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"I Robot", 17 years later
Jun. 21st, 2021 03:47 pmI remember being in the theater, wearing overpriced 3D glasses, watching the 2004 blockbuster "I, Robot" shortly after it came out. I left the theater thinking it had amazing special effects and did a nice job smashing together a few Isaac Asimov concepts and a handful of fun action scenes. I also remember being vaguely annoyed at the depiction of software developers, though I don't remember why.
There are many future-tech ideas in the film that haven't arrived in the real world today, and many that have, but the most interesting to me is the multi-touch interface and all its permutations. When it arrived less than three years later, contained in a lightweight handheld device, it took even the realm of science fiction by surprise.
Even though the imaginary future of "I, Robot" has magical floating 3D displays all over the place, every interface is effectively buttons. No one does something as dead simple to our modern world as place a finger on a screen and drag it to pan around a map. Other big-time sci-fi films of this era, like Minority Report and The Matrix, are audacious enough to use gloves and hand gestures to augment their VR, but there is still no simple, bare-fingered, touch-and-drag scroll. The closest anyone got was The Matrix Reloaded during a docking scene, but the very futuristic traffic controllers were still just dragging and stacking icons. The simple two-finger zoom was nowhere in sight. And still, it was a cheat because they were all jacked into a VR simulation, not interacting with a physical surface.
A few months after I obtained an iPhone, I was sitting in a restaurant in Santa Cruz looking at photos. A little girl in the adjacent booth got curious about the device and I held it out to her. In less than ten seconds of poking, she figured out how to pinch with two fingers to zoom around in the photo. The discovery of the feature was literally so easy a child could do it. And it had somehow never occurred to the biggest minds in sci-fi.
The shape of the futuristic user interfaces, and the feel of the computer graphics, both place "I, Robot" in a very small window of cultural history. Both are kind of charming, and can be appreciated for that. But there's also another part of this movie that plants it in a specific cultural context that is not charming at all. It's the female supporting character.
In the movie, Susan Calvin is supposed to be both an advanced engineer and a psychiatrist, and yet she spends almost the entire runtime being a myopic, cranky asshat. Everybody in modern society these days is familiar with how software can have bugs and glitches and be subject to tampering, but the woman in this movie steadfastly insists that the software driving all robots is utterly perfect in all situations. As a software engineer who's now spent half a lifetime around other software engineers, I find this portrayal uproariously bad, and I'm astonished it didn't drive me crazy back in 2004.
Susan's portrayal is a perfect example of the Hollywood "computer nerd"; a portrayal that hasn't changed much in almost two decades: In Hollywood, computer nerds are endearingly awkward nebbishes, always bearing one or more mental disorders from a buffet of Asperger's, ADHD, autism, PTSD, agoraphobia, narcissism, and schizophrenia. The point is they appear to require some kind of mental damage in order to find computers interesting. Otherwise they would be more interested in "normal" things, right? Being a sensitive wallflower or a prickly asshole as the scene demands is mandatory, and if they're on the side of the hero, they are always either mildly dickish, or a sexualized prize to be won, or both. They also usually have supermodel-shaped bodies, flawless skin, and a highly stylized wardrobe, but hey, that's everyone in Hollywood, right? And they barely spend any time around computers, at least on screen, because that's boring.
Susan is clearly the "dickish sexualized prize" variation of the computer nerd here. In this cultural window, there was apparently no other way to portray a scientist woman next to the streetwise gumshoe vibes of Will Smith's Detective Del Spooner.
But I guess I'm not the target audience here. The target audience is someone who thinks that engineers and/or psychiatrists are all huge assholes who see science as a religion, never admit to their mistakes, and spout nonsensical jargon when plain language would be better. Someone who thinks that high-and-mighty scientist lady is incompetent and wants her to get exposed - and perhaps get exposed too, if you know what I mean - and be humbled in the face of Will Smith's working-class common-sense know-how. Take that, nerd!
It seems like popular culture at the time was throwing some kind of fit over the fact that computer nerds were suddenly earning lots of money and being put in charge of things.
Even when Doctor Calvin finally gets on the same page as Detective Spooner, she is basically useless for the whole back half of the film, except for one small decision (she decides not to junk an important robot.) Even her skills as a programmer are useless: She tries to unlock a security panel and fails, so Spooner just punches it open. Then she tries to do some kind of decryption on an access portal but fails. Then she nearly falls to her death and is only saved by Spooner's heroic thinking. Funny how I didn't even notice what a thankless, negative role that was when I watched it the first time in my late 20's. She was there just to suck at things and be wrong, and that was it.
