The force is stronger with tech

Last week, one of the most anticipated movies of the year started showing. “The Last Jedi” is the eighth sequel of one the most successful movie series of all time. It opened to record box office and over the weekend immediately garnered $450 million worldwide, which made it the second biggest opening gross, only after the seventh sequel, “The Force Awakens.”

I went to watch it on the fifth day, and was quite disappointed that so early, the theater was nearly empty. It was a weekday and Cebu might have a few dozen theaters now, but then we have a population of a few million, too. So it’s either nobody cares about movies or Star Wars, or they just are not paying money to see it (meaning there is a rampant market for bootleg copies).

Of course, in these kinds of futuristic movies, which combines fantasy and science fiction, there are always scenes about technology vs. man, and as usual, man wins.

This is kind of a weak story arc because in the real world, we are facing a real possibility tha artificial intelligence and robotics will not only make us lose jobs, but may takeover many of our freedoms and benefits.

The main thing is that many people are not worried, and simply because they have been conditioned by years of watching movies where man always wins.

There are the classic battle scenes, where the robots and technology can never hit the enemy spaceship or even a running human being. That is not true.

Even at this point (much less years from now when we have the tech already to do time and space travel), technology already has the capability to hit a fast-moving object the size of a calling card, much less a spaceship, even a few kilometers away.

And there are many things – including remembering, recognizing patterns and faces, or calculating, or even processing, where undoubtedly the computer is now much better than us. I don’t think that right now, there is any chess champion that can lay claim they can win against the computer in the game of chess or strategy, or they can shoot faster or more accurately than any robot in any simulation.

However, much inspired you are by the movie, one thing you should never do – use StarWars as your password.

It has came out as one of this year’s list of worst passwords. These are the passwords most frequently used as according to surveys, and therefore it is not good to use them because these are the first combinations that hackers will use.

Among the other passwords that you should not use are 123456, password, qwerty, letmein, iloveyou, admin, welcome, login, passw0rd, hello, whatever and abc123.