This may not end well.

At any given time, Vancouver is standing in for a variety of locations for the purposes of television and movie production.  (As I've pointed out before, only rarely does Vancouver get to be Vancouver.) In fact, not long after I first moved to Vancouver, I was a bit puzzled during a trip downtown to discover that the area around Burrard and Cordova was littered with burned-out cars and destroyed police vehicles.  I was a bit less puzzled when I noticed that there were New York City subway entrances that didn't go anywhere on a few of the corners - when I finally saw The Fantastic Four, I immediately recognized the locations for the climactic battle with Doctor Doom.

Yesterday, I was dropping off some posters to be laminated at my print shop only to find some non-standard police vehicles blocking traffic on Hastings Street near Burrard, along with sidewalk "Volt" charging stations for electric vehicles.  (Coincidentally just around the corner from my initial encounter with leftover movie props from nine years ago.)

A little research revealed that these were probably from location shooting done for the upcoming J.J. Abrams/J.H. Wyman* science fiction police series Almost Human, set in 2048 Los Angeles, with Karl Urban and Michael Ealy.  I gather it's one of those human/robot partners scenarios, which would explain the "To Protect & Serve Man" tag** on the side of the SUV.

Any number of similar movies and TV shows come to mind almost immediately: Holmes & Yo-Yo, Future Cop, Mann & Machine, Total Recall 2070, and Alien Nation, both in movie and television form, with an alien partner rather than a robot just for the sake of variety.  Let's not forget Deputy Andy from Eureka, just to be thorough - and wasn't there an android cop in the 90s Tekwar series?  (I don't know if we want to drag Theodore Rex into this, where someone thought it would be a good idea to have Whoopi Goldberg play a futuristic cop working with a humanoid dinosaur.)

Unfortunately, most of these attempts at pairing carbon-based cops with silicon sidekicks have not been critical successes.  Maybe it's time for another approach to this?  Let's see...Matrix-style cops, where the partner is a virtual bot rather than a real one, and the human has to plug into the net to work with them?  Or have the robot cop actually be controlled by a paralyzed human detective, the next step for the Lincoln Rhyme novels by Jeffery Deaver?  Let's have both the cops be robots - let's have ALL the cops be robots - let's have all the criminals be robots - in other words, LET'S DO SOMETHING DIFFERENT!

Sorry...honest, originally this was just going to be a short post saying that I'd seen futuristic cop cars yesterday.  Anyway - J.J, J.H.?  Good luck with your series, I hope that works out for you.

- Sid

* What, do none of these people have first names?

** Are they aware of the associations with the Twilight Zone episode To Serve Man?  Which turned out to be the title of an alien cookbook, for anyone unfamiliar with the script - probably not what they have in mind here.

 

Interdit.

As I've mentioned before, I don't follow the news very closely, but every once in a while something will happen that's significant enough to attract my attention.  This time, it's the unbelievable Charter of Values being proposed by the Parti Québécois.  

I am in no way a religious person, but if you are, and your religion requires you to wear a yarmulke, a turban, a burqa, or a big hammer of Thor on a thong, I think that you should be allowed to, and frankly, I don't care if you do. In fact, as a geek, I have a certain professional respect for people who decide to stand up and show who they are - if that means that they wear something to indicate their religion, fine with me.  My only request to the followers of any particular religion is that they extend the same courtesy, respect the fact that I'm not eager to join their faith, and not attempt to proselytize their value system to me.

Sadly, there will always be people who will make their decision about others based on what they are wearing, especially if it somehow disagrees with their particular narrowminded view of the world about what's right, what's normal.  But the idea of institutionalizing that process, of making it a workplace requirement that you can't express your religious beliefs in the fashion (no pun intended) required by the tenets of your faith, that's wrong - that's the first step on a slippery slope, mes vieux.

I feel that people like me are somewhere on that slope, and the happy folks behind the Charter will eventually want to work their way down to us. The path that I have chosen to follow doesn't require that I wear anything to demonstrate my commitment, but there are still times when I don the vestments required by the tenets - well, the Tennant, actually, at least up to a couple of years ago - of my chosen area of worship.  Sooner or later, the Charter people will realize that geeks may be equally suspect, and then the posters will look like this:

The elder Trudeau once said that there's no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation - I'd like to think that it doesn't have any business in our closets, either. 

