Or the CSI hacker (2 people typing on the same keyboard to hack faster, or creating a hack on visual basic interface (technically possible, but sounds really odd))
David Mamet once lamented that the computer has taken over the horse, in films. Where once the hero would jump onto their ride to go fight justice, now we have her pulling out the keyboard.
"Case was twenty-four. At twenty-two, he'd been a cowboy, a rustler, one of the best in the Sprawl. He'd been trained by the best, by McCoy Pauley and Bobby Quine, legends in the biz. He'd operated on an almost permanent adrenaline high, a byproduct of youth and proficiency, jacked into a custom cyberspace deck that projected his disembodied consciousness into the consensual hallucination that was the matrix."
I'm a huge fan. What I would like to add is that in my experience the show has also helped the general public better understand some common practices and dangers. In particular the episode where Darlene drops a bunch of infected USB sticks in the police station parking lot. It's nice for people to understand that some mysterious hacker doesn't specifically need to target them as an individual. They're not safe just because they're not very popular or active online.
I love his narration of the password cracking, such as how his psychiatrist's password is "Dylan_2791" -- her favorite singer and her birthyear backwards. To me, that feels like what the average person would consider "good" obfuscation, because they can't imagine how fast a brute force attack works inside a narrow space.
Or how he tracks his psychiatrist's lover's identity by checking her (the psychiatrist) Instgram checkins, faking a reason to borrow the man's phone, then phishes his security questions and brute forces the password in minutes ("He's too old to have a complicated password, it had to be a combination of these things").
I'd say 'temporarily killed'. After the rise of quantum computing and AI in the public consciousness, I'd expect we'd see a return of the hacker-as-magician archetype.
The attempts to explain quantum computing are often as crap as any other attempt to explain anything "quantum", but in practice, it doesn't really change what computing looks like for most people. It means a certain class of problems can be solved more efficiently, and some problems may be solved that previously could not be, but it's not that significant to one not versed in the field.
By contrast, if we ever did get true human-level AI... uh... are quite sure that "magician" wouldn't be appropriate at that point...? It's not entirely dissimilar to "demon summoner", though there probably won't be actual pentagrams involved. Although you never know; just as my UNIX system has an awful lot of "demons" in it it would only take one AI researcher with a hacker sense of humor to program in an last-ditch emergency "containment via drawing a pentagram" routine in the base OS for the successful AIs....
> "The attempts to explain quantum computing are often as crap as any other attempt to explain anything "quantum", but in practice, it doesn't really change what computing looks like for most people. It means a certain class of problems can be solved more efficiently, and some problems may be solved that previously could not be, but it's not that significant to one not versed in the field."
Quantum computing is likely to have a large impact on crypto (making the crypto we rely on now easier to break). A large part of the Hollywood hacker is someone who breaks into systems with relative ease.
>"By contrast, if we ever did get true human-level AI... uh... are quite sure that "magician" wouldn't be appropriate at that point...? It's not entirely dissimilar to "demon summoner", though there probably won't be actual pentagrams involved. Although you never know; just as my UNIX system has an awful lot of "demons" in it it would only take one AI researcher with a hacker sense of humor to program in an last-ditch emergency "containment via drawing a pentagram" routine in the base OS for the successful AIs...."
Again, the angle I was going for was more about the power of hackers. The type of opinions people had when they denied Mitnick his phone call from jail because they thought he could launch nuclear missiles.
We're only starting to see the widespread impacts of AI. Wait until the impacts on day to day life are undeniable. At that point, people who can control AI will be seen as a little beyond the ordinary.
By contrast, if we ever did get true human-level AI... uh... are quite sure that "magician" wouldn't be appropriate at that point...? It's not entirely dissimilar to "demon summoner"
I think a lot of "rationalist" guff about super-optimizing AIs is just recycled crap we used to use religion to deal with. It's one thing to pose a thought exercise about an entity who can reliably predict what you are going to do and think 99% of the time. I can see how that's a useful exercise. The thing is, I think I'm seeing a lot of people go from that to essentially believing in such imagined entities as prophesied gods-to-be. (Or perhaps devils.)
Our current notion of such entities is probably as spot-on as Ada Lovelace's notion of personal computing. Our current notion of such entities is probably much more inaccurate than 1950's notions of what computing would be like in the 2nd decade of the 21st century.
>"I think a lot of "rationalist" guff about super-optimizing AIs is just recycled crap we used to use religion to deal with. It's one thing to pose a thought exercise about an entity who can reliably predict what you are going to do and think 99% of the time."
What makes you think those who are interested in AI expect we will be able to predict the future with 99% accuracy? The closest example I can think of from sci-fi is Minority Report, but that isn't exactly a pure AI solution, nor particularly realistic.
The coming impact of AI will be on jobs. You don't need godlike AI in order to do human work in all its forms. That's the type of change I think will re-ignite imaginations about AI.
What makes you think those who are interested in AI expect we will be able to predict the future with 99% accuracy?
I encounter people online and in person who pose logic puzzles involving such a hypothetical entity. I also encounter people online and in person who engage in futurist thinking about where humans would fit into a world with such entities.
The coming impact of AI will be on jobs. You don't need godlike AI in order to do human work in all its forms. That's the type of change I think will re-ignite imaginations about AI.
In "The Matrix" and sequel movies, human beings seem to react to machines in a way analogous to how we have historically reacted to different ethnic/religious groups. I hope "ignition" isn't apt.
>"I encounter people online and in person who pose logic puzzles involving such a hypothetical entity."
I'd see that as a valid thought experiment, but one that had very little basis in reality. The level of invasiveness needed to bring about anything close to that would make it highly improbable, you'd basically need a swarm of sensors at the nano-scale covering the entire planet just to have enough raw data to work with, and the processing power required to interpret that raw data would be ridiculously high.
>"I also encounter people online and in person who engage in futurist thinking about where humans would fit into a world with such entities."
You probably do, but considering that there's plenty of online discussion from the same communities about basic income and suchlike, there clearly are those who are attempting to come to terms with the expected impact of AI on humans.
>"In "The Matrix" and sequel movies, human beings seem to react to machines in a way analogous to how we have historically reacted to different ethnic/religious groups. I hope "ignition" isn't apt."
Ignition?
Aside from that, the changes in our society that AI is due to bring us soon will be resisted, that's completely understandable, it's happened numerous times in our past when human work has been replaced by a machine.
Unfortunately, it's not something that can be effectively resisted without changing centuries of conditioning about the role that new technology plays in shaping our future. The best we can hope for in the near term is damage limitation.
I assumed "human level", and that's all I need; I don't need magic super-human species-threatening AI for the point to stand. If we're making human-level beings to order, I'd call that pretty darned close to the traditional "magician".
AI has been in the public consciousness since well before computers, and quantum computers are vaporware that don't even really promise much that would be meaningful to a non-mathematician.
>"AI has been in the public consciousness since well before computers"
Not to the point where it has a sizeable impact on day-to-day life.
>"quantum computers are vaporware"
Are you just basing your opinion on D-Wave alone? Plus, they're likely to have a decent impact on crypto, which definitely has meaning beyond mathematicians.
Mr. Robot may be technically correct, but I couldn't get past a few episodes of the first season.
Comically bad/cliche companies that are polluting the earth, killing innocent people, and robbing the poor. A closeted gay, masochist antagonist and a smug, patronizing protagonist that regularly demeans the people around him and feels they are less intelligent than himself. This was all in the first few episodes.
I assume the characters and plots have changed since the first season, but not by much.
I felt like the writers were ignored in high school and used the show as a way to passive-aggressively get back at their perceived enemies.
Rami Malek really kills it in the first season IMO.
Especially the opiate withdrawal scene.
Also minor nit - I'm pretty sure Tyrell's wife is aware of his escapades. But you're missing the point about it...Tyrell and his wife are concerned solely with power.
I'm fairly certain that he's not meant to be a closeted gay man, but a psychopath who will pretend to be gay and sleep with someone he isn't interested in, in order to get what he wants.
I think this is right. The Willicks are the embodiment of the maxim that "everything is about sex, except sex, which is about power." They are both the most sexually prolific characters in the show, and at the same time, the characters least motivated by sex. It's entirely about power for them.
Another way to look at it in the context of the show is the 'unreliable narrator' that is Elliot. The show is told and shown through his perspective, which is a major aspect of the plot. So the criticisms you make could be seen as projections of his personality.
Either way, if you don't like it then there's plenty of other good shows to watch these days.
The thing you need to keep in mind about Mr. Robot is that it's told through the eyes of an unreliable narrator. Evil Corp is Comically Evil Cliche Corp because that's how Elliot perceives them, regardless of their actual evilness.
From a certain perspective, Mr. Robot is a critique of the very thing you are complaining about. Elliot is able to justify doing many things because of the comic-bookish way in which he perceives his world. He is mentally unstable and a central theme of the show is that the things you see (through him) may or may not reflect the reality of his world, and his actions which, while internally consistent with his reality, may not be as noble or righteous as he thinks they are.
The show's heavy lean on the unreliable narrator aspect is what eventually made me lose interest in it (near the end of the first season). At a certain point, a narrator can become so unreliable that there's no actual story anymore. Just increasingly opaque layers of obfuscation.
What I've heard about the second season only made me more glad of my decision to stop watching.
I think that's a fair critique. S2 definitely went full on "you have no idea what is real or not", which is either going to be extremely satisfying or extremely dissatisfying based on how S3 turns out.
At some point, the obfuscation has to resolve. I felt like it resolved reasonably well in S1, though S2 definitely did the LOST thing and just left you hanging for S3. I'm hopeful, though, as Sam Esmail has apparently written the whole story from start to finish, so he hopefully knows where it's going well enough to give it a graceful resolution.
I find that doesn't work, though, because they don't really remind you of it - and if the mechanism is that the world is seen through the eyes of the narrator, you can't show scenes for which the narrator isn't present. And there are plenty of those in Mr Robot. It's hard to have "Oh, this is all through the narrator's eyes" when two other characters are having a chat with the narrator nowhere nearby.
I also find the 'evil corp' thing to be immersion-drainingly adolescent, given that there's no other direct replacement. Everything else is 'gritty and real', and then there's this Loony-Tunes bit in the middle of it.
Elliot routinely talks to us, the audience. That's a pretty blatant reminder that we're being narrated to by him! His internal monologues aren't just exposition, they're him talking to us, his "imaginary friend".
