Bruce Almighty and Terminator:  these last two movies I saw at the theater (Bruce on June 11 on my 20th anniversary) and Terminator 3 (yresterday).  I am always interested in different treatments of the now decades old human fear of  “machines taking over”.  In fact,  the subtitle of Terminator 3 is “Rise of the Machines” (and the previous one,  T2 was “Judgment Day”).  Both suggest that technology finally reached the level where Computers became “self-aware” and instigated a revolt against humans.  This is also a slight variation on the Matrix theme,  where all of what is experienced by most people as “life” is a computer generated program “life simulation”,  but the question that gets re-opened in The Matrix Reloaded is “who wrote the program?”

This is where I think the Terminator theme is purely science fiction.  Their suggestion is that machines become “self-aware”,  crossing the barrier from “instructed” (by the humans who build them) to “deciding agent”.  The fact is,  computers are still very much tools that do our bidding,  from the machine level responding to volatge ,  to the operating system level,  to the appliaction level.  All are responding to voltage,  yes-no decisions,  translations of 0’s and 1’s into bits and  which represent other things, and work together to calculate and represent.  The fear that lies behind the mythological tales ,  I believe,  are the sense of being “out of control” with our decisions.  When we hand over “control” to a system of software and a network of such which is comanded to respond to situation A with response B by activating computer-controlled system C,  the range of possibilities for “malfunction” grows.  The malfunction may snowball into something unforseen.

In Bruce Almighty,  his initial decisions and acts as “God” have repurcussions on the other side of the globe (the moon incident when he arranges the moon to enhance the atmosphere for his romantic evening).  The application of computer control to such things as Missile Silos (also a theme in the 1983 movie, “War Games”) gives us cause for pause when we contemplate handing over more power to the “Sytems” we have constructed.