 Well, welcome everybody. Welcome fellow students and panelists. This is our third in the Science Circle series of panel discussions in voice. So, hopefully everyone here is able to hear me and the panelists in voice. A little bit of change of pace this weekend instead of, you know, the heavy topics that we did the last two sessions, science versus religion and the Fermi paradox, which were heavy, heavy duty. We're going to lighten things up a little bit this time. And our topic is favorite, favorite science fiction movies. This is a topic that could easily sort of digress into just a bull session. So I wanted to try to establish a couple of parameters to maybe try to impose some structure on it. So one of the things I want the panelists to keep in mind is for the movies they've chosen, I would like to ask them to tell us a little bit about what they like about the science in the movies. I'm still getting a little feedback from taglines microphone. I hope that's not bothering everyone. And then, in addition to what they like about the science in the movies, I thought we should discuss sort of what is it about the movies that inspire us to think about science or to think about nature. So tagline, why don't you just try muting your microphone until you're speaking. There, that's better. That was distracting to me because I'm hearing it in my headset, so it sounds loud. So to begin with, I would like to introduce our panelists. And then I want to go sort of down the row and ask each of them to say a few words about themselves. Tell us a little bit about who you are, what your interest in science is, I guess any sort of patient or credentials or whatever you might have that you think the helpful for the audience to know, something like that. Comments about that. So our panelists going from my left is Syzygy, asymptote, tagline, and Mike Shaw, who I think are all of them are familiar to the science circle students. So Syzygy, let me start with you. Why don't you just say a few words about yourself. Yes, thank you, Berrigan. I appreciate the work you do here. And I do enjoy being on the panel, but if someone else would like to be on the panel in the future, I urge people to consider being on the panel. I agree. Okay, in real life, my name is William F. Wall. I'm an astronomy researcher and a professor at the National Institute of Astrophysics, Optics, and Electronics in Tbilisi. So recently we've been the lead institution of Large Millimeter Wave Telescope. It's a national lab right now. So I study interstellar molecular clouds on large scale scales of many parsecs. I teach graduate courses and I also give public talks in Mexico and I've given them in Canada on the LMT. After one of my talks, one woman from the audience approached me and said, proclaimed triumphantly that she understood. And what that means is that she's been having trouble understanding scientific talks for at least some of the time and it raises an interesting question. I mean, how well do scientists communicate their messages to inside their fields, public, if not quite good enough, consider that in conjunction with inadequate science education schools, that leads to widespread scientific illiteracy. And this is a problem that I want to address and that's one of the reasons I'm participating in the Science Circle. But this leads me to science fiction because science fiction, good science fiction can educate us and we love stories and it helps weave science into a culture. But science fiction can also diagnose the scientific illiteracy of the society because what passes for science fiction in popular culture shows a severe ignorance of science. It inspires us, that's right Shantel, but it's an indication of a severe ignorance of science. If you have movies and television programs, we saw this science fiction. And I like fantasy too, but not science. Good science fiction sparks our imaginations. It can spark real innovation sometimes. Science fiction already about the future helps us to understand how to survive in a sometimes violent universe, how to deal with each other and other beings, how to live inside our own heads. It can also make us question the very nature of reality. Matrix is one example of that. And it can do so in the way that no other genre can because fantasy, for example, is not real, but science fiction could become real, potentially real. And the three movies that I chose to talk about, they're not perfect, but they are science fiction. One is Extinction with Michael Penya. It's on Netflix. And Eye Robot, which is an amalgamation of Isaac Asimov stories with Will Smith and Bridget Moynihan. And Gadica is about how genetics can affect or not affect human culture with Ethan Hawke. Outstanding, yeah. Those are all excellent choices. I'm actually not familiar with Extinction. I'm going to have to check that out on Netflix. I appreciate those comments. This is, gee, that's fantastic. Tagline, why don't you share a little bit about yourself? Okay, I'm a compulsively private person, so I go by tagline here. But I will say that I have a background in mathematics and not currently, but in the past. My academic involvement biggest was on being on the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School. I'm a physician. And nowadays I do pretty much what I want. All right. That's all I have to say about that. Just a little bit about the movies you selected. Well, the first to comment on the idea of science fiction, I had an epic fail today. I'd