Some of Gibson’s most fascinating comments were about how our era would be thought about by people in the far future. If the Victorians are known for their denial of the reality of sex, Gibson said, we will be known for our odd fixation with distinguishing real from virtual reality. This comment resonated with me on many different levels. Just a couple weeks before, I had lunch with Craig Mundie, the head of Microsoft Research, prior to a talk he gave at Northwestern. He told us about some new directions they are taking one of their hottest products, the Kinect. The Kinect is a camera for the Xbox gaming system that can see things in 3D. One of their new endeavors with this camera is to allow you to create 3D avatars that move and talk as you are in real time, so you can have very realistic virtual meet-ups. This is now available on the Xbox as Avatar Kinect. The second direction is the real time generation of 3D models of the world around you as you sweep the Kinect around by hand, called Kinect Fusion. With this model of the world around you, you can start to meld real and virtual in some very fun ways. In one of his demos, Mundie waved a Kinect around a clay vase on a nearby table. We instantly got an accurate 3D model up on the screen – exciting and impressive from a $150 gizmo. I’ve had to create 3D models of stuff in my own research, and that’s involved hardware about 100 times more expensive. Even more impressive, Mundie next had the projected image of the 3D model of the vase start to spin, then stuck his hands out in front of the Kinect and used movements of his hand to sculpt it, potter-like. It was wild. All that was needed to complete the trip was a quick 3D print of the result. Further demos showed other ways in which the line between reality and virtuality was being blurred, and it all brought me back to the confluence of real and virtual worlds so well envisioned by the show I advised during its brief life, Caprica.

Gibson’s right. We haven’t yet moved beyond our need to identify what belongs to what when it comes to digital and physical worlds, so we constantly consecrate it with our language. Ironically, some of that very language was created by him: “cyberspace,” a word Gibson coined in his story “Burning Chrome” in 1982. During the conversation today, led by fellow faculty member and author Bill Savage, Gibson said he’s less interested in its rise than to see it die out. He sees its use as a hallmark of our distancing ourselves from who we are as mediated by computer technology. He thinks the term is starting to go out of use, and he’s happy about that — in his view, there’s no need for a word about a space that we are constantly moving through the coordinates of, as we do each time we go on to twitter, facebook, google+, and other digital extensions of self. It’s not cyberspace anymore: it’s our space.

It seemed inevitable that a question about The Singularity would be put to Gibson in the Q&A. Sure enough, it was the final note, and Gibson dispatched it with typical incisiveness. The Singularity, he said, is the Geek Rapture. The world will not change in that way. Like our gradual entrance into cyberspace, now complete enough that marking this world with a separate term seems quaint, Gibson said we will eventually find ourselves sitting on the other side of a whole bunch of cool hardware. But, he feels our belief that it will be a sudden, quasi-religious transformation (perhaps with Cylon guns blazing?) is positively 4th century in its thinking.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes

In the film, we see over and over that it is not Caesar’s enhancement that causes problems. In fact, Caesar’s enhancement makes him the most moral and wisest person on the screen. The failure of those around him – from the cruel ape sanctuary caretakers to Caesar’s own father figure, Will Rodman – drive him to do what must be done: rebel.

So what am I saying here? That humans are bad and apes are good? Not at all. My argument is that in many science fiction films, we tend to question the ethics of the science itself and the ethics of pursuing that science. That is, there is a difference between saying “should science try to do X?” and “how can we study X in an ethical manner?” In the case of Rise of the Planet of the Apes, James Franco noted that someone might claim that “This is a Frankenstein story, or that you’re playing God.” But that mindset questions the pursuit of science in general, not how one can pursue a hypothesis ethically. It is how we experiment and what we do with the scientific results that matter. In the case of Caesar, humanity utterly fails to care for the mind that enhancement has created. Dana Stevens at Slate aptly described the film as “an animal-rights manifesto disguised as a prison-break movie.” And as with most prison-break movies, we’re on the side of the prisoners, not the warden, for a reason.

I argue that Caesar’s enhancement and that Caesar himself are ethical, but that the treatment of Caesar by every non-ape in the film (save Charles) is unethical and based on fear, arrogance, willful ignorance, and naiveté. Yes, that means that not only are the obvious villains in the wrong, but so are the other humans in Caesar’s life.

Word of warning: spoilers below.

To address my claim, we must first investigate whether or not enhancement itself harmed Caesar’s ability to be ethical. In the film, Caesar has a happy and inquisitive disposition. He likes exploring, solving puzzles, playing chess, and reading. Fast-forward to the revolution. Caesar directs his troops through the city, but not with the intent to cause mayhem and destruction and with express direction not to slaughter or maim. On multiple occasions, Caesar prevents wanton killing and only against Jacobs, the film’s ethically-bankrupt capitalist, does Caesar authorize death. Caesar’s goal is freedom, not revenge. So we are presented with a person, Caesar, who becomes more moral as his intelligence increases and his enhancement takes hold. He opposes killing and his primary goal for himself and his fellow apes is escape, not conquest. One struggles to make the case that a person who is unjustly imprisoned and abused does not have a right to seek liberation. I think we can make the case that Caesar’s behavior can be deemed ethical and, within the context of his treatment in the film, reasonable.

But how can this be? What sort of treatment would render Caesar’s rebellion justifiable?

Where to start? There are some obvious villains. Steven Jacobs (David Oyelowo) is the Big Pharma CEO who pushes for accelerated drug testing and the sacrifice of the chimps all in the name of profits. Jacobs is crafted to be hated. He knows that ALZ-112 might cure Alzheimer’s, but his need for return on investment leads him to kill the program. Only when there is evidence of intelligence increasing properties of the drug does Jacobs come around and reauthorize testing. I must admit, I was shocked by the idea that intelligence enhancing drugs equaled a paycheck in the mind of Jacobs, given the potential resistance to such a technology. But I digress. The point is that Jacobs is ultimately arrogant and uncaring about the animals upon the backs of which he makes his living, but he does little to impact Caesar’s life.

So is it the caretakers at the ape sanctuary? Brian Cox and Tom Felton are cruel and stupid, no doubt. That they have the backing of a faceless uncaring government bureaucracy does little to shock me. Somewhere in the world, there is an ape sanctuary that looks far too much like the one in this film. For every ape in the sanctuary, including Caesar, the caretakers are the second villains in their lives: the first are the original people who were raising each ape. In Caesar’s case, these men are not the instigators of the problem, but the catalyst for Caesar’s final rejection of humanity. The caretakers grind salt into the wound, but they did not make the first cut.

So who did first wound Caesar? I would argue that the main antagonist is not the cruel “caretakers” in the ape sanctuary, nor is it the Big Pharma CEO Steven Jacobs. Instead, I believe that James Franco’s character, Will Rodman, is ultimately responsible for forcing Caesar to rebel. Will Rodman is a mad scientist with a heart of gold. He makes a series of decisions no proper scientist would or should ever make: he brings a chimp that has been experimented on home and he tests his experimental drug on his father. This behavior is not that of a lucid person trying to do right, but of a lunatic lurching wildly towards love through every barrier that ethics and logic might erect. Will Rodman’s decision to test ALZ-112 on his father, Charles (Lithgow), is an almost unbelievable transgression. Yes, Will’s action comes from a place of love and concern for his father, but his recklessness only provides momentary relief from the horrors of Alzheimer’s before the drug fails and Charles experiences a brutal regression on par with that of his obvious namesake, Charlie, in Flowers for Algernon.

For Caesar, Will’s inability to pursue science ethically has the most horrible consequences. Of all the people in the film, Will should have known better than to provide a nurturing and loving environment limited enough to ensure Caesar’s intelligence is insufficiently stimulated, his knowledge of human norms and society stunted, and that any mistake will result in his improper imprisoning with fellow apes. Will also fails to recognize the incredible degree Caesar’s intelligence and, as a result, treats Caesar as an animal, not as a person with an IQ beyond that of most humans. At one point, Freida Pinto’s character, primatologist Caroline Aranha, says “You are trying to control things that are not meant to be controlled.” She is talking about Will’s attempts to cure Alzheimer’s and developing a drug to improve and fix the brain. Caroline is worried about trying to control nature. However, the fact that Will believes Caesar needs a leash, even into adulthood, is a better target for her critique. One does not leash a fellow person, one explains to and reasons with a fellow person. Will should not be trying to control Caesar. Will is arrogant and willfully ignorant, Caroline is naive and fearful, both fail Caesar. Just as with Frankenstein’s monster, the failure is not with the creation but with the creator.

Both Dr. Frankenstein and Franco’s Will Rodman utterly fail to protect or properly nurture their creations. In both cases, a single act of violence is sufficient for the creator to disown and abandon the creation to fend for itself. What was Caesar’s crime? Defending an Alzheimer’s sufferer, Charles, from an angry jerk of a neighbor. But since Caesar is an animal, he has no rights or recourse. Caesar is locked away with hardly a goodbye in the equivalent of a hardcore prison after his first misunderstanding with a culture that is alien and confusing. Trapped in a frightening and brutal environment, abandoned without sufficient explanation by the only father he’d ever known, and with a mind capable of comprehending the injustices against him, Caesar’s rebellion is a logical conclusion. Exposing his fellow apes to the more aggressive Alzheimer’s/brain-repair drug ALZ-113 is the application of enhancement as a tool of liberation. Caesar’s first word, “No!” is the animal equivalent of the Declaration of Independence.

Caesar and his ape rebellion do not rampage or seek revenge. Rise of the Planet of the Apes is not simply a story about how apes came to be intelligent. That’s only half of the story. The other half is the failure of humans, the failure of those closest to the apes, to recognize the new brilliant minds that had been created and to care for those new persons. Intelligent persons have a right to freedom and self-determination. Enhancement enables liberty. Simply being the result of an experimental new treatment does not take away one’s personhood or right to justice. If that justice and freedom is not provided, it must be taken. Rise of the Planet of the Apes is a film that strives to show the humanity in our closest evolutionary cousins and the resulting tragedy of our inhumanity towards them.

For more on Rise of the Planet of the Apes, check out my interviews with James Franco, Andy Serkis, and director Rupert Wyatt.

Follow Kyle on his personal blog, Pop Bioethics, and on facebook and twitter.

Promotional Images via Rise of the Planet of the Apes Trailer

Rise of the Planet of the Apes caught me off guard. I went into the film thinking it would be another anti-enhancement, “All scientists are Frankenstein’s trying to cheat nature” film. I have rarely been so happy to be wrong. Instead, the film treats the viewer to an entertaining exploration of animal rights, what it means to be human, and what’s at stake when it comes to enhancing our minds.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes is told from the perspective of Caesar (Andy Serkis), a chimp who is exposed to an anti-Alzheimer’s drug, ALZ-112, in the womb. ALZ-112 causes Caesar’s already healthy brain to develop more rapidly than either a chimp or human counterpart. Due to a series of implausible but not unbelievable events, Caesar is raised by Will Rodman (James Franco), the scientist developing ALZ-112. Rodman is in part driven the desire to cure his father, Charles, (played masterfully by John Lithgow) who suffers from Alzheimer’s. As Caesar develops, his place in Will’s home becomes uncertain and his loyalty to humanity is called into question. After being mistreated, abandoned, and abused, Caesar uses his enhanced intelligence as a tool of self-defense and liberation for himself and his fellow apes.

That cognitive enhancement is a way of seeking liberty is a critical theme that gives Rise of the Apes a nuance and depth I was not anticipating. Though the apes are at times frightening, they are never monstrous or mindless. Though they are at time’s violent, they are never barbaric. Caesar and his comrades are oppressed and imprisoned – enhancement is a means to freedom. There is less Frankenstein and more Flowers for Algernon in the film than the trailer lets on. It’s an action film with a brain.

As Rise of the Planet of the Apes is not out yet, I’m reluctant to do a full analysis of the implications of the film’s plot. That will have to come after August 5th, when the movie releases.

I had a chance to interview Andy Serkis, James Franco, and director Rupert Wyatt. The interviews are posted after the jump, where you can see how James Franco was caught off guard by my questions about cognitive enhancement, Rupert Wyatt explores the way in which the apes mirror humanity, and Andy Serkis describes enhancement as a tool of liberation. It’s good stuff, enjoy.

These interviews are edited, but I will say I am mighty impressed by the thought and honesty all three put into there answers. If Rise of the Planet of the Apes is the beginning of a new series, I for one am excited by the potential for complexity and exploration of humanity and enhancement in the coming films.

For any medical research to be considered ethical it must adhere to basic standards. A global standard for medical ethics is the Declaration of Helsinki. Devised and published by the World Medical Association in 1964, the Declaration of Helsinki is a guiding framework for all medical research involving human beings. It has been revised over the years to meet modern needs, with the most recent and 6th revision being published in 2008. There are three points of the Declaration that appeal directly to the type of experimentation done to create Captain America. They are:

#6. In medical research involving human subjects, the well-being of the individual research subject must take precedence over all other interests.

#8. In medical practice and in medical research, most interventions involve risks and burdens.

#9. Medical research is subject to ethical standards that promote respect for all human subjects and protect their health and rights. Some research populations are particularly vulnerable and need special protection. These include those who cannot give or refuse consent for themselves and those who may be vulnerable to coercion or undue influence.

Can you really say with confidence that General Chester Phillips had Rogers’ best interests in mind, that Rogers’ wasn’t under any sort of coercion (coughpropagandacough), and that the good ‘ol US-of-A wasn’t bending some rules to build a better soldier?