When Elliot isn't present, things are certainly more reliable, though we have to remember that our context for this world is through Elliot, which colors how we perceive these non-Elliot scenes, as well. We have to accept that at some artistic level, there have to be scenes without Elliot present, but we know that it's still colored by Elliot's reality through tells established in E1 - ie, characters referencing "Evil Corp" in conversations between themselves when he isn't present (it's not the company's name, it's the name that Elliot tells us he has explicitly replaced the real name with in his mental processes.)
"Evil Corp" is adolescent, but I think that's the point. It's not a lack of intellectual rigor on the part of the writers, but on the part of the characters. If you latch onto it literally as Esmail railing aginst dem eeeeeviiiilllll bigcorps then yeah, it would be tedious and silly, but Elliot goes out of his way in S1 to tell us that he that in regards to Evil Corp, he actively rejects reality and substitutes his own.
Given that the world is shown as perceived by the protagonist, what irked me was the straw man depiction of how a "hacktivist" supposedly perceives the world. Maybe there exist hacktivists who perceive the world this way, but it seemed completely implausible to me.
I think if we're honest, we all perceive the world this way to one degree or another. It's a lot easier (and more satisfying) to see our heroes as infallible champions for truth and justice, and our enemies as demonized caricatures with no redeeming values than it is to attempt to see them as they really are. The reach and effectiveness of the breathless propaganda that drenched the latest presidential election is solid proof of that.
We all think that we have an objective view of the world, and that it's the other people that must have it wrong. I can only conclude that I would be very foolish to believe that out of seven billion people on the planet, I'm the one that got it right.
(That being said, the extremist hacktivist is sort of necessary for a show like this. A responsible, measured one wouldn't make for nearly so engaging a story.)
Yeah, it's kind of amazing that people can have any sort of an objective view of the world, with the amount of noise being input to their senses. I guess even if you have almost complete garbage in, it is still possible to get mostly not garbage out if the processor is diligent enough :)
I disagree that the caricature protagonist is necessary. I think a more nuanced hacktivist character could have made the show much more ambiguous, and in my opinion, interesting, maybe approaching some of the complexities inherent in the material.
SPOILER-ish comment: I tried not to be explicit about the details.
>Mr. Robot is that it's told through the eyes of an unreliable narrator //
When they drop the bombshell of that reality in the second series, that the narrator is unreliable, was a great moment that had me giggling with glee. I'd been guessing "oh, that guy is another element of his own dissociated personality", but never quite guessed the full gravity of it.
The "breakdown" episode [there's just one!?!] where his family are on vacation in pseudo-flashback with smaltzy sitcom styling whilst not great to watch was a real testament to how different this show was IMO.
> When they drop the bombshell of that reality in the second series, that the narrator is unreliable, was a great moment that had me giggling with glee.
(spoilers) The Fight Club parallels were there from the very first time he saw Mr. Robot in the episode one. So I kind of expected what was coming.
Given what happens later in this series your comment reads like someone who watched half of Fight Club and is annoyed that Brad Pitt's character isn't a plausible friend to Edward Norton's character.
The later season hints at the antagonist being more than that and possibly alludes to some interesting ideas that I won't spoil for other readers.
Yes, the protagonist is smug and intelligent but that's common in a lot of TV shows for a good reason. Would you watch Suits if the character is an inept lawyer? Or House if the doctor is a mediocre doctor doing routine checkups?
And besides, I'd say that most programmers do feel a bit smug in the same sense about your average person clueless about technology.
I don't know about this. Co-workers and myself can run console commands so quick that for moments at a time (esp with console text scrolling, deploying, etc) it looks like we're hacking. I've heard more than one sales/project manager who's hovering mention it looks like Hollywood hacking. The part that looks like BS in Hollywood hacking to me is the green "matrix" text.
I'm anything but fast at my typing, etc. I've never been that way, but I've also experienced the "soul crush" of taking down a production system because I was doing things too fast, not paying attention, and then BAM - bye-bye production DB - so since that time I take a more cautious, think-before-hitting-return attitude (it was the early 90s, I was 18, blah-blah - we eventually got things back to normal, and somehow I kept my job).
That said, I once worked with a guy who could type, switch windows, desktops, etc - at what seemed like lightning speed. I mean, when he was at it and "in the groove" - his screen, fingers, etc - were a blur of frantic activity. In some ways, it even reminded me of "hollywood hacking". He was expert at what he did, though - more often than not, his solutions and designs were spot on, and even these "quick fixes" or whatever - would work right first time out the gate.
Definitely when I get "in the groove" my typing, editing and code navigation are at least 3x faster. That's why I know it always pays off to learn all the hotkeys and optimize my workflow in the software I use.
When at normal speed the increase in productivity may seem minimal, but after a while, when you get that groove moment, the benefit compounds.
Another way to see it is that the less time and effort you spend on actually doing the thing the less it stays in the way of your mental process.
I'm a designer first and foremost, have been for well over a decade. Started coding (Basic) a decade before that.
However, circumstances have led to me being more than that. I'm a copywriter, social media manager, web developer. Content manager, product designer and manager. This means a TON of switching tasks.
But sometimes, I have to do something small, like spend a couple of days launching a WordPress site. Switching between the mockup PSD and the template files, the various browser tabs where I have the CMS open, the FTP client, etc.
I've always loved keyboard shortcuts and all the tiny little hacks, hidden double clicks and ctrl+alt+right-clicks that made this go faster.
And when people watch when I'm plugged in like that, "magic" is the word most people use to describe what I'm doing. (Even some medium level devs do!)
Not boasting btw. Just happy about life in the industry. We're lucky fucks.
The tab key with autocomplete really makes you look like you're typing more than you really are. Not to mention the amount of output relative to the input. Sure, all you typed was 'ls -al' but look at all that useful output!
People are different. I like typing, so I do it a lot while coding. Admittedly I use it more to write a journal to gather my thoughts and outline the strategies to solve problems and keep to plain English most of the time, but I do like fast typing. It would look boring in a movie though, writing prose text.
Now when it comes to coding, I also tent to type fast, but mostly because I'm a vim user and that's how you navigate and edit around. All the braces and brackets are something that I don't fancy typing fast and rely on auto-complete.
Also, I do type fast in the command line when necessary, though it's mostly boring stuff like switching directories, running programs like make and git and starting vim.
Smart coders design elegant solutions that don't require frantic typing
I've met young coders, new to the Bay Area, who actually did try to impress me with their frantic keyboard skills. Being able to rapid-fire keyboard shortcuts is some kind of signal to some subset of technical people. To me, it just demonstrated that they were really bad at the communication thing and understanding social context.
Two things. First, that's going to depend on coding style and how you operate. Personally I'll give great thought to the particular problem and then hammer away at the keyboard as I crank things out.
Second, the world of hacking isn't some grand operation where folks are working in some lab run by the Russian Mafia or whomever. I work for a cyber security company, albeit as a software engineer, but a lot of this shit is taking pre-built kits (which often times are not not that great either) and changing some configs, adding a little extra functionality or whatever.
I don't see this so much in Mr. Robot but I saw a good point is that a lot of movies and shows uses hacking as an action sequence instead of just using it to move the story forward.
I don't think it's fair that plumbers aren't well-respected as a profession, but you act as though it's inconsistent that people would look down on something they cannot currently do.
I'm extremely confident that if you trained me, I would be an exceptionally good plumber. I am extremely unconfident that if you trained me, I would be an exceptionally good neurosurgeon.
I'll extend that - I am confident that the majority of adults could be trained to become competent plumbers. I am not at all confident that the majority of adults could be trained to become competent neurosurgeons.
Some people react to the reality of vastly different education, patience, effort and talent requirements in job occupations by being condescending. That's not fun for anyone, but it also doesn't make sense to be smug about that reaction as though those people are being condescending towards a skill they fundamentally couldn't learn how to do even with great effort, time and intelligence. They are being condescending towards a skill that is very low in terms of the percentile required to do it competently.
I'm a huge fan of the hacker angle, but I really deplore their use of the Mad Genius trope.
In real life, when people are as tormented by schizophrenia and PTSD as Mr. Robot is, their talents are of no use and of no threat to anyone. We're surrounded by such people in every city, and the only threat they pose is to themselves.
Sadly if current reality shows are any indication it probably would make for compelling television. But I wouldn't wish that on the TempleOS author in any fashion.
Have you actually seen any of Terry's streams? They're actually quite instructive about topics like OS design. Barring the occasional rants against "CIA ni*".
I agree that it's an overused trope, but don't think it's fair to say that schizophrenia keeps people from accomplishing impressive things (eg TempleOS)
It's an effective example of the possible benefit having a double major in psych and computer science. However, that is impressive psychopathology. I had no idea.
It is a tool to learn about how your computer really works by providing an extremely simple operating system. It's so simple you can draw circles on the screen with one line at the command prompt.
It is very dumb to argue it has no usefulness because it does not work with modern dev tools or environments
Some people learn well through certain methods than others.
Some people stick with the first thing that they find and make it work for their needs. Never discovering the "better tools".
Richard Feynman, often regarded as one of the best teachers of physics to have ever lived, when asked how to teach, said he didn't know. He just tried to bring as many views to the table as possible. Some people learn from simple high-level descriptions, others need more details to build up to high-level understanding.
Pretty sure you're just being contrarian to be contrarian. Because it seems you're suggesting your way and the things you find the most value in are the only way. Which is a nonsense counter-argument to the question "Why does this thing exist."
Your criterion feels more like "I don't get why it exists. Thus it's useless."
It's not my criterion; this discussion originated in a comment (not mine) claiming roughly that the products of mental illness are of no use to anyone. And I know full well why TempleOS exists: God told Terry Davis to build it. While that clearly means a lot to Mr. Davis, I am not sure how much validity you mean it to have to anyone else.
As it happens, I tend to agree that utility is where you find it. But that's not at all the same as saying that TempleOS is a good teaching tool. Perhaps it is. But thus far I see nothing save repeated assertion to support that claim, and it would be nice to see a bit more by way of substantiation.
For example, someone claimed that, because you can draw circles at the command line with TempleOS, it is simple. But I can do that too, with a terminal and a gnuplot build that include sixel graphics support. (I did it the other day for grins.) Does that mean my setup is simple? Obviously not. Why does it mean that TempleOS is? What does the existence of the capability say about TempleOS's suitability for teaching? Does it say anything? If it does, no one has seen fit to explain how. The same goes for the fact that TempleOS is written in C and assembly. Lots of things are written in C and assembly. Are they all good teaching tools?
People like Terry Davis and Yayoi Kusama are outliers. Can you name any other schizophrenics that have accomplished impressive things? The only reason they are able to keep working is a lot of support from others over the years to help them overcome the negative effects of their mental illness - Davis' family made sure he received hospital treatment and now he lives on Social Security Disability; Kusama has been living full-time in a mental hospital for the last several decades.
