The movie starts off with a banal family scene. The year is some time around 140 years ahead. We learn that there are animal parts embeded in all humans that enhance their capabilities, and that robots are now common, marked in some way that clearly shows they are not humans. They have no desires although they seem to blend well with the family.
The kids learn that 200 years ago they used to have computers and there were computer programming languages. The robot teacher is telling a small class of students about it and teaching them sample code which they are enjoying very much.
Everything goes well. Psychology and Psychiatry has advanced enough to stop all wars, and whoever wishes to decline taking the pills (like one of the teenage girls is contemplating) can choose to go to the free wild no-government lands and they even receive special survival training to deal with the warlords,religions and customs of those places which are outside the protected zone and are constantly monitored so that no harm happens to Calmland.
We learn to understand that plain language has completely replaced computer programming, and that the robots are now designed to do the requested tasks, by clarifying the desires of the calm people, who have solved the global warming problem by beaming energy back out into space, and placing giant cooling grids in the north and south, restoring temperatures there.
The robots are taking care of everything nicely and then things start to go horribly wrong, but not because of any "robotic intelligence", and not because of any "robotic unrest". Its a simple misunderstanding of words in the way that machine translation sometimes gets things awfully wrong. The problem is that a random sequence of these mistakes gets things going out of control. And now CalmPlace needs the help of the wild people to save it.
It turns out that although some of the wild people are very wild indeed, some are surprisingly advanced and part of the movie watches their society and debate whether to help CalmPlace or not.
[First version of non-idea, heavily criticized] End of first half of movie, second half to be continued by the HB community...
[New version with first few blunders as example] The teacher wishes to demonstrate the phones they used to have, and asks the students to guess why they were called smartphones. They laugh at the primitive people of the past, but one boy, Kanokki, has an idea. He askes what if the smartphone was called so because it had some very strong power that could be used. The other kids laugh at him, but the robot teacher takes this to be a command to try and find what the super power is.
Later on that day, we see the committee of robot elders plundering over the smartphone, with one of the robots, robot J, saying that perhaps it was something in the content that made them smart, and not the hardware or software running in it. Robot Z is assigned to connect them to the internet where they check and find that most of the material is porn or violence, or both.
They struggle to understand what's happening and bring it to the kids, who are shocked and blushing at what they see. But the automatic feeding system calms everyone down and in the next scene they are examining together in class a porn movie from the 1970's and trying to understand the narrative.
A girl in the class says that she thinks they have to know how it was at that time in order to reconstruct what this was all about. The teacher hears this and again mistakes it for a command to reconstruct the past, which he brings to the committee.
The next day they learn about books, and are shown an ancient library which has been carefully preserved. It is said to be a place of holiness from former religions, and religion along with other belief systems such as physics are briefly explained to the class.
In the next scene, Kanokki is being bullied by his classmates. His books are on the floor and the boy is in the garbage bin, with his newly made glasses broken. Who's idea was this he asks the teacher who answers: Yours. The teacher tries to take the smartphone away from the boy but he refuses to give it up.
Cut to the robots convention in the teacher's room. Robot J is thinking aloud. Perhaps this is a good thing, he says. Maybe the Smartphones were called so because they assisted in getting over aggression, or controlling it. They decide to continue the experiment but need to bring the human adults up to date about what is happening at school.
Kanokki's father Sitbull, is watching a violent porn movie and calls up the teacher saying he found a vital clue. Before watching he had to confirm that he's an adult. But it seems that the kids had been lying and confirming their supoosed adulthood. The robots, upon receiving this new information, realize that "smart" is used to teach the young ones how to overcome obstacles. They decide to change society for the better and the movie ends with a regular epocalipse dressup where Kanokki and his father Sitbull are dressed in American Indian feathers and tar stripes on their forhead and face, with the beautiful park in background which we had been watching throughout the movie is now being burnt down.