Let’s take each of these points from the Declaration of Helsinki in turn.

#6. In medical research involving human subjects, the well-being of the individual research subject must take precedence over all other interests.

Steve Rogers before the experiment is scrawny, yes. But unwell? By no means. As with all heroes, Rogers’ induction into the army is a mixed story with multiple versions declaring different things. The general story, however, is that Rogers was healthy but unfit for military service. Too short, scrawny, and weak to serve. So in terms of general health, Rogers has everything to lose and nothing to gain from the experiment.

However, Rogers is, before the treatment, a poor specimen of a human being. He is clearly not confident, nor happy with his physical ability. Furthermore, he is unable to pursue his life as he sees fit. He wants to join the military and is disallowed because of his biology. Thus, we could argue a second way of defining well-being in a more holistic fashion.

By the holistic well-being criterion, Rogers would be benefiting from improved physical condition which would enable him to pursue more courses in his life as well as achieve his goal of supporting the US war effort against the Third Riech. Therefore, as General Phillips is giving Rogers an option he wouldn’t otherwise have, we could argue that he is providing Rogers with an opportunity to improve his well-being.

The catch is that the Declaration says Rogers well-being should take precedent over all other interests, not merely that it should be improved. It seems that Rogers’ interests are the interests of the US government and those conducting the super-soldier experiment. So everything should be dandy, right . . . Right? More on that in a moment.

#8. In medical practice and in medical research, most interventions involve risks and burdens.

Goes without saying. Everything has risks. The ethical issue here is that the patient understands, clearly, just what risks are involved. Given that Rogers was in the process of signing up to get shot at by Nazis, I think we can presume he was OK with the additional risks posed by the super-soldier experiment. From everything I’ve read, it seems that the General explained the research, its experimental nature, and the risks involved to Rogers before even offering it to the scrawny would-be soldier. If that’s the case, the super-solider experiment passes point #8.

#9. Medical research is subject to ethical standards that promote respect for all human subjects and protect their health and rights. Some research populations are particularly vulnerable and need special protection. These include those who cannot give or refuse consent for themselves and those who may be vulnerable to coercion or undue influence.

Ah, we come to the point. So Rogers has the same interests as the US government – convenient, that. I’m honestly torn on this one.

Here you have a young man whose country in the midst of a World War, churning out hyper-patriotic propaganda and defining masculinity through a helmet and a gun. Though the coercion isn’t direct, the overwhelming influence of the war effort could be construed as undue. It’s hard to not see the nationwide war effort as anything but an inappropriately and dangerously coercive influence on Rogers’ decision to go through with the super-soldier experiment. Are his interests in line with the US government’s because he’s been mesmerized by all the flag waving?

Not so fast. One could also argue that Steve Rogers is a consenting adult who was 1) not drafted, 2) attempted to enlist multiple times, and 3) desired to defeat the Third Reich based on factual information (i.e. they were horrible). Furthermore, the General didn’t conscript him, but instead sent Rogers through a series of tests after which Rogers was allowed to volunteer for the test if he so desired. Every step Rogers took toward the experiment was his own. Sure, signing up for the military could be the result of patriotic coercion, but it’s unlikely to cause a man to do everything and anything in the face of repeated refusals to enlist.

Steve Rogers’ best interests and well-being were in mind when he signed up for the experiment, he was aware of the risks, and his consent was as uncoerced as one could realistically hope. Is this a grey area? Certainly. The experiment was rushed, generally untested, and had no precedent in previous medicine. Was it necessary to win the war? Probably not. But, by and large, I’m a consequentialist and a utilitarian. Rogers knew what he was getting into and how massive the risks were. Things worked out. He got what he wanted. Lots and lots of people benefited, perhaps Rogers most of all.

By the yardstick of consequentialism and the Declaration of Helsinki, the super-soldier experiment and Steve Rogers’ enlistment in the military were ethical. But just barely.

Promotional Image of Captain America via Marvel.com

Do you ever worry that Steve Rogers (aka Captain America) wasn’t really giving informed consent when he agreed to become enhanced? Or are curious as to why someone might choose a bionic hand over a real one? The awesome Maggie Koerth-Baker of boingboing.net and I had some of the same questions. We chat about the ethics of superheroes and our perception of science in this week’s Science Saturday on bloggingheads.tv. Enjoy!

I love Pixar. Who doesn’t? The stories are magnificently crafted, the characters are rich, hilarious, and unique, and the images are lovingly rendered. Without fail, John Ratzenberger’s iconic voice makes a cameo in some boisterous character. Even if you haven’t seen every film they’ve made (I refuse to watch Cars or its preposterous sequel), there is a consistency and quality to Pixar’s productions that is hard to deny.

Popular culture is often dismissed as empty “popcorn” fare. Animated films find themselves doubly-dismissed as “for the kids” and therefore nothing to take too seriously. Pixar has shattered those expectations by producing commercially successful cinematic art about the fishes in our fish tanks and the bugs in our backyards. Pixar films contain a complex, nuanced, philosophical and political essence that, when viewed across the company’s complete corpus, begins to emerge with some clarity.

Buried within that constant  and complex goodness is a hidden message.

Now, this is not your standard “Disney movies hide double-entendres and sex imagery in every film” hidden message. “So,” you ask, incredulous, “What could one of the most beloved and respected teams of filmmakers in our generation possibly be hiding from us?” Before you dismiss my claim, consider what is at stake. Hundreds of millions of people have watched Pixar films. Many of those watchers are children who are forming their understanding of the world. The way in which an entire generation sees life and reality is being shaped, in part, by Pixar.

What if I told you they were preparing us for the future? What if I told you Pixar’s films will affect how we define the rights of millions, perhaps billions, in the coming century? Only by analyzing the collection as a whole can we see the subliminal concept being drilled into our collective mind. I have uncovered the skeleton key deciphering the hidden message contained within the Pixar canon. Let’s unlock it.

Before we begin, I ask you to watch the video below. Leandro Copperfield stitched together this seven minute tribute to “The Beauty of Pixar.” Full screen. HD. I dare you to not be moved.

People love these films. They are a part of our lives and of our culture. Pixar has artfully built a universe of beloved critters and beings that populate our popular consciousness. The analysis that follows is in the spirit of reverence and respect for the great contribution Pixar has made to our world.

To understand Pixar films, one must first to go back to Disney before Toy Story was released – to be precise, The Lion King. On top of being my favorite Shakespeare adaptation, The Lion King is the only Disney film to date with zero references to the existence of human beings. Disney and Pixar rarely have humans as the sole intelligent entities in their movies. Excluding plots requiring magic, non-human characters in Disney films are either anthropomorphous animals (e.g. walking upright, wearing clothes, drinkin’ out of cups) that take the place of humans (e.g. Robin Hood or The Rescuers) or are animals with a preternatural awareness of and ability to interact with feral human beings (e.g. The Jungle Book or Tarzan). The Lion King stands out in that the universe is animal only. There is no trash on the Serengeti, no airplanes flying over, no animals in hats or walking unnaturally on hind legs. You can’t even date when the story takes place, because there are no human references from which to calculate an approximation. Save for the fact that Zazu knows “I’ve Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts,” there is no evidence that the characters within The Lion King even know humans exist.

The Lion King gives us a clean slate. We know what a non-human world looks like. Now we can tackle how Pixar handles people.

The relationship between humans and the non-human characters is critical to understanding Pixar’s movies. There are certain rules in Pixar movies that make things far more interesting than the average Disney fairy tale. The first is that there is no magic. No problems are caused or fixed by the wave of a wand. Second, every Pixar film happens in the world of human beings (see why I excluded Cars? It’s ridiculous and out of character for Pixar). Even in films like a A Bug’s Life and Finding Nemo, in which humans only exist as backdrops for the action, humanity’s presence in the story is essential. The first two rules are pretty direct: the universe Pixar’s characters inhabit is non-magical and co-inhabited by humans.

The third rule is that at least one main character is an intelligent being that isn’t a human. This rule is a bit complex, so let’s flesh it out. There are two types human roles in Pixar films. The first is Human as Villain. In films like the Toy Story 1, 2, & 3, A Bug’s Life, and Finding Nemo, the protagonists are all non-human. Ancillary characters like Sid, the Collector, and Darla are not main characters. A more accurate description would be that they are pieces of the environment and, on occasion, playing the role of supporting antagonist. The second type of Pixar film is Human as Partner. In these films, the main character befriends a human being as part of the hero’s journey: Remy, Colette, and Linguini; WALL-E, EVE, Mary and John; Sully, Mike, and Boo; Russell, Carl, Kevin and Dug. These are the heroic teams of their respective films.

In each Pixar film, at least one member of the team is human and at least one member is not human but possesses human levels of intelligence.

You can see where I’m going here. Particularly in WALL•E, Ratatouille and Up! there is no ambiguity about the reality of intelligence in the non-human characters. Each Pixar film asks us to accept one deviation from our reality. While it seems like the deviation is different in every case (e.g. monsters are real, robots can fall in love, fish have a sense of family, Kevin is a girl, a rat can cook), the simple fact is that Pixar only asks us to accept one idea over and over and over again:

Non-humans are sentient beings. That is the central difference between Pixar’s universe and our current reality.

That idea alone would suffice to show that Pixar films are all but propaganda for the concept of non-human personhood. But that is where the hidden message begins.

What makes these films so astonishing and the message so powerful is the story arc of the Human as Partner narrative. The story begins with a non-human living among a familiar setting. Be it WALL-E alone among the garbage, Remy with his massive extended family, or Sully and Mike Wazowski on their way to work, we are introduced to the hero in relative normalcy. Yet each of these characters deviate from their fellow non-humans. Remy wants to cook. WALL-E falls in love. In each case, the deviant non-human is ostracized. Dug is laughed at for his ineptitude and Sully and Mike are banished to live with the Abominable Agreeable Snowman.

In being ostracized, however, the non-human encounters a human. Remy, lost in the kitchen, meets Linguini. Kevin and Dug both partner up with Carl and Russell. The deviant behavior acts as a catalyst for the first interaction. Furthermore, the human is also deviant. Boo is not afraid of monsters. John and Mary (the two people who help WALL-E and EVE) get out of their hover chairs and look away from the screens. Carl escapes the old folks home with a balloon-house airship. A team is formed when the mutual outsiders recognize a shared sense of purpose. Human and non-human rebels alike seek out each other. In combining efforts, however, the team doubles their opposition, with the non-human and human normative majorities rejecting and condemning their behavior. Remy is criticized by his father and alienates his friends while Linguini loses the respect of the entire kitchen and is at risk of having the restaurant closed for health violations. There is a high cost for non-conformity.

The new is seen as dangerous and therefore feared. Pixar’s Human as Partner films emphasize that should a non-human intelligence arise, be it a rat or a robot or a monstrous alien, there will be no welcoming with arms wide open from either side.

Victory in the battle for the rights and respect from both groups will come from an act of exemplary personhood and humaneness by those who dare to break ranks with their kind. Thus, the Human as Partner story arc ends with the capitulation of those who refused to recognize the personhood of the non-human and a huge reward coming to those who accepted the non-humans as fellow persons. In Monsters Inc. Mike and Sully discover that laughter yields far more energy than screams. In Ratatouille Anton Ego has an epiphany and gives one of my favorite speeches of all time in response to a Proustian flashback he experiences after eating Remy’s cooking. In WALL•E none less than the human race is saved from the brink of self-induced-extinction. In short, the benefits for humanity are tremendous in every case where non-human persons are treated with respect.

There is one Pixar film that does not fit either the Humans as Villains or Humans as Partner structure: The Incredibles. Instead of non-human protagonists, we are treated to super-human protagonists and antagonists. Yet the struggle from outcast to redeemer is the same, only this time, it is because the super-humans come together as a family. What enables the Incredible family to succeed is not that they are superhuman but that they are humane; that they love, support, and protect one another. As a result, the society that once feared and banished them sees the supers not as Others, but has fellow members of humanity.

Taken together as a whole narrative, the Pixar canon diagrams what will likely this century’s main rights battle – the rights of personhood – in three stages.

First are the Humans as Villain stories, in which the non-humans discover and develop personhood. I mean, Buzz Lightyear’s character arc is about his becoming self-aware as a toy. These films represent nascent personhood among non-human entities. For the viewer, we begin to see how some animals and items we see as mindless may have inner lives of which we are unaware.

Second are the Humans as Partners stories, in which exceptional non-humans and exceptional humans share a moment of mutual recognition of personhood. The moment when Linguini realizes Remy is answering him is second only to the moment when Remy shows Ego around the kitchen – such beautiful transformations of the Other into the self. These films represent the first forays of non-human persons into seeking parity with human beings.

Third, and finally, there is The Incredibles, which turns the personhood equation on its head. Instead of portraying the struggle for non-humans to be accepted as human, The Incredibles shows how human enhancement, going beyond the human norm, will trigger equally strong reactions of revulsion and otherization. The message, however, is that the human traits we value have nothing to do with our physical powers but are instead based in our moral and emotional bonds. Beneficence and courage require far more humanity than raw might. The Incredibles teaches a striking lesson: human enhancement does not make you inhuman – the choices you make and the way you treat others determines how human you really are.