Writing compelling dramatic fiction about people who aren't outliers is hard, and that's something far more widespread than just Mr. Robot and the "exceptional genius" hacker idea.
What exactly are you trying to achieve with your argument? Do you think the kind of stigma you're contributing to persist will encourage any productive person with a serious mental illness to be open about their work?
In the show, Elliot is actually not all that functional. He's debilitated - he can't remember where he's been or what he's done, he's socially awkward and destroys his relationships, and he gets in a lot of bad situations as a result. He's also a drug addict. Maybe the picture of his life isn't all that unbelievable.
I don't think generalized comments regarding any mental illness are welcome to be honest. I don't need to point out the broad and varied spectrum of disorders a lot of us in Comp.Sci are prone to do I? Most of us are pretty damn functional (despite them).
Nope, I truly think it is suffering later in life: Before it took hold, he had some symptoms - but he wasn't suffering.
I watched such a disorder do its stuff to my ex-husband. He always showed signs of it, but neither of us knew. It was more like a slew of personality quirks. Stress would get to him and he developed quite a temper. It got fairly bad before the diagnosis. I thought he had a drug problem (partially true, but you know).
And then one night he was convinced his spit melted concrete. And so on. Finally a diagnosis: A few years later he couldn't work. Sometimes, even while medicated, he had a flimsy grasp on reality, but most of the voices stopped, which helped tremendously.
The suffering after it takes hold can be a beast of suffering, which was so much differnt than before it really 'took hold'. The hardest period was the time between it becoming serious and the diagnosis.
What I mean is it's an affliction that develops in severity over the years, but if you look back it was never not there, it was just in a much milder form.
But it wasn't there, signs existed that it might develop but if things had gone differently he may have never been been afflicted. Nash himself says a combination of stress to do great things and the necessity of thinking in unorthodox ways to do those things is what triggered the illness.
As far as I know, it's not something your born with, it's something your born more likely to develop.
I'm sure everyone here remembers the term 'suspension of disbelief' or related.
The reason a Hollywood virus or universal decryption key doesn't allow technical people to suspend disbelief is because both are immediately absurd in multiple ways, often to the point of being unintentionally funny.
It isn't hard for me, at least, to suspend disbelief that people with psychological challenges can do big things, because there are examples in which people with psychological challenges have accomplished big things.
Suspension of disbelief is tricky when approaching domain-specific knowledge. Really, the "hacker's complaint" is no different than lawyers complaining about, well, every courtroom drama ever.
I won't argue whether "Elliot's" PTSD is so severe that he couldn't function. It is fiction, and arguing about personal investment in fiction is a mug's game, outside of friendly bar talk.
I will simply note that you're vastly overgeneralizing the range effects of both PTSD and schizophrenia. PTSD, for instance, has in fact led to horrific violence, and, well, go google 'famous schizophrenics' if you'd like to see what people have accomplished.
The issue with suspension of disbelief is that while smart people do it, weaker minds on the left hand of the bell curve just internalize the notion that the fiction they're watching is an accurate reflection of life.
So when the movies and television shows portray mad geniuses who threaten to destroy life as we know it, it covers up the sad reality, which is severe schizophrenics are only a challenge to our sense of decency, and little else.
I don't think it is anywhere nearly so simple as "dumb people believe fiction is real." There is a complicated interplay between lived experience, class, personality, education, desires and other priors driving how people process both fiction and nonfiction.
Or as a brief counterfactual, sure is nice how the murder rate has dropped now that we've banned violent video games, amirite?
It's not because people are dumb. It's because they trust the blue screen - because, well, why wouldn't they? They don't know how it actually works.
And it is a real problem wrt applying such acquired "knowledge" to the real world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSI_effect is a well-documented instance, and there are numerous reports by lawyers of juries making unreasonable assumptions (e.g. about the accuracy of DNA matches), or giving undue weight to "expert" evidence like bite mark analysis (which is fraudulent pseudoscience: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2016/09/07/...). All this stuff has effect on outcomes of real world criminal cases, sometimes literally with people's lives at stake.
As Cory points out in this piece, the same is true for information security. It all ultimately translates to a very skewed public picture of what the threats are and how they can be mitigated, and that, in turn, affects public policy and laws. That is a real problem.
Honestly, I think we are saying something at least similar, but in the case of intersection with the legal system, I thin there's something else going on. Apologies, but I'm running with a tangent.
Bite mark analysis is a great example. It isn't just that CSI: Market Segmentation Unit convinces people science can do something it can't. The legal world (outside of some lonely voices to which nobody listened until pretty recently) was telling juries it was valid. Defense attorneys might have taken the odd run at expert testimony in a particular case if it looked promising, but their job is to win particular cases, not take principled stands in general. Meanwhile, the rest of the attorneys in the room (people with reputations for being serious, whom you might expect to have carefully considered the value of different types of evidence, given their careers) were taking bite mark analysis seriously. What, exactly, is a juror in that situation to do?
It is worth asking if the CSI effect is just a cultural feedback loop. Criminal law[1] has always wanted magic unassailable evidence. It just makes everything so much easier. Fiction sometimes still portrays fingerprint evidence as close to infallible, but who has spent generations treating it as such in the context it for which it matters most?
So at the risk of sounding cynical, I'll note that doubts about bite marks, fiber analysis, and now even fingerprints are legally acceptable now that a new magic guilt-certifier is available.
[1] I'm being somewhat flip with language. All of these topics are much more complicated than portrayed. Please take my broad generalities about legal topics in the spirit offered.
But aren't prosecutors and lawyers really a part of the general public when it comes to forensics? They have an "expert" telling them that they have magic, and they have Hollywood telling them that this kind of magic exists (and, as you point out, they have a good incentive to believe in magic - but it's not just the lawyers, it's the jurors as well - it makes their life much easier, too!).
But the same applies here! The general public wants to believe, for example, that if terrorists use encryption, some really smart guys from NSA or wherever can "hack" it somehow (but nobody else). Or at least that we could regulate encryption such that only the "hackable" varieties are available to terrorists. It makes them feel safer. And so you have 44% supporting legislation to mandate backdoors.
> But aren't prosecutors and lawyers really a part of the general public when it comes to forensics?
In this case, no, they aren't. A better comparison would be to a general contractor hiring an electrician. A prosecutor is likely to have no more formal education or hands-on experience with forensic science. But, as professional "consumers" of expert testimony, and a motivation (professional duty) to win, you can't evaluate their scientific ignorance the same way you'd evaluate a juror's. I don't think the reason bite mark analysis lasted so long is because Judge Goodsense watched cop shows, any more than you can say a GC can't be blamed for shoddy wiring because they weren't a member of the Electrician's Local.
To swap contexts, nontechnical people who work with programmers may not be able to give you the big-O cost of a loop, but they tend to know when a programmer is bullshitting about something.
This goes to my contention that the CSI effect isn't just 'I believe it 'cause I saw it on the toob'. Education, lived experience, class, personality and other priors play in to it. In the case of criminal evidence admissibility, I think there is at least motivated reasoning as there is true belief in methods. The motivation is in part the same as with how plea deals have evolved - the current criminal justice system would collapse if trials were needed for more than a tiny fraction of cases. Magic evidence is a performance hack.
I don't disagree that ambient falsehoods matter. I am saying that comparing motivated professionals in a field with random MOPs misses a lot of the picture, and that even your MOP is going to react to ambient falsehoods they can't evaluate differently, based on priors.
> This goes to my contention that the CSI effect isn't just 'I believe it 'cause I saw it on the toob'.
I don't think that is the case in general, either.
The problem is that "I saw it on the toob" has secondary effects, that attenuate as they propagate, but can still go a long way. Basically, you might not believe that DNA testing is 100% correct because you saw it on TV; but you you believe it to be 100% correct because "everybody knows it", and the reason why they do is because "everybody knows it", and so on, until you actually get to a much smaller minority who believe it because they personally saw it on TV.
(In general, it's amazing how many popular "common sense" things are blatantly false, but they keep getting repeated and propagated as part of ambient noise of society, because "everybody knows it".)
> Really, the "hacker's complaint" is no different than lawyers complaining about, well, every courtroom drama ever.
Except, oddly enough, My Cousin Vinny, which lawyers apparently love [1]. The fact that I can name one movie known for this probably proves your general point, though.
Thanks for posting the link. I recently discovered what an INTP is and that I am one. I don't believe that I have a mental disorder but I definitely struggle with severe depression and mood swings, I'm trying to figure myself out.
You might want to be careful with that. The Myers Briggs test is most likely pseudoscience and you shouldn't base any important-ish life decisions on it.
I am skeptical. I don't take it as fact. I did find it interesting that the INTP profiles I read described me with painful accuracy, which is why I've begun exploring this stuff a little more. Still, it's good advice to take everything with a grain of salt.
Often depression is a side effect of harsh life conditions. Like moving to a new country where you have no social support or don't speak the language. I doubt a therapist can fix those problems.
a therapist might not be able to "fix" those problems outright in a neat and tidy way, but i'd bet a good therapist could greatly ameliorate those problems, and help enhance quality of life in general.
>Sneakers ridiculously featured a universal key that can break all crypto
That's not ridiculous at all: go back and re-watch the film. If the MacGuffin did what the film said it did, it would effectively act as a universal key.
Yeah I was wondering if I remembered it wrong. I thought what they figured out was an efficient algorithm for factoring primes, which is effectively a universal key. AFAIK Shor's algorithm is pretty much just that, and handicapped solely by the lack of a [known] sufficiently-sized quantum computer to run it on.
It was a combination of an algorithmic improvement and ASIC hardware, to attack and recover encryption keys from vulnerable schemes in minutes, rather than billions of years. The algorithm might have also required a hardware instruction not typically provided by commercially available chips.
As a MacGuffin, it is still entirely plausible. But the actual use of any such magic box would never be visually exciting enough for Hollywood.
"Ok, so I ssh in to the box, feed it the hash, let it run for 450 hours, and then we get the result and spend Satoshi's Bitcoins into accounts we control."
"Does anything blow up?"
"No."
"Blinky lights at FBI headquarters?"
"No."
"Car chases?"
"No."
"Break in to a secured building?"
"No."
"So who's going to watch this movie?"
"How about we just get some laser pointers and some cats while we wait?"
Indeed 'Sneakers' is a good hacker movie by all means. It even give us a Perl script at some point AFAIK.
There is another movie called "Travelling Salesman" where a few mathematicians solve P vs NP and explain the possible implications to a federal agent who wants to exploit their breakthroughs.
