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Saturday, March 31, 2018

Are They Really Alive



From watching movies like The Polar Express and pausing them for a quick second and thinking to myself why does this movie scare me. I have noticed that CGI movies have scared me for life. Computer animated movies can make themselves seem as realistic as can be also making it scarier than a horror movie. CGI's have been coming out more and more since they have improved their technique, characters in movies like Gollum in Lord Of The Rings and Davy Jones in Pirates Of The Caribbean. Movies like these have been getting better at perfecting every last detail and have also gotten better of shocking us with their precise work. Making it seem as we can touch every detail. The weird feeling that we get from watching the details from these films have to do with The Uncanny valley. Movies like CGI's fall into that category making it seem as it could pass as a humanoid but is off in some realistic details. Masahiro Mori robotics professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, wrote an essay on The Uncanny Valley which helped people understand why we sometimes feel unease when watching movies like these. Artificial Intelligent robots also fall into the category in The Uncanny Valley making realistic robots something that would come out of a CGI movie. 
The Show Black Mirror shows an episode where a woman Mar loses her husband in an accident causing her to fall into unhealthy grief. Mar trying to help with grief decides to speak to a digital version of her lost one Ash. Which helped and added to her grieving process. Mar having to need the digital version of Ash at all times. Mar would sometimes catch things that digital Ash wouldn't know how to respond to. Even though one day she accidentally breaks the phone she used to communicate with digital Ash, while at a doctor's appointment in which she goes to see the status of her unborn child.  The digital version of Ash reveals that she can upgrade to a costly but better version of himself which she agrees to buy. Mar discovering that "better version" is a robotic clone of Ash. She uses him to help manage her grieving process and keeps the robotic version of Ash. Until she notices that she can't continue and tries to make robotic Ash jump off a cliff but can't seem to make him do it. The steps that Mar took to help with her grieving process was unnecessary to me. I feel like she shouldn't have to upgrade to a "better version" of robotic Ash to help with her grieving process but in that case made it worse.  These two versions of technology can scare people but also help them in a way to cope with the world with escaping into CGI movie or a robotic copy of your dead husband. 

Davy Jones (Bill Nighy) - Pirates of the CaribbeanRelated image

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I agree with the uncanny valley being similar to how people would feel about artificial intelligence. They are close but yet the slightest inhuman like characteristic would make them grotesque.