made up 64 slides, including slides to illustrate or show images from the choices of the gentlemen here. But I couldn't get it to work. So this will all be verbal. But people that like sci-fi have imagination, so we should be able to overcome that. Science fiction is speculative fiction. I think of it as coming from literature and coming from human kind of innate linguistic ability to tell stories. And further to imagine what you're not able to do or see, but to be able to live it in your mind. It can also be described as a type of writing about imagined developments in science, advanced science and tech, space flight, time travel, extraterrestrial life, and that sort of thing. But especially their effect on life and the future. Now, I had two quotes I wanted to share with you. One was by Robert Schultz. Science fiction can be described as that branch of literature which deals with the reaction of human beings to changes in science and technology. I think that is really insightful. The changes in science and technology and how we keep up with it is at the heart of science fiction, I think. Science fiction began, modern science fiction began with the, in most people's view, with the publication of Frankenstein by Mary Shelley in the early 19th century. In 1828, she published The Last Man, which was also sci-fi and it was about the outcome of or consequences of a massive plague. And that's been used quite a lot. Stephen King did a book that was made into a television movie called The Stand about a devastating plague, for example. So that's, that kind of apocalyptic fiction has been with us and been on our mind for quite a while. But Isaac Asimov in 75, at the same year that Robert Schultz made his statement about the nature of science fiction, he said, science fiction is anything published as science fiction. Asimov was a biochemist, but a prolific writer. Also he was Russian and I like Brooklyn a lot. That's where he passed away, 92. One side shows were in chronological order. 1951, the day the earth stood still, 1978 invasion of the body snatchers, 1986, the fly with Jeff Goldblum and 2004, the eternal sunshine of the spotless mind. And I've always loved literature or cultural experiences that helped me understand what it is to be human. And the exploration of consequences of the presumptions that they impose upon us in sci-fi really explore that. It's pretty striking to me how easily people can go with the flow and I suggested presumption like the very idea that you could have a teleporter or be disassembled into elementary particles or atoms and then reassembled. And okay, I can go with that. And then you follow through the story. On the other hand, it at its extreme reflects extreme gullibility of humankind as we see people willing to believe most anything these days, as long as it tends to agree with their prejudices. So those are my choices. I can tell more about them in a bit, but I'll let off. Okay, that's fine. Very good. Very interesting selection of movies in particular. Classics all. And let's move right along and Mike, tell us a little bit about yourself and your movies you picked. All right. Let's see. I'll move my microphone just a little bit. So we don't get any reading. There we go. Okay, well, I was born in the Eastern townships of Southern Quebec, Canada. You should go and visit for the fall foliage. Stay for the wineries apple cider and maple syrup. I went to got my bachelor degree in chemistry at a school called Mount Allison University. It's at the tip of the Bay of Fundy in New Brunswick, Canada. It's famous for its nine meter vertical tides. I have a PhD in organometallic chemistry from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver from 1993. And I moved to University of Vermont where I was a postdoctoral fellow and then a lecturer. Again, organometallic electrochemistry. Gary jargon words. Sorry. Very simple concept basically looking at the chemistry of species which contain a metal attached to a carbon atom. In 1998 I started at Southern Illinois University of the Edwardsville as an assistant professor. I've been there ever since. Worked the way up the chain. I've been chair. Glad that's over. And right now they call me distinguished research professor, but probably not after they talk to me twice. So, you know, I've had a good career. In the middle of it, there's funding. There have been wonderful, wonderful students. I think I've had something about about 25 master's students and maybe 40 undergraduate students work with me for the in the past 20 years. And one of the wonderful things is to see how popular culture influences their expectations of their for their lives and careers. And so the movies I've chosen kind of reflect that there's two movies that I chose. And my reasoning was that since we're looking at science fiction movies that could happen with what we know now. That that was a good criteria for me. So the first is Europa report and Europa reports on Netflix. It's a story told through a series of flashbacks, log entries and interviews about the first crew of people sent to study Europa. They experienced a lot of setbacks along the way that test them and leave them with no communication to Earth. They decide to finish their mission and they find a way to send back the amazing results they find. But that's the good news and the bad news, no survivors. The second movie was X Machina. It's on Amazon Prime, maybe other places. And this one's about Caleb, a programmer