Gamer (2009)
Another movie I'm glad I didn't see in theaters. Not that I had any interest at all. Boredom got the better of me. And my seed ratio suffers
I'm also glad I saw it after Surrogates because Gamer destroys Surrogates into a steaming chunks of movie premise giblets. While that makes me glad, Surrogates being a horrible waste of time.. their still so much wrong with Gamer that I wouldn't buy the bluray now after seeing it. Like Minority Report, one of my favorites, the movie is just too dark. The focus is more on crime (obviously) than the world and technology.
Not happy with Gamer because of all the hyper-violence and it's criminal wastage of Amber Valleta's ample talent. Same with Surrogates wasting Radha Micthell's screentime. Both being robotic tits and ass on legs. Why?! They are both incredibly talented actors. Whatever. Shame on both Directors.
SO
What I do like is their Nanex concept. It's a very similar concept to one I'm using in my novel both in purpose and implementation. Bugs eating away at the brain and replacing the brain with something better.
From Gamer I can draw a few really good ideas. One being the cost of that conversion to a more computer like brain. Off the top Gamers are supposedly Antisocial and display similar symptoms to substance abusers. This isn't something that is mentioned in the movie, which is disappointing.
The kid is otherwise normal and not even the least bit geeky.
Not to spoil anything but they inject nano-logical machines into your brain with the intent of replacing the structures there with more computer copasetic ones. Now they don't specify the chemistry of those new cells but in the end it's all the same. Your brain is a video game controller.. oh and it's got a much longer shelf-life to boot.
My concept differs in that I want physical structures in the brain that can stand the test of time and repair themselves and that aren't biological if it can be helped. Meaning tah-tah soft tissue to be replaced with a substance more like a carbon or silicon-coral. Hopefully the connections would be preserved, or little by little through parkinsons like symptoms you'd go from soft brain tissue to something much more efficient and complex. Mainly I want to give you more senses and sharper senses so you brain needs more processing power and more memory to remember everything. The debate is still raging though about neurons in their current structure with blood as a coolant etc being the most efficient way to run an analog computer like the human brain. In which case you'd keep all the memory crap while updating it with raw processing faculties and much more dense ROM and RAM. Plus having a wireless connection to the internet in your head wouldn't hurt. At the end of the day it would end up like switching phones from an analog Nokia to a Smartphone. You might lose some things in the transition but all the new functionality far outweighs the stuff you're losing.
Do you lose your humanity and personality in the process. Probably. How many people actually have the same personality all their lives? If you give them more skills, experience and trauma, introduce them to the internet they can access in their head, AND give them remote control over stuff with the brain.. I'm fairly sure everyone would change.
As to being able to interact with society.. that's another matter. In principal being able to work faster than everyone else and being right all the time (internet fact checker).. the social dance changes dramatically. The ability to keep someones attention, and wanting to, on generic human timescales.. would be a strain.
If you're rewiring the brain to be more like a computer, besides being a remote control for things (oddly they don't even use it to remote control computers), is all the basic stuff they could upgrade your senses with.
For example, there's debate about enhancing your vision by firmware-like upgrades to your brain not necessarily with the eyes. If your brain know how to use the retina better you'd have better vision. Beyond that if you're able to alter cells anyway, why not add extra rods and cones with better signal processing for enhanced vision? Same goes for hearing. They could add more hairs in the ear, or replace them all with better structures.
Imagine you could detect and identify trace chemicals in the air, minute sounds and vibrations. And of course being able to mute all that input so you can actually just relax and literally tune people out...
As a starting point to further debate, Gamer does SOOO much more than surrogates did it isn't even funny.
Plus the ethical dilemmas raised in Gamer goes so much further by being much more specific and believable (at least from a post gamer's standpoint). They managed to do more with less.
If I had the option of playing a game through the eyes of an enhanced super soldier, lacking a proper war (against humans or aliens) to fight, and there wasn't any lag OR interpretation noise,
meaning Ping is one thing but the jump, and how high problem should have been mentioned too. I can expect to control a human being like a robot but I need to know like my own body what my avatar's body is capable off. Being in my own skin while controlling someone else's body, while standing up etc (conscious) doesn't make sense.
, or playing on a screen. Would I care about the human avatar versus my in game one? Is it easier to send a human to his bloody death in the name of sport, sentence served.. that bad?
Most gamers might not have a big issue with it.
