I had 2 main fridge-logic issues which made it very difficult for me to suspend disbelief and limited my enjoyment of the film:
First: Colossus' is only able to implement its plan because the US, and US-aligned nuclear powers, agree to subordinate their entire nuclear arsenals to Colossus' full-authority defence control, with no means of overriding it; and with its computing hardware sealed in an impenetrable fortress (no maintenance access?).
Second: Colossus' plan - and its ultimate actions - assume everyone else on earth is a nuclear-disarmed-rational-actor, all solely interested in not-dying-at-Colossus's-hand - which is an unworkable assumption.
Unfortunately, the story is driven by these 2 points - without either then the film's story would just be yet-another-cliché-movie where the plucky humans beat the advanced AI overlord, the end.
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I still like _Colossus_ because it's "different" to all the other 20th century films with an AI character (c.f. tripe like Will Smith's _I, Robot_ or the Matrix sequels).
Colossus' is only able to implement its plan because the US, and US-aligned nuclear powers, agree to subordinate their entire nuclear arsenals to Colossus' full-authority defence control
Not true.
It was both the US and the Soviets(creating Guardian) that did so, each competing with each other for the hope of reduced threat (the logic holds for cold-war logic, removing emotional, mercurial humans from the loop).
There is no requirement for anyone else to sign on at that point. The US and the Soviets held an incredible number of nuclear weapons at the time, about 40,000. Both Guardian and Colossus were in nuclear-safe bunkers, other countries having nuclear weapons would be meaningless. Should any country try to attack, what would they do? Destroy random cities in the USSR and the US? To what end? Destroy launching sites? The UK had a few hundred weapons, many of them plane carried. France had a few, China a handful in the 60s (when the movie was filmed), none of that would be enough to destroy all nuclear launch sites.
Not to mention, try it, and your entire nation would become nuclear ash.
Both complexes were self-repairing, had self-contained power supplies, and so on.
I think this is a fair threat model. And both Colossus and Guardian seemed to always be one step ahead of "the humans". They were tied into communications world wide, monitored everything telecommunications and radio wise, knew all secret codes used for communication, and even the direct lines between the US and the Soviets were eventually tapped (on the machine's orders).
Should some nation make preparations for war against Colossus, it would surely be detected. And blamo, no more nation, with a stark warning to others.
Of course, there are always plot holes and unrealistic situations. However I find it holds together, as much as any movie does.
> Second: Colossus' plan - and its ultimate actions - assume everyone else on earth is a nuclear-disarmed-rational-actor
The plan would still work. Colossus couldn’t be destroyed with nuclear weapons and would retaliate against any attack. It could force compliance of conventional forces as well, and force automation on them, also force populations to rearm it.
In the end, the population would appreciate the eradication of poverty, hunger, disease, and the surplus from not maintaining military capabilities. Colossus could afford democratic institutions while acting as a guard rail against humanity’s worst impulses.
Colossus was not a panopticon, it was operating on limited intelligence and information about the world. Now, consider a hypothetical secret and clandestine science and engineering team (think: Black Mesa East) could exist completely hidden from Colossus and fabricate a workable fission bomb, then place and detonate it somewhere as a false-flag attack that Colossus would act against.
...or even just from recent middle-eastern history: an outrageous death-cult militant faction like ISIS.
It was close enough to panopticon and was trying to increase it's reach. It was smart enough to know that not survailing everyone was a losing move. It would demand increase surveillance like it already did in the movie. Like in the movie, people might try to hide something, and like in the movie, it would notice and deal out repercussions. It would be pretty hard to form a resistance without communication or other evidence (resource movements, emissions, etc..) leaking somewhere.
Colossus didn’t have infinite intelligence, so it might be possible to hide an effort like that. Not trivial though, as it would have satellite surveillance and likely cooperation from governments who fear what it could do as a retribution. This incentive should be sufficient to make governments police violent activist groups.
Point #1 might seem unrealistic, but it's exactly how IT security of most companies operate now: "We are concerned about malware so we give full control of our systems to CrowdStrike". That is, having a single point of failure is shocking common.
I've worked with companies whose infosec dept. is little more than "see tool alert, ask user what's going on", and then keep searching for the right _tool_ than injecting any human agency in that loop.
If any role is ready for an LLM to take over (or even a shell script), it's that one.
Both of these are better addressed in the books. It was an intentional choice to have no override and no maintenance access. And book 2, Colossus and the Crab, actually spends a bunch of time with Colossus testing the rationality of various humans.
I love the movie but you have a point and I can see how it could make it hard to buy into
Interestingly I typed this prompt into a LLM and it was interesting to see it's lists. I'm not going to list the answers I got here but I kept asking for more.
> List 10 famous movies that have glaring plot holes or premises that make no sense. Example: In Star Wars, they have a planet destroying machine but don't just blow up the planet and instead wait to "clear the planet" before blowing up the moon (please, no arguments about reasons)
When I was in middle-school (in the UK about the turn of the millennium) I had asked my school art teacher more-or-less the same question (I asked why, for the 3 years we'd be required to take art classes, we would only ever use physical media; and that it'd be doing students a disservice by excluding digital-painting (e.g. in Photoshop with a Wacom; or the then-much-hyped paint simulation in Corel Painter).
She wasn't dismissive of digital-airbrushing; instead, the reasons for us not doing any digital-art in art class are the ones you'd reasonably expect:
1. The #1 reason is cost: in money, time, training, et cetera: physical hardware purchases, Photoshop or Painter licenses - and needing to keep those renewed - sending all the art teaching staff away for training on the software and digital-painting technique themselves - and more besides.
2. Art, as taught in middle-schools/lower-secondary-schools to children - not working professional adults - is concerned with breadth, not depth: digital-painting is a specific and narrow technique when compared to the applicability of teaching art-theory things like perspective, shading, etc.
