The two most interesting characters (and most fascinating performances from the pair of young British thesps) are Darby and Bill, which means that on some levels the parts of the show shot in Utah are more intensely interesting — in spite of all the big concepts seemingly flying around at the retreat in northern Iceland.
Other than Bill, the male characters are all rather flimsy, even Andy (and especially, Ray.) Ultimately, so too the plot and the plotting, though I enjoyed the ride.
Brit Marling herself didn’t give any real life to Lee. It was always as if the show-runner had wandered onto the set and was standing in for the real actor cast in the role.
Tech tycoon lurking in outlandish isolated crib is becoming a bit of an overworked trope, though most of the equivalent scenarios I can recall took themselves a tad less seriously. (The ideas don’t need to be quite so ploddingly interconnected when there is an openly satirical slant. Most of these might have been improved if the proverbial piss had been taken more openly.)
Yet I also wanted a bit more thought-provoking dialogue between the guests on all the big picture stuff. The closest we got to this was the suggestion that human creativity can be improved via collaboration with AI. It is not to be dismissed out of hand, but it could also be taken as an example of the ‘augmentation’ fallacy often pushed by Silicon Valley types as a kind of moral justification for their private, often narcissistic obsessions — along the lines of ‘eat your greens, they are good for you’, not so much a perspective on the potential for human enhancement, but a tactic whereby a tech-elite minority forces its expensive toys on the masses.
On this occasion I mused about how many of the great minds of the past would have benefited from an AI collaborator, just as in the past I have wondered whether Hemingway would have written better novels on MS Word instead of a typewriter.
Yet I also wanted a bit more thought-provoking dialogue between the guests on all the big picture stuff. The closest we got to this was the suggestion that human creativity can be improved via collaboration with AI. It is not to be dismissed out of hand, but it could also be taken as an example of the ‘augmentation’ fallacy often pushed by Silicon Valley types as a kind of moral justification for their private, often narcissistic obsessions — along the lines of ‘eat your greens, they are good for you’, not so much a perspective on the potential for human enhancement, but a tactic whereby a tech-elite minority forces its expensive toys on the masses.
On this occasion I mused about how many of the great minds of the past would have benefited from an AI collaborator, just as in the past I have wondered whether Hemingway would have written better novels on MS Word instead of a typewriter.
Some might have done. I think if one were to make a big list of all the great creatives of the past, a subset do turn out to be the ‘spent most of their life in a library’ sort. But only a subset.
For others, their achievement was largely to lift themselves above the background noise of information and opinion.
And just how many great thinkers and artists ever really ‘collaborated’?
Alice Braga appears to be making quite the career for herself as ‘most intriguing secondary character’ in American TV shows. I remember her well in 2002’s City of God, but have been freaking out as I also seem to have an entirely false memory of her co-starring with Joaquim de Almeida in an adaptation of one of Machado de Asis’s novels.
Alice Braga appears to be making quite the career for herself as ‘most intriguing secondary character’ in American TV shows. I remember her well in 2002’s City of God, but have been freaking out as I also seem to have an entirely false memory of her co-starring with Joaquim de Almeida in an adaptation of one of Machado de Asis’s novels.
(I would have been tempted to title this Ten Little Hackers...and risk cancellation for the implied reference to a play that was performed by the staff of my prep school with its original name on the programme.)
No comments:
Post a Comment