by Roger Bourke White Jr., copyright April 2014
Transcendence is a sci-sci romance filled with nonsense. It talks about deep issues but doesn't really address them because the story is so inconsistent. This is all about from-the-heart issues -- romance and techno zombies -- not ethical or technological issues.
The heart of the story is that Will and Evelyn Caster, a brilliant husband-wife science team, are making things happen in the world of AI. But anti-AI terrorists attack and mortally wound Will with a radioactive bullet. Before he dies, his wife and his partner and he cobble together a backyard data center and move his mind into those databanks. The terrorists get wind of this, and just as they are attacking his wife transfers the mind from the isolated databanks into cyberspace, as in, the Internet. From there... well... things happen. What mostly happens is a love story -- wifey is trying to relate to hubby who is now all bits and bytes.
There is so much inconsistency in this story that it is hard to get a handle on it and describe specifics. A simple one is that radioactive bullet, here we hark back to the 1950's Ed Wood days. Another example is that Will and Evelyn want to get Will back into one place, so they build another data center. Even though the backyard one, which fit in a single school room, was big enough to hold Will, this new one is the size of several city blocks. And discretion is apparently not an issue because this new one is powered with a solar farm of equal size. This whole complex is put up next to a nearly abandoned desert town. Neat stuff for Google maps! Yes, the terrorists, and the government, find out about this and join forces to attack at the end of the movie. Adding to the inconsistency, in spite of the size of this facility, and Will directly commanding it, nothing comes out of it that rocks the world. All the change-the-world we see come out of it is a single line of health charity.
Transcendence shows us that familiar theme based sci-fi is far from dead -- in this case undying love and worries about robots taking over the world. In spite of how much we have learned over the last sixty years, these movies aren't showing us any new insights into these issues. Even though the story being told has changed little from the 1950's these themes can still draw producers to spend big bucks.
Here are some stories I've written about this topic:
o My book Child Champs has an older couple in it that go cyber.
o My story The Failure in Tips Vol. 2 is about a cyber species being created.
o This is an essay on how tough it is going to be to move a human consciousness into cyber, but the effort will produce interesting and world shaking surprises.
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