The "animated singing virus" was probably Leonardo Da Vinci, which was based on the real-world panic surrounding the "Michelangelo" virus in 1992. Michelangelo displayed on the infected machine's screen a still image of the artist Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel fresco, much like the fictional Leonardo virus displayed a solarized Vitruvian Man. Some viruses of the era (early 90s) did feature animation, such as making the on-screen text slowly disappear or "rain down" the display like the Matrix intro.
Not animated but I have been struck by the music bug virus[1]. Given hacker's egos and sense of humor I wouldn't be surprised for a moment by a animated singing virus.
This would be true if the average viewer watched Mr Robot. Pretty much only geeks tend to. So just more preaching to the choir. Sure its a step forward, but not a paridigm shift by far.
An interesting example of the change of perception in hacker culture is the difference in the video games Watch Dogs (released 2014) and Watch Dogs 2 (released last month). Watch Dogs 1 features a cyberpunk, grindark Chicago where an unlikeable hacker fights against Big Brother government survellience. Watch Dogs 2 takes place in sunny San Francisco, and features younger hackers having to infiltrate places such as not-Google and not-SpaceX to fight back against corporate data collection (yes, big data is the villain!). The second game also features more real life technologies, companies (not-Google, not-SpaceX) and ripped-from-the-headlines sidequests, including one where the main hacking group leaks a Ubisoft video game trailer...
As a whole, the game was much better received. Although, Watch Dogs 2 has Hacker Vision, which lets you see people and objects through walls. The game makes no attempt to justify how that works.
I'd just go with Batman magic from The Dark Knight. Hacked microphones and speakers already on the other side of the wall produce a short range ultrasound sonar image.
Many games from UbiSoft do this. At first each game tried to justify the existence of such an ability, these days they don't even try. In Far Cry 4, if you see them mark them with the camera; if you don't see them, inject a magical leaf drug that marks them. In other games just make your eyeballs glow and you see more than you could possibly know.
I'm very sad that Swordfish was never mentioned in this article. My developer friends all have a soft spot for the ridiculous world created in that film.
What killed it for me is the "We have to teach her to hack in 24 hours!" bit. She had to run a script and bounce a network interface. If that's hacking I'm Captain Crunch.
Can't happen soon enough. I just watched the last season of Arrow on Netflix, and while I like the actress that plays the computer chick I want to punch someone in the face at least once an episode over the absurd lines she has to read.
Hackers killed the Hollywood hacker. (Hackers as in people, not Hackers the film.) Dominic Sena, in his director's commentary for Swordfish, stated that the people who were likely to complain about the inaccuracy of the hacking shown in his movie were nerds who ultimately didn't matter. In this era where the internet response can make or break a film or TV show, the nerds do matter and directors go the extra mile to please them. This started before Mr. Robot. Think Tron: Legacy.
Pass it off as Morpheus not understanding the machines' true purposes. He believes it, but we don't have proof. Perhaps the machines use human brains as cloud infrastructure, for storage and highly parallel processing.
(I also like Eliezer Yudkowsky's theory that the Laws of Thermodynamics are an in-simulation creation by the machines, and humans-as-batteries works according to the laws of the real universe.)
Or maybe they never really had any intention of wiping out humanity and that is their way to preserve humans. The same way we preserve animals in zoos. Maybe this is just a human sanctuary along with zion.
Humans are just too stupid/arrogant to believe it.
If we get a little bit too annoying or dangerous they just cull us the same way we cull foxes or bears attacking livestock. We are never really a threat to them. Especially if you consider that they are a million steps ahead of us given their intelligence.
A single AI being is more intelligent than the entire human race that has ever lived; there are millions of independent AI's in the machine society. Once you look at it this way it is laughable to think that humans have even a tiny chance against an entire society of AI entities.
We think we pose a threat the same way a bear thinks it posses a threat against an armed human. The bear may get lucky against a few humans but against the entire human species it has zero chance.
Also, given that the mind of an AI is just software they are virtually immortal. Every time humans "kill" a machine it is just a piece of hardware that is being destroyed. The mind is still intact. So yeah, as soon as a sentient AI comes into being, the fight will be over before it starts. We think we are intelligent but just look at how long it takes us to study for a career. An AI will be able to learn all of human knowledge in a virtual instant. We are doomed!
If you follow this line of thinking you can fill a lot of the plot holes in the movies.
I can easily explain it away. But seriously, is it really believable that an entire race of AI beings would be destroyed by a single computer virus.
Most likely than not each single being is completely independent from each other. For all we know it is only the "zoo" that is being affected. You know, the same way that a whole bunch of animals in a herd get an infection and die.
Planet earth is big, and by this point all of it is populated by AI beings. They are probably using fusion energy and traveling to the stars already. This whole thing is probably just an isolated incident.
For all we know this is by design to keep the humans from dying off of boredom. Or maybe and most likely this is just an experiment some curious AI is running the same way we run experiments with rats and mazes. Since they are virtually immortal they can run an experiment for hundreds of years.
It could be that the fall of human civilization happened millions of years ago. The problem with the skies is just the result of climate change or changes with the sun. Since the machines live in a virtual reality they don't care what is the environment on Earth.
It actually wasn't stupid. As implied in the sequels, the "real world" either worked differently than our world, or was another level in the simulation itself, since Neo was able to stop the machines using some sort of magic ability. So perhaps humans contained some special force or other essence that the machines harvested.
Even without that, batteries are a store of energy, not a source, and perhaps the machines had discovered some unknown laws of nature that involved intelligent biological creatures being the only way to store or transform some sort of energy currently unknown to man. That is no more or less far fetched than the machines and ships using some sort of antigravity capabilities to fly.
There are plenty of ways to explain the technology in the matrix that isn't completely ridiculous.
>>As implied in the sequels, the "real world" either worked differently than our world, or was another level in the simulation itself, since Neo was able to stop the machines using some sort of magic ability
Or maybe the implants he had worked as transmitter/receivers and he was picking up on the chatter between the machines. It could be part of the reason why he could control so much of the virtual world. Maybe all implants had some form of wifi and Neo's was just unusually strong. Why the wifi? So that they could be switched to a different pod without loosing their connection to the matrix.
One can just keep going and going with alternative explanations.
Yeah I wasn't thinking he'd gained some kind of Jedi-like powers in the real world. Just presumed he'd attained something like 'root' access and just hit the machines' kill-switch.
Another explanation would be that even if humans weren't the best form to store energy, they were already plentiful and their numbers may have been a burden.
Using them as batteries reduced those numbers which is a plus, and meant the machines didn't have to build a new store of energy, and could use the existing humans.
The original script was that human minds were the most heat efficient computers, which is why they needed to be wired into the matrix in the first place, because just running humans as headless heat zombies should have been possible; but cloud computing human minds would need to have some sort of experience to be corporeal.
Apparently this concept was far too difficult for test audiences to understand so it was scrapped.
Test audiences will misunderstand the scientifically impossible explanation as much as they will misunderstand a plausible explanation, so why not use a plausible one?
"Humans are batteries when the sun goes out!" Is easy for people to understand.
"Human minds are computers but in order to use human minds as computers we need to make the matrix as a semi-corporeal realm, oh and this is why people like Trinity can do impossible things like jump really far because their minds are so powerful and actually used in the calculations of the matrix that they can impact it's outcome."
You misunderstand the metaphor. The batteries scene was about the Matrix as a system of control for harnessing human cognitive output - the Matrix is just a proxy for "The Man" in our world. The entire third movie is about control and purpose vs non-determinism and free will.
For the first two, I saw the self-transformation that Neo undertook and the eventual self-sacrifice for the good of all as the overarching "christianity" plot.
I must be missing something. I realize the stories share some similarities but the third movie ends with a Hindu prayer to drive the point home: the Matrix is a fairly classic retelling of the story of Gautama (the Buddha). It follows the Hindu tradition of the story but it's definitely Gautama.
no no no. It is all about the flying spaghetti monster. If you look at the sentinels they all look like flying spaghetti monsters. That was the real intent. The flying spaghetti monster is trying to control us, don't listen to it.
Morpheus was close to the truth but misunderstood (wouldn't be the last time, right?).
The machines were harnessing the unused parts of the human brain to create a gigantic supercomputer, but one that was capable of intuitive leaps, blah, blah, blah, lost interest....double backflip scissor kick to the face. Whoa did you see that?
I disagree. When I was close to becoming addicted to World of Warcraft, it was exactly this image that made me quit cold turkey. "Oh my, I'm turning into a battery for Blizzard." Humans as batteries, feeding the machine. It's not as far fetched as you suggest, at all.
But it's exactly what we are: inserted into economy as cheap energy ("labor"), exhausted, and disposed of. Batteries. It's the most brilliant part of the entire movie!
Directors and writers (who come up with the actual story 99% of the time) have always gone the extra mile to please a favored demographic (or occasionally offend a disfavored one). Think aristocrats in any Shakespeare play.
I'm tempted to reach back even farther, but classical Greek drama was generally completely rooted in divine miracles because that was how most people thought the world actually worked back then, and you could get in trouble for saying otherwise, as Socrates discovered. However, in Plato's Dialogues Socrates puts in a lot of time displaying or eliciting military knowledge from his interlocutors, since they were the elite of Athenian society and Plato's target audience for his ideas on statecraft.
that was how most people thought the world actually worked back then
How can we know this? Who is "most people"?
If Shakespeare wrote to please the aristocracy, might it be possible that the surviving Greek writing was written to please some other set of elites / religious authority / etc.
Edited to add: I imagine the average working class person, or peasant, what have you, might have privately said or thought "Miracles, what a load of dingo's kidneys", much like we do today about whatever we don't believe.
We can know this through the study of history, and the relative absence of non-divine explanations for mysterious phenomena from the same period. Absent the germ theory of disease, for example, people proffered various fantastical explanations for patient's illnesses, from divine punishment to demonic interference. The incompleteness of our knowledge is not a good reason to avoid forming hypotheses.
I imagine the average working class person, or peasant, what have you, might have privately said or thought "Miracles, what a load of dingo's kidneys"
That's because you have a host of other ideas to draw on. What if you didn't have all that scientific knowledge and people in your village started dying mysteriously? Look at how people are in undeveloped places, if they're not educated they tend to blame evil spirits or say that someone caused a curse to fall on the village and suchlike.
Yes, the reference to our contemporaries in less developed areas is a good one. I listened to an Australian ABC Radio National podcast recently that talked about tuberculosis on the islands between Australia and Indonesian and they brought up how the locals believes about the disease made it more difficult to treat.
