Curious what people thought of Moon—pretty interesting take on clone identity and one of the more thoughtful sci-fi movies of the last couple of years.
The basic premise was pretty silly. (You have strong AI, perfect duplication of adult humans, regular flights to Earth—and you need hundreds of them on the Moon to do… nothing?)
Conceiving a realistic not-entirely-antagonistic AI that’s smart enough to act as a character in a drama and not smart enough to learn to do pretty much everything the human characters do isn’t all that easy.
Possible outs are that for some reason or other, robotics just isn’t an option for the AI to interact with the outside world, and humans need to be manipulated to serve its ends instead, or that there’s some way in which the AI is a dramatic character with agency despite not quite having general intelligence.
The bit at the end is necessary to make it a happy ending; what’s the alternative, everyone dies and a new one is defrosted? That would be a serious bummer ending.
And you know what, the AI is strong enough. Look at what the human does the entire time—he carries some canisters around, and drives out to look at a wrecked vehicle. (At least, I don’t remember him doing anything more complex.) A really weak system can drive cars across the freaking Mojave desert! The canister stuff could be automated by a 8-bit microchip.
The clones are easily scrapped as a plot device. When the protagonist’s shift is up, he climbs into the pod—and his memories are erased by an injection or something. He climbs out with total amnesia, is told the trip up damaged him and may have caused moderate memory loss or hallucinations, and sets to work at his new job… I think that’s pretty sinister and creepy myself, possibly even better than the clones.
Without getting into a long and spoiler laden discussion I’ll just say that I think the movie is sufficiently ambiguous that a more charitable interpretation than yours is possible.
Overall I thought this was a relatively consistent and plausible plot as sci-fi movies go (admittedly a fairly low bar). I’m curious if you like any sci-fi movies and if so what some examples are of movies that you think do a better job in this regard?
Curious what people thought of Moon—pretty interesting take on clone identity and one of the more thoughtful sci-fi movies of the last couple of years.
The basic premise was pretty silly. (You have strong AI, perfect duplication of adult humans, regular flights to Earth—and you need hundreds of them on the Moon to do… nothing?)
Conceiving a realistic not-entirely-antagonistic AI that’s smart enough to act as a character in a drama and not smart enough to learn to do pretty much everything the human characters do isn’t all that easy.
Possible outs are that for some reason or other, robotics just isn’t an option for the AI to interact with the outside world, and humans need to be manipulated to serve its ends instead, or that there’s some way in which the AI is a dramatic character with agency despite not quite having general intelligence.
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The bit at the end is necessary to make it a happy ending; what’s the alternative, everyone dies and a new one is defrosted? That would be a serious bummer ending.
And you know what, the AI is strong enough. Look at what the human does the entire time—he carries some canisters around, and drives out to look at a wrecked vehicle. (At least, I don’t remember him doing anything more complex.) A really weak system can drive cars across the freaking Mojave desert! The canister stuff could be automated by a 8-bit microchip.
The clones are easily scrapped as a plot device. When the protagonist’s shift is up, he climbs into the pod—and his memories are erased by an injection or something. He climbs out with total amnesia, is told the trip up damaged him and may have caused moderate memory loss or hallucinations, and sets to work at his new job… I think that’s pretty sinister and creepy myself, possibly even better than the clones.
Without getting into a long and spoiler laden discussion I’ll just say that I think the movie is sufficiently ambiguous that a more charitable interpretation than yours is possible.
Overall I thought this was a relatively consistent and plausible plot as sci-fi movies go (admittedly a fairly low bar). I’m curious if you like any sci-fi movies and if so what some examples are of movies that you think do a better job in this regard?