There are many future-tech ideas in the film that haven't arrived in the real world today, and many that have, but the most interesting to me is the multi-touch interface and all its permutations. When it arrived less than three years later, contained in a lightweight handheld device, it took even the realm of science fiction by surprise.
Even though the imaginary future of "I, Robot" has magical floating 3D displays all over the place, every interface is effectively buttons. No one does something as dead simple to our modern world as place a finger on a screen and drag it to pan around a map. Other big-time sci-fi films of this era, like Minority Report and The Matrix, are audacious enough to use gloves and hand gestures to augment their VR, but there is still no simple, bare-fingered, touch-and-drag scroll. The closest anyone got was The Matrix Reloaded during a docking scene, but the very futuristic traffic controllers were still just dragging and stacking icons. The simple two-finger zoom was nowhere in sight. And still, it was a cheat because they were all jacked into a VR simulation, not interacting with a physical surface.A few months after I obtained an iPhone, I was sitting in a restaurant in Santa Cruz looking at photos. A little girl in the adjacent booth got curious about the device and I held it out to her. In less than ten seconds of poking, she figured out how to pinch with two fingers to zoom around in the photo. The discovery of the feature was literally so easy a child could do it. And it had somehow never occurred to the biggest minds in sci-fi.
The shape of the futuristic user interfaces, and the feel of the computer graphics, both place "I, Robot" in a very small window of cultural history. Both are kind of charming, and can be appreciated for that. But there's also another part of this movie that plants it in a specific cultural context that is not charming at all. It's the female supporting character.
In the movie, Susan Calvin is supposed to be both an advanced engineer and a psychiatrist, and yet she spends almost the entire runtime being a myopic, cranky asshat. Everybody in modern society these days is familiar with how software can have bugs and glitches and be subject to tampering, but the woman in this movie steadfastly insists that the software driving all robots is utterly perfect in all situations. As a software engineer who's now spent half a lifetime around other software engineers, I find this portrayal uproariously bad, and I'm astonished it didn't drive me crazy back in 2004.
Susan's portrayal is a perfect example of the Hollywood "computer nerd"; a portrayal that hasn't changed much in almost two decades: In Hollywood, computer nerds are endearingly awkward nebbishes, always bearing one or more mental disorders from a buffet of Asperger's, ADHD, autism, PTSD, agoraphobia, narcissism, and schizophrenia. The point is they appear to require some kind of mental damage in order to find computers interesting. Otherwise they would be more interested in "normal" things, right? Being a sensitive wallflower or a prickly asshole as the scene demands is mandatory, and if they're on the side of the hero, they are always either mildly dickish, or a sexualized prize to be won, or both. They also usually have supermodel-shaped bodies, flawless skin, and a highly stylized wardrobe, but hey, that's everyone in Hollywood, right? And they barely spend any time around computers, at least on screen, because that's boring.Susan is clearly the "dickish sexualized prize" variation of the computer nerd here. In this cultural window, there was apparently no other way to portray a scientist woman next to the streetwise gumshoe vibes of Will Smith's Detective Del Spooner.
But I guess I'm not the target audience here. The target audience is someone who thinks that engineers and/or psychiatrists are all huge assholes who see science as a religion, never admit to their mistakes, and spout nonsensical jargon when plain language would be better. Someone who thinks that high-and-mighty scientist lady is incompetent and wants her to get exposed - and perhaps get exposed too, if you know what I mean - and be humbled in the face of Will Smith's working-class common-sense know-how. Take that, nerd!
It seems like popular culture at the time was throwing some kind of fit over the fact that computer nerds were suddenly earning lots of money and being put in charge of things.
Even when Doctor Calvin finally gets on the same page as Detective Spooner, she is basically useless for the whole back half of the film, except for one small decision (she decides not to junk an important robot.) Even her skills as a programmer are useless: She tries to unlock a security panel and fails, so Spooner just punches it open. Then she tries to do some kind of decryption on an access portal but fails. Then she nearly falls to her death and is only saved by Spooner's heroic thinking. Funny how I didn't even notice what a thankless, negative role that was when I watched it the first time in my late 20's. She was there just to suck at things and be wrong, and that was it.