The End.-- pashute, Jan 02 2022 Interesting idea, a group written comedy, but want to get us started with the first joke?-- doctorremulac3, Jan 02 2022 A robot propelled itself into a bar...-- pocmloc, Jan 02 2022 Men Are Different by Alan Bloch
I'm an archaeologist, and Men are my business. Just the same, I wonder if we'll ever find out about Men - I mean really find out what made Men different from us Robots - by digging around on the dead planets. You see, I lived with a Man once, and I know it isn't as simple as they told us back in school. We have a few records, of course, and Robots like me are filling in some of the gaps, but I think now that we aren't really getting anywhere. We know, or at least the historians say we know, that Men came from a planet called Earth. We know, too, that they rode out bravely from star to star; and wherever they stopped, they left colonies - Men, Robots, and sometimes both - against their return. But they never came back. Those were the shining days of the world. But are we so old now? Men had a bright flame - the old word is "divine," I think - that flung them far across the night skies, and we have lost the strands of the web they wove. Our scientists tell us that Men were very much like us, and the skeleton of a Man is, to be sure, almost the same as the skeleton of a Robot, except that it's made of some calcium compound instead of titanium. Just the same, there are other differences. It was on my last field trip, to one of the inner planets, that I met the Man. He must have been the last Man in this system, and he'd forgotten how to talk - he'd been alone so long. Once he learned our language we got along fine together, and I planned to bring him back with me. Something happened to him, though. One day, for no reason at all, he complained of the heat. I checked his temperature and decided that his thermostat circuits were shot. I had a kit of field spares with me, and he was obviously out of order, so I went to work. I turned him off without any trouble. I pushed the needle into his neck to operate the cut-off switch, and he stopped moving, just like a Robot. But when I opened him up he wasn't the same inside. And when I put him back together I couldn't get him running again. Then he sort of weathered away - and by the time I was ready to come home, about a year later, there was nothing left of him but bones. Yes, Men are indeed different. -- zen_tom, Jan 02 2022 8th of 7, the movie...-- RayfordSteele, Jan 02 2022 First you said there were no more wars and then you said there were warlord religions…?
So why would they need special training for survival?
Maybe the robots got mixed up.-- xandram, Jan 02 2022 ...and he'd have gotten away with it too if it weren't for you pesky kids.-- 2 fries shy of a happy meal, Jan 02 2022 //...and he'd have gotten away with it too if it weren't for you pesky kids.//
LOL. Bravo.-- doctorremulac3, Jan 02 2022 BUT, I do remember a time when we (hb)ers did write stories, when one person left off and then other continued. Must have been allowed under the guise of something else…-- xandram, Jan 02 2022 //not because of any "robotic unrest" // simple misunderstanding of words in the way that machine translation sometimes gets things awfully wrong//
So in essence it's really just the old 'grey goo' scenario gussied up.
Not that that's meant as a criticism, a truly novel idea is hard to come by these days.
Too many buggers that could think came before us :)-- Skewed, Jan 03 2022 Here's a story that would be pretty easy to serialize by adding additional chapters. When me and my cousin were about 8 years old during Halloween we were telling scary stories to all the other kids in the room with the lights off holding the flashlight under our faces. This was his story and no, I'm not making this up.
"Once there was a mad head chopper. There was a guy standing on the street corner and the chopper CHOPPED OFF HIS HEAD! The head rolled and rolled and rolled and rolled, it rolled by the gas station! SHWOOOSH! It rolled and rolled and rolled and rolled, it rolled by the grocery store! SWOOOSH! It rolled and rolled and rolled and rolled, it rolled by the school! SWOOSH! It rolled and rolled and rolled and rolled it rolled onto the freeway! SWOOSH!"
I don't remember where it ended up, I think I grabbed the flashlight at some point. Although he was just making fun of the concept of telling scary stories, I will hand it to him, he really acted it out with the scary voice and saying "SWOOSH!" really loud twisting his head as if watching the head roll by. Anyway, feel free to continue that scary story. Pretty easy formula to follow.-- doctorremulac3, Jan 03 2022 //I don't remember where it ended up//
It's behind you.-- pertinax, Jan 03 2022 Heyyyyyy, that's actually pretty good.