It's not even a nerd thing. I found that I enjoyed technical jargon even when I didn't understand the meaning behind all the words. I doubt every viewer understands everything Big Bang Theory physicists say, but it's still fun! It does seem to enhance the experience plus it has the side benefit of buying good will from the experts in the relevant field.
I never understood what people find funny in Big bang theory show. Can you still laugh at the jokes if there is no laugh track https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AY0Zkthn8Og ? :) I like IT crowd much better.
First of all, while BBT may sweeten the track, it is still filmed in front of an audience; people really do laugh at the jokes. It doesn't work at all in part because the actors pause to let the laughter subside, and if you watch without that, it just feels bizarre. Second of all, the show's humor isn't entirely verbal. The overbroad stereotypes and exaggerated reactions are part of a joke, and a lot of that requires a familiarity with (and appreciation of) both the specific characters and the archetypes they're playing on.
Of course some people just won't find the show funny, and that's fine. But a lot of very experienced, talented people put a lot of work into that show; it would be unfortunate to dismiss it entirely.
(And for the record, I personally don't find the show funny in the least bit.)
First of all, while BBT may sweeten the track, it is still filmed in front of an audience; people really do laugh at the jokes.
I never really understood the idea that this is meaningfully different from a canned laughter track. A live audience applauding because the applause light goes on isn't any more authentic than a editor mixing it in. It's just easier to make the end product sound like it flows realistically.
And while there may not be a "laughter" light, the audience knows that they're expected to laugh at the punchlines. Just like they know to "ooh" and "aww" at all the right moments too. In fact the crowd warm-up often tells them to make sure they laugh and laugh loud enough for the microphones to pick it up.
--
In either case, the reason people bounce off of laughter in the mix is because the jokes don't land. It's the fact people would find it funny that people complaining about the "laugh track" perceive as artificial. Not because the audio is stilted enough that someone can recognize it as edited in after the fact. Getting pedantic about the colloquial use of "laugh track" or "canned" is generally irrelevant.
Most people probably don't understand what Emacs, Apache configuration or "wget magic" is but they don't have to. Sorkin's screenplay makes, what might otherwise be a boring evening to a external observer, seem really exciting while communicating the high level ideas.
In other words: people who saw the movie partook in the excitement of watching a programmer build something cool, fairly quickly, that elicited strong feedback and reaction, which is rewarding to any programmer and they did not have to get bogged down in the details. As well, this scene also doesn't embellish in the details of hacking with absurd looking command lines nor GUIs like "Hackers" (the movie) does and, therefore, does not elicit an obligatory 'eyeroll' from the programmer/hacker community.
I'd argue that Mr. Robot just perpetuates the Hollywood Hacker stereotype. Sure, the logistics of hacking have moved closer to the truth, but it was unable to escape the moralistic 'greater good' story arc of most hacker movies.
It seems like, given the distribution of breakins and news articles about discovered hacks, there are very few morally motivated hackers and when those hackers do surface - their hacks take the form of much broader less targeted attacks than those of the show. i.e. It's a lot more of grab Xtb of data and then find the weak passwords than everyone has weak passwords.
Yes. The story arc matters more than technical detail. And the moral tropes are boring.
I've come to realize that I actually care less about the technical inaccuracies than I do about a good plot. I don't expect the general public to know a lot about hacking, and I don't care that much. Sometimes it can contribute to the plot (e.g.: prison SCADA systems being easy to break), but often it isn't that important, if it's not too ham-handed.
I care more about a good story. So yeah, the story arc matters, the dialogue matters (the conversations, the attitudes of the characters) -- all the basic elements of a good film/tv show/movie matter first. Which is why I stopped watching Mr. Robot at the beginning of season 2. I just didn't care about the characters or story any more.
Maybe it gets better? Personally, if you're looking for a good story, involving technology and morality, I can't recommend West World enough. There's some "hacking" involved and the show over all is genius. Just my $.02.
[edit] I'll add that the article does bring up the point of the societal harms technically "dumb" plots can cause -- making computing/hacking seem like magic for example. This is an interesting point, but I still think this is less important than a good plot. The potential social benefits of good writing outweigh everything else, if you ask me.
I am surprised you found something in the characters and development arcs of Westworld that you didn't see in Mr. Robot. Westworld is almost entirely plot based with little care or regard for character motivations or development while Mr. Robot spends a lot more time on that type of thing.
Yeah its not exactly an apt comparison I suppose anyway.
Westworld is quite brutal to the characters and you're right, mostly plot driven. And I did find much to like in the first season of Mr. Robot, but then I got bored with the story arc near the end and into the beginning of season 2.
This is somewhat tangential (although related to the "good guys" hacker trope), but one detail I loved from the begining of Mr. Robot was the reference to Enron with the Evil Corp logo. I will definitely give the show credit for its self awareness of it's 90s roots...
>I care more about a good story... Which is why I stopped watching Mr. Robot at the beginning of season 2. I just didn't care about the characters or story any more...Personally, if you're looking for a good story, involving technology and morality, I can't recommend West World enough.
Interesting. The same critique you have of Mr. Robot, I have of Westworld: plot lines that are irrelevant, huge loopholes, and characters that don't develop and that I don't care for.
To each their own of course. Perhaps it's the underlying plot that really bothers me with Mr. Robot -- it feels very 90s to me, even if the surface details are much better. Today, we live in a world where "lone genius hacker" types are becoming thoroughly commoditized. It's all about careers, money, thesis papers. Weaponised exploits are now bought and sold. To people with capital it might as well be magic, why should they care? If you're a kid who identifies with a character like Elliot on some level, you may not realize that's what you're getting into. Maybe this is toched upon in a way I didn't get or see in Mr. Robot?
Then Westworld is basically science fiction, with a good bit of philosophy (which I didn't expect when I started watching it). I liked the way it shifted perspective between the guests, hosts, and operators throughout each episode so much, it left me questioning reality a bit for a few minutes after each episode.
Watching Westworld, I often find myself frowning upon a certain line of dialogue which sounds forced or 'off' in some way, or a scene which looks like it's meant to be emotional but just doesn't make me feel the sentiment. I also liked the daring, weird shots and cinematography in Mr. Robot. Sadly, in Westworld, there is less of this, as the director has opted for a more 'textbook' approach to filming and editing.
Not to say that Westworld isn't an enjoyable show, just that I too just can't seem to like it better than Mr. Robot.
I feel like "emotional but just doesn't make me feel the sentiment" scenes are an intentional specialty of westworld. There are enough "false" endings to emotional scenes (e.g., the beachfront scene in the final episode of s1) that the viewer is trained to question the authenticity of any emotion expressed by the hosts. You could say that that's really the crux of the whole series, and still an open question. The best modern successor to Philip Dick in that regard.
Read the Hacking Team writeup? I don't know their personality, but the person behind that hack is definitely a very talented hacker and the attack was certainly targeted. He got in with a 0day and it was politically motivated.
Wow. I remember scanning this writeup when it first became public, but looking back over it, I'm certainly struck by the author(s) seeming desire to educate their audience...
When thinking of this topic, the Hacking Team hack was one of the first to come to my mind, but political motivations are hard to untangle or to separate from even purely economic motivations (e.g.: commercial competitors disguising motives with political rhetoric).
OT, but WOW! What a tedious movie! By making everything instant (because people will get bored if there's ever a change of pace?) they manage to make it super-boring. The thing that made the previous Bourne movies appealing was that there were some slow moments between the action.
Legendary hacker Hacky McHacky typed swiftly on the IBM M Model keyboard with the fingers attached to his hands. He hated laptop keyboards, they made his eyes flash like thumbdrives.
The Model M is a designation for a group of computer keyboards manufactured by IBM starting in 1984, and later by Lexmark, Unicomp and MaxiSwitch. The keyboard's many variations have their own distinct characteristics, with the vast majority having a buckling-spring key design and swappable keycaps.
Hacky's nostalgic reverie about IBM keyboards was suddenly interrupted when a voice spoke, chillingly close, coming from the other side of the server hall. "Drop that keyboard McHacky" it said menacingly.
I'm not a fan of the character's narrative ramblings it seems conspiracy theories and paranoid rants are far too common these days.
Suspension of disbelief is one thing but when characters who are experts have to explain to each other what they should already know to me a real groaner in TV and movies.
One character on Mr. Robot at the security company didn't know what a rootkit was, really?
It's a large security company, filled with middle managers, I find that entirely plausible. I'm a junior developer in a large organisation and some of the PMs that I work under don't understand the tech we use.
It's exposition. It kind of sucks because we'd like to suspend our disbelief and pretend we're entering a "real" world when we watch a movie, but movies and books are doing more than just "showing scenes from the life of ___," they're telling a story to an audience. An audience needs to be told sometimes what a rootkit is, or that this character has a history of x or y, because the audience didn't grow up with the characters and experience all their shared experiences, or sit in university with them and learn rootkits alongside them.
I've just binged through the faux-bitcoin series "Startup", and didn't see a lot of progress there. Random computers (including a PowerMac G4), keyboard mashing, bad & dark visuals, assuming that everyone in IT is also a "hacker" and the usual bad jargon ("He's using bots! They're in the wifi!") and awkward mistakes (main character has "proficient in Linus" on her CV).
"Hollywood hackers" differ. Cyberpunk genre can be quite good, so I don't think it needs "killing" necessarily or even can be killed. It's not that creators don't know about real hacking. Some may be don't, but others can be quite aware of it. But as in various science fiction genres, things don't necessarily always correspond to real ones.
Whatever gains Mr. Robot made in "killing" (i'd say updating, but anyway) the Hollywood "hacker" trope, they lost twice over with their shoddy portrayal of mental illness.
Not only are you generalizing about an entire hobby/profession and its overlap with a particular mental disorder, you didn't even diagnose the main character of Mr. Robot correctly. He has dissociative identity disorder, not schizophrenia. The two are similar in some respects but vastly different for the most part.
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[ 5.6 ms ] story [ 261 ms ] threadhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8qgehH3kEQ&t=13s
In case you need to do it yourself:
http://hackertyper.net/
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkDD03yeLnU
;)
"Case was twenty-four. At twenty-two, he'd been a cowboy, a rustler, one of the best in the Sprawl. He'd been trained by the best, by McCoy Pauley and Bobby Quine, legends in the biz. He'd operated on an almost permanent adrenaline high, a byproduct of youth and proficiency, jacked into a custom cyberspace deck that projected his disembodied consciousness into the consensual hallucination that was the matrix."
