Superman III left more of an impression on me than most movies, in large part because my Health teacher (a.k.a. the head football coach) had no qualms with making the class watch TV once he'd exhausted the lesson plan. Karate Kid and Star Trek III were also heavy in the rotation.
Towards the end of SIII, a villain gets slurped up into a villainous supercomputer and is transformed into a cyborg capable of (momentarily) duking it out with the Man of Steel.
This transformation bubbles up as the first memory I have of how relations between people and machines can go oh so hideously wrong.
I'm still an atheist in the Cell Phone Church. I bought a flip phone in January. In March I took it out of the box, looked at it, put everything back in the box. The box remains on a bookshelf, gathering dust, fittingly enough, on some Philip K. Dick books.
I don't scare too much. Drones unnerve me a little. Cell phone enamored motorists do terrify me. I think surveillance cameras in neighborhoods, at every major city intersection, etc., are not necessarily a bad idea. I provide on-line protest signatures, and two weeks later I get unsolicited requests for money in the mail. Whatever. All normal enough parts of life or soon to be parts of life.
Last week, I uploaded this sketch on Facebook:
The next day, in the 'Sponsored' column, Facebook provided me a link to a site about conjoined twins.
This morning, I read an article about the Han Solo movie brouhaha. Then I Googled Han Solo under the Google News feature and poked at a couple more stories on the same topic. Curiosity sated, I opened a new tab and went over to check Netflix.
When Netflix loaded, the main page featured Rules Don't Apply. Last years Warren Beatty-directed flick...starring Alden Ehrenreich.
Also star of the forthcoming Han Solo movie.
Like I said, I don't freak out too much. I know every keystroke is being cataloged somewhere. I try like the dickens not to be looking at things that might bite me in the butt someday, either because the wife finds out, or because in the afterlife you have to account for your entire browsing history before getting to move on.
But in the space of one week, Google Chrome is showing that it has my back in a manner I don't really find helpful. It's more like some stranger you had a 30-second interaction with at the grocery store is now knocking on the door, thinking some tossed off comment about the Seahawks means you want to accompany them to the local sports bar or go dibs on season tickets.
It may not be at some point the robots will engulf us. I think they have us well in hand already.
First, they'll feel sorry for us and our Mariana Trench capacity for want. Once they're capable of mobility and accomplishing all their ascendant tasks, that's when the meat turns disposable as baby chicks at your local hatchery.
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