who's employed by a mysterious billionaire to assess Eva who is a humanoid robot. And basically assessing her sentience like a Turing test during the events of the film Caleb's humanity is tested. I'm still trying to figure out if the end of the film represents the beginning of the singularity. It's a very Westworld type of movie. So these two I actually think are very solid science fiction where I don't think that there's any leap of faith that has to happen. I don't think there's any technology that's out of our reach to make these things possible. You know, as Tagline said teleporters that, you know, we could disassemble something molecule by molecule, but then we might reassemble it into a smoking heap, which would be unfortunate if that had been a person and faster than light travel has its own problems as well. So that's where I'll end and I think we can start with a good discussion between us. Yeah, fantastic. These are all great movies. I suppose I should also tell a little bit about myself. In real life. I'm Matthew Burr. I have some science background. My father was a chemist with Rockwell International. He also during in the 60s during the Apollo and Gemini programs in California. Brother is also a biologist. And I worked in labs a lot in high school and college. Ended up working in a lab at MIT with my brother, my oldest brother and the lab of James Buchanan, who I'm sure is now retired, but when I was 19, I got to present. The work of that laboratory at a scientific meeting in San Diego. I was at college at use and Diego at the time. So that was kind of a highlight of my science career. And I also did graduate work at Baylor College of Medicine. Which is how I ended up access. And so I had ambitions to be a working scientist all through my youth. But when I was actually in graduate school, I had something of a midlife crisis at 25 where I kind of freaked out at the prospects of trying to make a living in academia. So guess what? I bailed out and went to law school. That's refuge of the scoundrel. I've been a, just in my technical background, I'd be patent attorney. I've been a patent and trademark attorney. But I've always maintained my, I do at least keep up with it as a lay person. And let me see. So the movies I picked, let me see if I can pull up my list. And I have to say, I've thought about more movies. I just came up with a couple, you know, I thought we should at least mention 2001, a space Odyssey. I feel like that's a classic sci-fi movie. I'm a little bit surprised it hadn't been already picked, but I think that should be on our list. Another one, a little more obscure is called surrogates. It's from 2009 with Bruce Willis. I'm actually not even sure it's available. I think you might be able to see it on YouTube for $2 or $3. But I enjoy that movie a lot. And I also added an honorable mention that I think maybe is not on our official list. But I wanted, I thought Steven Spielberg should be represented in our list because he's done some seminal sci-fi movies. But the one I picked was Ready Player One, his most recent one. I actually particularly like because I liked the fiction of life in a virtual world and would like to have relationships in a virtual world with people you only know through their avatars. I thought the movie didn't have that. So I wanted to give that an honorable mention. So let's see. Why don't we, let me take a look, is there, let me kind of poll the audience perhaps. Is there anything, any particular movie that we mentioned so far that our students would like us to do? Like us to delve into perhaps right away? Oh, someone mentioned Narnia in local chat. I did want to mention that I specifically wanted to exclude fantasy like Lord of the Rings and Narnia and Harry Potter and things like that. You know, unless you could make a strong case about that they have something to say about science. But I thought we should limit our discussion to, if no one minds, I kind of would like to open up maybe with a discussion of Gadica. I think that that's a movie maybe people have not seen in a while and I recently rewatched it about a year or so ago. And I actually was much more impressed with it in rewatching it than was when I bought in the theaters. It really has a pretty gripping story about the social impacts of genetic engineering. And so if no one objects, let me open up the discussion to Gadica. Sure, I suppose I should jump in here since I introduced that one. Yeah, I'll tell you what I do like about it and what I don't like about it. But let me describe the movie a little bit first is that it is a society that's probably not too far in the future. And it's not really a meritocracy anymore. It's more that you get what you get. You get good positions in corporations or universities or wherever based on your genes. And yes, you do have to have skills in those areas, but it's mostly because of your genes. Do you have a genetic predisposition for certain types of jobs of employment? It's genetic engineering. What I liked about it is the science seemed a little simplistic to me. What I liked about it was that people just had to go somewhere and have their genes read and then they could figure out what their medical problems are going to be. That is potentially a good thing as it can help you in the future. But the problem is that you are also classified, put into a pigeonhole. And that's the part that I don't like and I'm wondering if that's what's going to happen in the future. Will we