Are Hosts, Replicants, and Robot Clones Closer Than We Think?
"Judging by the last 10 years of movies and television, we’ve changed our minds on
the whole robot apocalypse thing. They’re no longer coming to annihilate us—probably
because we seem to be doing too good a job of that ourselves. No, now the robots are
here to deliver us from death entirely. From Westworld to its trashy Netflix cousin,
Altered Carbon; from Don Hertzfeldt’s quirky animated short World of Tomorrow to
Black Mirror; from Spike Jonze’s lovely 2013 meditation Her to the magnificently
terrible-looking new Keanu Reeves movie Replicas, which seems trapped in its own
version of afterlife—every film or show about AI is now about the promise of
immortality and how the machines might deliver it for us.
Blame Elon Musk, maybe, or perhaps our own seemingly dwindling prospects as a
human race, but the story we tell ourselves about technology seems to have
permanently changed. Here’s how the new story goes, and it’s told with alarming
consistency: After we die, the information in our brains will be preserved, uploaded to
a cloud, and then downloaded again, into a new body. After that, we will rub our eyes,
roll the crick out of our shoulders, maybe even get home in time for dinner. Death is
just another connection problem, a momentary hiccup in the endless scroll, and robots
are no longer the skeletal arm of the Terminator clutching our ankle; they are the
dangling claw in the old carnival game, lowering itself one by one to rescue us from
our overcrowded pit."
See:
https://www.theringer.com/tech/2018/...rror-westworld