before. I didn't really buy her turn towards the terrorists, either. These are the guys who killed her (physical) husband, is she really going to be buddy-buddy with them? Even if she's mad at him, I don't see it happening. Similarly, Morgan Freeman's character spent his whole life researching AI and now he just kind of shrugs and says, "eh, let's kill it?" I don't see it. The nanotech and solar power subplots were dumb. Why wouldn't you use a power plant that was small and could fill all your needs? At least geothermal if you are going environmentalist. Solar power just doesn't supply that much power. Nanotech just isn't that interesting in movies-- people seem to treat it as magic pixie dust. F that. More fundamentally, why would you have just one datacenter, and why would you let everyone know where it is? You can easily have people go wherever you want to access your magic healing devices... they don't all have to be in one spot. The ending just reminds me of a Simpsons episode, where at the end of the episode, Homer gets his job back, moves back in with Marge, and nothing has progressed since the beginning. Really? Everything just goes back to normal, modulo some power blackouts? It's just a lazy cop-out to try to tie up the loose ends at the end. But really, nothing is resolved. if an AI was invented once, it obviously will be again. And maybe not by such a nice guy next time. To be fair, there is some kind of a suggestion that the AI guy and his wife are alive inside a raindrop or some bullshit at the end. That's kind of a cool idea, but it's never really explained how that works or what it really means. I know I've been hard on this movie. In fairness, the movie avoided the "evil AI takes over the world" cliche and presented some interesting ideas. It's worth watching just for that reason. |
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Transcendence by 04/01/2015, 12:06am PDT  Re: Transcendence (massive spoilers) by 04/01/2015, 12:47am PDT |