Pixar has given those who would fight for personhood the narratives necessary to convince the world that non-humans that display characteristics of a person deserve the rights of a person. For every category there is a character: uplifted animals (Dug), naturally intelligent species (Remy and Kevin), A.I robots (WALL-E, EVE), and alien/monsters (Sully & Mike). Then there is the Incredible family, transhumans with superpowers. Through the films, these otherwise strange entities become  unmistakably familiar, so clearly akin to us.

The message hidden inside Pixar’s magnificent films is this: humanity does not have a monopoly on personhood. In whatever form non- or super-human intelligence takes, it will need brave souls on both sides to defend what is right. If we can live up to this burden, humanity and the world we live in will be better for it.

An entire generation has been reared with the subconscious seeds of these ideas planted down deep. As history moves forward and technology with it, these issues will no longer be the imaginings of films and fiction, but of politics and policy. But Pixar has settled the personhood debate before it arrives. By watching our favorite films, we have been taught that being human is not the same as being a person. We have been shown that new persons and forms of personhood can come from anywhere. Through Pixar, we have opened ourselves to a better future.

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Image of Dug seeking a squirrel via The Pixar Podcast.com

The reason? Branagh leans heavily on the magi-tech rule of Arthur C. Clarke, which Natalie Portman’s character quotes in the film, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” So what is the difference between really-really advanced technology and actual magic? Sean Carroll, who did some science advising for the film, clears the idea up a bit:

Kevin Feige, president of production at Marvel Studios, is a huge proponent of having the world of these films ultimately “make sense.” It’s not ourworld, obviously, but there needs to be a set of “natural laws” that keeps things in order — not just for Iron Man and Thor, but all the way up to Doctor Strange, the Sorcerer Supreme who will get his own movie before too long.

In short, the Marvel universe is internally consistent, which makes me all the more excited for the Avengers film. Clarke’s rule of magical tech helps create some of that consistency. I both love and loathe Clarke for that statement. Love because it strikes at the heart of what technology is: a way for humans to do things previously believed not just implausible, but impossible. Loathe because it creates an infinite caveat for lazy authors and screenwriters. It seems like anytime some preposterous technology is injected into a narrative either as a McGuffin or a deus ex machina, that damn quotation from Clarke gets trotted out as the defense. So does Thor live up to Carroll’s hopes or abuse Clarke’s rule?

To answer the question, we need to investigate Clarke’s rule a bit further. There is a corollary to Clarke’s rule: “Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.” By that measure, just how advanced are Asgardians? More than sufficiently. I knew Branagh wanted to explicitly avoid making Thor an actual magical god of thunder. And, because of that, I had so many damn questions about pretty much everything in the film. Why is Thor the only one who can lift Mjölnir? What is Odinsleep? Are Frost Giants aliens? How is Odin able to “take” Thor’s powers?

Needless to say, I was frustrated. And then I remembered the spirit of the rule. If I’m able to tell the difference, then it isn’t advanced enough technology. But that doesn’t mean we’ll always perceive the Asgardian’s abilities as magical.

The best example of a good use of the tech-as-magic scenario is the Stargate series. In the Stargate Universe, the Gou’ald are an advanced alien species that use their highly advanced technology to overwhelm and subject less-advanced alien races. To the late 20th century humans who discover the stargate and utilize it, the equipment of the Gou’ald is advanced, but not magical. Yet to the Egyptians who were originally exposed to the Gou’ald, the tech was magical. As a result, the Gou’ald were worshiped as gods by the Egyptians and merely treated as advanced aliens by late 20th century Americans. That difference is critical to understanding why Thor isn’t just using Clarke’s law as a caveat. The parallel with Stargate (super-advanced race mistaken for gods leading to a mythologizing of their existence) allows us to understand just where the Asgardians sit in the Marvel universe.

In essence, the technological gap between early 21st century human technology and the Asgardians is at least as large as the gap between the Egyptians and the Gou’ald. We’ve got a long way to go.

Thor, thankfully, does not as a film attempt to justify the science behind Asgard. Only two remotely scientific elements are relevant to the plot. The first is that Bifrost, the rainbow bridge (pictured), is a controlled “Einstein-Rosen Bridge” aka wormhole. A huge piece of machinery enables the cosmic transportation device to work. Asgardians get into the transporter, it spools up and then beams them to another realm. Second, Thor’s hammer Mjölnir (which Kat Denning’s mispronunciation thereof is comedy gold) was “forged in the heart of a dying sun.” How that happened and why it makes the hammer so magical is never explained. Those are the only two references in the film that, from what I could tell, even pretended to acknowledge science. No effort is made to disguise the rest of the overtly magical and mythical elements of the Asgard. And that’s a good thing.

Thor does not pull a George Lucas and attempt to over-science the magical elements. Thor is not superhuman because he has some Norse equivalent of midichlorians. He is superhuman because he is magical. Sure, that magic is allegedly based in technology, but technology so incredibly advanced, we can’t distinguish it from magic. That lack of distinguishability is the indicator of just how advanced the Asgardians actually are. It’s also what let’s us enjoy the movie for what it is. Don’t try to understand how the Bifrost’s gate works or why a wormhole needs a sword to activate it – just enjoy watching a hunky bearded man heroically smashes things with his magical hammer and while wooing a gorgeous theoretical physicist. It’s magical!

Follow Kyle on his personal blog and on facebook and twitter.

Promotional Images for Thor via Paramount

The hardware for Myndplay, made by the company Neurosky, is a slimmed-down version of an electroencephalogram (EEG), a device common in neuroscience and medicine that uses sensors on the scalp to pick up electrical activity caused by neurons firing in the brain. The headset has one sensor that rests on the forehead, to read those electrical brainwaves, and one that rests on the bony part of the head just behind the ear, called a ground electrode, which essentially provides a baseline measurement to compare the brainwave-reading sensor to. (You can see a video of how the headset works—and people testing it out on less cinematic, more educational interactive games that Neurosky also produces—here.)

Unlike CYOA books, which were written in an empowering-yet-accusatory second person, Myndplay videos are in the first person: You’re not only making decisions of what the protagonist should do, but seeing the action through his or her eyes. The interactive videos for the system are available online; some are free, some cost a few dollars. Offerings so far include movies where you attempt to dodge a bullet or, bizarrely, perform an exorcism.

One big limitation of this kind of game is that the mind-reading tech we currently have is pretty limited compared to The Matrix or Total Recall or any one of a hundred other sci-fi digital-reality movies. The EEG headset doesn’t read out specific ideas you have for the plot—say, whether you want to push open the door that’s mysteriously ajar or run away screaming. Instead, it just analyzes brainwaves for patterns that correspond to concentration or relaxation, and uses that info to push the plot one way or another. The key to dodging the bullet isn’t to think, “OK, now I want to weave right!” It’s to concentrate on what’s happening onscreen—really hard.

Myndplay was officially launched at the Birmingham, United Kingdom, Gadget Show, which kicked off yesterday. Click here to don the mind-reading headset, here to keep things old-school.

Image: Flickr / xJasonRogersx

Heads up, this article has *spoilers* about the movie Hanna.

Joe Wright’s new film, Hanna, staring Saoirse Ronan is being hailed as the anti-Sucker Punch for its portrayal of a rich, rounded, and compelling female lead. Hanna is a young woman in her late teens (her age is indeterminate) who can beat you up, break your neck, and shoot you down six ways from Sunday. Why is she able to do that? Well, that right there is an interesting question. You see, Hanna was genetically engineered to have “high intelligence, muscle mass, and no pity.” But here’s the rub: she was also raised to be a trained assassin.

So who is to credit (or perhaps, to blame) for Hanna’s ability to crush faces with naught but her hands and an emotionless grimace? Is it her genes or her training?

The film ostensibly portrays Hanna as a naive heroine striving against her draconian and demonic “mother” figure, Marissa Wiegler, with the help of her noble father, Erik Heller. But I submit that is not the case: I believe the “teaching” and “nurture” Heller gives to Hanna makes him as much a monster as Wiegler. Hanna’s battle is to be a good human being against a perfect storm of nature and nurture designed to make her a heartless killer.

Hanna, on initial viewing, symbolizes the contest between genetics and environment. Or, perhaps more familiarly, nature vs nurture. Cate Blanchett is Marissa Wiegler (pronounced by Hanna in proper German as a deliciously evil “Veeglur”), who we gather from the course of the film had more than a little to do with engineering a batch of children to be super soldiers. After deciding the project was a failure/waste/danger, she shut it down and slaughtered the guinea pig children.

Eric Bana plays Hanna’s “father,” Erik Heller, the rogue agent who saved Hanna from Wiegler’s clinical cessation of the program. Heller (as we see from a flashback) it seems was in love with the surrogate mother of Hanna. Heller rightly sees Hanna as a child worth saving, not an experimental product to be disposed of at Wiegler’s leisure. To keep Hanna alive, Heller moved with her to a cabin in an endless wood “just below the arctic circle.” There, amid the caribou and evergreens, he taught her from day one to be the ultimate assassin.

Yet, if Heller sees her as human, not as a mere sum of her genetics, he does a pretty terrible job showing it. Hanna is raised in her father’s demented version of home school with a major in survival skills and violence and minors in 10+ languages and science. They live off the land, training for a confrontation about which Hanna has little knowledge. Then, when he decides the time is right, Heller presents Hanna with the option to throw a switch that will “tell Marissa Wiegler where we are.” Joseph Campbell would be proud at the simultaneous subtlety and neatness of Hanna’s vector for crossing the first threshold of the hero’s journey.

We are lead to believe that Hanna has been trained by her father to protect herself so that she cannot be killed by Wiegler. This theory, however, is not the case. The reason is that, though their life in the wild is hard, Heller and Hanna have a good life. Hanna, thanks to her genetic enhancements, is an adept learner and needs no protection in the wild. She is in excellent health, has spectacular creative and critical thinking ability, shows inventiveness, and has appreciation for the wilderness that surrounds her. The film shows us that Wiegler and the US government in general had no idea where Erik Heller was, nor did they seem to care. If Heller had really wished to save Hanna, he would have simply destroyed the tracking beacon and lived a life of happy hermitage with his prodigious adopted daughter.

But she knows nothing of music, of the arts in general, of human kindness or of the myriad aspects of humanity not comprised by Hobbesian elements. Heller never gives Hanna a choice.

Instead, Heller raises an assassin. Then, after coaxing her to set events in motion, leaves to run his own parallel mission to kill Wiegler. The film is about Heller using Hanna as a pawn in his quest of vengeance. Heller “saves” Hanna from death only to then single handedly complete the experiment Wiegler and her genetics team started. In short, Wiegler bred Hanna to be a monster, and then Heller trained her to be one.

Yet Hanna rebelled against both.

What is astounding is that in spite of Heller’s selfish and cruel rearing, Hanna is a good individual. She never harms an innocent (a Spanish dude trying to get fresh gets a scare, but nothing serious), nor does she present any level of irrational rage, maliciousness, or cruelty. When she fights, it is in an emotional vacuum and always in self-defense. Saoirse Ronan’s portrayal even gives Hanna a moment of sadness and pity for Wiegler at the end. Echoing the scene that opens the film in which she kills a deer, Hanna is sorry that the death was painful and not instant. Wiegler’s death is, like that of the deer, a necessity for Hanna’s existence.

Yet, in my mind, it was the death of Hanna’s father, Heller, that signaled her true liberation. Neither Hanna’s genetic coding nor her father’s relentless conditioning could force Hanna to be any specific kind of person. Her will, her sense of self, and of right and wrong determined who she was. She acted to protect those who helped her and was visibly sorry for those who died or were threatened at her expense.

Thus, the tragedy of Hanna is that those who had the means to shape her life, both biologically and environmentally, chose to treat her like a means to an end, not as the human being she would become. She is a transhumanist hero. I’d love to see a sequel exploring how she continues to discover the world her father did so much to hide from her.

Could something like that ever happen? While much of the technology in Source Code will remain purely fiction, says University of Arizona neuroscientist and electrical engineer Charles Higgins, modern science may eventually let us take a peek at, and even play around with, someone else’s consciousness. Among the movie’s technological inventions, Higgins says, ”the idea of monitoring and influencing consciousness with a physical neural interface is the most plausible.”

Judging by past and current efforts, pinning down what, or where, consciousness is won’t be easy. But one thing modern science can do is record from small populations of neurons in the brain, as demonstrated by neural prosthetics and recordings taken during brain surgery. “We’re getting better and better at that, rapidly,” Higgins says. A colleague of his at the University of Arizona records motor movements from nerves in one person’s arm, then plays back those movements in someone else’s arm.

To record one person’s consciousness, once we know what exactly that is, “I think you’d have to record from basically all the cortical areas of the brain,” Higgins says, far more than current technologies can handle. ”So monitoring somebody’s consciousness, not even influencing it, is going to require many, many years,” but it’s not out of the realm of possibility.

Doing so without direct neural interfaces, however, seems less plausible. Neither Stevens nor the man whose consciousness he inhabits are hooked up or jacked in to anything, begging the question of how the experiences were recorded from one’s brain or replayed in the other’s. “It’s getting implausible enough that I’m not sure how it could be reached by modern science,” Higgins says. And the fact that Stevens is somehow going back in time to relive the same moment again and again, well, that’s “an even farther step.” This film took some cinematic liberties.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the film is how it broaches the important ethical issues that will come with this kind of technology, Higgins says. Brain recording now is generally done on people undergoing brain surgery anyway, to whom it poses little additional risk, or people who are paralyzed or terminally ill, and who have less neural health to lose. In the movie, the technology is being tested on a wounded soldier—a scenario Higgins expects may play out as these techniques become more advanced.