- Sid

"The courtroom is a crucible."

Sometimes it feels like data has free will around here, too.

- Joe Shewfelt 

I currently share my office at work with a fellow named Bill.  It's universally accepted that BIll is one of the nicest people you could ever meet, and as such, he's obviously a great person with whom to share a workspace. 

However, Bill does have one shortcoming:  he is in no way a science fiction or fantasy fan, thereby proving that no one is perfect.*

Bill spends a lot of his time in hearings that deal with injury claims:  they're not exactly legal situations as such, but there are resemblances to the courtroom environment - evidence is presented and refuted, arguments made, and judgements delivered.  We were chatting about the generalities of this process during a recent lunchtime walk, and he mentioned that one of the main issues is to avoid dealing with irrelevant information.

At this point I laughed a bit, which puzzled Bill, so I had to explain why the mention of irrelevancy rings the bell for science fiction fans, particularly fans of Star Trek:  The Next Generation.

The Measure of A Man is one of the best episodes of The Next Generation, one of those scripts which typifies good science fiction in its discussion of universal issues through the abstracted lens of speculative SF. It addresses the question of how artificial intelligences will be treated by humanity when the time comes - what will be their status? Will they be peers, servants - or simply property, considered to be nothing more than bits and bytes, and as such deactivated, erased and rebuilt at our whim?

The plot is quite simple on the surface:  a request has been made to transfer Lieutenant Commander Data, the Enterprise's android bridge officer, to the Daystrom Institute, so that he can be disassembled by the Robotics Department and studied in hopes of building similar androids.  Data himself is the product of Noonian Soong, an independent, reclusive genius, and as such his construction is an enigma - as a result, there is no guarantee that it will be possible to successfully put him back together.

Because of this, Data attempts to resign his commission, but is informed that he cannot:  after all, as an assembly of molybdenum-cobalt alloys and positronic circuitry, he is as much a piece of Starfleet's property as the Enterprise itself, and no more able to protest a command than any other piece of equipment.
  
The case is put forward for adjudication by the Starfleet Judge Advocate General - does Data have rights? Or is he property?  It is easily proved that Data is a machine, and Captain Picard, who is defending Data, is convinced that his case is lost. 

 

He is in conversation with Guinan about Data's value to him when she points out that an multitude of androids would be even more valuable, as a race of disposable beings.  Picard realizes that property is a euphemism for a much more fundamental word:  slavery.

At the climax of the courtroom action, Picard delivers the following brilliantly written speech:

Your honor, the courtroom is a crucible; in it, we burn away irrelevancies until we are left with a pure product: the truth, for all time. Now sooner or later, this man - or others like him - will succeed in replicating Commander Data. The decision you reach here today will determine how we will regard this creation of our genius. It will reveal the kind of people we are; what he is destined to be. It will reach far beyond this courtroom and this one android. It could significantly redefine the boundaries of personal liberty and freedom: expanding them for some, savagely curtailing them for others. Are you prepared to condemn him - and all who will come after him - to servitude and slavery? Your honor, Starfleet was founded to seek out new life: well, there it sits! Waiting.

Ultimately, it is ruled that Data, although a machine, is not property - and has the freedom to choose.

When we returned to the office after our walk, I took a minute of the company's time to find the appropriate clip from the episode on YouTube™ (I knew it would be there somewhere) and let BIll listen to Jean-Luc's entire speech.  When it finished, he nodded slowly a couple of times and said, "Good, that was good. I liked that - 'a crucible in which we burn away irrelevancies'..."

I immediately warned him that he should be cautious if he planned to borrow this bit of courtroom rhetoric for a hearing.  All he needs is one Star Trek fan in the room, and he would be so completely busted.

- Sid

* When I mentioned this** to Bill, he initially protested, then sort of agreed.

** The fact that he's not a genre fan, that is.  He was willing to admit that he might not be perfect.