I watch the 1982 movie Tron with my kids last night. They'd never seen it, and I hadn't seen it for probably 20+ years. It wasn't nearly as good as I remembered thinking it was when I was a kid, but it also wasn't nearly as bad as I expected it to be. There was, in fact, one exchange of dialogue that was rather prophetic:
Dr. Walter Gibbs: ...computers are just machines; they can't think.
Alan Bradley: Some programs will be thinking soon.
Dr. Walter Gibbs: Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop.
(from IMDB)
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Recall that Tron was released in 1982. The Commodore 64 had just been released; the Apple II+ had been out for a couple of years; and the TRS-80 had been on the market for five years. There is significantly more processing power in cell phones now than those computers possessed; in fact, you can get emulators for your smart phone that will run a virtual
Commodore 64 or
Apple IIe.
Computers in 1982 were hardly ubiquitous. Yet, Lisberger had enough foresight to predict what I saw on
Buttface Facebook this morning:
FB Friend: The weather app lied to me. I guess I should look out the window before I get dressed..
Words fail me.
I started to write that stupid doesn't count when it comes from a teenager but then it occurred to me that 100 years ago she could have easily been married with a child by this age. I can't decide which we abandoned the appreciation of first : fertility or good sense.
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