tehcnicolor dreamworld

Television: A Technicolor Dreamworld
The narrative structure of The Wizard of Oz starts out with the main character, Dorothy. Her house has been blown into a mythical world full of witches and munchkins. A good witch tells her that she must find the Wizard to take her and her little dog back to Kansas. All she has to do is follow the yellow brick road straight to the land of Oz. Along the way Dorothy makes a few friends, who are in need of something. She meets a scarecrow who needs a brain, a tin man who needs a heart and a lion who needs some courage. They run into some trouble when they encounter a wicked witch who is angry at Dorothy because her house landed on her sister, another wicked witch. They get captured and are taken to her castle. With Toto’s help they escape and kill the wicked witch. They make it to Oz and find that the Wizard is a lonely old man with little power at all. He is wise though and helps each of them by giving meaningful gifts. Lastly, he invites Dorothy to go home with him in a big air balloon, but she gets out when Toto runs away, ruining her chances of ever getting home. But miraculously the good witch comes back and tells her to click her heels three times if she ever wanted to go home. She does and wakes up back in Kansas, to find out that it was all just a dream. Many stories about people overcoming obstacles do in fact fit in the shape of the narrative of this story. The “yellow brick road” symbolizes certain inevitability for Dorothy. Her ultimate good nature and kind feeling towards everyone she meets leads her down a certain path and certainly she will find her way home. This seems to be the central moral of the story. If people are good hearted, friendly and polite enough they will find their way home. I do think that this narrative is a bit simplified though in comparison to real life biographies. Realistically, the yellow brick road is not always so plain and obvious. In Oz, you know you are on the road and you know that this road will lead to, in Dorothy and company’s case, the resolution to your problems. In life decisions made are not always the right ones even if we all are kind natured and friendly.
I think there might be a subliminal undercurrent of shedding a favorable light on watching television in The Wizard of Oz. As a metaphor, “somewhere over the rainbow” certainly could represent imagination as a way of escaping reality. And just as one can go there in an instant, one can come right back from it. This is the wonder of television. It creates a substitute, for a while, from the cruel, dull, grind that is our existence. In most cases the world we see in the TV is brighter than the black and white of reality. When we turn on the TV we are immersed in a world where problems are solved after commercial break. Thirty minutes is all someone needs to create, struggle with and solve the problems they are faced with. We are happy in this Technicolor world. This is what TV stands for in our every day lives and this is what The Wizard of Oz stands to represent and tell about this type of technology’s place in our culture.

Robots, Chimps and Us

I think that we can tolerate robots to a point. Robots who think and feel for themselves are threatening because we, as humans like to think of ourselves as the most superior beings we have ever interacted with. Robots embedded with laws like Asimov’s are still untrustworthy to us and for no reason. Logic tells us that robots who have these unbreakable laws will never commit murder. But since we know human capabilities to break any law ever created, which is the reason the law was created in the first place, assumptions are made to think that robots are capable of such lawlessness as well. Look at Baley clinging to his fleeting idea that, first Daneel is not a robot and second that he is capable of committing murder. What he does not realize is that the human and robot brain are different. “A human brain or any mammalian brain cannot be completely analyzed by any mathematical disciple now known. No response can therefore be counted upon as a certainty. The robot brain is completely analyzable, or it could not be constructed. We know exactly what the responses to given stimuli must be. No robot could truly falsify answers. The thing you call falsification just simply does not exist in the robots mental horizon” (Asimov pg 180). Because of our tendency to irrationalize behavior and forget these simple logical truths, we will forever fear, like Lije, robots who threaten our superiority. We will fear, to an even greater degree, those which threaten our exclusive existence as superior beings on this planet; human-like robots.
The closer the machine looks to a human the more we perceive and therefore react to them as humans. I believe now and in the near future when robots begin to get more sophisticated, our brains will have to adapt to notice subtle details that we cannot currently pick up on, to notice the distinction between humans and robots. An example would be the eyes. There are so many muscles on and around the eye that humans can notice and through that can perceive what that person is feeling. Humor is something that robots with logic engrained into them would have a hard time processing and even harder time attempting to create. Humor is based on sarcasm and human heuristics. Sarcasm is illogical and follows no set of codes. The robot would have to throw out his logic based mind and ‘think more like a person’ in order to have humor.
In human’s ever present attempt to relate and connect to things slightly resembling human form we go so far as to treat chimpanzees and gorillas as near human or humanlike people. In essence they are almost human. Which leads me to wonder what it is that makes us human? Sophisticated communication, capacity for love and hate, and a multitude of other advanced traits only humans seem to possess are some close guesses. The tendency to anthropomorphize is engrained in our perception because we see a bit of humanity in these lower primates. They can love and hate, they can communicate and even make tools to fulfill needs. It’s fascinating to watch gorillas form families and communities even. I can’t tell you how much I want a chimpanzee of my own, but then that would be unfair to my perception of their closeness to humanity if I kept him or her locked up in a cage!

robots are inciteful

Like the biblical God, man creates robots in his own image. We can stand to learn a lot about our values, cultures, human tendencies, and our way of life by comparing our soul to that of another creation, the robot. The logical, calculated analysis of the world differs from the heuristic and biased view humans have of the world. Olivaw stood up on the counter in the shoe store and calculated the risk factors on a strictly logical basis. He was programmed in the nature of humans to bend towards authority. There was no risk of bodily harm because robots do not feel as humans do and he is programmed to lay down his life if it comes to harming a human. What the robot cannot calculate is human’s reaction to this stand of authority. He has rules governing what humans do but I do not think humanity is as expectant as to adhere to laws governing behavior in any strict sense at all. At any moment in that scene someone could have challenged Olivaw’s assumed authority and where would the robot be then? The crowd would have noticed he wouldn’t shoot and he would have also been ripped to shreds. I think it would be extremely difficult to work side by side with R. Daneel Olivaw just based on the fact of reading human emotions. He does it differently and I would not bank the lives of the public or myself on it.
Tank is an interesting observation in human communication. The fact that people get excited that a being not human is talking and responding to what humans are saying to it shows that it is working. Giving him a soap opera background and emotions, to some extent, brings him closer to relating to people and reveals a lot about what humans look for in communication. There is more to talking than just communication. We detect feelings through slight inflections in voice or of the context in which someone says something. All these things have been a gift of evolution and language that robots have yet to master. I think that is the next step towards having a robot talk as a human would.
I do not add emotive pictures in my typed messages or emails because I think they are cheesy and unnecessary. If I ever did use them they would be to make fun of them or out of complete boredom. The typed word is a newer and different way of communication than voice. It’s more efficient and less emotive. The sacrifice in feeling is balanced by the ease and efficiency of the communication.