No, that's VERY good. You tell that story, lull everybody into a state of comatose boredom then yell and point "IT'S BEHIND YOU!"
Okay, so you wouldn't tell it the way my cousin did, you'd whisper it. "it slowly rolled and rolled and rolled, da-dunk-da-dunk-da-dunk... by the graveyard... it slowly rolled and rolled, da-dunk-da-dunk-da-dunk, onto (whatever the name of the street is where you're telling the story) it rolled and rolled... and... rolled... to... a... stop... (then yell) DIRECTLY BEHIND YOU!!!!!!"
As you said it "rolled...to...a.......stop" you'd whisper quieter and quieter so they could barely hear you to draw the listener in. Then you do the screaming in their face thing.-- doctorremulac3, Jan 03 2022 I don't think I meant what I think I meant that to mean. (Rebbi Mendel of Trulov, the Patenkinner Rebbe)
I have not seen a sci-fi movie where everything goes wrong because of a lexical misunderstanding. And that can only happen where computer programs and bugs have been replaced with natural language processing and polysemic (and antisemic) words.-- pashute, Jan 06 2022 //lexical misunderstanding//
You mean like not knowing what lexical means? Because I did that without needing a computer.-- doctorremulac3, Jan 06 2022 I mean like not understanding what "lexical misunderstanding" is.
Taking note of Alan Bloch's story I realized that I did not emphasize that the misunderstanding was part of the "programming" conversation just like a bug must be a mistake in the computer program, so even though Bloch's story is great and original, the misunderstanding of the word heat and the misunderstanding of the internals of the human are not the kind of story I had in mind.
Alan Bloch (btw is that his pen name? couldn't find info about an author by that name) never explains how the new programming works with natural language.
Granted, I forgot to mention it in the title, thought it obvious, which it obviously is not. The archaeologist must tell about computer programs and how they were replaced with us, self programming "understanding" robots that break up the sentences into linguistic components and then attempt at understanding them. And so we created an atomic bomb in 2 days, when what was needed was a hot topic bound to today's main item.
OK. I'll stop arguing. Bloch's heat isn't all that different and maybe what I thought was an idea is a bit stale. I stale it from Bloch.-- pashute, Jan 06 2022 //I mean like not understanding what "lexical misunderstanding" is.//
Since I don't know what lexical means I don't understand what a lexical misunderstanding is either.
//OK. I'll stop arguing.//
I didn't even know you were arguing. Was I arguing? I'd have to argue that I wasn't.-- doctorremulac3, Jan 06 2022 //And that can only happen where computer programs and bugs have been replaced with natural language processing//
[I think that comment was aimed at something [doc] said rather than my comment? but what the heck, my comment could do with some clarification anyway]
Which is perforce built on top of (& by, no one 'codes' something like this, they design learning algorithms & set them loose) the computer programs, most likely through the agency of goal oriented AI learning reward functions, precisely the things (in collaboration with the laws of unintended consequences) behind most of the old standard grey goo scenarios.
The //computer programs and bugs// won't have been //replaced// they'll still be very much there underneath the new language comprehension programs.
So we're back to me saying it's essentially the old grey goo gussied up a bit.
But it was long past due a facelift & some lipstick slapped on it anyway :)-- Skewed, Jan 07 2022 Is only difference between an idea, short story, novel and film is LOD and number of perspectives?
B grade movies do have a consistent following because it is really hard to make a complete stinker without a facet of appeal.-- wjt, Jan 07 2022 I think I appologized already. Checking... yup.
This was a very bad idea. But then you say it wasn't an idea at all. So then it wasn't that bad, was it?-- pashute, Jan 25 2022 OK I edited the idea, hopefully turning it into one. I'll change it's name into version II-- pashute, Jan 25 2022 I really hate science fiction stories that end with a complete reset to the old ways with nothing new retained. The good thing about a good fiction is its kernel of truth, and that kind of ending is VERY untrue.-- Voice, Feb 02 2022 random, halfbakery