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| Plug & Pray | |||
"Jens Schanze’s aptly titled Plug and Pray opens with an old man cursing at his laptop — one of many computers surrounding him — which won’t turn on. He is Joseph Wiezenbaum, one of the earliest visionaries of computer science, who taught at many of the world’s top universities, including MIT, and arguably the sole voice of reason in this enthralling and chilling film. Schanze explores the controversy surrounding the next steps in computer technology, where human flesh and the computer chip merge to create what some see as the utopian vision — prolonged life and the eradication of countless diseases. The antagonist to Wiezenbaum’s cautious view of progress is Ray Kurzweil, inventor, innovator and successful businessman. He only sees the “can do” in research into all aspects of computer technology, with little thought to “should we be doing it”." – International Film Guide "A measure of the film’s intelligence is how it avoids the documentary form’s common pitfall of posing easy opposites to cook up a phony conflict in the eyes of the viewer. Thus, although Schanze clearly sympathizes with famed MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum’s view that the recent scientific and industrial shift toward greater emphasis on robots and robotic research is a potentially dangerous path, [he] is also clearly fascinated with the missionary zeal of scientist/futurist Ray Kurzweil, who firmly argues the positives of a future where human and machine merge into a new kind of being. Both men are, in their distinct ways, outstanding communicators, and the effect on the open-minded viewer is intellectually dazzling. Schanze displays his own curiosity by traveling to several countries to observe various robotic scientists and their visions, all of which seem viable and are pure eye-candy for cinematographer Börres Weiffenbach’s attentive camera. Professor Minoru Asada is seen developing robots with extraordinarily human-like characteristics and appearances. Italian scientist Giorgio Metta (whose team strikingly resembles a group of artists at work in a studio) stresses the fundamentals of biology in his project to create humanoid robots, noting, “There are no limits to the possibilities.” This is where Weizenbaum begs to differ; as the man who created “Eliza” in 1968, the world’s first great leap in artificial intelligence research, he early on recognized that robotics could potentially hatch monsters (not unlike a HAL 9000 machine run amok), and worse, become a fully owned subsidiary of government defense departments.… Plug and Pray unexpectedly concludes on an almost cosmic note, contemplating not Kurzweil’s notion of ultra-extended human life via nanotechnology, but the poetry and certainty of human mortality. Not just the idea of man playing God is raised here, but also the meaning of life, and whether such life has a beginning, middle and end, unlike robotic “eternity.” – Robert Kohler, Variety Presented in cooperation with the Goethe-Institut. |
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| Germany 2010 | |||
Director: Jens Schanze With: Joseph Weizenbaum, Raymond Kurzweil, Hiroshi Ishiguro, Minoru Asada, Giorgio Metta, Neil Gershenfeld, Hans-Joachi Wünsche, Joel Moses In English, Japanese, Italian and German, with English subtitles 90 mins, DV (16:9) Palmerston North Film Society |
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