“Probably the way a lot of this technology will become practical is through experiments on soldiers, unfortunately,” Higgins says. The reason for this, he says, is that such devices must be tested on humans; monkeys can’t chat with you about their conscious experiences. And while already ill or injured patients may be the starting point, the devices must eventually be tested on whole, healthy brains. “When you join the military, there are some limits on your civil liberties that you accept,” Higgins says. Clauses that give the military permission to experiment could be added into soldier’s contracts. “This is exactly my concern with neural prostheses and government uses.”

Image: Summit Entertainment

This futuristic method is based on a centuries-old observation that electric fields can do funny things (videos) to flames, making them sputter and even snuffing them out.

The researchers’ early-stage prototype consists of a 600-watt amplifier hooked up to a electric beam-shooting wand, according to their presentation at the American Chemical Society meeting earlier this week.  In tests, they were able to quickly zap out flames over a foot high.

A firefighting electric beam could probably be generated only using a tenth as much energy, estimated Ludovico Cademartiri, one of the researchers, meaning a much smaller amplifier would do the trick. They’re hoping to go after bigger fires, too, but the prototype has proven the concept. “Our research has shown that by applying large electric fields we can suppress flames very rapidly,” Cademartiri said.

While fighting fire with electricity seems to work, it’s not quite clear how it works. Charged particles of soot appear to respond to the electric field, throwing the flame off balance. It’s likely a bunch of other things are all happening at once—but no one’s sure yet what those processes are.

Whether it’s ye olde villagers passing buckets of water from the nearest well or modern-day firefighters with pressurized hoses and flame-quenching foams, putting out fires has has always been a matter of smothering them with some material. Zapping them with electricity instead could let firefighters do their work from farther away, and could be used to target a specific area—say, carving an escape route through the flames.

Image: Flickr / AMagill

Transhumanism is a big, complicated, sprawling idea. The central concept – that humans can be made better with technology – touches on a lot of hopes and fears about the future of humanity. Though I’m always going on about how great human enhancement could be, I’ve got my fair share of fears myself. But my fears are probably way different than many of your fears. But how in the world can we represent those concerns? As it turns out, I’ve found a pretty good set of archetypes that represent our hopes and fears: Marvel Comic’s Avengers.

How we frame scientific progress changes how we see individual technologies. When we think about science changing people, our minds naturally go to that group of individuals constantly being bombarded by gamma radiation, genetic mutagens, cybernetic interventions, and biological acceleration. I’m talking, of course, about superheroes. Superheroes are modern mythology. And because of that, they make great metaphors for understanding big issues. With The Avengers movie officially announced, I can’t help but notice that the four main members* of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes – Thor, the Hulk, Captain America, and Iron Man – are great examples of the different ways different people understand (or misunderstand) enhancement. Respectively, they are The God, The Monster, The Soldier, and The Robot.

Now, in the case of the Avengers, I don’t mean that they each represent a kind of enhancement, like cognitive enhancing pharmaceuticals or genetic engineering for athleticism. I am talking about the mindset people have around enhancement. Will transhumanism make people into monsters or Gods? Is science on the right track or out of control? The Avengers represent how you think enhancement works. Not only that, each Avenger symbolizes the hopes, fears, and problems enhancement may have. Whatever your dreams or nightmares about enhancement are, at least one member of Marvel’s wonder team has got you covered. So which Avenger represents you?

The Hulk

The Hulk represents The Monster. The Hulk is a man, Bruce Banner, who becomes enhanced by a massive blast of gamma radiation. But his enhancement is beyond his control. Rage, a state we associate with a loss of control, brings out the monstrous Hyde to Banner’s human Jekyll. The Hulk is what we think about when we worry that human enhancement will result in unpredictable and overwhelming changes in a person.

The Fears: The Hulk (as generally portrayed) is far less intelligent than Banner. He is pure, furious id smashing his way through any obstacle. One fear the Hulk embodies is the idea that enhancement could change our basic biological limits such that our humanity falls by the wayside, leaving only a creature of incredible but inhumane power. Unlike the other Avengers, the Hulk becomes inhuman when enhanced.

Views Science as Out of Control: Banner’s transformation into the Hulk is the result of an accident. Instead of enhancement occurring because of a deliberate plan, the Hulk is a result of super-science playing with fire. The Monster sees science as just too many accidents waiting to happen. Enhancement will have a lot of unintended consequences, one of which may be the loss of humanity itself.

The Hopes: The Hulk is still Bruce Banner. The good and kindness in Banner manifest in the Hulk’s fight against evil and enemies of those he loves. Banner is also constantly searching for a cure, at least a way to control, his Hulk side. Even if science reaches too far, good scientists will fix their errors.

Bottom Line: The Hulk, The Monster, represents science out of control. The fear is that our pursuit of enhancement will make monsters of us whether we like it or not. The hope is that if we start down that path, human nature and science will help us return to our better angels. The Monster is torn between caution and arrogance.

Thor

Thor represents The God. Thor is godlike. He possesses superhuman powers like near immortality, incredible strength, and endurance, but is not omniscient or infallible. Moreover, he is not human. Thor is an Asguardian, a humanlike race distinct from human beings in terms of biological superiority and magical ability. The God is what we think of when we think of enhancement making a superhuman race. The God is the opposite of the Monster.

The Fears: Thor is an Aryan wet dream. Blue eyes, blond hair, perfect physical attributes, cunning intelligence, and a member of a superior race. In this aspect, he represents the fear of eugenics being used to create racial purity or under the auspices of “improving the species” by eliminating “undesirable” racial attributes. Also, he’s cast down to Earth due to his arrogance. Time among the pleebs will straighten him out. Not the best perspective of normal humans.

Views Science as Techno-Magic: Thor represents the misconception that enhancement is closer to a magical cure-all than a scientific pursuit. Science fantasy like a pill that will let you live forever (i.e. the golden apples of Idunn) comes to mind. Forget actual genetics and biology, for those who view transhumanism through the lens of The God, science may as well be magic.

The Hopes: Thor sees himself as protector. The difference in race is not a reason to subjugate humans but instead creates a duty to defend them. Asguard and its ruler, Odin, hold Asguardians to higher standards of ethics and morality because of their superior abilities. In this aspect, The God represents the hopes surrounding moral enhancement.

Bottom Line: Thor, The God, represents the view that enhancement will lead to an ideal. The fear is that the ideal is based on physicality and race, the hope is that the ideal is based on morality and ethics. The God is torn between seeing biological superiority as a license for cruelty and as a duty to protect those unable to protect themselves.

Iron Man

Iron Man represents The Robot. Tony Stark is an alcoholic genius playboy who saves his own life by installing a reactor into his chest that also happens to power a mechanized exoskeletal war-suit. He represents external enhancement through prosthetic and computer augmentation. Without the suit, Stark is just a very flawed human being.

The Fears: Tony Stark is the most frighteningly human of all the Avengers. He is a drunk, a jerk, a slut, and astoundingly arrogant. Though he invents the suit, he is also utterly dependent upon the arc-reactor that powers it to keep himself alive. Alternatively, when he is in the Iron Man suit, he’s trying to be clean and be a good guy. And that’s when Stark seems the least like himself. The suit that makes him a hero also flattens his personality.

The other fear is related to how the Robot reflects science as a pursuit of the wealthy individual. Tony Stark doesn’t build a fleet of suits for the elderly or disabled. Nope, just one really amazing suit for himself – a sovereign entity by virtue of his riches and knowledge.

Views Science as Gizmos and Gadgets: Stark is a tycoon. The Robot represents science as a product of the individualist. Transhumanism will be a capitalist pursuit in which we mechanically upgrade ourselves like computers and cars.

The Hopes: Stark, the living embodiment of the military-industrial complex, rejects warmongering for peacemaking. Furthermore, his invention saves his life and enables him to move beyond his personal demons. In the films, the Iron Man suit is the result of a near-death experience and an exposure to the emptiness of his vice-riddled life. His personality isn’t flattened, it’s elevated. Thus, the Robot represents the hope that only the negative aspects of our personalities will be brought under control.

Bottom Line: Iron Man, the Robot, represents the view that transhumanism will trade biology for engineering. The fear is that our human qualities will be repressed for the sake of the “good” of society, resulting in bland automatons. The hope is that enhancement will not quell the human spirit but create a sense of duty to a higher calling. The Robot is torn between personal desires and societal needs.

Captain America

Captain America represents The Soldier. Captain America, taken purely as an example of enhancement, represents the ideal. He is slightly better than the best human in any category: strength, smarts, endurance, and health. The result of a one-off experiment (as is his shield), Captain America takes his sworn duty to protect the Constitution against enemies foreign and domestic seriously.

The Fears: Captain America is a hyper-nationalist soldier. His name is Captain America for chrissake. Forget the latent fears of racism you associate with Thor; Captain America only loves you if you love America. Furthermore, he’s a product of a military experiment. By nature and design, he’s a warrior and sees violence as a solution.

Views Science as a branch of the Military: Captain America is government property. The Soldier represents the view that scientific progress is something that happens behind closed doors and in secret. Or at least at the whim of our elected officials. The benefits are used to keep citizens “safe,” but not to better the citizens themselves.

The Hope: Captain America is a perfect human. Not superhuman, but a Homo sapiens sapiens with all his stats maxed out. He isn’t tortured by a sordid past, he doesn’t really have vices, and is a good guy through and through. He represents what enhancement could really be and what it might look like, instead of the caricature of enhancement portrayed by the other Avenger archetypes. He isn’t American only, so much as he is a defender of our dearest values: liberty, truth, and justice.

Bottom Line: Captain America, The Soldier, represents what transhumanism might really look like. Stronger, healthier, and slower-aging, he is a human with almost no biological flaws. The fear is that enhancement will be used generate jingoistic military zealots at the bidding of the State. The hope is that enhancement will improve human health and quality of life. The Soldier is torn between America and the ideals for which America stands.

There you have it: The Monster, The God, The Robot, and The Soldier each represent the fears, hopes, and views of science associated with transhumanism and human enhancement. One archetype alone may not capture your thoughts. Just as the Avengers are a team that “fights enemies no one hero can face,” these different ideas can be mixed and matched. You may fear the God and hope for the Soldier but worry The Monster is reflective of how science might actually be.

The key is that enhancement isn’t itself scary, but the way we think science and society work color our views of progress. Of course, this list isn’t exhaustive, but it gives as a good start. My comics knowledge is limited, so feel free to suggest some others. So the next time you think about genetic engineering or augmented reality goggles and feel a twinge of concern, ask yourself which of the Avengers is framing your thoughts.

*Comic geeks: I apologize for treating the films as canon here. For folks like me still newer to comics, the films have provided a great gateway to enjoying comics. Feel free to correct/clarify my summaries of the heroes in the comments.

Follow Kyle on his personal blog and on twitter.

Images via Wikipedia

Limitless is one of the first movies to directly take on the idea of pharmaceutical enhancement. The trailer is here and fake viral ad for NZT is here. I’m already wary of the film based on the trailer. Not because of the acting, directing, or plot, which all look good enough. Instead, my problem is that the movie appears to take the same boring old stance on enhancement: the cost of making yourself superhuman is too high.

Limitless has a simple set-up: loser/author Bradley Cooper who lives in filth and dresses like a hobo is offered a pill that will make everything all better. The pill makes him much smarter, more creative, and more driven. Thanks to this new found brilliance, Cooper makes boatloads of money and catches the eye of evil Robert De Niro, who threatens Cooper in various menacing and shadowy ways. Then the pill starts making Cooper crazy and his world starts crumbling around him. It’s Flowers for Algernon except with bespoke suits, exotic cars and international intrigue.

The reason I’m getting an overall vibe of “meh, who cares” from Limitless is that the even though the film has a great bad guy with De Niro and his shadowy mega-corporation, it takes the easy way out and makes the drug the enemy as well. Flowers for Algernon is great because the main character, Charlie, has to cope with how his intelligence-burst impacts his social life. We’re confronted with the fact that increased intelligence doesn’t mean increased maturity, worldly experience, or romantic ability. Limitless ignores these deeper issues.

Wouldn’t it be more interesting if the problem of power and wealth was that Cooper had to deal with other wealthy and powerful people, who are, in general, incredibly awful? Or what would Cooper do if the drug simply stopped working? Or how it affected his relationship with the woman he thought he loved when he becomes too smart – way too smart – for her and is bored by a person he once admired?

The theoretical enhancement drug at the center of Limitless could have allowed the writers to ask much more interesting questions than the trailer lets on. Maybe the movie will surprise me, but I doubt it.

Image viral promotional material for Limitless

The movie, if you haven’t seen it, is about a group of aliens who arrive on a mysterious mother ship hovering above South Africa. Eventually the authorities send an expedition up to find out what’s going on and discover a bunch of starving aliens. They are settled in a South African township called District 9, directly below the mother ship (a squatter camp in the township of Soweto, called Chiawelo, was used for the shooting). Much of the story revolves around the forced relocation of the aliens from District 9 to District 10. Besides being confined to the township and being forcibly relocated, they suffer various other kinds of oppression very reminiscent of the ways blacks were treated during the time of apartheid. Interestingly, in this case, South Africans of all colors are united in their hatred and mistreatment of the aliens, derogatively called “Prawns” (not least because they look like supersized bipedal version of king prawns, a delicious crustacean that is often on the menu at nicer restaurants in South Africa).

