From HAL to WOPR:
O'Brien, Tom
'WAR GAMES' & OUR COMPUTER CULTURE From HAL to WOPR TOM O'BRIEN LIKE THE STOCK MARKET, the media has reached a stage of computer saturation. Last year a film called TRON took place inside a...
...Long ago, her Frankenstein provided the prototype of the machine mind run afoul, either because demonically possessed or contaminated by the secret vices of humanity...
...The difficulty that the film underlines is that humans can correct their errors...
...Most other media visions of computers have tended to simplistic images of good and evil...
...WOPR does not reflect our sins, in short, but our complacency...
...War Games warns us, as Emerson did at the beginning of the industrial revolution, "things are in the saddle and ride mankind.'' But War Games also delights in things, and refuses to blame hi-tech for our own malfunctions...
...Fortunately, it also avoids an opposite error...
...Its name is sardonically pronounced "Whopper," and it nearly accidentally whops mankind into nuclear war...
...Consider Alien and its omniscient machine "Mother," who goes on a Medea-like rampage against its operators...
...Instead, men victimize themselves by their surrender of will to machines, by their refusal to accept human fallibility as a necessary part of decision making...
...It's innocent, its voice haunting and childlike, its main ambition "to play...
...Rather, WOPR cannot acknowledge a distinction between games and other illusions and reality...
...There are no real villains in the film: the machine is not out to get man, nor are men (both Americans and Russians) out to get each other...
...As Norbert Weiner, a computer expert at MIT, has said, "render to computers the things that are computers' and to man the things that are man's...
...Peter goes hi-tech: if a record is lost or mislabeled, it may take two eternities to correct his fate...
...What's the difference...
...War Games, for the most part, is worthwhile because it protests that delusion...
...this year even James Bond's Miss Moneypenny has adopted one for office use in Octopussy...
...WOPR gets bored with a meaningless game, but he doesn't grow to see the difference between game and reality...
...But pity the poor sinner at Heaven's gate if St...
...In its early sequences, we are saturated with scenes of video arcades and computerized library searches, of the hero's hijinks with his home computer and his brief encounter with some programming friends, satirical types already known in computer folklore as "nerds...
...Or consider Simon, whose zany but harmless computer was played by the voice of Louise Lasser...
...computers can't, and operators have to go to extraordinary lengths to trace and then erase the consequences of their foul-ups...
...The suggestion is clear: will humanity learn in time...
...An Air New Zealand DC-10 crashed in the Antarctic in 1979 because the pilots relied entirely on an inaccurate computer program during a snow storm...
...it asks, the most terrifying line in the film...
...It thus reflects some contemporary black comedies: stories of people notified that they are dead by Social Security offices...
...stories of airline tickets assigned to the wrong person or seats assigned in the wrong plane, etc...
...The film closes with a stunning sequence in which WOPR goes through all the strategic geopolitical variables and makes its discovery, pleading in its final fatigue for a "nice game of chess...
...These movies, however, have less to do with Mary Hartman than Mary Shelley...
...Consider HAL, the super metal mind of 2001, A Space Odyssey, who took over a Jupiter-bound spacecraft and terminated its onboard astronauts before they could terminate him...
...This provides a useful allegory on military affairs, but an utter fantasy on computers...
...Will humanity renounce war as a game...
...Advertising - and now educational oversell - make computers sound like saviors, as if their end product can really transfigure the good or bad quality of initial human input and ongoing human monitoring...
...They don't learn...
...Last year a film called TRON took place inside a computer...
...Despite the tiring of Atari, in short, artificial intelligence still sustains the image of a brave new world...
...Consider WOPR, the War Games computer, the latest in the line of movie machines with a mind of its own...
...The foul-ups so far include only one disaster...
...The tradition she mothered rests on one simple assertion: artificial intelligence means catastrophe...
...Besides merit pay, demands for computer literacy dominate academic news - assuming, of course, that a more basic literacy can be taken for granted...
...Will it give up playing with no-win variables - MX and Cruise Missiles and Backfire Bombers (the Russian answer to one of our answers to one of their...
...Once provoked, WOPR cannot be deterred from playing a game of nuclear combat, but not because it knows what it is doing is evil...
...But WOPR itself is no monster...
...But could any ever be programmed to distinguish fact from value, to correct a bureaucratic mistake by distinguishing between a dead person and a live one or by understanding the injustice of a payroll error...
...Consider Demon Seed, where a satanic computer impregnates Julie Christie, one of Hollywood's more subtle experiments in blending diverse genres...
...The issue is not human misuse of computers - though the hero's mischief with school grades reflects an increasing number of real life stories - but human inability to correct a mistake that a computer has been programmed or been induced to make...
...In this context, War Games says something different, marking, perhaps, a new maturity in our attitude to machines...
...But War Games evades both computer chic and computer gothic, snappy-Apple-happy enthusiasm for artificial intelligence and counter-culture hostility...
...Computers, perhaps, can be programmed to learn to distinguish better among sets of facts...
...Computers rarely make mistakes, but when they do, War Games claims, watch out...
...Hardly a night can go by, even with minimal TV viewing, without seeing Charlie Chaplin's "little tramp" making peace with modern times over his IBM personal computer (and image-wise IBM thus softening its "impersonal" reputation...
...Still, War Games also criticizes the notion that computers will always function more efficiently than men, and isolates their exact point of weakness, or "vulnerability," to use the term of the computer trade...
...Nevertheless, War Games celebrates computer culture in small ways...
...Its defects lie not in a poisoned will or perverse heart, but in the programming assumption that it could never be misled by accident...
...The most fantastic thing about the War Games WOPR is that it can learn and correct its programming error: it realizes that there is no point in a "game" of thermonuclear war that no one can win and that must always end in stalemate...
...when they were supposed to be over water they hit a mountain, killing all 257 aboard...
...Its distinction in the film tradition is that it treats the computer neither as savior nor devil, just false god...
...they store, retrieve, and apply...
...Fortunately, personnel at North American Air Defense have caught supposedly fail-safe computers when they signaled false nuclear alerts twice in the last several years...
...War Games thus expresses the delight in the computer as toy that colors so much of its advertising for home use and that dominates such movies as the recent Rollover, early parts of the current Superman 111, and upcoming fall TV series such as ABC's Whiz Kids and a new version of NBC's Knight Rider...
...There is a competing image of computers, however, a heritage of the movies made under the sign of Aquarius in the late sixties and early seventies...
...stories of payroll checks mislaid or miscalculated...
Vol. 110 • September 1983 • No. 15
