“Surrogates” May Ruin Interesting Premise With Action Movie

Writing by Evan Ackerman on Thursday, 20 of August , 2009 at 1:06 am

This is gonna sound crazy, but just bear with me… Imagine a world in which millions of people stay at home, living out their lives by controlling artificial representations of themselves that let them be whoever they want to be and do things they could never do in real life.

Yeah, I know, totally crazy. But that’s the premise for Surrogates, a robot action flick starring Bruce Willis that’s due out September 25. And of course, something goes horribly wrong with the robots and Bruce has to save the day. IRL. Which is, I guess, scary in the future. And why shouldn’t it be? Robots today exist to take over tasks that are dull, dirty, and dangerous, and oftentimes, real life is all of those things and worse. Project that philosophy into the future, and you’ve got robots living our lives for us, while we control them from someplace comfortable and safe, like a bomb shelter filled with pillows.

Surrogates looks to be basically another Matrix, except with hardware instead of software and everybody knows that it’s going on. More realistic? Maybe. People are experimenting (successfully) with neural control of robots, but reading brains is the easy part: it’s writing data that’s hard. Even so, it’s not impossible… Direct brain stimulation has been used to allow blind people to see, for example.

I’m probably overthinking this movie, but the premise does seem interesting, and if nothing else, it appears to contain ample amounts of sex, violence, and robots… What else could you possibly want?

[ Surrogates ] VIA [ io9 ]

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Category: Pop Culture

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2 Comments

Comment by Anastasios-Antonios Toulkeridis

Made Thursday, 20 of August , 2009 at 2:31 am

very interesting post Evan.
Allow me to expand the idea further. When and if that happens humans will no longer need biological parts such as legs and arms. They could as well exist in the form of a brain plus some necessary supporting organs. And eventually nanotechnology shall be able to substitute and improve upon the functionality of the biological counterparts until one day it is even possible to completely digitize our consciousness

Comment by Alex

Made Thursday, 20 of August , 2009 at 4:02 am

It’s been done. There’s a Japanese movie called Hinokio about a boy who stays at home but controls a robot to go to school. Decidedly less blood in that one, though :)