In the events of the real District 6 in Cape Town, a thriving community of 60,000 people of various races were forcibly relocated over the course of two decades, starting in the late 1960s. The entire district was then bulldozed for subsequent redevelopment that is stalled to this day. The relocation sparked large protests and great bitterness. The District 6 Museum goes through this history as a reminder of a key historical event during the painful times of apartheid.

Science fiction is rare in South Africa, as Deirdre Byrne wrote in an analysis back in 2004. As District 9 demonstrates, the themes of South African sci-fi are often abstracted versions of the country’s racial tensions and disparities in access to resources. For example, Michael Cope’s book Spiral of Fire, is about a novelist writing a science-fiction story. The story within the story is about an anthropologist who comes to another planet to study a particular sect in the southern area of the planet. Here the anthropologist finds a culture that seems the polar opposite of South Africa in many ways—for example, it is completely egalitarian.

The rarity of science fiction has led me to wonder whether sci-fi is a privileged genre that can only thrive in wealthy countries. Or is it more basic than that? Most people here lack access—or even exposure—to technology, particularly in rural areas. Indeed, they often struggle to rise above the level of subsistence (many of the residents Chiawelo, where District 9 was filmed, were too poor to get transportation and a ticket to see the film). And yet I’m writing this in one of the more remote parts of the country, a small village near Coffee Bay in the Eastern Cape, via an Internet connection through their excellent cellular phone network. The gap between rich and poor in this part of Africa is larger than nearly anywhere else. There is a good technical infrastructure, but outside of the cell network, it is mostly confined to the wealthier areas of the country. The “digital divide” that people in developed countries worry about is therefore significantly worse here. Crossing it may also be part of the solution, of course, and perhaps then sci-fi can become a playground for South Africans to explore their fears and hopes regarding emerging technology as it is elsewhere.

Reference: Science Fiction in South Africa, by Deirdre C. Byrne. PMLA, Vol. 119, No. 3, Special Topic: Science Fiction and Literary Studies: The Next Millennium (May, 2004), pp. 522-525

Photo: Flickr / Big Bambooly

A brief synopsis: Having run out of energy on Earth, humanity has gone to the Moon to extract helium-3 for powering the home planet. The movie begins with shots outside of a helium-3 extraction plant on the Moon. It’s a station manned by one worker, Sam, and his artificial intelligence helper, GERTY. Sam starts hallucinating near the end of his three-year contract, and during one of these hallucinations drives his rover into a helium-3 harvester. The collision causes the cab to start losing air and we leave Sam just as he gets his helmet on. Back in the infirmary of the base station, GERTY awakens Sam and asks if he remembers the accident. Sam says no. Sam starts to get suspicious after overhearing GERTY being instructed by the station’s owners not to let Sam leave the base.

So Sam tricks GERTY into letting him go out of the station in one of the rovers. He finds the first Sam who has crashed and brings him back to nurse him to health. The new Sam decides that chronic communication difficulties—which have only permitted seeing previously recorded messages from his wife and daughter waiting for him to return back on Earth—might be an elaborate deception. He goes far enough off base to get outside of the range of jamming antennas and calls back home to Earth to discover his daughter, who was an infant in the pre-recorded messages, is now a teenager, his wife is now dead—and her father Sam is there on Earth.

The sinister truth of the helium-3 base is now fully disclosed. What is actually happening is that the “first” Sam was himself a clone (where this means everything, including all his memories, not simply a genetic clone). Evidently, the copying occurred early in Sam 1’s stay at the station. Each clone is awakened with the thought of returning home to his family in three years. What actually happens at the end of those three years is that the clone is incinerated in the return capsule, and a new clone is awakened, to begin the cycle anew.

Near the end of the film comes a striking moment. The Sam that nearly died in the earlier crash has gotten increasingly sick and will die soon. The two Sams realize that the bosses of the station are coming to kill both of them and activate a new clone. They hatch a plan that has one of them leaving back to Earth in one of the helium-3 delivery shuttles. After newly awakened Sam tells dying Sam that he deserves to go back—“you did the three years”—dying Sam disagrees, and tells new Sam that he should return to Earth, because dying Sam is too sick to make it. This is a really powerful moment in the film, and our feelings about it are helpful in untangling our own mangle of thoughts about identity and death.

Dying Sam’s sacrifice seems less significant than, say, me telling an unrelated co-worker to take the capsule home. There are suggestive biological resonances to this feeling. Think of how, in social insects like bees, individuals give up the right to reproduce in order to facilitate the genetic continuity of individuals that they are closely related to. So, would the fact that you have a copy of yourself, which diverged from you even quite some while back (in this case, three years of solitude on a Moon base), ease your anxiety about dying?

Consider the following thought experiment. Rather than three-year stints, the clones of Moon get replaced on a 24-hour cycle. You fall asleep. Your memories and any other physical changes from the “base copy” get noted and propagated to a new clone. You are then, in Moon-like fashion, vaporized, and in the morning, a new clone is awakened after these changes have been “installed.” You awake, none the wiser for this change in body. Consciousness is not continuous, of course, and discontinuities such as sleep are natural places where we can do the “body change” business with minimal mess (not unlike what was depicted in the fantastic sci-fi film Dark City). The gap between what actually happens in sleep and this scenario seems too small to quibble over. Or is it?

As experiences and other physical changes separate you from your base clone as weeks, months, and years pass, your ability to separate your own identity from that of the clone grows similarly. It is like a core scene in the play “On Ego,” when a Star Trek-like teleporter fails to vaporize the original version of the protagonist. So two protagonists now exist. From that moment forward what was once one person is now two people, with increasingly different senses of self and experiences.

Your sense of how much you would sacrifice for your copy might be a good test for how different you feel from him or her. Your sense of how much comfort you would feel in dying, knowing that this other version of you lives on, might be another good test for how much of your identity has leaked out of the lump of tissue that has hitherto conveniently been bounded off by your jacket of skin. Perhaps in the first few days after such a teleporter accident, you would feel you could give up your life for your copy (and be relaxed about the idea of dying so that one of you can go on); after a few weeks, maybe something less than your life, and after some years of passed, perhaps you’d feel you could sacrifice nothing more than you would sacrifice for a close friend. (Topic for a future movie and post: Does forming a close friendship involve blurring and merging of your two identities?)

Here’s some final thought experiments for you to puzzle over. The great anthropologist Mary Douglas wrote in her paper “The Forensic Self,”

[In] western culture, whatever we say seriously about persons and selfhood needs to some extent to be compatible with what a jury in a court of law will accept.

For a graduate degree in philosophy with Ian Hacking many years ago, I once applied this idea to the issue of multiple personality disorder (MPD), to see how the judicial system dealt with defenses of MPD. The courts have mostly taken a view most eloquently put by Judge Birdsong in the case of Georgia v. Kirkland: “…we will not begin to parcel criminal accountability out among the various inhabitants of the mind.”

Rather than MPD, let’s see where we get when we apply Douglas’ insight to the problem of multiple person disorder: having multiple copies of yourself present at once. What if, just prior to copying, one of you formed a criminal intent. Because of slightly different post-copying existences, one of you now decide to stop the other. Would it be ethical to kill your copy? What would ethics require of how you treat one another? After all, we have sometimes odd ideas of what we are allowed to do to ourselves: Yes to smoking ourselves to death, no to elective limb amputations. These confusions would only be amplified by the peculiar situation of having multiple person disorder. Or being the victim of a sinister plot by Lunar Industries on the Moon.

Here’s the extended version of our interview with director Joe Kosinski from the December issue of DISCOVER, in which the first-time feature film director talks about reinventing the light cycle, building suits with on-board power, and how time passes in Tron compared to the real world.

Why return to Tron, and why now?

The original Tron was conceptually so far ahead of its time with this notion of a digital version of yourself in cyberspace. I think people had a hard time relating to in the early 1980s. We’ve caught up to that idea—today it’s kind of second nature.

Visually, Tron it was like nothing else I’d ever seen before: Completely unique. Nothing else looked like it before, and nothing else has looked like it since—you know, hopefully until our movie comes out.

How did you think about representing digital space as a physical place?

Where the first movie tried to use real-world materials to look at digital as possible, my approach has been the opposite: to create a world that felt real and visceral. The world of Tron has evolved [since it's been] sitting isolated, disconnected from the Internet for the last 28 years. And in that time, it had evolved into a world where the simulation has become so realistic that it feels like we took motion picture cameras into this world and shot the thing for real. It has the style and the look of Tron, but it’s executed in a way that you can’t tell what’s real and what’s virtual. I built as many sets as I could. We built physically illuminated suits. The thing I’m most proud of is actually creating a fully digital character, who’s one of the main characters in our movie.

What did you keep from Tron, and what evolved?

The central one in that whole equation is the character of Kevin Flynn, played by Jeff Bridges. For me, that was the first thing I did in getting the project going—securing Jeff’s commitment to be involved, to continue the character of Kevin Flynn to bridge the gap between the original and ours. We brought back Clu, Jeff’s avatar. Kevin F is now 60 years old, where Clu is frozen at 35 years old. But to expand on that, we’ve introduced Sam Flynn, who is Kevin Flynn’s son. He’s really the character the audience meets first, and we follow his journey as he goes back into the computer to look for his father who disappeared 20 years ago.

What else did the original directors want to do, but couldn’t, that you had the ability to include?

One thing that turned out to be special about our film is illuminated suits. All our suits are self-powered and self-illuminated, so you never have to fake light when two characters get near each other. They can illuminate each other’s face and reflect in the floor and the wall around them, or light up a room when you turn the lights out.

Was it a huge hardware challenge to build those suits?

Absolutely. You’re talking about flexible light fabric, and everyone had to carry their own on-board power. It couldn’t be a big bulky spacesuit—these are really elegant, thin suits that you had perform physical stunts in and wear comfortably.

With the advances in computing and filmmaking since 1982, you could do just about anything with Tron: Legacy. How did you keep it grounded?

I didn’t want to make a movie about the Internet. That’s kind of a trap. It can make your movie feel dated the weekend after it comes out. I really liked the idea that this was a closed-off system like the Galapagos Islands, where the simulation has been constantly evolving and growing on some server locked away in some hidden place. That way it felt more like a Western: The world is large and expansive, but at the same time, there’s a code or a set of rules you have to follow. If you want to send a message to someone, you can’t just beam it across cyberspace. You have to get on your light cycle and deliver it in person. You understand that there are repercussions in physicality that make it feel as non-virtual as possible.

To continue the analogy: If this is a digital Galapagos, what is the driver of evolution in the Tron world?

Kevin Flynn created a system that has the ability to evolve on its own. Today you read about these kinds of life simulations, where you program digital organisms that grow and mutate. It’s cutting-edge stuff, but we’re saying Kevin Flynn was such a brilliant, far-ahead thinking guy that he was experimenting in these new types of code that can do self-generation and evolution. Therefore it doesn’t need maintenance and it doesn’t need input from a programmer to change it. In doing so you can create a magical thing, but you can also create something that can get out of control. That’s one of the themes at the heart of our film: Technology can be a very powerful and useful thing, but if not used correctly or if left unchecked, it can turn out to be a very dangerous thing as well.

Given that Kevin Flynn has been inside Tron for 20-plus years, I would like to nerd out with the following question: Does time work the same inside the digital world as outside?

No, it doesn’t. In the first film they weren’t very specific about it, but you got the sense when Kevin Flynn returned to the real world, very little time has passed compared to what he had endured. We’ve gone with a ratio of basically 50 to 1: for every 50 years spent inside the world of Tron, only one year would pass in the real world. If you’re a user, or a human being pulled into that world, you track with what your age would be in the real world—that’s why Kevin Flynn looks 60 years old in our film. But if you’re a program, you remain the age you were when you were created. Therefore, since Kevin Flynn created Clu in 1985, when Flynn was 35 years old, Clu looked exactly like he did then. And in the 25 years since that moment, Clu hasn’t aged at all. Programs are frozen in time.

How do you maintain many of the Tron elements that seem fairly simple now, like the light cycle game, but keep it relevant in 2010?

If you’re talking about light cycles, for instance—that’s something where I was able to sit with Steve Lisberger, the director and creator of Tron, and go back into the archives. On the original light cycle, the rider was meant to be on it and not enclosed in the canopy. But they just couldn’t render that complex geometry, so they had to create that simple shape that covered the rider up.

Knowing that fact, it was fun to go in with my design team and say, “All right, we want an external rider on the light cycle now that we can do anything. How do we maintain the original intent, but evolve the design from that classic shape?” It’s pretty simple—the original is basically a 2D board where all you do is try to cut off the guy in front of you with these right-angle turns. We’ve taken the 90-degree restrictions away so they move like real racing bikes with big sweeping turns. And we’ve taken away the two-dimensionality of the game boards—now it’s a multi-level game board with ramps that carry you up and down.

Did you invent any new games, or just stick with the originals?

We did invent some new ones, but I’m going to keep those to myself for now.

What did Tron get right about the future? And what do you hope to get right?

If you spend some time with Steve and talk about his goals for that first film and then [look at] our film, the one thing I think both touch on—and I think this is a good lesson to be learned in our society today—is the importance of maintaining human connection in an increasingly digital world. That’s a strong element in our film with the connection between father and son. It’s something that we all deal with every day, and struggle with—being able to unplug ourselves and focus on the people around us. It’s easy to get lost in technology as it continues as it invades more and more of our lives.

