Geekfoolery

When sit down to watch a movie, we make a deal to suspend our disbelief in things like magic or flying superheroes or love at first sight in order to enjoy the story. If it works, you get 90 minutes of pleasant diversion. Sometimes, though, the whole edifice of a massive plot construct can come crashing down over a single detail. Take the movie Independence Day. We, the audience, will go along with the idea of aliens crossing the vast reaches of space to destroy Earth, but when Jeff Goldblum successfully uploads a virus that takes out the entire fleet of alien ships from his Mac, you’ve lost us.

Hollywood computers don’t behave like the recalcitrant boxes we wrestle with on a daily basis. Hollywood computers can access any data, provide any answer, crack any code. Wikipedia has a nice list of the apparent features of the Hollywood OS here, and it is an amusing read. I am old enough to remember when computers first started to make an impression on the public consciousness with appearances on television and movies. Few people had ever seen an actual computer in the sixties and early seventies, and we imagined them as the large banks of machines with spinning reels of tape and flashing lights, and there was vague understanding that they the computer was a “thinking machine.” I think the average person believed that the day was not far off when you would walk into a “computer room” and start asking deep, philosophical questions, and the computer would blink and hum for a moment and give precise, unimpeachable answers–this scenario, of course, brilliantly imagined by the late Douglas Adams whose supercomputer Deep Thought, upon being asked the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything, responded with the answer “42.”

The idea of monolithic, deep-thinking computers that either run amok or break down or decide that don’t need us comes back again and again, from 2001: A Space Odyssey to Westworld and more recently, the Matrix and the Terminator movies. In the meantime, you and I and the general public are using computers to send email and instant messages and download MP3s. But even when Hollywood has actors doing something as mundane as sending an email, they still have to make a big production out of it. You don’t just type your email and hit send, you have to see this little animated graphic of an envelope fly around the screen–this was in the first Mission Impossible, Ransom, and The Specialist. Doesn’t anyone in movies use Outlook, for crying out loud? I’m not fan of Exchange, but c’mon, I’ll suspend my disbelief only so far.

I’d also love to know what OS they use on shows like Alias. I get it, they’re a big super-duper secret spy organization. They have a nerd in the backroom who can design any kind of computer gadget or robot or surveillance tech or weapon, so I am assuming he also designed the high-tech groovy computer interface that runs on their laptops. The one that shows real-time satellite video, and searches through databases of bad guys by displaying the pictures at some incredible rate before settling on a match–always the correct one, too. No false positives. Who knows, give Google a couple years, maybe this will be reality.

Which brings me back to the original question: Where is the Hollywood OS? I especially want to know when we’re going to get the level of Artificial Intelligence that was shown in the early 70s movies, when we really thought computers were electronic brains. In 1950, computer pioneer Alan Turing pondered the question of whether machines could think, and devised the Turing test, just in case it seemed like a machine might be getting close. We were promised HAL 9000 by 2001, but all we got was Roomba. And while Roomba may do fine job on your floors, it’s a ways off from passing the Turing Test.

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