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Article by Alpha-Girl
Lisa Fary's earliest influences are Princess Leia, Rainbow Bright, Astronaut Barbie, and her 6th grade teacher, Ms. Palmer. She's angry that it's 2011 and she still doesn't have a hovercraft, but will accept a jetpack as consolation. That jetpack had better be pink with a rhinestone monogram. 15 Comments
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So science fiction + tv + popularity = star trek = crap. Got it!
Of course! How else can we explain Nemesis?
[laughing] I’m happy we’re on the same page on this one.
If they do end up doing the Star Trek Pinnochio plot with Cameron, I’m going to be very upset. I liked what the actress said a year ago about “I think it’s more interesting to explore my character’s inhumanity than her humanity, because she doesn’t have any humanity.” I like to think that she had at least an inkling of what the producers were up to when she said that. As such I’d like to think her emerging emotions are part of a larger plot, and presumably a scam on the part of the Terminators, rather than an emerging Blue Fairy in the programming.
@ Hoobajoobah: I disagree with you on this one, only because the whole point of making a robot a character is to explore its humanity. Creating a character implies that the character has, well, a CHARACTER, which can only happen with human traits. There are plenty of robots in sci-fi without human characteristics, but they are either boring, like the “Terminatrix” (which you yourself called bland), or they’re non-main characters who could care less about human beings, like the old Cylons on BSG. It would be impossible to have an interesting robotic character WITHOUT giving it some humanity, and that usually comes in either human “programming” or an evolved desire to be human. The movie “AI” was intersting to me, because while the AI in question was programmed to love, and programmed to have human reactions to things, we never saw it in a “non-human” state. We were only given access to its humanity, which is why we feel so sorry for him, and why his story can carry a movie.
I don’t know what it is in Cameron’s case yet, but it’s one of those, and that’s why she’s so interesting. The most poignant scene of hers, to me, was when she was dancing ballet – something that a machine isn’t supposed to be able to do with so much feeling. Here we have a terminator appreciating art. That’s a big deal.
@ Alpha-Girl: I LOVE the word gynoid. And I never would’ve thought that the word android should only apply to male robots until you used this word.
Oh, no, the old-school cylons from the ’78 show had personality. We saw the chrome ones express fear (“Oh no!”, “Uh-oh!” etc.), we heard about them grumbling about throwing their lives away needlessly. We saw them express shock – not confusion, but shock – and that’s just the Centurions. The IL series models we saw (Lucifer and Spektre) were very machiavellian and speculative, entirely geared towards their own advancement with the least exposed risk. They lied, cheated, schemed. The Imperious Leader himself (Both of the ones we saw in the show) showed anger, frustration, petulance, and even a bit of pretention. And then there were the civilian cylons that we only got a glimpse of, but seemed to act more or less like people would in similar situations.
A bit of dialog from the show that always jumped out at me:
Lucifer: What you request will be very hard on our pilots.
Baltar: What do you mean ‘hard’ on them? They’re machines, they’ll do what they’re told.
Lucifer: They will do what they’re told, but we are all machines, Baltar, even you. You are simply a machine of a different kind.
I *Love* that!
I respectfully disagree about the point of AIs being to ‘explore their humanity.’ I think that’s what they’re commonly used for, but I think that’s a copout. There’s no reason to assume that just because an alien or a machine looks human, it thinks or acts like a human. Particularly when it comes to machines, since our thinking is remarkably inefficient on a lot of levels. I think machines can be sentient, but think *differently* that we do.
Wasn’t that the old pulp definition of SF? “Give me something that thinks as well as a man, but differently…”