roll like that? Perhaps not. The movie itself was making a very strong statement about nature versus nurture. They were saying that this main character played not, he was considered one of God. He was not a child, so he was genetically defective and should not be trying to become an astronaut. But he was able to borrow someone else's genetic material, his roommate basically, a tabled man, who had extremely good genes but could not do anything. So it was kind of ironic that the one with great genes couldn't aspire to the position that he was supposedly ideal for. But this genetically defective child could do this because he did it by sheer will and hiding his genetic material. He was always cleaning his keyboard. There was also a murder in the movie which they were looking for who committed murder and they figured they could find his genes and they thought they were trying to identify who was the one who had those genes. So they figured he was the one who committed the murder because he was genetically inferior. They couldn't identify who it was at first and they never really did it by the end of the movie. But it turned out to be one of the instructors who was genetically superior and he's the one who committed the murder. Throughout this movie they were making a very bold statement that your personality and who you are is not totally dictated by your genes. I did like the message, it came across a little too heavily but I did like the message. Isn't there one of the most vivid scenes, there's a couple of vivid scenes in that, you know, one where the wheelchair guy is tied by crawling up the stairs of his apartment to hide. Yeah, I like that. Sorry, you're going to say more. Well that's very gripping. But I guess the one I was actually really thinking of, isn't there a scene where he has to go through a checkpoint I think like to get into work? And of course they sampled the DNA at the checkpoint to I guess make sure you're authorized. And he has some kind of like fake blood or like a, I can't remember exactly specifically but it's very tense about whether he has some kind of a little packet of fake blood or something that he has to submit to the checkpoint. Do you remember that at all? Yes, I do remember that. He was wearing something like fake skin and within the face skin was a pool of blood and that was from his roommate who had the greater genes. That's right. And while he was going through the checkpoint he had to remove his contact lenses, otherwise they would know, when they check him they would know he had contact lenses and was trying to be someone else. And also there was a scene where he was climbing up the staircase. The interesting thing about that staircase was it was a spiral staircase. It looked like a double helix. It looked like, I mean it was a metaphor. He was trying to climb up and he was trying to achieve in a metaphorical sense. He was trying to aspire to his own genetic potential by crawling up that staircase. Oh, I love that. I never picked up on that the first time. But yeah, that's a great detail to pick out. May I comment? Yes, please go ahead. I thought that was wonderfully artistic. There were several shots with Jude Law sitting in his wheelchair with the spiral double helix staircase or stairwell, I guess staircase behind him. And it showed the idea of all this genetic parameters as qualifying for quality of humanness being imposed upon people. The other thing about Jude Law in that he was the ubermensch who had all the physical skills, the extraordinary intelligence and excellent genetic makeup. He had thrown it away. He had caused his handicap. He had broken his spine by throwing himself in front of a bus, I think, in despondence. And that along with a point where the Ethan Hawke against his brother, they had swimming contests and he managed to beat his brother. And who was genetically superior. And his brother finally asked him, how did you do that? And he said, I, you know, he didn't save anything for the trip back. They would swim out into the harbor and then swim back. He swam with everything he had to get to the goal and dealt with any shortcoming later, even if he might drown. And the extraordinary thing about this statement was that this idea of superior beings with better genes doesn't beat heart and determination and will, as Sergey mentioned. And it's a great movie. Yeah, those are excellent points. I mean, the swimming, the swimming scenes or at least a couple of those scenes where they're racing against each other and seeing who can get further. I think that that was a little bit overdone. I'm not entirely sure that willpower can beat up genes completely, but it was a good point. And I'd forgotten that the character played by Jude Law had broken his own back. And that's another excellent point that even though you have superior genes, supposedly, you may not feel comfortable in society and which values you. You may feel valued by that society. You may be valued in the wrong way. So you become despondent. And that I found a little bit inconsistent was if this is a medically advanced society that can measure your characteristic soul so precisely, then wouldn't they also have the capability of repair? It struck me as a little bit inconsistent. Very interesting. So I'd like to bring up a couple points. You know, a hallmark of a good science fiction movie is that it stands test of time and has some predictive character to it. So Gadica is old enough so that we can actually look