Or how he tracks his psychiatrist's lover's identity by checking her (the psychiatrist) Instgram checkins, faking a reason to borrow the man's phone, then phishes his security questions and brute forces the password in minutes ("He's too old to have a complicated password, it had to be a combination of these things").
By contrast, if we ever did get true human-level AI... uh... are quite sure that "magician" wouldn't be appropriate at that point...? It's not entirely dissimilar to "demon summoner", though there probably won't be actual pentagrams involved. Although you never know; just as my UNIX system has an awful lot of "demons" in it it would only take one AI researcher with a hacker sense of humor to program in an last-ditch emergency "containment via drawing a pentagram" routine in the base OS for the successful AIs....
Quantum computing is likely to have a large impact on crypto (making the crypto we rely on now easier to break). A large part of the Hollywood hacker is someone who breaks into systems with relative ease.
>"By contrast, if we ever did get true human-level AI... uh... are quite sure that "magician" wouldn't be appropriate at that point...? It's not entirely dissimilar to "demon summoner", though there probably won't be actual pentagrams involved. Although you never know; just as my UNIX system has an awful lot of "demons" in it it would only take one AI researcher with a hacker sense of humor to program in an last-ditch emergency "containment via drawing a pentagram" routine in the base OS for the successful AIs...."
Again, the angle I was going for was more about the power of hackers. The type of opinions people had when they denied Mitnick his phone call from jail because they thought he could launch nuclear missiles.
We're only starting to see the widespread impacts of AI. Wait until the impacts on day to day life are undeniable. At that point, people who can control AI will be seen as a little beyond the ordinary.
I think a lot of "rationalist" guff about super-optimizing AIs is just recycled crap we used to use religion to deal with. It's one thing to pose a thought exercise about an entity who can reliably predict what you are going to do and think 99% of the time. I can see how that's a useful exercise. The thing is, I think I'm seeing a lot of people go from that to essentially believing in such imagined entities as prophesied gods-to-be. (Or perhaps devils.)
Our current notion of such entities is probably as spot-on as Ada Lovelace's notion of personal computing. Our current notion of such entities is probably much more inaccurate than 1950's notions of what computing would be like in the 2nd decade of the 21st century.
What makes you think those who are interested in AI expect we will be able to predict the future with 99% accuracy? The closest example I can think of from sci-fi is Minority Report, but that isn't exactly a pure AI solution, nor particularly realistic.
The coming impact of AI will be on jobs. You don't need godlike AI in order to do human work in all its forms. That's the type of change I think will re-ignite imaginations about AI.
I encounter people online and in person who pose logic puzzles involving such a hypothetical entity. I also encounter people online and in person who engage in futurist thinking about where humans would fit into a world with such entities.
The coming impact of AI will be on jobs. You don't need godlike AI in order to do human work in all its forms. That's the type of change I think will re-ignite imaginations about AI.
In "The Matrix" and sequel movies, human beings seem to react to machines in a way analogous to how we have historically reacted to different ethnic/religious groups. I hope "ignition" isn't apt.
I'd see that as a valid thought experiment, but one that had very little basis in reality. The level of invasiveness needed to bring about anything close to that would make it highly improbable, you'd basically need a swarm of sensors at the nano-scale covering the entire planet just to have enough raw data to work with, and the processing power required to interpret that raw data would be ridiculously high.
>"I also encounter people online and in person who engage in futurist thinking about where humans would fit into a world with such entities."
You probably do, but considering that there's plenty of online discussion from the same communities about basic income and suchlike, there clearly are those who are attempting to come to terms with the expected impact of AI on humans.
>"In "The Matrix" and sequel movies, human beings seem to react to machines in a way analogous to how we have historically reacted to different ethnic/religious groups. I hope "ignition" isn't apt."
Ignition?
Aside from that, the changes in our society that AI is due to bring us soon will be resisted, that's completely understandable, it's happened numerous times in our past when human work has been replaced by a machine.
Unfortunately, it's not something that can be effectively resisted without changing centuries of conditioning about the role that new technology plays in shaping our future. The best we can hope for in the near term is damage limitation.
Not to the point where it has a sizeable impact on day-to-day life.
>"quantum computers are vaporware"
Are you just basing your opinion on D-Wave alone? Plus, they're likely to have a decent impact on crypto, which definitely has meaning beyond mathematicians.
Comically bad/cliche companies that are polluting the earth, killing innocent people, and robbing the poor. A closeted gay, masochist antagonist and a smug, patronizing protagonist that regularly demeans the people around him and feels they are less intelligent than himself. This was all in the first few episodes.
I assume the characters and plots have changed since the first season, but not by much.
I felt like the writers were ignored in high school and used the show as a way to passive-aggressively get back at their perceived enemies.
Also minor nit - I'm pretty sure Tyrell's wife is aware of his escapades. But you're missing the point about it...Tyrell and his wife are concerned solely with power.
The protagonist isn't always right.
Either way, if you don't like it then there's plenty of other good shows to watch these days.
From a certain perspective, Mr. Robot is a critique of the very thing you are complaining about. Elliot is able to justify doing many things because of the comic-bookish way in which he perceives his world. He is mentally unstable and a central theme of the show is that the things you see (through him) may or may not reflect the reality of his world, and his actions which, while internally consistent with his reality, may not be as noble or righteous as he thinks they are.
What I've heard about the second season only made me more glad of my decision to stop watching.
At some point, the obfuscation has to resolve. I felt like it resolved reasonably well in S1, though S2 definitely did the LOST thing and just left you hanging for S3. I'm hopeful, though, as Sam Esmail has apparently written the whole story from start to finish, so he hopefully knows where it's going well enough to give it a graceful resolution.
I couldn't even make it through the first episode of season 2.
The Wolf of Wall Street employs a similar trick for part of the film to great effect.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZhGPH83ZHE
I also find the 'evil corp' thing to be immersion-drainingly adolescent, given that there's no other direct replacement. Everything else is 'gritty and real', and then there's this Loony-Tunes bit in the middle of it.
When Elliot isn't present, things are certainly more reliable, though we have to remember that our context for this world is through Elliot, which colors how we perceive these non-Elliot scenes, as well. We have to accept that at some artistic level, there have to be scenes without Elliot present, but we know that it's still colored by Elliot's reality through tells established in E1 - ie, characters referencing "Evil Corp" in conversations between themselves when he isn't present (it's not the company's name, it's the name that Elliot tells us he has explicitly replaced the real name with in his mental processes.)
"Evil Corp" is adolescent, but I think that's the point. It's not a lack of intellectual rigor on the part of the writers, but on the part of the characters. If you latch onto it literally as Esmail railing aginst dem eeeeeviiiilllll bigcorps then yeah, it would be tedious and silly, but Elliot goes out of his way in S1 to tell us that he that in regards to Evil Corp, he actively rejects reality and substitutes his own.
We all think that we have an objective view of the world, and that it's the other people that must have it wrong. I can only conclude that I would be very foolish to believe that out of seven billion people on the planet, I'm the one that got it right.
(That being said, the extremist hacktivist is sort of necessary for a show like this. A responsible, measured one wouldn't make for nearly so engaging a story.)
I disagree that the caricature protagonist is necessary. I think a more nuanced hacktivist character could have made the show much more ambiguous, and in my opinion, interesting, maybe approaching some of the complexities inherent in the material.
>Mr. Robot is that it's told through the eyes of an unreliable narrator //
When they drop the bombshell of that reality in the second series, that the narrator is unreliable, was a great moment that had me giggling with glee. I'd been guessing "oh, that guy is another element of his own dissociated personality", but never quite guessed the full gravity of it.
The "breakdown" episode [there's just one!?!] where his family are on vacation in pseudo-flashback with smaltzy sitcom styling whilst not great to watch was a real testament to how different this show was IMO.
(spoilers) The Fight Club parallels were there from the very first time he saw Mr. Robot in the episode one. So I kind of expected what was coming.
It worked for comic books, back in the day.
Yes, the protagonist is smug and intelligent but that's common in a lot of TV shows for a good reason. Would you watch Suits if the character is an inept lawyer? Or House if the doctor is a mediocre doctor doing routine checkups?
And besides, I'd say that most programmers do feel a bit smug in the same sense about your average person clueless about technology.
Don't you mean sadist?
Smart coders design elegant solutions that don't require frantic typing (and the same would apply to elegant hack-scripts).
Seeing an online gamer crank at WASD is more in-line with "hack faster by typing more".
Also the "GUI interface in Visual Basic."
That said, I once worked with a guy who could type, switch windows, desktops, etc - at what seemed like lightning speed. I mean, when he was at it and "in the groove" - his screen, fingers, etc - were a blur of frantic activity. In some ways, it even reminded me of "hollywood hacking". He was expert at what he did, though - more often than not, his solutions and designs were spot on, and even these "quick fixes" or whatever - would work right first time out the gate.
When at normal speed the increase in productivity may seem minimal, but after a while, when you get that groove moment, the benefit compounds.
Another way to see it is that the less time and effort you spend on actually doing the thing the less it stays in the way of your mental process.
I'm a designer first and foremost, have been for well over a decade. Started coding (Basic) a decade before that.
However, circumstances have led to me being more than that. I'm a copywriter, social media manager, web developer. Content manager, product designer and manager. This means a TON of switching tasks.
But sometimes, I have to do something small, like spend a couple of days launching a WordPress site. Switching between the mockup PSD and the template files, the various browser tabs where I have the CMS open, the FTP client, etc.
I've always loved keyboard shortcuts and all the tiny little hacks, hidden double clicks and ctrl+alt+right-clicks that made this go faster.
And when people watch when I'm plugged in like that, "magic" is the word most people use to describe what I'm doing. (Even some medium level devs do!)
Not boasting btw. Just happy about life in the industry. We're lucky fucks.
Wait, you don't use green "matrix" text?
Now when it comes to coding, I also tent to type fast, but mostly because I'm a vim user and that's how you navigate and edit around. All the braces and brackets are something that I don't fancy typing fast and rely on auto-complete.
Also, I do type fast in the command line when necessary, though it's mostly boring stuff like switching directories, running programs like make and git and starting vim.
I've met young coders, new to the Bay Area, who actually did try to impress me with their frantic keyboard skills. Being able to rapid-fire keyboard shortcuts is some kind of signal to some subset of technical people. To me, it just demonstrated that they were really bad at the communication thing and understanding social context.
And also tilting the office chair up to the upright position.
Two things. First, that's going to depend on coding style and how you operate. Personally I'll give great thought to the particular problem and then hammer away at the keyboard as I crank things out.
