Oddities spotted in the news

[robkelk]

An opinion piece:

The Register: Could an AI android live forever? What, like your other IT devices? You'd be lucky if it survives until next Thursday

You may find sci-fi childish and irritating already but I find this particular sci-fi trope particularly annoying: that androids, not being organic and therefore not destined to grow old and die, will live forever. Well-known examples such as Steven Spielberg's movie A.I. and Osamu Tezuka's manga Mighty Atom centre on this essentially daft conceit, allowing the authors to explore the emotional and psychological aspects of a self-aware computer inside a humanoid-styled vehicle outlasting its creators and possibly the human race itself.

I would like to invite fantasy authors and screenwriters – not Tezuka or Asimov, they're dead – to take a peek at the electronics at the back of my bottom drawer.

I go snowboarding and break a shoulder; a nurse helps reset it and, within days, the bones have already begun happily knitting themselves back together long before I get bored of watching Homes Under The Hammer. An android breaks its shoulder and an army of engineers have to retool spare parts in a purpose-built factory in South Korea before shipping them out with a team of skilled technicians to rebuild the shoulder, run exhaustive tests, tweak the performance as necessary, and make themselves sick one evening by trying to eat hamburgers "like the locals".

Treat your androids like that creepy bearded fat guy in Ex Machina and they'd be broken all the time.

No wonder Ghost In The Shell's Major Kusanagi spends half the time in the repair shop (i.e. hospital) getting something or other fixed, replaced or upgraded. It's a painfully recurrent story theme throughout the GITS manga, anime and even that recent live-action movie that suggests to me that author Masamune Shirow probably has a bottom drawer full of old earphones too.