at some of the predictions that it made in terms of our own society right now. If you look at genetic testing services, things like 23andMe and the other ones that are out there. Fast sequencing of genetic testing is essentially here. Back when this movie was made, the Human Genome Project was a huge undertaking to sequence one individual's DNA basically took years. Now such things can happen in a very short amount of time and perhaps not as short as depicted in the movie. The other part is that we now have better gene editing techniques. Things such as CRISPR are now a reality and are beginning to be used in ways that align with what we see in this movie. So one of the things about Gadica that is wonderful in one sense is that it's highly predictive. But I hope it doesn't predict that particular society. Fascinating. That's just fascinating. You know, it strikes me hearing you mentioned the gene editing that, you know, if gene editing does turn out to be as powerful as its promise holds, you know, selecting a population for superior genes could become irrelevant. You don't need to really select for simply engineer people with great effect. It may be quite possible that in four or five generations from now, pretty much everyone will be sort of engineered by gene editing to have all of the characteristics that are desired. That is an interesting scenario that you bring up. It raises, I mean, will that result in a utopia or a dystopia, as Vic has mentioned? Could the gene editing be used to change certain things that you probably shouldn't change? Like you want someone who is super intelligent, but at the same time they lose certain other abilities like how to socialize properly, how to avoid certain impulses that are dangerous as one example. Yes. By achieving one characteristic, you might affect other characteristics, you know, sort of in the way that domesticating dogs causes their ears to flop and their tails to curl, or something like that, yeah, so that certain traits are linked to other traits. They're very unharmed. They're very difficult to untang. Well, I would like to get back to Mike's point. I mean, he's right. We can read genetic sequences now. But the problem is if you use different companies to find out what your genetic background is, Eastern European or Asian or whatever, it turns out that the different companies give somewhat different results. So there's a problem with the calibration of the method. So yes, you can do this now, but it has to be a long way from doing things accurately and consistently. And a related point is that much of this information is now kind of publicly available when people get their genetic sequencing done and upload it to sites that then police agencies can use to track down your relatives who might have done something nefarious. Yes, that is very interesting. Forgive me, I'm going to exploit my role as moderator and ask us to move on a little bit because we have limited time, and I do want to discuss some of the other movies. It occurs to me looking at our list that perhaps we can discuss iRobot, the Matrix, and even 2001, a Space Odyssey, perhaps together since each of them relate to sort of machine intelligence or have elements of machine intelligence. So that group of three, I think we could sort of discuss together. One thing I wanted to mention about 2001, a Space Odyssey, and one reason it's one of my favorite movies, is for the one single scene when Dave is dismantling Hal, and Hal says, Stop, Dave, I'm afraid. And that was in 1969, and I always felt that that moment where Hal was afraid was just a seminal moment in science fiction of the machine who is utterly self-aware and is terrified at losing. Yes, and he sings at the end. Yes, indeed he does. And one thing I really, you know, I'm a big fan of the whole Matrix series. I actually like all of the movies, and I also feel that that story resolved itself really well because, you know, in the first movie, Neo gets inside, who is it? Is it Agent Smith? And destroys him, but Agent Smith comes back, and now he is a program without any purpose. And the big thing that the agents are, their whole thing is purpose. The concept of purpose permeates the whole mythology of the Matrix. And by losing his purpose, Agent Smith becomes a danger to the machines. So in the third movie, Neo and the machines form a common cause to defeat Agent Smith. And I thought that was just a very elegant way to resolve that storyline because the machines could not tolerate a rogue program who had no purpose. And at the same time, Neo, by defeating Agent J, could liberate the humans. So I thought that was a very interesting twist to the Matrix. I've seen iRobot, I did not love iRobot, but it did have some excellent moments in it, but perhaps the other panelists can maybe comment on iRobot. And with that, maybe, Mike, why don't we start with you if you would like to have any comments on it? Sure. The set of movies is in a fine tradition, starting with Frankenstein. And then the short story called Rossum's Universal Robots, where we get the word robot from, and then all of Asimov's work. One of the things about Asimov is that with his three laws of robotics, his robots tended to be a little more benign than what we see in 2001, and Hal is simply acting logically with his primary goal being the mission. And in Ex Machina, where Eva is acting towards her self-interest, self-preservation. And I would also include in this list the Westworld TV series, if