Images: Disney Enterprises

The idea of attacking scientists to stem technological development is an old one. Perhaps the most dramatic example from recent times is Ted Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber. In his case the targeted killings were embedded in an anti-technology philosophy fully developed in his Manifesto. In the recent assassination attempts in Iran, we see the workings of geopolitical pragmatism in its most raw form.

Regardless of what we may think of Iran having the bomb, the strategy of killing scientists and engineers of a country’s technological infrastructure is one that should give us pause. Few steps separate this ploy to making them the domestic enemy as well, a tradition with an even deadlier history that includes the Cultural Revolution and Pol Pot’s purge of academics.

Although on the fringe at present, there are parts of the public which are already in tune with this lethal segue. They view scientists as the people that bring us global warming and much else that is taking our technological society to potential crisis. Unfortunately, the way scientists are depicted for dramatic affect in popular entertainment doesn’t always help. A recent opinion piece in Nature criticized the effort of certain organizations to make the depiction of science and the work they do more accurate in movies. (I responded in another post.) Below the article, however, was one reader’s comment that made me think about how these unrealistic portrayals can be causing some real damage:

The reason that most depictions of science in movies are in a negative light is because it’s a reflection of reality. Every day, science is poisoning our oceans and air, destroying our communities and creating terrifying new weapons to be employed on the poor and oppressed of the world.

The “awkward nerd” depiction of a scientist is far too fair. They are the monsters tearing our world apart while having the temerity to hold us in contempt for “not understanding them.”

How ironic that this comment serves as its own best argument for the need of some smidgen of truth in character development, contrary to the thesis of Daniel Sarewitz, who penned the Nature opinion piece.

Not surprisingly, the motivations of scientists are much more diverse than the simple portrayals of narrative fiction. They range from a desire to make the world a better place, to the self-centered pursuit of prestige, money, and power with little regard for the ethical implications of one’s scientific work. The first type doesn’t get a whole lot of play, while the second has great dramatic potential, and so we see it a lot more. As the French novelist Henri de Montherlant wrote, “happiness writes white. It does not show up on the page.”

Could the dramatically compelling caricatures of scientists of the “evil genius” type underlie some of the thinking behind the assassination attempts on Iranian scientists? It seems a stretch. But in its suggestion of a strategy for dealing with technological development of another country that is thought of as a threat, the killing of Iran’s scientists raises some troubling concerns about how scientists can be scapegoats for a society’s discomforts with technological progress, and how narrative fiction can be a lubricant for such a move.

Back in the early 1990s, Jon Durant very usefully outlined out the three main types of scientific literacy. This is probably as good a place to start as any:

• Knowing some science – For example, having A-level biology, or simply knowing the laws of thermodynamics, the boiling point of water, what surface tension is, that the Earth goes around the Sun, etc.
• Knowing how science works – This is more a matter of knowing a little of the philosophy of science (e.g. ‘The Scientific Method’, a matter of studying the work of Popper, Lakatos or Bacon).
• Knowing how science really works – In many respects this agrees with the previous point – that the public need tools to be able to judge science, but does not agree that science works to a singular method. This approach is often inspired by the social studies of science and stresses that scientists are human. It covers the political and institutional arrangement of science, including topics like peer review (including all the problems with this), a recent history of policy and ethical debates and the way funding is structured

On the first point, I do think that there are some basic science facts which should be required fodder in K-12 education. From my field alone, people should not only know that Earth orbits the sun, they should know that our year is based upon the time takes Earth to complete the journey.  Don’t laugh. On my last birthday, when I told folks that I’d completed another orbit of the Sun, a distressing number of them did not understand the implication and, upon further questioning, didn’t know that Earth’s orbital period was the basis of one year. K-12 students should know that the Moon orbits Earth, why it goes through phases, and given it’s significance (in particular for several religious holidays), that our month is based upon that orbital period. Finally, everybody should know why we have seasons.

Knowing how to find Polaris, the North Star, and why your satellite TV installer pointed the dish south-facing, are both practical, but I’d place those in the category of “nice to have” not “need to have.” At the same time, I also think there’s a fourth bullet item that Dr. Bell could have included, one to which she alludes in the body of her text:

Science isn’t necessarily a transferable skill. This is easily demonstrated by examining carefully the lives of scientists outside of the laboratory (or, to put it another way: “yeah, cos scientists are all sooo well organised outside of work, living super-rational evidence-based lives, all the time”). It would be lovely if we could provide a formula for well-lived lives, but people just aren’t that consistent.

In addition to teaching factoids—even useful ones—about science, and in addition to educating non-scientists about the process of science, educators need in instill  a willingness in people use the lessons learned and knowledge imparted. Why do we learn this stuff? Why is it practical?

At the same time, there is a human tendency, to which Dr. Bell alludes in her quote above, to compartmentalize our knowledge. Dr. Bell implies, rightfully so, that many, arguably most, scientists check scientific thought at the door as they leave work–when it would be equally useful in organizing their (our) personal lives. Related, talk to any science educator who’s given a writing assignment. I can guarantee that, at some point(s), the assignment was met with the student question, “Are you going to grade off for English?” as if proper grammar is the purview of English class alone and slacking is allowed in biology (or pick your favorite science). Author Jennifer Oullette uses this notion—that life runs more smoothly and interestingly when met with a dose of science and math–in her Calculus Diaries: How Math Can Help You Lose Weight, Win in Vegas, and Survive a Zombie Apocalypse.

What got me jazzed on this topic, enough to write at length about it, was the confluence of two events – one fun, quirky, and topical, one somewhat more on the horizon – both of which benefit when approached with a due application of scientific skepticism. The first was a recent web buzz, where a Charlie Chaplin movie (and not a particularly good one at that) was, in essence, promoted from the genre of comedy to science fiction. A woman in the 1928 Charlie Chaplin film The Circus appears to be talking on a cell phone, which wasn’t invented until decades later.

A short Google search turns up countless, and often very amusing, analyses on this video like this one from the Washington Post. Apparently George Clark of Yellow Fever Productions noticed the quirk  of the “woman on a cell phone” in the background when he was watching the DVD extras for the film, and after a year of studying this clip, he concluded:

This short film is about a piece of footage I (George Clarke) found behind the scenes in Charlie Chaplin’s film ‘The Circus’. Attending the premiere at Mann’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, CA – the scene shows a large woman dressed in black with a hat hiding most of her face, with what can only be described as a mobile phone device – talking as she walks alone.

I have studied this film for over a year now – showing it to over 100 people and at a film festival, yet no-one can give any explanation as to what she is doing.

My only theory – as well as many others – is simple… a time traveler on a mobile phone. See for yourself and feel free to leave a comment on your own explanation or thoughts about it.

Seriously? NOBODY could give an explanation better than that of a time-traveling cell phone user? Well web sites and surfers alike certainly offered up their speculation.

What was surprising, nay a wee bit appalling, was the ratio of conspiracy theories—and just plain “out there” speculation—to critical and/or scientific thought (Though if you read one article, the second post in the talkback, there’s a hilarious example of somebody who tried too hard to apply too much science to the problem, and winds up writing a lengthy discourse, nay manifesto, about Einstein and time and relativity and GPS satellites and the speed of light and… what were we talking about again?).

One simple “Where’s the cell tower?” comment (and thankfully there were some of these) in the articles’ talkbacks  should have been “End of subject”, at least as far as the object being any kind of communications device, and in too many cases it wasn’t. Do the search yourself, even when there were posts of this nature they were often ignored, and outlandish hypotheses floated instead. While I’m not beyond my own tongue-in-cheek blog posts (muzzle flashes from alien warfare anybody?), it’s astounding to me how many Twilight Zone-caliber theories were floated on the 1928 cell phone user that weren’t intended as glib. (Trust me, I’m from the future, and we have way better communication devices than cell phones.)

Which brings me to the second topic that got me to write this, my own manifesto, which is one that is still ahead of us but one on which I’ll posted increasingly often. It’s late 2010, and in the runup to 2012 a quick Google search reveals that the whole Mayan Calendar mythos is still generating a vast amount of fear and fear-mongering.  We will all soon be subject to an onslaught of sketchy scientific claims, references to “lost” ancient wisdom, and predictions of gloom and doom on this front from now until January 2013. Not only is is useful to have Mad Science Skillz to combat outlandish claims, we have to be both willing to use the tools at our disposal and to pay attention when the scientifically perspicacious make what should be topic-concluding “Where’s the cell tower?”-like observations.

The full audio of the event can be streamed or downloaded from here.

We all pitched in to comment on the clip featuring Keanu Reeves learning kung fu through an apparently painful download in The Matrix. The panel consensus: if something like a neuroprosthetic arm for everyone is in the near future, downloading skills a la The Matrix is at the far end of the far future. Reasoning: there are hundreds of thousands of sensory and movement neural channels being activated while learning of kung fu (not even counting vision, which has a million channels per eye). To train the brain via download, we’d either need to excite those channels in just the same way artificially — at roughly normal speed — or figure out how to directly modify the many millions to billions of neurons in the brain that are changed while learning kung fu. Either option presents technical challenges we are far from overcoming.

I picked the Minority Report clip, which featured robotic spiders artfully killing any last doubts you might have had of having privacy in the future. In this clip, some police come to an apartment complex that they are searching for a person in, and release a platoon of nimble robot spiders. These spiders spread out and crawl up people to scan their retinas to identify each person in the building. They sense in the infrared (which is why Tom Cruise hides in a tub of cold water) to detect the warmth of live bodies to be scanned. One of the brilliant aspects of the way it’s shot, as a pan over top the exposed rooms of a floor of the building, is how it shows just how “normalized” the loss of privacy has become in the future, with one couple in the midst of a fight hardly pausing their exchange of blows to let the scan happen before starting to whale at each other again. It’s as natural as selling a row of pumpkins on FarmVille and losing your privacy through Facebook application data misuse.

There’s a few things I love about this segment of the film. The first is that, like most good sci-fi, it simultaneously makes you say “oh wow that’s cool,” while terrifying the crap out of you that this may be the endpoint of all the privacy failures we are being subjected to. Sci-fi as incubator of dreams and place to work out our anxieties about technology.  On a professional level, I also liked how center stage was not a humanoid robot for once, but rather a non-human biologically-inspired robot. I appreciate that story-tellers need robots that people can relate to, but the disconnect between what actually goes on in robotics (where humanoid robotics is a tiny fraction of research effort) and what’s always in the movies is sometimes jarring. Not only did Minority Report show a biologically-inspired robot, it showed them in exactly the context in which they make a lot of sense: solving problems that conventional machines and robots don’t do well, such as high agility motion that needs large amounts of sensory intelligence. Animals are fantastically agile. But agility requires a lot of flexibility in the way a body can move, and with that flexibility comes the great challenge of how to control all that movement for stable motion, and how to acquire enough sensory information to guide the body in a highly nimble way. It’s a fantastically complicated problem, and understanding how it works is precisely what motivates some of us who do research in this area.

I also liked how the makers of the movie went to the trouble to seek out a colleague who studies jumping spiders, Damian Elias at UC Berkeley, to get good sound of the spiders scampering around.

It’s interesting, as Sean Carroll noted for a similar panel he was part of  at Comic Con, how much demand there is for this kind of discussion. With the blogosphere and traditional media saturation of science and tech news, maybe this all portends the dawning of a new age of sci-fi for viewers who will be a lot more sophisticated in the kinds of stories that will get them intrigued.

A strange additional element of the social dimension of science operating in this comment is a certain fixation with credit among scientists, nicely expressed by Kissinger in his “There is no politics quite as vicious as academic politics, because there is so little at stake.” In doing science, few things cause more grief than arguments over who contributed what to a scientific study, and what order the authors names should have on some publication. The suggestion that Feynman got his idea from elsewhere will immediately incite a credit fight among supporters and detractors; the fact that the source was literature just adds another dimension to this fight.

Colin Milburn also talks about barriers in the humanities to properly understanding the interactions between narrative fiction and bench work in the laboratory. One of these is the idea of narrative fiction having organic unity that doesn’t take well to decomposition into the most adaptable and usable parts from a scientific perspective.

Despite these barriers from both sides, it’s clear that there’s lots of ideas flowing from science fiction into science itself. Milburn suggests we think of science fiction as being repurposed and remixed into lab bench practice through three different kinds of “mods“. The first is the blueprint mod where some discrete part of science fiction is used as a blue print for something in real life. He gives the example of Second Life, which was a blue print mod from the Metaverse in Neal Stephenson’s “Snow Crash.” The second is the supplementary mod, where the originating sci-fi has elements of technical impossibility to it, so it can’t be taken into the lab without some substantial modifications. Teleportation is an example of this: the quantum entanglement underlying recent examples can only occur with zero-mass states of atoms, which is to say pure information, a bit of a problem for applying it to people a la Star Trek even with the most strenuous of diets.  The third is the speculative mod. Here science projects its future possibilities using the language of sci-fi. Milburn gives Kurzweil’s “The Singularity is Near” as an example of one of these mods.

As Milburn’s categorization of the ways in which fictional narratives about science and technology get put into practice percolates in my mind, I see a rich stream of case studies in my own work and those of my colleagues. It would be good if the result of looking at scientific practice through the lens of these ideas would be to nudge these two creative enterprises — work at the bench, and the crafting of stories — a bit closer together. Perhaps in the future scientists will have workshops (modshops?) with story creators in a similar way in which business execs collaborate with creatives to get people thinking outside of their usual constraints.

