Entertaining future
Does today’s tech bear any resemblance to the sci-fi world depicted by Hollywood?
I’M SORRY, what were we talking about?
The future of entertainment and tech, I think, with a lot of carefully modulated, well-reasoned comments hewing to the sobriety of the subject matter.
“I have a responsibility for what I put out into the world just like everyone else here,” Oscar-winning director Spike Jonze noted at this week’s True North tech conference.
“But my responsibility is to make what I feel is honest. The people who make the tech — that’s their responsibility.”
There was a lot of sober hemming and hawing — and maybe a couple of surprised glances — at the all-star “Stranger than Fiction” panel, which drew an estimated 1,400 people from around the globe to a cavernous converted Kitchener factory.
The rumpled, fidgety Jonze, after all, seemed far from the whimsical storyteller we might have expected from movies like “Being John Malkovich,” “Adaptation” and the Oscar-winning sci-fi drama “Her.”
Nor did Charlie Brooker, creator of the acclaimed sci-fi anthology series “Black Mirror” — a sort of high-tech “Twilight Zone” — fit the sobering visionary stereotype, coming off instead like a British version of rock star Bono, oozing charm and one-liners in equal measure.
“We’re trying to unsettle people and it’s probably easier if your story has one foot based in reality,” laughs the humourist turned TV visionary, whose fictional appropriations of modern tech have landed “Black Mirror” two Emmys and a Peabody award.
“I can’t really relate to an alien with a croissant for a forehead.”
Seated between them — overlooked for the first 10 minutes as if she were a hologram — was robot ethicist Kate Darling, whose Twitter account describes her as a “mistress of machines” and who specializes in robot-human interactions of the kind that have little to do with Hollywood fiction.
But wait. Suddenly a disrupter is brought onstage. A tiny robotic dinosaur engineered by Darling. And before you can say “Jurassic Park,” everything shifts.
“It turns out people will treat robots like they’re alive, even though they know they’re just machines,” she points out as the cooing creation elicits appreciative murmurs from panel and audience alike.
“It’s a little bit manipulative, but I think people enjoy illusions when they’re for their own benefit.”
How this ties into the intriguingly paranoid landscapes of Jonze’s “Her,” in which a geek falls in love with his computer, and Brooker’s “Black Mirror,” which thoughtfully explores tech’s nuanced undercurrents, is unclear.
Nor is it clear how any of this feeds into the conference’s altruistic theme, “Tech For Good.”
Nevertheless, the conversation, which wasn’t really going anywhere, suddenly finds its focus.
“I don’t think sci-fi gets anything wrong,” notes Darling, who will remain the focal point for the duration of the panel.
“But it focuses on tech we’re not close to having, like artificial intelligence that develops its own consciousness — which is much further off than people think. We’re distracted by questions we don’t need to be asking now.”
Why this happens is open to speculation, but Darling suspects it has to do with the people who produce it.
“The problem is that tech is being made by 20-something white guys,” she confides openly. “I love 20-something white guys, but they have blind spots.”
She pauses. “I see people going into robotics because they loved ‘Star Wars’ as a kid and want to build R2-D2. We need more diversity in terms of life experience.”
What they need to be focusing on, she insists, are practical issues like healthy human-robot interactions — and by “robots” she doesn’t mean killer androids from “The Terminator” — and how they can measure things like empathy.
“It’s about using tech to tell us about human behaviour.”
Brooker, whose show “Black Mirror” smartly depicted Uber rating systems applied to people and synthetic beings who don’t perform as advertised, eagerly takes
the bait, recalling an overcrowded cellphone with the number of a deceased friend he couldn’t bring himself to clear: the emotional tug was too great.
Having said this, he agrees that current tech — which at this moment involves a tiny wriggling thing snuggled in Jonze’s lap — has little to do with the sci-fi world depicted by Hollywood.
“If an artificial intelligence could tell a joke that would make me laugh, or was obnoxious, I could respect it. These systems are trying to please me too much. I recoil from things that are too nice to me.”
He laughs: “Sorry, this is therapy for me.”
Jonze, whose movie “Her” lays out a plausible man-meets-machine love story, insists he’s less a trailblazer than a mirror of society as it now stands.
“I didn’t set out to write a film about the state of where we are. I was living in the state of where we are,” he notes, turning to Brooker: “Do you write your anxieties?”
Brooker laughs: “Most of our stories are from observational comedy — ‘Oh wouldn’t it be a nightmare if THAT happened?’
“It was nicer in the old days when they would just invent Kirk’s communicator — the Star Trek Effect.
“But I’d be slightly worried if people are using our show as a ‘how to’ manual.”
And yet, says Darling, that is, to some extent, exactly what’s going on.
“It’s hard to say there’s no responsibility there. The questions we get asked by journalists are so heavily influenced by sci-fi.
“But I agree that shouldn’t be your job — your job is to tell stories.”
In the end, they agree, the future of tech, good or bad, has yet to be written.
“It can go either way — like atomic energy,” Jonze notes. “But we’re so divided right now, so tribal.”
“Tech can help us do things better,” offers Darling. “But I’m worried about capitalism setting the agenda so that development is not in the public interest.”
“We should use it to be kind to ourselves,” insists Brooker, offering a qualified view.
“We seem lost at the moment — like we’ve got an extra limb and we’re knocking over all the furniture.”
As for the contentious question of who is ultimately responsible, the answer is unanimous: “NOT ME!”