But most gamers will tell you that you'll run out of humans very quickly. Death Sports don't work because attrition would be too high versus training new candidates. In this case drawing from the prison system, of death row inmates for millions of gamers to play with. On a very basic level the numbers don't make any sense.
Or good movie sense for that matter as both gamers in the movie are silly. The boy is more believable than the wheelchair bound pig man, but at least Surrogate wins that fight by putting your mind in control, not your body.
That's another question about ping and interpretation if it takes your body to control the avatar or your mind. Your mind knows the limitations of your own body... and it has lag which takes training to get used to. Controlling yours and someone else's body at the same time exacerbates that lag.
And then there is the screen. I'm confused about the screens they have. Why fake holographics if the screens are 2D most of the time?
Again, if you're looking at a screen that means your eyes are seeing a screen which it has to interpret, which is from an online source, from another person's eyes. But even then then mess it up because there's these little floating Kino camera balls.
Either way visual information is travelling to the avatars eyes, processed, sent wirelessly to a network node, interpreted again for broadband network transmission, to your computer, then interpreted again for display..
That's a crazy amount of lag which isn't suggested in the movie no matter how fast their technology and network is. Then of course you're looking at the screen and reacting. more lag. Then sending commands back to the avatar's body, who has to react. It's far beyond just a problem of Ping.
Then to look beyond both Gamer and Surrogate, I'm wondering what it would be like to have mind control over stuff like a car... local (you in the car, hands off) and remote (you controlling a car over the internet).
Where if I parked my car at Wal-Mart and went inside to shop, I could start it by remote control and drive it to me. This takes some of the need away from requiring an AI for driver-less operation of a car. Which to an extent already exists and works. So does driving by remote by thought, but for that you need your eyes open and a dorky skullcap with electrodes on it. Not sexy.
The bandwidth wouldn't even need to be that high especially if you had full peripheral vision and positional sound. All the processing could be done by a wearable computer like in your cellphone then fed into your brain on your optic nerve. And what you see doesn't even need to be photo-realistic. If it was grids and lines you could get the job done with practically no information, or rather you'd have more important information to work with in real-time than if you were behind the wheel, e.g. no blind spots.
I figure that kind of sensorium and neo-cortical augmentation would be of more primary use than controlling some dorky killbot video game.
Another movie I'm glad I didn't see in theaters. Not that I had any interest at all. Boredom got the better of me. And my seed ratio suffers
I'm also glad I saw it after Surrogates because Gamer destroys Surrogates into a steaming chunks of movie premise giblets. While that makes me glad, Surrogates being a horrible waste of time.. their still so much wrong with Gamer that I wouldn't buy the bluray now after seeing it. Like Minority Report, one of my favorites, the movie is just too dark. The focus is more on crime (obviously) than the world and technology.
Not happy with Gamer because of all the hyper-violence and it's criminal wastage of Amber Valleta's ample talent. Same with Surrogates wasting Radha Micthell's screentime. Both being robotic tits and ass on legs. Why?! They are both incredibly talented actors. Whatever. Shame on both Directors.
SO
What I do like is their Nanex concept. It's a very similar concept to one I'm using in my novel both in purpose and implementation. Bugs eating away at the brain and replacing the brain with something better.
From Gamer I can draw a few really good ideas. One being the cost of that conversion to a more computer like brain. Off the top Gamers are supposedly Antisocial and display similar symptoms to substance abusers. This isn't something that is mentioned in the movie, which is disappointing.
The kid is otherwise normal and not even the least bit geeky.
Not to spoil anything but they inject nano-logical machines into your brain with the intent of replacing the structures there with more computer copasetic ones. Now they don't specify the chemistry of those new cells but in the end it's all the same. Your brain is a video game controller.. oh and it's got a much longer shelf-life to boot.
My concept differs in that I want physical structures in the brain that can stand the test of time and repair themselves and that aren't biological if it can be helped. Meaning tah-tah soft tissue to be replaced with a substance more like a carbon or silicon-coral. Hopefully the connections would be preserved, or little by little through parkinsons like symptoms you'd go from soft brain tissue to something much more efficient and complex. Mainly I want to give you more senses and sharper senses so you brain needs more processing power and more memory to remember everything. The debate is still raging though about neurons in their current structure with blood as a coolant etc being the most efficient way to run an analog computer like the human brain. In which case you'd keep all the memory crap while updating it with raw processing faculties and much more dense ROM and RAM. Plus having a wireless connection to the internet in your head wouldn't hurt. At the end of the day it would end up like switching phones from an analog Nokia to a Smartphone. You might lose some things in the transition but all the new functionality far outweighs the stuff you're losing.