Other links: The science-humanities gap is often discussed with reference to C.P. Snow’s Two Cultures. Interdisciplinary programs that combine art and science studies attempt to heal the divide: here’s a discussion of some work on that.

The exhibit is broken down into four areas:

ALIEN FICTION

The alien fiction section was small, and had a collection of movie props, videos, and sections devoted to Roswell and the Alien Autopsy video.  Interestingly the content in the Roswell section was donated by the International UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell, NM, so I felt it was slightly skewed in favor of the object that crashed at Roswell being of an extraterrestrial nature, while the content provided for the Alien Autopsy video practically screamed “THIS WAS A HOAX!”

ALIEN SCIENCE

What might aliens look like?  Where might we find them? Are alien life forms most likely to be (from our viewpoint) extremophiles?  While astronomers and planetary scientists often make the claim that “we study other worlds to learn more about Earth,” this section emphasizes the reverse:  What have we learned about our planet, its life, and the Solar System to further help us find life “out there.”  There are exhibits that describe potential abodes of life in the Solar System, extremophile life, even bizarre Earth creatures that simply look alien. Of the four sections, this is the least speculative, most grounded in science. Later one of the docents told me that, surprisingly, this section is overwhelmingly the most popular with kids.

ALIEN WORLDS

To me this section was, by far, the most interesting of the exhibit. This section details the hypothetical worlds Aurelia and Blue Moon: the worlds and their ecosystems.  Aurelia is a hypothetical planet that is tidally locked to a red dwarf; Blue Moon is an Earth-sized moon orbiting a jovian gas giant planet. These planets and their creatures were designed by scientists who study extremophile life forms, planetary scientists, and scientists who search for extraterrestrial civilizations. In fact, the creatures inhabiting both of these worlds are very reminiscent of those from Wayne Barlowe’s Expedition. It was also in this section that I was “adopted” by a very nice docent named Ann who personally showed me the aspects of various exhibits that she found most interesting.

Thor! Buddy! Tell me if you’ve heard this one. An Asgard walks into a bar, and the bartender says, “Why the long face?”

ALIEN COMMUNICATION

What is the like likelihood of there being other civilizations out there? If they are out there, how would we communicate? That’s the theme in the final section of the exhibit.

Hey I recognize that! The Drake Equation.

After examining all the bizarre earthly “alien” life forms in “ALIEN SCIENCE”, and after being transported to both Aurelia and Blue Moon in “ALIEN WORLDS,” I found this last section relatively anticlimatic, and probably the least interesting of the four sections. There was, however, a fun little alien gift shop immediately beyond. I like little shops.

Yes, I realize that I should have visited/posted before San Diego Comic-Con, when so many more people — the kind who are likely to enjoy this kind of thing — could have stopped in. Still, the San Diego Air and Space Museum will be hosting the Science of Aliens from now until the end of the year.

While I was still a doctoral student, I had the opportunity work with a relative of interactive holographics, 3D virtual reality data CAVEs. This particular one, at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) in Urbana Illinois (the birthplace of HAL) circa 1999, was a cube with back projection on five of the six walls. You wore a headset that tracked your head position and orientation, and goggles that were LCD screens that blocked images to your right eye when the projectors were rendering images for your left eye, and vice versa when the projector was displaying images for your right eye. As you walk through space or move your head, what you see in the virtual space changes as you would expect it to.

The problem that had pushed me to use this system was trying to analyze 3D motion data of a fish that I was conducting research on. I’d developed a motion capture system for the fish, which gave fantastic 3D data of the fish moving while it was attacking its prey, but looking at this 3D data on 2D computer monitors turned out to be quite difficult. Even replaying the motion from several different views didn’t quite do the trick. So Stuart Levy at NCSA put my data set into a system called “Virtual Director” and I was able to playback the data in the cave. It was something of an unbelievable experience the first time I tried it – suddenly I could walk around the animal as it engaged in its behavior, manipulate it to get any view, rotate the wand I held to wind the behavior forward or back at different speeds. Visitors particularly enjoyed my “Book of Jonah” demo where I positioned them so that they ended going into the mouth of the fish during a capture sequence.

For my technical problem, the VR CAVE was appropriate technology: 3D display and interaction for an inherently 3D data set. It helped me see patterns in the data that I had not clearly seen before, which were incorporated into some of my subsequent publications that analyzed the movement data. It was worth the effort, and the physicality of it was fine since I didn’t need to spend multiple days working through the data.

Other uses of these kinds of “direct manipulation” interfaces that mix 3D data and real world interaction have not found such a receptive audience, as people complain that it seems tiring to make sweeping (if dramatic) gestures to go through photos that would just as well be navigated through with an arrow key. As someone who still uses “vi” to edit my text with, I can relate to criticisms of interfaces that offer more than is needed.

The important question, for any given interface, is whether simplifies difficult problems of control or analysis, or gets in the way. My former colleague Don Norman at Northwestern University has contributed a great deal to our understanding of this question, in books like The Design of Everyday Things. One of my favorite examples from that book considers two different interfaces to manipulating the position of a car seat. In one interface, on a luxury American car, there is a panel of knobs and buttons almost hidden below the left side of the dashboard. To go from a state of discomfort to a new chair position requires translating your discomfort into a series of knob pulls and twists on a console of many controls with tiny labels below each. In contrast, a German luxury car had a small version of the driver’s chair in the dashboard. To move the back of your chair down, you manipulated the chair in the dashboard accordingly; to move it forward, you would move it in the direction the chair was facing, and so on. One interface placed a large cognitive load on the user to solve the discomfort problem, while the other placed minimal demands.

Another favorite example is the “speed bug” – a tab that a plane pilot puts on the edge of an airspeed indicator to mark the velocities for critical changes to shape of the wing. Were it not for those bugs, the pilot would have to remember the velocity to do the wing adjustments – and that’s not easy, because it changes with things like the weight of the plane.

The virtual fish, miniature car seat adjuster, and speed bug are all examples of interfaces that make problems easier, and in this sense, amplify our brain power. Interactive holographic interfaces can do the same for problems where space is a convenient or needed basis for navigating the information. This isn’t always apparent in sci-fi depictions of these interfaces, but their use speaks to our hope that such 3D holographic wizardry will help us cope with the flood of data we contend with on a daily basis.

I’ve always maintained that in science fiction TV and cinema good science should be jettisoned in deference to drama as a last resort only–and then when you have all your other  ducks in a row. If the science is solid in the large bulk of your work, we’ll make the leap with you when you get a bit more… speculative. Some works stick to grounded science well, some do not.

Therefore, for my clips, I chose two instances of the same type of  event–the impact of a comet/asteroid with Earth — one done well (Deep Impact), one that could have been done better (Armageddon).

Since Deep Impact‘s science is fairly solid, and their science advisor (they actually had one!) once told me “We pretty much get our mistakes out of the way in the first five minutes”, there’s little to say. There’s plenty to say with the Armageddon clip I chose — which was the first 40 seconds of the movie. The opening of Armageddon purports to show what is called the K/T Event — the asteroid or comet impact 65 million years ago that caused most of life on Earth, including the dinosaurs, to meet extinction.

The opening narration, done by Charlton Heston doing his best Moses voice, starts out:

It hit with the force of 10,000 nuclear weapons.

Here’s where getting the science right would have improved the drama.  To be more correct, Charlton Heston wouild have said:

It hit with the force of over 19 million 1 megaton nuclear weapons.

Or

It hit with a force almost 1.5 billion times the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

While Charlton narrates, the video shows the impact, and a blast wave traveling over the entire planet. While normally willing to suspend disbelief happily, from a science standpoint this movie lost me in the first 30 seconds when I first saw it in the theatre. The blast would not have traveled that far. What the video could have shown, and Charlton could have described in his best “The Dinosaurs Have Been Smote” voice was the several-hundred-foot-high tsunami that raced away from the impact. Or the chunks of impactor and target rock that fell back to Earth as secondary impacts, setting most of the world’s forests on fire.

What Charlton says instead is:

A trillion tons of dirt and rock hurtled into the atmosphere.

That’s about 1/10 the mass of the impactor (assuming it was an asteroid), so that number isn’t too bad, but, where’s the drama? What is the result of this?  He continues with:

…creating a suffocating blanket of dust the sun was powerless to penetrate for a thousand years.

Probably not that long, the dust probably settled out faster than that — without the sun’s life-giving radiation, it would not have taken long for Earth’s ecosystem to collapse.

It happened before.  It will happen again.

Yay! They got something right!  It’s clear that had the folks who made Armageddon stuck to known science, they could have made this scene simultaneously more realistic and more dramatic.

If you missed the panel, weren’t able to attend Comic-Con, or were turned away at the door because the room was packed, here’s the video:

The “Science of Science Fiction” panel will be back at San Diego Comic-Con again next year — hopefully in a much larger space (and hopefully it will still be in San Diego).

The film raises the issue of how much we understand about the neuroscience of dreams. Due to its need for invasive experiments, neuroscience typically works with non-human animals, which raises a significant difficulty: how do you know that a rat is dreaming? You can’t wake it up from REM sleep and ask. (Well, you can, but don’t expect a cogent response.) There’s no accepted objective indicator that a person or animal is having a dream, as opposed to sleeping. But, we can still learn something useful by looking at the neuroscience of sleep.

The neuroscience of sleep has told us a few important things over the years. For example, we know that our pattern of sleep and wakefulness (the “circadian rhythm”) has much of its basis in the activity of the suprachiasmatic nucleus, a rice-grain-sized group of cells just above where the optic nerves from our eyes crossover. We know that our free running rhythm—what we go to if we are completely in the dark, with no indicator of solar activity—is slightly over 24 hours, and that the length of the rhythm can be affected by things like cannabinoids found in pot. We know that the brain activity of a person dreaming is very similar to that of an awake person—were it not for the fact that our body is paralyzed during dreaming, we’d probably do a lot of things we’d regret.

While we’ve made a lot of progress in understanding sleep, we’ve a long way to go to understand dreaming. What makes it a challenge, perhaps as big a challenge as understanding consciousness itself, is the subjective aspect of dreaming. For example, we know that vivid dreaming occurs during REM sleep in humans. We also know that other animals have REM sleep. Do they also dream? How can we know, since, as I mentioned above, we can’t wake them during REM sleep and ask (the way we determined this fact with humans)? How we can go from objective facts like the presence of REM sleep to subjective ones, like a dream of a pink elephant bouncing down along a high tension power line (from one of my own dreams) is as unclear as how we get from neurons firing to awareness. Nonetheless, significant work has occurred on some of the neuronal correlates of REM sleeping in rodents and songbirds.

The most intriguing result from recent work is that during sleeping, the brain appears to “play back” patterns of activity that occurred during the day. For example, Matt Wilson and colleagues have found that patterns of “place cell” activity — brain cells that light up, like crumbs left on Hansel and Gretel’s path in the woods, corresponding to a specific path that the animal (in these experiments, a rodent) took during the day — and this playback seems to be integral to the animal learning the path it took. In birdsong, from work by Dan Margoliash and others, we’ve learned that birds playback patterns of activity almost identical to singing while they sleep, and again, it seems to be integral to the bird learning its songs from its tutor. Why does the brain play back patterns of daytime activity at night? It isn’t completely understood, but some backstory on memory research helps motivate one hypothesis.

It’s been known for some time that a structure called the hippocampus is responsible for acquisition of new memories. Without it, we still have our memories, but anything new that happens is completely lost (think of the movie Memento, one of Christpher Nolan’s previous films) — we are stuck in the continual present. Real-life patient HM taught us this many years ago, after he had this structure removed as part of an experimental operation to cure his epilepsy. He, and many similar cases, lose all memory but for those events that happened some time before the loss of their hippocampus, typically a few months. Over time, the idea has emerged that perhaps the hippocampus “trains” the neural networks in other regions of the brain to store memories through repeated playback during sleep. Like crickets trying to attract females in the night, in the world of memory nothing succeeds like persistent repetition.

So if in REM sleep the brain is repeating patterns of activity from periods of wakefulness, perhaps that process helps the brain to remember, over the long term, the items that are temporarily stored in the hippocampus.

What is not understood from these studies, which were done in rodents and song birds after all, is the basis of all the strange subjective aspects of dreaming — such as how or why in our dreaming we seem to borrow from real experience while adding a good dollop of stuff from elsewhere. This aspect of dreaming seems like it would be crucial in order to have any hope of building a dream experience a la Inception. There is not a whole lot of creative potential in simply regurgitating the day’s brain patterns.

Until these and many other mysteries of dreaming are solved, what the research is showing is that the best way to architect a dream is to architect the experience you have during wakefulness, since dreaming appears to be a lot about learning patterns you were exposed to while awake. Our understanding of the coupling is not clear enough to think about designing dreams by structuring our awake behavior, but perhaps with further research we will come to that point where we can do inception of ideas into our own heads.

Image: Midlands Rat Club
Corrections: Aug 11, 2010: “…neuroscience typically works with animals, rather than humans…” adjusted to “…neuroscience typically works with non-human animals.” Reference to length of circadian rhythm also adjusted. Aug 12, 2010: “integral to the bird learning its large repertoire of over a million syllables” changed to “integral to the bird learning its songs from its tutor.”

Though Thor is the story of a god who crushes his enemies with a magical hammer, Kenneth Branagh’s Thor movie is set in a scientific universe. Or so it seemed from footage we saw this weekend, especially of Destroyer.