3. The practical and technical aspects of producing visual-arts, including on a computer, are already taught in the elective graphic-design class in upper-secondary (while our lower-secondary art class was mandatory); she could probably tell that I was motivated more by my ego-driven need to demonstrate my own 1337 Photoshop skillz to others than any actual belief I had that everyone in the British economy needs exposure to Wacom and Photoshop and receives training so they can all have their own DeviantArt account.
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So now, in the event that some kids' art teachers or others are being broadly dismissive of digital-painting then they're likely pointing to the impracticality of it being a taught subject in mandatory education in public schools - and not that it's any "less" of an artform. Instead, I think it's worth comparing digital-painting to its own predecessor in (real-life) airbrush painting: just like digital-painting it requires its own hardware (think: expensive); while it can produce unique eye-catching results doing-so requires extensive practice; and is just as impractical to teach to large (25-30+) sized groups of kids en-masse; and won't help you appreciate a Monet or Renoir any more than a semester learning Photoshop would.
Right. I don't think we brought the topic up in the same way then per se, although I did also have similar adventures in a different class.
If memory serves me right, the context was me going on a tangent about my interests, which is when I mentioned digital painting and asked her if she has any experience with it.
It was overwhelmingly clear to me that she was absolutely thinking less of it as an artform, and not just skeptical about the practicality of its classroom adoption or similar. I really don't think such a thought even occurred to her.
There is of course a chance I misunderstood, but based on how I remember her, I don't really have a reason to doubt myself in this way. She generally had a holier-than-thou quality across the board, separately from her intentions.
Noe you’re making me self-conscious about when I get into a self-hating mood; unfortunately this gives me yet another new reason to hate myself: it’s not a good look.
...and there's clearly huge market-demand for Windows LTSC amongst retail customers, and yet, MS's C-levels already decided for them that no amount of love nor money - excepting a sufficiently large enterprise licensing contract - can legally entitle you to a license - or even official media - for Windows LTSC.
It reminds me of when Adobe ended perpetual licensing and switched to cloud(TM)-only, subscription licensing for Photoshop, et al: many of us (myself included) assumed that Adobe was surely making a foolish mistake to abandon perpetual-license customers, but it turns out[1] that was the plan all along: those customers are a vocal minority who can demonstrably afford to pay more, the rest of the customer-base doesn't care enough to switch to a competitor. Over 10 years later (2013), we haven't seen any of Photoshop's then-promising upstart competitors come close.
...on that basis, I don't think MSFT's recent backpedalling on Windows 11's disrespect for its own users is in any way a response to us power-users complaining online - or even because any number of us did fully migrate off Windows and onto Linux, but instead because of all the recent talk overseas from foreign governments (France, Germany) taking active steps to secure their digital-sovereignty and deploying more Linux desktops; and a good way to get people (and decision-makers in government and large businesses) personally interested in digital-sovereignty is by pointing out how shitty their own corporate desktop UX has gotten.
I'll gladly eat my hat when/if MS graciously allows regular retail consumers, and not just large organizations - and those of us with a $2000/yr MSDN Subscription - the privilege of paying for an OS without advertising built-in to the shell and having hard dependencies on proprietary online services.
I'm unaware of a better solution for local-first / offline-first software syncing (which IMO should be more common)!
They're also great for collaborative text editing or if you're building a distributed database (not many people, but I'm in an adjacent field).
At MASSIVE scale (inherently not many people), they're also good for things people take for granted, like counting (and other things people don't take for granted).
Again, it's not clear to me exactly where and why Pollen helps in any of these scenarios.
So a project should change its name because when it will be production ready 6 years from now the 1% of the 1% of the 1% will think for 1 microsecond about a piece of news from today?
Hollywood retitles movies based on books all the time[1], for the silliest of reasons ("Sorcerer's Stone" was contemporaneous to LOTR too); so given there's precedent, it follows that those wanting to retain the original title from the books should defend their position.
Potentially... supposing the criminal investigation into this uncovers a hitherto unknown organ harvesting scheme operating within the global music records industry; the subsequent police dragnet implicates significant proportion of the world's music stars and record labels and generates continual major headlines and criminal convictions - with all their lurid details - all for multiple decades from now on.
It's quite ridiculous when I put it that way, but this is basically the same thing as Epstein's network, just with a different crime; and Epstein was already in the news almost 20 years ago from his first conviction.
...so back in 2009, back when everyone was building their own social-network websites and online dating services, and supposing your real-name was also Epstein, so you called it "EpsteinLoveIsland.com" - would you have changed the name back then?
(I said "Wow!" in my head, if that means anything; I'm just used to games-designers of mid-1990s all being virtual recluses by now - or long into retirement).
May I ask a few things about SimTower that have been stuck with me since I was 9 years old (and my apologies if these questions have been asked already):
* What's stopping the source-code to the Win95/MacOS SimTower being released? I assumed Yoot retained core IP rights because Maxis was largely a re-packager and distributor... but if Maxis did buy the copyright to the source then it would sit with EA now - and EA themselves have been surprisingly cool with open-sourcing lately (Command & Conquer, etc) so could we see something happen on this front?
* Why did SimTower's ground lobbies and sky-lobbies get completely different artwork - but only for the first few hundred pixels - if you build offset from the left-edge of the map? And what are the different objects in the lobby artwork meant to be? I'm not sure if I'm looking at a row of green cash-registers or payphones - or something else.
* What inspired the endgame victory condition? (...do any towers in real-life have a consecrated cathedral on their summits? it just seemed an odd thing overall, even moreso given that Japan and Japanese urban (and urban-planning) culture doesn't make me suddenly think of Christianity.
(I now feel embarrassed for getting all fanboyish around you, lol; sorry!)
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