Do you lose your humanity and personality in the process. Probably. How many people actually have the same personality all their lives? If you give them more skills, experience and trauma, introduce them to the internet they can access in their head, AND give them remote control over stuff with the brain.. I'm fairly sure everyone would change.
As to being able to interact with society.. that's another matter. In principal being able to work faster than everyone else and being right all the time (internet fact checker).. the social dance changes dramatically. The ability to keep someones attention, and wanting to, on generic human timescales.. would be a strain.
If you're rewiring the brain to be more like a computer, besides being a remote control for things (oddly they don't even use it to remote control computers), is all the basic stuff they could upgrade your senses with.
For example, there's debate about enhancing your vision by firmware-like upgrades to your brain not necessarily with the eyes. If your brain know how to use the retina better you'd have better vision. Beyond that if you're able to alter cells anyway, why not add extra rods and cones with better signal processing for enhanced vision? Same goes for hearing. They could add more hairs in the ear, or replace them all with better structures.
Imagine you could detect and identify trace chemicals in the air, minute sounds and vibrations. And of course being able to mute all that input so you can actually just relax and literally tune people out...
As a starting point to further debate, Gamer does SOOO much more than surrogates did it isn't even funny.
Plus the ethical dilemmas raised in Gamer goes so much further by being much more specific and believable (at least from a post gamer's standpoint). They managed to do more with less.
If I had the option of playing a game through the eyes of an enhanced super soldier, lacking a proper war (against humans or aliens) to fight, and there wasn't any lag OR interpretation noise,
meaning Ping is one thing but the jump, and how high problem should have been mentioned too. I can expect to control a human being like a robot but I need to know like my own body what my avatar's body is capable off. Being in my own skin while controlling someone else's body, while standing up etc (conscious) doesn't make sense.
, or playing on a screen. Would I care about the human avatar versus my in game one? Is it easier to send a human to his bloody death in the name of sport, sentence served.. that bad?
Most gamers might not have a big issue with it.
But most gamers will tell you that you'll run out of humans very quickly. Death Sports don't work because attrition would be too high versus training new candidates. In this case drawing from the prison system, of death row inmates for millions of gamers to play with. On a very basic level the numbers don't make any sense.
Or good movie sense for that matter as both gamers in the movie are silly. The boy is more believable than the wheelchair bound pig man, but at least Surrogate wins that fight by putting your mind in control, not your body.
That's another question about ping and interpretation if it takes your body to control the avatar or your mind. Your mind knows the limitations of your own body... and it has lag which takes training to get used to. Controlling yours and someone else's body at the same time exacerbates that lag.
And then there is the screen. I'm confused about the screens they have. Why fake holographics if the screens are 2D most of the time?
Again, if you're looking at a screen that means your eyes are seeing a screen which it has to interpret, which is from an online source, from another person's eyes. But even then then mess it up because there's these little floating Kino camera balls.
Either way visual information is travelling to the avatars eyes, processed, sent wirelessly to a network node, interpreted again for broadband network transmission, to your computer, then interpreted again for display..
That's a crazy amount of lag which isn't suggested in the movie no matter how fast their technology and network is. Then of course you're looking at the screen and reacting. more lag. Then sending commands back to the avatar's body, who has to react. It's far beyond just a problem of Ping.
Then to look beyond both Gamer and Surrogate, I'm wondering what it would be like to have mind control over stuff like a car... local (you in the car, hands off) and remote (you controlling a car over the internet).
Where if I parked my car at Wal-Mart and went inside to shop, I could start it by remote control and drive it to me. This takes some of the need away from requiring an AI for driver-less operation of a car. Which to an extent already exists and works. So does driving by remote by thought, but for that you need your eyes open and a dorky skullcap with electrodes on it. Not sexy.
The bandwidth wouldn't even need to be that high especially if you had full peripheral vision and positional sound. All the processing could be done by a wearable computer like in your cellphone then fed into your brain on your optic nerve. And what you see doesn't even need to be photo-realistic. If it was grids and lines you could get the job done with practically no information, or rather you'd have more important information to work with in real-time than if you were behind the wheel, e.g. no blind spots.
I figure that kind of sensorium and neo-cortical augmentation would be of more primary use than controlling some dorky killbot video game.