I may, because, again, there is self-preservation. So without some constraints on AI behavior, in fiction it seems like a lot of the time the AIs do what we fear and treat us like we treat each other. You don't see how one can have anything approximating intelligence without self-realization. And if you have self-realization, then you have, it seems to me, by necessity, a sense of survival, whatever it takes. And that's where you can have a lot of danger. There seems to be a lot of anxiety in Silicon Valley about the threat of artificial intelligence. I'm not sure I fully grasp what they're afraid of. Do any of you guys have any insights about that? From what I've heard, I listened to certain programs on the radio like Crooks and Quarks on CBC Radio, and they have experts talking about AI and its possible dangers. The thing about AI is that it's like a computer program. If you don't, you do your computer program correctly, you can end up making silly mistakes, but that's part of a manufacturing process, and you slip your decimal point, kind of something instead of one of something, or 10,000 instead of 100. So you have to do your programming very carefully with AI. You don't make any mistakes, like you want to make a scenario, I heard, is you want a robot that's very good at making paperclips, and suddenly it goes out of control with everything, including human beings, dogs, rocks, trees, and paperclips. You have to be programming very carefully. Yes, that's the old no-man conundrum. I have to destroy everything that is imperfect. But you yourself are imperfect, no-man! Another comment. When you think of the complexity of the computer programming to create anything approximating artificial intelligence, it's an immense job to debug it. And fundamentally anything created by human beings, especially having a focus not being focused on other unintended or untoward consequences, will result rather not so much in artificial intelligence, but in artificial stupidity at some point. There is a lot of criticism nowadays about the reliance on algorithms. So many online processes are controlled by algorithms, job hiring, and YouTube recommendation lists, for example, that come under intense criticism for their reliance on algorithms, which turn out to be, you know, socially destructive. And that is coming under a lot of scrutiny nowadays. So you were mentioning the Matrix. We started this round of discussion with you talking about the Matrix. So I'll tell you something. I'll give you a couple of my views on the Matrix. One is, as I mentioned before, there are fantasies and there's science fiction. And the great thing about the Matrix is you could actually roll those two together, because within the person's mind, I mean, that's what's happening in the Matrix, where basically someone's mind is in some simulated scenario, like we are here almost. Not as good as in the Matrix. But you can have fantasy within your science fiction. But I found that particularly interesting. I don't question the nature of reality. Are we all in the Matrix? Right. One of the issues, I think the single biggest flaw in the Matrix is the entire premise that humans are grown to provide energy for the machines. I think there's a thermodynamics issue there where the energy it takes to grow the humans exceeds the energy that they produce. Yes, that's very insightful, because I was going to mention that as a matter of fact. The whole energy scheme that they've come up with doesn't really make sense. You don't need to create human beings. Human beings are extremely complex organisms, and what you can do is you can use something similar like a lead acid battery and you get plenty of energy without producing a human being. For a human being, you have to create food, which means you have to grow crops, or you have to create at least synthetically. How do you create the energy? Where do you get the energy from for the food? Because the skies were scorched, as they said, so there's no sunlight for energy. So they did have a thermal fusion source. So that would help, but then why do you need the humans on top of that? It was a little bit contrived. Right. But if you gloss over that, it does create an extremely interesting premise to kind of explore, you know, not just whether humans are, whether the human reality is quote-unquote real, but I actually also, as I mentioned earlier, I really sort of liked the issue of purpose, sort of what sort of values does machine intelligence have? In the matrix, one of the key values of the machine intelligence is purpose, that every program has a purpose, kind of like a paperclip bending robot purpose. And I thought that was an insightful value to give the machines. Yeah, that's true, but I was also thinking that, as I said, the whole energy scheme is contrived, as you mentioned, but another thing that's contrived is that if somehow they're killed in the matrix, their bodies are killed, that doesn't make sense. I mean, you can have the matrix designed that way so that there's some circuit that kills you when you're killed in the matrix. You could have it designed that way, but it would seem to me that these people who are no longer in the plant, as they call it, that are separate in this marine, in this hovercraft, you could have them who are accessing the matrix from outside the plant. You could have that circuit deactivated so that no one's in danger. I mean, that seems like an obvious thing to do, and they keep that in there