Continue Reading Below Advertisement

OK, so maybe my relationship with screens and lights isn't exactly healthy. Still, it's nothing compared to ...

How It Works in Movies:

I have to make a fine point here -- movies love progress, but only so long as that progress doesn't involve a computer outperforming or outthinking a human.

At the end of Star Wars, Luke Skywalker and Garven Dreis both take shots at the Death Star's exhaust port. Garven uses the targeting computer, but it misses, making him look like an incompetent asshole. Luke is going to use the computer until he realizes that it won't work, it can't work, and that he has to rely on the ancient mystical energy of the Force in order to achieve the goals he needs. In the extended cut, Luke actually radios back to the rebel base to say, "Fuck your technology, Tito. I'm about to proton-fuck this death sphere with love magic."

Lucasfilm

Auto-aim is for nubcakes.

Continue Reading Below Advertisement

And until very recently, AI was always evil: HAL 9000, The Matrix, Tron, Stealth, the Alien series -- hell, even RoboCop is about the human part of RoboCop triumphing over the robot part, and ED-209 is an engineering student's robotic wetmare from the very beginning. The very first feature-length sci-fi movie, Metropolis, is all about robots taking over the working class. If Johnny Five hadn't displayed human qualities, Ally Sheedy would have thrown that home-invading demon in a car crusher and masturbated to its screams.

Star Trek stood out as being definitively optimistic in its portrayal of the future, but Gene Roddenberry had to fight to keep things from getting pessimistic, and things got steadily darker as he lost control of the franchise. Even in movies and shows that rely on hackers, they always need the lead character to never understand what's going on with all that typy mumbo-jumbo. That's why the technologically illiterate are always the ones to come up with the solution, even when that solution doesn't make sense. So keep that in mind the next time you're fixing someone's computer and they throw out some comment that makes you want to go back in time and punch their father's sperm.