Consider Hamlet . I'm sure you remember Hamlet. Gloomy guy. Wears black a lot. Talks to himself. Likes to hang out in cemeteries. Now, imagine for a moment that you are Hamlet. You are the Prince of Denmark (congratulations!) and heir to the throne. While you're off at University doing the "student" thing, you receive word that your beloved father (the King) is dead; murdered, it turns out, by your horrible Uncle, who then promptly marries your mother (eww) and usurps the throne, snatching it away from you before you even have a chance to catch the next train home. Your father's ghost (who is, you learn, burning endlessly in some harrowing Purgatory, suffering torments beyond imagining) confirms all this, and urges you to take revenge on his behalf. You're not really the right guy for this sort of thing; you're more the academic type. Revenge isn't your natural style; your first instinct would probably be to write an essay at them or something... bu...
This is not the film I was planning to screen this week. I was in the middle of writing the notes for an entirely different film (which I still plan to screen, just not quite yet) when things happening in the real world changed my mind. I'll come back to this one in a couple of weeks. Stay tuned! This series (which I am continuing to call The Grok, the Glunk and the Golem ) has been exploring depictions of "artificial existence" in cinema, in literature and in popular culture; prompted of course by the rapid and (for some) alarming explosion of actual A.I. in our modern lives. I get it. I understand why emotions are running so hot. Machines are talking to us. Doing our homework for us. Writing articles for us (not for me, actually; I enjoy writing this stuff far too much to hand it off to a computer) and in some cases apparently having sex with us (LGBTQIA+ AI ? Don't worry; what you do in the privacy of your own ChatBot is no one else's business). A.I. is everyw...
Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life. The upshot is simply a question of time, but that the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants is what no person of a truly philosophic mind can for a moment question. Our opinion is that war to the death should be instantly proclaimed against them. Every machine of every sort should be destroyed by the well-wisher of his species. Let there be no exceptions made, no quarter shown; let us at once go back to the primeval condition of the race. Samuel Butler; Darwin Among the Machines ; 1863 "You can't Un-thunk a Glunk!" Dr. Seuss; The Glunk that got Thunk ; 1969 You may or may not be familiar with the poet Dorothy Frances Gurney, but ...
Let me tell you a little story about my friend Sheldon (his name is Sheldon). Sheldon. Sheldon lives in the East End of London, but he grew up in the US and moved to England with his family about forty years ago. Even though he has lived here for most of his life, Sheldon knows that he will always be something of an outsider in the UK, which is one of the reasons he loves living in London. Quite apart from the genuine thrill of a big bustling city with its crowds and traffic and chaos (Sheldon likes to say that you can trust the air in London because you can see it) Sheldon loves living in a city where millions of people from diverse cultures and backgrounds have deliberately chosen to live together in a messy, sometimes futile attempt to create a cohesive, functioning community. Like Sheldon himself, almost every Londoner has an "origin story"; something that brought them on a path from wherever they were, and led them to London. They may not share a religion, an ethnicity,...
Gather around, everyone, and make yourselves comfortable. I'm going to tell you a little story. There once was a guy; oh, let's call him "Pygmalion". He was unhappy with all the women of his community, and refused to have anything to do with them (I'm sure they had their own opinions about him , but whatever they said amongst themselves has not been recorded by posterity) so he decided to take matters into his own hands. To be precise, he took matter into his own hands, and sculpted himself a woman of his very own. His creation was absolutely everything he wanted in a woman... and nothing he didn't want. She was the perfect companion, the perfect sexual partner; the perfect wife. But that of course is just the beginning of the story. Because now Pygmalion didn't just have a wife; he had a business model . If he could manufacture a perfect partner for himself, why couldn't he do the same thing for everyone else? So, Pygmalion opened up a little shop,...
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