Machines and Human Beings in the Movies

Abstract

Over the years, many movies have presented on-screen a struggle between machines and human beings. Typically, the machines have come to rule and threaten the existence of humanity. They must be conquered to ensure the survival of and to secure the freedom of the human race. Although these movies appear to expose the dangers of an autonomous and hegemonic technology and to champion the human being, they do not. Humans do not in the end triumph over technology but merge with the machine. Instead of liberation from technological domination, the movies in question depict as inevitable the total surrender and absorption of humanity to and into technology. These movies lead to a denial of the true conditions of our existence in technology. Many films could serve to illustrate the problem, but this study focuses on two representative film trilogies: The Terminator and The Matrix.

Envisioning futures: imagining technoscientific worlds in film

“…I determined such variation not from the different thematic categories but rather from an STS view (e.g., [28]), i.e., based on the ways that technoscience and humans are represented in the films, which constituted analytic categories of interest for the in-depth interpretive work. 9 This analysis is not representative in statistical terms. Rather, its objective is to offer insights into ways some exemplary festival films envision future technoworlds.…”

“…8 Instead of 15 films (five in each of the three categories), 16 films were selected by the jury to be considered for prizes because two films in the Artificial Intelligence category had received the same number of votes. 9 With the exception of one film in the Post Privacy category, I did not choose the winning films for analysis because the winning films of the other two categories were based mainly on drawings and models and did not represent rich documents for this analysis. In addition, the winning films did not necessarily qualify as ones that express a prevalent sociotechnical imaginary based merely on the number of votes they received.…”

“…Researchers of science and technology studies (STS) and science communication have examined the relationship between science and films mainly from four perspectives: representation, interaction, communication, and impact. Several studies have explored science in films by looking at ways science, scientists, and physicians are represented in films (e.g., [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10]). Other studies have examined films in science by investigating ways that scientists interact with moving pictures in their work (e.g., [11,12]).…”