Branagh, whose previous films include Frankenstein and Dead Again, is known for over-the-top theatricality and an emphasis on acting in his films. The 3D Thor is no exception, especially since the director says he loved Thor growing up and has even worked to include different versions of the first Avenger in his film. Though the hero’s iconic hammer is pure Jack Kirby, Branagh assured the audience that “there are some Donald Blake touches” too.

Natalie Portman plays Jane Foster, a minor character in the comics who has a very large role in the movie. She called her character a rare “real, frazzled, grounded female scientist – not the low-cut lab coat and sexy glasses kind of thing.” She added that she was happy to get back in front of a green screen with an actor-oriented director like Branagh, because “working with green screens is a skill – it should be something you learn in acting school.”

Chris Hemsworth is the perfect physical type to play the god of thunder, and when we saw the sizzle reel from the film, I was immediately sold on Hemsworth as much more than just a pretty boy who looks good shirtless. We saw him in both action scenes and in tense, intimate moments – and he burned up the screen. Especially when he finds the hammer hidden at the heart of a secret New Mexico military installation and lets out a mega-shout to heaven.

His damaged younger brother Loki is played by Tom Hiddleston, the god of mischief who turns into a major badass who wears black fetishwear and big horns on his head. Hiddleston says Loki’s main issue is that “he was the guy who was almost the guy, but wasn’t.”

Before we get into the footage, let me say that the 3D was good. It didn’t feel intrusive, but at the same time we got a lot of fun squirts of fire aimed out into the audience – plus, of course, some hammer throwing. And the 3D made the sets really pop, giving the whole flick some texture. I’m usually the first to grouse about the overuse of 3D but I think Thor earned it.

So what was so sciencey about the footage we saw? First of all, the emphasis was on the secret industrial-science facility where Thor is being held by clueless fed types for part of the movie. Plus, when Thor is hurled to Earth by Odin, who casts the young god out for his arrogance and penchant for war, we see a shot that looks remarkably like something out of a scifi movie. We zoom toward the galaxy from a great height, as if Thor’s home Asgard is in another galaxy rather than being some kind of god dimension. Also, Asgard itself looks more like one of those really gorgeous Alderaan-style planets from Star Wars rather than heaven.

Jane is the person who finds Thor when he crashes to Earth, so Thor is immediately treated like a scientifically-discoverable thing rather than a mystical presence. (There’s also a nice moment of quippery where Jane tells her sidekick that “for a homeless guy, he’s pretty cut.”) And we hear him explaining to Jane that he comes from a place where “magic” and “science” are indistinguishable. This does nothing to quench our feeling that this is a scientific universe – it’s just that the Asgardians have science that’s advanced enough to be indistinguishable from magic.

So I know what you want to know: What about the hammer fighting? Was it awesome? Hell yes. Like I said earlier, there’s a great moment when Thor finds the hammer Mjolnir, pulls it from a pile of muddy rock, and lets out a cosmic yelp. Then we see him fighting a variety of enemies, including brother Loki and his fetishwear-clad Asgardian corps, who have taken over Asgard after the death of Odin. He does a good hammer throw, and the hammer manages to look both cartoonish and kickass at the same time.

We also got a glimpse of Hemsworth doing the steely eye when he’s being interrogated by a fed at the secret facility, who accuses him of being a highly-trained mercenary. I like the look of our mercenaryesque god in that scene: Human, but with a glint of godhood in his eyes.

The other ultra-awesome part of the sizzle reel was meeting Destroyer, who looked like a medieval version of Gort from the original Day The Earth Stood Still. He stands a few heads taller than a human, and when he arrives the Feds mistake him for “unauthorized military technology” and ask him to stand down in bored tones. Then he opens all the layered vents on his suit and his face plates open to reveal – emptiness, shortly filled with a surge of fire. Again, it feels Gort-like, but also terrifically old school, as if he has a dragon breath weapon.

I was left feeling like this film would be a pleasure to watch, full of awe-inspiring visual flourishes, great acting, mega-battles, and funny, tight dialogue. A perfect superhero treat.

This post originally appeared on io9.

io9. Escape to the world of tomorrow.

Science fiction is sometimes a playground to explore what it would be like to have a different body. Most recently, in Avatar and Iron Man 2 we saw people joined to exoskeletons, which are being developed in real life for the military and for rehabilitation. The biomechanics of these exoskeletons are a close mimic of our own but with much more power or size. In Avatar, we also witnessed people experience the novelty of inhabiting a three-meter-tall blue body with movable ears and a neural interface that conveniently doubles as a tail.

But why wait for the shapeshifting future? Corsets and girdles are the best known types of “foundation garments” or “shapewear,” but for me at least, they are more Jane Eyre than Madonna, despite the latter’s use of them in her performances over the past twenty years.

For those who actually use shapewear on a day-to-day basis, the most common types must be the padded bra and shoulder pads. But the past week highlighted two new ways of changing the shape of our body. The first was in a Wall Street Journal article by Rachel Dodes on padded panties that promise to give Beyoncé-level gluteus maximi to the large behind-inclined; the second is from Sylvester Stallone’s comment that “action movies changed radically when it became possible to Velcro your muscles on.”

Three cheers to Stallone for bringing male shapewear to our attention. Besides those sometimes unsettling codpieces we see when we watch ballerinos perform the Nutcracker, it turns out that you can purchase just about as many kinds of shape enhancing undergarments for men–bottoms and tops–as for women. Unlike the “Booty Pops” talked about in the WSJ article, which are available at Walgreens and Bed Bath and Beyoncé Beyond, these are not quite as readily available, however (or so I’m told).

Changing our body and face shape is an old past time, of course but shapewear now seems an especially timely approach as a form of body shaping on the cheap, with no trainer or surgery required. In words that would make the hover-chaired human blimps of Wall-E eat another banana split, these two new types of shapewear have already been tied to freedom from the misery of physical movement. Stallone now realizes that he “didn’t have to go to the gym for all those years,” while Booty Pop’s website celebrates that “No expensive surgery or overpriced trainer required.” This is body-shaping custom-tailored for the calorically abundant and economically depressed times of Homo sedentarius.

The mass embrace of the Booty Pop, to choose my words carefully, hints at a new stance toward the human body as human scaffold. It’s a fitting preamble to the future envisaged by sci-fi, when robotic augmentation or more radical reshaping of our body shape through genetics may come to pass. My personal hope is that I’ll have a chance to be an octopus in some future life, so that I can answer emails with two tentacles while using others for stuffing my clam-hole with deep fried cheese, doing an experiment, and lifting barbells. Or maybe I’ll just get Octobooty Pop instead.

The overall effect is a little overwhelming. It is also kind of…awe-inspiring.

First of all, there is the sheer technical achievement of making a 10-story-tall vinyl banner. The ads are an impressive showcase of what current graphics technology can do: extremely large-scale digital images printed directly onto enormous sheets of vinyl mesh. At a conference that is in no small part a celebration of the graphic arts, this kind of over-the-top element seems apt. Then there is the public art aspect of the thing. The San Diego skyline around the convention center here isn’t the most inspiring thing to begin with. The ads, garish as they may be, are more creative and personal than the jumble of generic modernist architecture they are covering.

And really, the application of digital technology to realize visuals that previously existed only in the realm of imagination is a central theme of the conference. In the “State of the Geek” session here, former Digital Bits editor Bill Hunt evocatively recalled a childhood memory of making copies of the USS Enterprise from paper plates and toilet paper tubes–and then being amazed to when Star Wars came out and showed for real the kinds of images that had been dancing around in his head. At the same session people lavished praise on the digital dreams of Inception.

In the exhibit hall, a showcase of special effect designs from Stan Winston Studios powerfully illustrated how the special-effect master progressed from latex and paint to far more elaborate and evocative imagery conjured directly from bits. His creations also blurred the boundaries between solitary vision and corporate branding. Which category do the Iron Man suits belong to? Which category properly holds the military tech from Avatar?

Looking out at the cityscape here, San Diego looks like nothing so much as a giant comic book. If that is the effect of branding run amok, I’m strangely OK with it.

Like me (or whoever I stole that bizarre-o dream about the crazed grizzly from), everyone has dreams that strangely intertwine with reality. That’s what makes Chris Nolan’s newest thriller, Inception, so fun to watch. It plays with ideas we’ve all experienced—how dreams can reveal our most guarded memories, feel like days when only hours have passed, or affect our emotions when we wake up.

Inception’s Leonardo DiCaprio plays Dom Cobb, a man trained in the art of stealing personal info using a process called dream sharing. He builds the world of a dream, brings his subject into that world, and guides events so he can extract needed information, or plant a life-altering idea. Cobb is charged with creating a dream to convince Robert Fischer, the son of a multi-billionaire businessman, to use his inheritance to build his own company. To do this, Cobb and his crew induce an incredibly deep sleep, and enter a dream, within a dream, within a dream, and at one point (I think) within another dream.

Sure, busting into dreams and planting very specific ideas in someone’s mind is pretty far removed from even the most leading-edge brain science, but Nolan got the basic idea right: Neuroscientists say sleep plays an important role in memory consolidation. While we’re sleeping (or perhaps dreaming), our long-term memories stabilize deep in our hippocampuses. If someone were to plant a memory in a dream, who knows how long it would persist.

As the plot develops, the dreams are so realistic that it becomes challenging for the characters—and audience—to distinguish the dream state from reality. But that’s all part of the game, drawing us in as we attempt to sift fact from fiction. The film’s cinematographer, Wally Pfister, told me that in his earliest conversations about the film with Nolan, the director said “Remember, this is a dream world. When you’re in a dream, it feels real and you want to believe it’s real.” This warped reality triggers some moments of confusion (as you try to keep track of which dreamscape you’re in, and how actions in one realm affect the others) but by the end my brain had adjusted to the scheme.

I emerged from the theater into a chatty crowd—some firing questions excitedly at their neighbors or calling friends to announce how confused they were, while others praised the film’s brilliance. Fans and critics alike, everyone was talking.

—DISCOVER reporter/researcher Amy Barth

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Launch Pad 2010 Attendees

Launch Pad is a free, NASA-funded workshop for established writers held in beautiful high-altitude Laramie, Wyoming. Launch Pad aims to provide a “crash course” for the attendees in modern astronomy science through guest lectures, and observation through the University of Wyoming’s professional telescopes.

The workshop’s mission is to:

…teach writers of all types about modern science, primarily astronomy, and in turn reach their audiences. We hope to both educate the public and reach the next generation of scientists.

The person who runs Launch Pad, Mike Brotherton, is a wizard at using sci-fi as a vehicle to teach actual science (or, in his own words, he’s a wizard at funding his own science-fiction habit).  A few years ago he received NSF funding to compile ”Diamonds in the Sky” — an anthology of hard science-fiction stories that also can be used by physics and astronomy teachers as a vehicle to teach real science. Some of the stories are quite good and worth the read. Perhaps we’ll see “Diamonds in the Sky II”  in the not-too-distant future, populated with stories from former Launch Pad attendees!

Launch Pad 2011 and 2012 are funded, and there’s still time to apply for next year!

Okay, okay, accelerated pregnancy isn’t real (yet). It’s a (not-so) fictional assisted reproductive technology imagined by Tze Chun in his short film, “Silver Sling,” which is part of the FUTURESTATES project by the Independent Television Service. In addition to accelerated surrogacy, at 92Y Tribeca’s screening of FUTURESTATES films, I was treated to human-plant chimeras, self-aware androids, and a picture of just how much worse Arizona’s draconian immigration laws are going to be in 15 years. My favorite, “Silver Sling,” follows the story of a young Russian immigrant, Lydia (pictured above auditioning for potential parents). Faced with financial woes and no job, she plans to become a surrogate mother for the third time–a decision that could potentially render her sterile for the rest of her life. Lydia is forced to choose between her present problems and her future hopes.

While the film itself is wonderful, what made “Silver Sling” stand out was Chun’s treatment of the technology. Accelerated surrogacy in “Silver Sling” isn’t good or bad, it merely is, with the ethics being different for each person involved. The complicated issues Chun brings to light are those currently pressing some surrogate mothers: their own desire for children, the risks and burdens of the procedure, and the “no-other-option” mentality driven by the problem of economic need. Even with the science-fictional elements of “Silver Sling”–the accelerated surrogacy and the fact that surrogate mothers are cared for by the assisted-reproduction company–it still feels intensely realistic.

What’s more, “Silver Sling” may have an idea of where we are in history. In the film, a spokeswoman for Silver Sling, the company that coordinates the surrogacies, describes accelerated pregnancy and surrogacy as indicative of the “Reproductive Revolution,” echoing the preceding agricultural, scientific, industrial, and sexual revolutions. A fitting description, I should say. But why pretend the revolution is in our future instead of our present? With over 90,000 assisted reproductive technology births in Europe in 2007, I would venture that we are now right in the midst  the Reproductive Revolution. More interesting, however, is a detail in the film synopsis left out of “Silver Spring” itself: According to the synopsis, “corporations offer financial incentives to their high-ranking female employees to pay for chemically accelerated surrogate births.” Just as with the earlier revolutions, though the change began with a new technology, ultimately it was the shift in lifestyles, social mores, and culture itself that had the real impact. Half a century later and our society is still struggling to adapt to the sexual revolution; one can only imagine what changes the current reproductive revolution will bring.

PS: If you’re looking to guess just what will happen in the future, the FUTURESTATES website has a Predict-O Meter that’s worth checking out.