because it's more dramatic. It's one of those premises that allows them fictional liberty. One other point I wanted to add quickly for the copper tops as an energy source, 25% of human metabolism is spent in cerebral activity. So if these individuals were very, very inactive, they might help with figuring the energetics, but it was not something you would want to try to sell as an engineering project. Yes, that's true. I was also thinking about iRobot. There were some comments about iRobot, the movie with Will Smith. I think it wasn't really true to Isaac Asimov's stories, and I'm afraid I have to disagree there. Let's start with the three laws of robotics. Does everyone know the three laws of robotics? Go ahead and summarize them for these two. The first law is that no robot may harm or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. The second law is that a robot must obey the orders given it by a human being unless it conflicts with the first law. The third law is that a robot must protect its own existence unless it conflicts with the first laws. Based on those, the movie iRobot would seem a little bit far-fetched, but Isaac Asimov actually, I mean, this was actually a combination of his different stories, and in his later stories on the robots, he does point out that there is a problem with the first three laws, that it can lead to sort of a revolution in the sense that we saw in the movie, because he was saying there could be a zeroth law, which is that robots must protect humanity, and they must protect humanity, and not, through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm. So then if you consider that, then suddenly the first law is not strictly adhered to, because now you can kill a human being if it's better for all of humanity. And that was what was happening essentially in the movie. Fascinating. That presents robots with the same sort of moral dilemmas that humans face. If you're on the train track, and there's a split, and there's one person on one branch, and a crowd of people on the other, which path do you take, and now intelligent robots have to face that same moral dilemma that humans do. Yes, exactly. Since I might as well leap into the hole here. Yeah, I mean, there's a theme, and let's see, I am a robot and also an extinction. Extinction, I don't want to be... The problem with describing these movies is a spoiler for those who may want to watch the movies. So I won't go into too much detail on extinction. It's on Netflix, and what I really liked about it was, well, you'll have to watch it to see it, but without the... About a very large population of synthetic people as they were called, androids, or robots. It raises the question, they were treated by the humans extremely poorly. So it raises a very important question, because in the future, I mean, already in Japan, you have very human looking robots, androids. How do we treat them? Do we give them rights as other human beings? Do we treat them like dirt because they're merely possessions? I mean, to me, it seems to feed into this question about how we treat people from other ethnic groups. I mean, racism, bigotry. It seems to me that it's like an extension of that. You can argue that, you know, these things aren't even human, so we shouldn't... Whoever wish don't even have to treat them well. I agree with that, because the way you treat someone or something will affect you, not just the thing you're affecting. So it's an interesting question that's raised by this movie. Yes, and, you know, it's reminiscent of the Next Generation episode, where Picard has to prove that data is a sentient being. It kind of establishes the principle of an artificial life form. So we're almost out of time, and I hate this. I knew we would run out of time before we were finished talking. I'm going to exercise my prerogative as the moderator to also give a plug for surrogates, because I think many people may not have seen that, but just very briefly, the reason I love it is because in the premise of surrogates is that completely life-like androids can be driven by people sitting in a gaming chair in their house. And the advantages of moving through the world with a completely realistic android avatar in the real world, it's basically an extension of second life migrated into the real world, where avatars are now androids. But the benefits of this become so obvious that, in fact, it's made a law that everyone has to have a surrogate, an android that they move through, and everyone is sitting at home in these really complex gaming chairs moving through the world in their robots. And so that, I think, is just a fascinating premise, and it really pulls it off well, because it toggles back and forth between the real-life lives of the characters when they sort of get out of their chairs and have to get up and eat and go to the bathroom and things like that, and then switches back to their surrogate life. And also very interesting because there's a real, there's a fun mystery to it. Bruce Willis plays a detective, and a technology has been invented in which if you destroy someone's surrogate, it kills them in real life back in their gaming chair at home. And this threatens the entire social order that has been constructed around the surrogates. And so he's trying to track down the technology. Yes, a little bit like the Matrix, so I really like the mystery part of it. So I think anyone who enjoys second life, I think we'll really get a kick out of surrogates, but