Second, the world of hacking isn't some grand operation where folks are working in some lab run by the Russian Mafia or whomever. I work for a cyber security company, albeit as a software engineer, but a lot of this shit is taking pre-built kits (which often times are not not that great either) and changing some configs, adding a little extra functionality or whatever.
I don't see this so much in Mr. Robot but I saw a good point is that a lot of movies and shows uses hacking as an action sequence instead of just using it to move the story forward.
But would you really want it any other way?
Let's face it: we will forever be viewed as either wizards, or plumbers.
Isn't this analogy great?
I'm extremely confident that if you trained me, I would be an exceptionally good plumber. I am extremely unconfident that if you trained me, I would be an exceptionally good neurosurgeon.
I'll extend that - I am confident that the majority of adults could be trained to become competent plumbers. I am not at all confident that the majority of adults could be trained to become competent neurosurgeons.
Some people react to the reality of vastly different education, patience, effort and talent requirements in job occupations by being condescending. That's not fun for anyone, but it also doesn't make sense to be smug about that reaction as though those people are being condescending towards a skill they fundamentally couldn't learn how to do even with great effort, time and intelligence. They are being condescending towards a skill that is very low in terms of the percentile required to do it competently.
But it is funny.
In real life, when people are as tormented by schizophrenia and PTSD as Mr. Robot is, their talents are of no use and of no threat to anyone. We're surrounded by such people in every city, and the only threat they pose is to themselves.
It is very dumb to argue it has no usefulness because it does not work with modern dev tools or environments
Learning C or asm gives you no insight into what the microcode under the hood is doing.
Some people learn well through certain methods than others. Some people stick with the first thing that they find and make it work for their needs. Never discovering the "better tools".
Richard Feynman, often regarded as one of the best teachers of physics to have ever lived, when asked how to teach, said he didn't know. He just tried to bring as many views to the table as possible. Some people learn from simple high-level descriptions, others need more details to build up to high-level understanding.
Pretty sure you're just being contrarian to be contrarian. Because it seems you're suggesting your way and the things you find the most value in are the only way. Which is a nonsense counter-argument to the question "Why does this thing exist."
Your criterion feels more like "I don't get why it exists. Thus it's useless."
Self-aggrandizing nonsense.
As it happens, I tend to agree that utility is where you find it. But that's not at all the same as saying that TempleOS is a good teaching tool. Perhaps it is. But thus far I see nothing save repeated assertion to support that claim, and it would be nice to see a bit more by way of substantiation.
For example, someone claimed that, because you can draw circles at the command line with TempleOS, it is simple. But I can do that too, with a terminal and a gnuplot build that include sixel graphics support. (I did it the other day for grins.) Does that mean my setup is simple? Obviously not. Why does it mean that TempleOS is? What does the existence of the capability say about TempleOS's suitability for teaching? Does it say anything? If it does, no one has seen fit to explain how. The same goes for the fact that TempleOS is written in C and assembly. Lots of things are written in C and assembly. Are they all good teaching tools?
(Also: A throwaway, for this? Why?)
And is it so strange for a lead character in a movie or TV series to represent an outlier?
John Forbes Nash Jr. ?
After his first hospitalization in 1959 Nash only wrote two more papers in the 60s. Nash's schizophrenia definitely put a stop to his work.
I watched such a disorder do its stuff to my ex-husband. He always showed signs of it, but neither of us knew. It was more like a slew of personality quirks. Stress would get to him and he developed quite a temper. It got fairly bad before the diagnosis. I thought he had a drug problem (partially true, but you know).
And then one night he was convinced his spit melted concrete. And so on. Finally a diagnosis: A few years later he couldn't work. Sometimes, even while medicated, he had a flimsy grasp on reality, but most of the voices stopped, which helped tremendously.
The suffering after it takes hold can be a beast of suffering, which was so much differnt than before it really 'took hold'. The hardest period was the time between it becoming serious and the diagnosis.
As far as I know, it's not something your born with, it's something your born more likely to develop.
I'm sure everyone here remembers the term 'suspension of disbelief' or related.
The reason a Hollywood virus or universal decryption key doesn't allow technical people to suspend disbelief is because both are immediately absurd in multiple ways, often to the point of being unintentionally funny.
It isn't hard for me, at least, to suspend disbelief that people with psychological challenges can do big things, because there are examples in which people with psychological challenges have accomplished big things.
Suspension of disbelief is tricky when approaching domain-specific knowledge. Really, the "hacker's complaint" is no different than lawyers complaining about, well, every courtroom drama ever.
I won't argue whether "Elliot's" PTSD is so severe that he couldn't function. It is fiction, and arguing about personal investment in fiction is a mug's game, outside of friendly bar talk.
I will simply note that you're vastly overgeneralizing the range effects of both PTSD and schizophrenia. PTSD, for instance, has in fact led to horrific violence, and, well, go google 'famous schizophrenics' if you'd like to see what people have accomplished.
So when the movies and television shows portray mad geniuses who threaten to destroy life as we know it, it covers up the sad reality, which is severe schizophrenics are only a challenge to our sense of decency, and little else.
I don't think it is anywhere nearly so simple as "dumb people believe fiction is real." There is a complicated interplay between lived experience, class, personality, education, desires and other priors driving how people process both fiction and nonfiction.
Or as a brief counterfactual, sure is nice how the murder rate has dropped now that we've banned violent video games, amirite?
And it is a real problem wrt applying such acquired "knowledge" to the real world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSI_effect is a well-documented instance, and there are numerous reports by lawyers of juries making unreasonable assumptions (e.g. about the accuracy of DNA matches), or giving undue weight to "expert" evidence like bite mark analysis (which is fraudulent pseudoscience: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2016/09/07/...). All this stuff has effect on outcomes of real world criminal cases, sometimes literally with people's lives at stake.
As Cory points out in this piece, the same is true for information security. It all ultimately translates to a very skewed public picture of what the threats are and how they can be mitigated, and that, in turn, affects public policy and laws. That is a real problem.
Bite mark analysis is a great example. It isn't just that CSI: Market Segmentation Unit convinces people science can do something it can't. The legal world (outside of some lonely voices to which nobody listened until pretty recently) was telling juries it was valid. Defense attorneys might have taken the odd run at expert testimony in a particular case if it looked promising, but their job is to win particular cases, not take principled stands in general. Meanwhile, the rest of the attorneys in the room (people with reputations for being serious, whom you might expect to have carefully considered the value of different types of evidence, given their careers) were taking bite mark analysis seriously. What, exactly, is a juror in that situation to do?
It is worth asking if the CSI effect is just a cultural feedback loop. Criminal law[1] has always wanted magic unassailable evidence. It just makes everything so much easier. Fiction sometimes still portrays fingerprint evidence as close to infallible, but who has spent generations treating it as such in the context it for which it matters most?
So at the risk of sounding cynical, I'll note that doubts about bite marks, fiber analysis, and now even fingerprints are legally acceptable now that a new magic guilt-certifier is available.
[1] I'm being somewhat flip with language. All of these topics are much more complicated than portrayed. Please take my broad generalities about legal topics in the spirit offered.
But the same applies here! The general public wants to believe, for example, that if terrorists use encryption, some really smart guys from NSA or wherever can "hack" it somehow (but nobody else). Or at least that we could regulate encryption such that only the "hackable" varieties are available to terrorists. It makes them feel safer. And so you have 44% supporting legislation to mandate backdoors.
In this case, no, they aren't. A better comparison would be to a general contractor hiring an electrician. A prosecutor is likely to have no more formal education or hands-on experience with forensic science. But, as professional "consumers" of expert testimony, and a motivation (professional duty) to win, you can't evaluate their scientific ignorance the same way you'd evaluate a juror's. I don't think the reason bite mark analysis lasted so long is because Judge Goodsense watched cop shows, any more than you can say a GC can't be blamed for shoddy wiring because they weren't a member of the Electrician's Local.
To swap contexts, nontechnical people who work with programmers may not be able to give you the big-O cost of a loop, but they tend to know when a programmer is bullshitting about something.
This goes to my contention that the CSI effect isn't just 'I believe it 'cause I saw it on the toob'. Education, lived experience, class, personality and other priors play in to it. In the case of criminal evidence admissibility, I think there is at least motivated reasoning as there is true belief in methods. The motivation is in part the same as with how plea deals have evolved - the current criminal justice system would collapse if trials were needed for more than a tiny fraction of cases. Magic evidence is a performance hack.
I don't disagree that ambient falsehoods matter. I am saying that comparing motivated professionals in a field with random MOPs misses a lot of the picture, and that even your MOP is going to react to ambient falsehoods they can't evaluate differently, based on priors.
I don't think that is the case in general, either.
The problem is that "I saw it on the toob" has secondary effects, that attenuate as they propagate, but can still go a long way. Basically, you might not believe that DNA testing is 100% correct because you saw it on TV; but you you believe it to be 100% correct because "everybody knows it", and the reason why they do is because "everybody knows it", and so on, until you actually get to a much smaller minority who believe it because they personally saw it on TV.
(In general, it's amazing how many popular "common sense" things are blatantly false, but they keep getting repeated and propagated as part of ambient noise of society, because "everybody knows it".)
Except, oddly enough, My Cousin Vinny, which lawyers apparently love [1]. The fact that I can name one movie known for this probably proves your general point, though.
[1] http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/entertainment/movies/New-...
Mediocre source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5pggDCnt5M
I don't claim you are wrong, but be very careful about the Barnum/Forer effect when reading such descriptions:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnum_effect
BTW: I'm personally rather immune to this effect, since I'm not a person who fits "the profile of a typical citizen".
Depression is a (very common) mental disorder. I highly recommend talking to your doctor/a therapist about this if you're self-identifying as such.
That's not ridiculous at all: go back and re-watch the film. If the MacGuffin did what the film said it did, it would effectively act as a universal key.
As a MacGuffin, it is still entirely plausible. But the actual use of any such magic box would never be visually exciting enough for Hollywood.
"Ok, so I ssh in to the box, feed it the hash, let it run for 450 hours, and then we get the result and spend Satoshi's Bitcoins into accounts we control."
"Does anything blow up?"
"No."
"Blinky lights at FBI headquarters?"
"No."
"Car chases?"
"No."
"Break in to a secured building?"
"No."
"So who's going to watch this movie?"
"How about we just get some laser pointers and some cats while we wait?"
There is another movie called "Travelling Salesman" where a few mathematicians solve P vs NP and explain the possible implications to a federal agent who wants to exploit their breakthroughs.
ps. Awesome script to play hacker while people is looking at your shell https://github.com/bartobri/no-more-secrets
Maybe not, but you're damn right I've rickrolled hackers trying to access our servers and steal user data.
