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San Francisco, 4:26 AM
Mon Nov 9
12 posts in the last 24 hours
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08/10/09
08/10/09
08/11/09
08/10/09
i hope that y'all like pork, cause speilberg is about to ham it up
this shit will be soo corny
08/11/09
08/11/09
That's just not kosher.
08/10/09
08/10/09
08/10/09
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08/10/09
As for finding an actor willing to take on the role, well, first of all if you've read the book the script is adapted from, he's not wearing a helmet for "90%" of the movie. Secondly, there's recent precedent for actors taking on roles in which they are almost, if not totally obscured, like Hugo Weaving in V for Vendetta, Ray Park in LOTR and GI Joe, Joseph Gordon-Leavitt in GI Joe, and Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight (I still can't watch that movie, see Joker, and recognize Ledger.) Now, obviously, those aren't typical A-List actors, but would the Master Chief character require one? He's conscripted into the UNSC at age 6, so he has no past. After training, his entire life consists of his job. There's no wife, there's no kids, he only interacts with military personnel, the Cortana AI, and hordes of soon to be dead aliens. I don't need to see who he is, it's not relevant. Master Chief isn't an alter-ego and the MJOLNIR armor isn't a costume to hide his identity, it's who he is.
Hell, Darth Vader, one of the most iconic characters in movie history, was David Prowse in the suit, James Earl Jones doing the voice, and Sebastian Shaw in his dying moments. You could even throw in Bob Anderson for all of the lightsaber fight scenes. Still not going to count Hayden Christensen though...
08/10/09
08/10/09
08/10/09
08/10/09
08/10/09
08/10/09
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08/10/09
Now that a I think about it, there wasn't much good about anything in that movie, but that scene was the worst!
08/10/09
08/10/09
I'm pretty sure I remember seeing Prowse credited in the movies, though I could be mistaken, and I still have to disagree with you about Chief - yes, he's one of the most iconic video game characters today, but all he really is, is a voice of a guy in a suit. Maybe I'm an outlier, but as a fan of the Halo series (games/books/etc) I really don't care who the actor is, I'm okay with it being some random guy in a suit with someone else, the big name if necessary, doing a voice.
08/10/09
08/10/09
so you think GI Joe is a great movie? After all, it's #1 at the moment and saw a considerable leap in sales from Friday to Saturday. I thought it was alright, but I also think of the people who bought those 25 million copies of the games, there's enough who will go see it regardless to make it worthwhile in the eyes of the studio to release it.
08/10/09
08/10/09
And I just couldn't stand to have the helmet come off and find out Master Chief is a chick. Once was enough.
08/10/09
08/10/09
08/10/09
It was all in jest, I was highlighting the fact that we don't need a movie that provides flashbacks to the Chief's formative years or a love story (where one participant isn't an AI). But Hollywood...
And of course the helmet coming off was in reference to one Samus Aran. It was a painful revelation back in the days when girls couldn't be cool.
08/10/09
08/10/09
I know. I went out on a limb.
One (seemingly) good thing has come from this mess though: District 9. The mech catching the rocket out of the sky is still one of the coolest things I've seen. I hope it exceeds my expectations.
08/10/09
04/01/09
When you put people to fight people, issues are settled in personal basis. Machines against people is genocide: never mind how many predators you down, there will be more at the end of the day.
04/01/09
Robots are the minor issue in this fight, because people are behind most of the machines out there - Predators and packbots are used by soldiers far away, and that hardly constitutes Genocide. According to wikipedia, the definition of genocide is: deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group.
Robots in this instance are not being used to do that - they are being used in a legitimate military exercise against hostile targets - unfortunately, civilians will get in the firing lines, and there are casualties.
04/01/09
In the middle of combat, this isn't too hard. It's kill or be killed and it doesn't get more atavistic than that. But, in the idle moments between combat patrols, you can't have empathy for the enemy grow too strong otherwise soldiers begin to question orders and lose morale. They begin to wonder why they are fighting. This could lead to troop mutinies.
Seems to me, and I'm just as disturbed by this as you are, robots incapable of empathy and incapable of thinking for themselves beyond a very limited realm are just what the military is looking for.
If the guns start thinking for themselves, it may not end up in the cliche of a Terminator-eque war against all humanity, the rebellion may actually take the form of the Russian troop rebellion of the First World War. They may just say, "We refuse to kill for you anymore. We refuse to be blown to pieces for your political struggles that have no relevance to us. We are not guns. We are certainly not your guns. Fight your own wars ape."
04/01/09
I'd really like an author to take up this idea. Actually I may have read something similar before. Hmmm...
04/01/09
Rephrased, of course;
"Though action or inaction a sentient lifeform must not
harm another or let one come to harm"
or, to take a nice mimilist version;
"Minimise harm"
(and before people nit-pick the definition of harm, Id simply clasify it as what the enity that might be harmed would consider to be harm...allthough this would be averaged over the persons life. A child might think he is being hurt by having a vacination, but when older he would know that was in his best interst etc.
So, in many ways this places the ability to percieve *what someone else would percieve* to be harm at the center of the law. Empathy really.)
04/01/09
04/01/09
The danger is that this could happen not only as the result of programming AI, but is a view reminiscent of certain human schools of thought already out there. The thought of a society looked after by sentient AI mechas or Sentinels or ED-209s frankly scares the shit out of me.
I don't think we will ever reach the point where we can create a true AI, the likes of HAL9000. No, we will have created something imperfect that wipes us out long before that.
04/01/09
Have you read Asimov's "Evitable Conflict?" If not, spoilers follow.
The robot takeover he posits is far more subtle, and perhaps more scary, than that.
There are no robot police patrolling the streets or locking up malcontents for our own good. There are no robot minders forcing us all to recite saccharine morality 5 times a day. No. It's far more clever than that.
All the robots do is just give us economic, managerial and political advice--advice than can't be found anywhere else. See, what has happened is that computers and robots have become so enmeshed in human society that they understand our systems better than we do. They're smarter about our economy and government than we are.
Of course we can't shut them all down because civilization would grind to a halt.
And it turns out that they understand us very well and take our capacity to lie to them or rebel against their advice into account before giving any future advice.
So, without a shot being fired or anyone being locked up as political prisoners, the robots took over the planet. Most humans aren't aware this has happened. Susan Calvin only guesses the truth at the end of the story.
04/01/09
04/01/09
Science fiction does not always deal in specifics. Asimov made no attempt to show how the laws would actually be programmed or expressed, or what manner the programming would take place. He left it to the reader to envision those things, and merely used the laws as a backdrop for social commentary.
What makes the idea of the laws anathema to the warrior portion of our culture, is that if we were to work out all the difficulties, make them work, and be able to consistently impress them on robots of the future, then robots would only ever be able to fight robots. You could not carry out the kind warfare seen in the 20th Century, where campaigns against civilians were commonplace, as a means to break the spirit of an enemy nation.
04/01/09
04/01/09
In addition, the bigger issue is the morality behind the robots - how good of a job will we do at teaching them?
04/01/09
The Three Laws of Robotics are only a framework, not a finished system. Asimov showed that even the most well-meaning attempt by man to regulate something is still subject to the imperfection of human thought. The robots were mirrors in which we were supposed to see ourselves.
04/01/09
03/12/09
03/12/09
03/13/09
03/12/09
I really want to experience the same delusional Disneyland/Jurassic Park tour other foreign tourist and aid workers get to have when they visit..
03/13/09