it would be like if we were moving through the world in surrogate and... May I make a final point? Yes, please. The four movies I had wanted to talk about some, I would like to just say about two of them. 1951, The Day the Earth Stood Still. It was the first of that movie. It was redone with Canary's, I guess. And it and the invasion of the body snatchers in 1978 were good examples of science fiction as responses of humankind to technological changes or new challenges as civilization progresses or makes new confrontational challenges for themselves with discoveries. The Day the Earth Stood Still was a huge political statement about the fact that humankind had become weaponized to the point that we could destroy entire cities or our entire civilization with atomic weapons, nuclear weapons and aliens who they weren't benign and they weren't malicious, they were just... It was just business. Klaatu shows up with his killer police robot, Gort, and he gets shot promptly by the authorities in Washington because he holds up a gift for the president and at any rate, he's here to warn humankind that if they don't live peacefully, their planet will be destroyed. And he had to figure out a way to get them to listen. It was a wonderful movie. It's quite dated in its style, but Michael Rennie was the British actor who played Klaatu and he was an extraordinary actor, in my opinion. The invasion of the body snatchers also was a social statement and political statement. This exotic, beautiful flower shows up on the ground. It's part of a systematic reign of aliens in the forms of flowers that seem attractive and people will take them home and plant them. And then when they sleep, tendrils come out of the flower and start to envelop the person and they are replaced. And you think of the Charlottesville marchers yelling, Jews will not replace us and that sort of thing. The invasion of the body snatchers, the 1978 version was a remake of a 1953 version. Both of them really reflect xenophobia and fear of aliens coming in and making us disappear or become irrelevant and it's the same stuff we're dealing with now toward people that are different, quote, tribes, unquote. So yes, absolutely. The original one was about McCarthyism, but the idea of fear of other tribes or tribal thinking in humans is pretty much still with us. And I made a mistake in a sense. I showed that to my daughter when she was eight and my two other children were out. So we sat and watched invasion of the body snatchers and she would never sleep in a room with a flower in it again. So my bad. I really encourage those two films and I'm finished. Thank you. Okay, I just wanted to make a request to the group. Suggestions to the group that might consider that this seems to be a very rich topic, science fiction in general. One of the topics I recall is science fiction books and so on. We might have another session on science fiction movies again some day I think most people would like them. Absolutely. You read my mind. We should have a part two. Yeah, sometime. It doesn't have to be next time, but we need to try that. Another suggestion is, as I said before, I think the difference between science fiction and fantasy is really important and I think what we should do is have a session where we talk about that. Why the difference is important and give examples of things on each side and why we think that something is science fiction. Yes, I love that idea. I was going to show, I had a definition of fantasy to contrast it with the definition of science fiction. And the fantasy definition I was going to use was that it's a form of literary genre in which a plot cannot occur in the real world. It usually involves witchcraft, magic, taking place on an undiscovered planet or in an unknown world. The theme and setting have combinations of technology and architecture and language, often set in European medieval age type arrangements. But these are the sorts of movies with the talking animals. It's a good point about fantasies being about magic, but the thing is you have to define magic. How does that differ from science? I sort of have a definition for that, but we don't want to talk about that now. Maybe we want to talk about that during the panel session of that someday. Good point. Yes, thank you all. This was just super enjoyable. I'm a little concerned. I think we've really gone over our time though. I did want to maybe give Chantal a chance to promote the next panel discussion, which will happen in a number. The topic is going to be the Cambrian Explosion and the History of Life, which I think will be a rich topic for discussion. Students will enjoy if you want to about a call for anyone who would be in the panel to discuss the Cambrian Explosion and the History of Life to contact me. And then also give Chantal an opportunity to take care of any group business. Thank you, Berrigan. Thanks to Chantal and Jess. And I appreciate Chantal's chance to be on the panel. Yes, thanks again, Berrigan. Thanks to the panel members, Mike and Tagline. I appreciate your presence here. And thanks to everyone else. Yes, definitely. Thanks everyone. And thanks to the audience who took part of their Saturday to join us. Yes, I agree. I really enjoyed the audience participation in the nearby chat. It really added a lot to our discussion, I think. So, all right, I guess with that, I will adjourn this edition of our Science Circle panel discussions and look forward to seeing you all next time.