And some keygens (or malware pretending to be a keygen) have pretty whimsical designs with music and animation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFqBkSJOYOQ
[1] https://www.f-secure.com/v-descs/musicbug.shtml
I immediately thought of Bonzai Buddy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJnklyxbcL8
As a whole, the game was much better received. Although, Watch Dogs 2 has Hacker Vision, which lets you see people and objects through walls. The game makes no attempt to justify how that works.
Mapping/tracking with wifi signals [from special devices IIRC]? http://www.theverge.com/2015/10/28/9625636/rf-capture-mit-wi...
And the whole wiping her fingerprint part was extremely stupid.
It's a typical work day for me.
Think The Matrix: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PxTAn4g20U
Using nmap to find a vulnerable ssh server for the SSH CRC32 attack.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vxq9yj2pVWk
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=u8qgehH3kEQ
(I also like Eliezer Yudkowsky's theory that the Laws of Thermodynamics are an in-simulation creation by the machines, and humans-as-batteries works according to the laws of the real universe.)
Humans are just too stupid/arrogant to believe it.
If we get a little bit too annoying or dangerous they just cull us the same way we cull foxes or bears attacking livestock. We are never really a threat to them. Especially if you consider that they are a million steps ahead of us given their intelligence.
A single AI being is more intelligent than the entire human race that has ever lived; there are millions of independent AI's in the machine society. Once you look at it this way it is laughable to think that humans have even a tiny chance against an entire society of AI entities.
We think we pose a threat the same way a bear thinks it posses a threat against an armed human. The bear may get lucky against a few humans but against the entire human species it has zero chance.
Also, given that the mind of an AI is just software they are virtually immortal. Every time humans "kill" a machine it is just a piece of hardware that is being destroyed. The mind is still intact. So yeah, as soon as a sentient AI comes into being, the fight will be over before it starts. We think we are intelligent but just look at how long it takes us to study for a career. An AI will be able to learn all of human knowledge in a virtual instant. We are doomed!
If you follow this line of thinking you can fill a lot of the plot holes in the movies.
The agents are just zookeepers.
Most likely than not each single being is completely independent from each other. For all we know it is only the "zoo" that is being affected. You know, the same way that a whole bunch of animals in a herd get an infection and die.
Planet earth is big, and by this point all of it is populated by AI beings. They are probably using fusion energy and traveling to the stars already. This whole thing is probably just an isolated incident.
For all we know this is by design to keep the humans from dying off of boredom. Or maybe and most likely this is just an experiment some curious AI is running the same way we run experiments with rats and mazes. Since they are virtually immortal they can run an experiment for hundreds of years.
It could be that the fall of human civilization happened millions of years ago. The problem with the skies is just the result of climate change or changes with the sun. Since the machines live in a virtual reality they don't care what is the environment on Earth.
Even without that, batteries are a store of energy, not a source, and perhaps the machines had discovered some unknown laws of nature that involved intelligent biological creatures being the only way to store or transform some sort of energy currently unknown to man. That is no more or less far fetched than the machines and ships using some sort of antigravity capabilities to fly.
There are plenty of ways to explain the technology in the matrix that isn't completely ridiculous.
I honestly thought I'd read that CPUs were the original intention but the studios changed it to batteries but can't find any source now.
Some hint about it here[1] but no conclusive proof.
[1] http://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/19817/was-executive...
Or maybe the implants he had worked as transmitter/receivers and he was picking up on the chatter between the machines. It could be part of the reason why he could control so much of the virtual world. Maybe all implants had some form of wifi and Neo's was just unusually strong. Why the wifi? So that they could be switched to a different pod without loosing their connection to the matrix.
One can just keep going and going with alternative explanations.
Using them as batteries reduced those numbers which is a plus, and meant the machines didn't have to build a new store of energy, and could use the existing humans.
Apparently this concept was far too difficult for test audiences to understand so it was scrapped.
"Humans are batteries when the sun goes out!" Is easy for people to understand.
"Human minds are computers but in order to use human minds as computers we need to make the matrix as a semi-corporeal realm, oh and this is why people like Trinity can do impossible things like jump really far because their minds are so powerful and actually used in the calculations of the matrix that they can impact it's outcome."
Was the part that was too complex.
I really enjoyed this documentary on Philosophy and the Matrix - https://vimeo.com/53000177
The machines were harnessing the unused parts of the human brain to create a gigantic supercomputer, but one that was capable of intuitive leaps, blah, blah, blah, lost interest....double backflip scissor kick to the face. Whoa did you see that?
I'm tempted to reach back even farther, but classical Greek drama was generally completely rooted in divine miracles because that was how most people thought the world actually worked back then, and you could get in trouble for saying otherwise, as Socrates discovered. However, in Plato's Dialogues Socrates puts in a lot of time displaying or eliciting military knowledge from his interlocutors, since they were the elite of Athenian society and Plato's target audience for his ideas on statecraft.
How can we know this? Who is "most people"?
If Shakespeare wrote to please the aristocracy, might it be possible that the surviving Greek writing was written to please some other set of elites / religious authority / etc.
Edited to add: I imagine the average working class person, or peasant, what have you, might have privately said or thought "Miracles, what a load of dingo's kidneys", much like we do today about whatever we don't believe.
I imagine the average working class person, or peasant, what have you, might have privately said or thought "Miracles, what a load of dingo's kidneys"
That's because you have a host of other ideas to draw on. What if you didn't have all that scientific knowledge and people in your village started dying mysteriously? Look at how people are in undeveloped places, if they're not educated they tend to blame evil spirits or say that someone caused a curse to fall on the village and suchlike.
Yes, the reference to our contemporaries in less developed areas is a good one. I listened to an Australian ABC Radio National podcast recently that talked about tuberculosis on the islands between Australia and Indonesian and they brought up how the locals believes about the disease made it more difficult to treat.
Of course some people just won't find the show funny, and that's fine. But a lot of very experienced, talented people put a lot of work into that show; it would be unfortunate to dismiss it entirely.
(And for the record, I personally don't find the show funny in the least bit.)
I never really understood the idea that this is meaningfully different from a canned laughter track. A live audience applauding because the applause light goes on isn't any more authentic than a editor mixing it in. It's just easier to make the end product sound like it flows realistically.
And while there may not be a "laughter" light, the audience knows that they're expected to laugh at the punchlines. Just like they know to "ooh" and "aww" at all the right moments too. In fact the crowd warm-up often tells them to make sure they laugh and laugh loud enough for the microphones to pick it up.
--
In either case, the reason people bounce off of laughter in the mix is because the jokes don't land. It's the fact people would find it funny that people complaining about the "laugh track" perceive as artificial. Not because the audio is stilted enough that someone can recognize it as edited in after the fact. Getting pedantic about the colloquial use of "laugh track" or "canned" is generally irrelevant.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSKoVsHs_Ko
Most people probably don't understand what Emacs, Apache configuration or "wget magic" is but they don't have to. Sorkin's screenplay makes, what might otherwise be a boring evening to a external observer, seem really exciting while communicating the high level ideas.
In other words: people who saw the movie partook in the excitement of watching a programmer build something cool, fairly quickly, that elicited strong feedback and reaction, which is rewarding to any programmer and they did not have to get bogged down in the details. As well, this scene also doesn't embellish in the details of hacking with absurd looking command lines nor GUIs like "Hackers" (the movie) does and, therefore, does not elicit an obligatory 'eyeroll' from the programmer/hacker community.
I've come to realize that I actually care less about the technical inaccuracies than I do about a good plot. I don't expect the general public to know a lot about hacking, and I don't care that much. Sometimes it can contribute to the plot (e.g.: prison SCADA systems being easy to break), but often it isn't that important, if it's not too ham-handed.
I care more about a good story. So yeah, the story arc matters, the dialogue matters (the conversations, the attitudes of the characters) -- all the basic elements of a good film/tv show/movie matter first. Which is why I stopped watching Mr. Robot at the beginning of season 2. I just didn't care about the characters or story any more.
Maybe it gets better? Personally, if you're looking for a good story, involving technology and morality, I can't recommend West World enough. There's some "hacking" involved and the show over all is genius. Just my $.02.
[edit] I'll add that the article does bring up the point of the societal harms technically "dumb" plots can cause -- making computing/hacking seem like magic for example. This is an interesting point, but I still think this is less important than a good plot. The potential social benefits of good writing outweigh everything else, if you ask me.
Westworld is quite brutal to the characters and you're right, mostly plot driven. And I did find much to like in the first season of Mr. Robot, but then I got bored with the story arc near the end and into the beginning of season 2.
This is somewhat tangential (although related to the "good guys" hacker trope), but one detail I loved from the begining of Mr. Robot was the reference to Enron with the Evil Corp logo. I will definitely give the show credit for its self awareness of it's 90s roots...
Interesting. The same critique you have of Mr. Robot, I have of Westworld: plot lines that are irrelevant, huge loopholes, and characters that don't develop and that I don't care for.
Then Westworld is basically science fiction, with a good bit of philosophy (which I didn't expect when I started watching it). I liked the way it shifted perspective between the guests, hosts, and operators throughout each episode so much, it left me questioning reality a bit for a few minutes after each episode.
Watching Westworld, I often find myself frowning upon a certain line of dialogue which sounds forced or 'off' in some way, or a scene which looks like it's meant to be emotional but just doesn't make me feel the sentiment. I also liked the daring, weird shots and cinematography in Mr. Robot. Sadly, in Westworld, there is less of this, as the director has opted for a more 'textbook' approach to filming and editing.
Not to say that Westworld isn't an enjoyable show, just that I too just can't seem to like it better than Mr. Robot.
That 'good hacker' exists.
Groan.
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The Model M is a designation for a group of computer keyboards manufactured by IBM starting in 1984, and later by Lexmark, Unicomp and MaxiSwitch. The keyboard's many variations have their own distinct characteristics, with the vast majority having a buckling-spring key design and swappable keycaps.
Hacky's nostalgic reverie about IBM keyboards was suddenly interrupted when a voice spoke, chillingly close, coming from the other side of the server hall. "Drop that keyboard McHacky" it said menacingly.
Suspension of disbelief is one thing but when characters who are experts have to explain to each other what they should already know to me a real groaner in TV and movies.
One character on Mr. Robot at the security company didn't know what a rootkit was, really?
Maybe we should bring the intertitles back.
[0] http://img-9gag-fun.9cache.com/photo/277232_700b.jpg
He's just a dude suffering from schizophrenia. Hackers, for starters, are playing in the autism-asperger spectrum.
They're utterly opposite and incompatible psychological traits.