Hacker Cinema
Generation Zero
2010 · Film · documentary
Directed by Steve Bannon
An examination of the causes of the global economic crisis which began in 2008, studying how decades of social changes have influenced financial systems and practices.
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> Imagine being pinned down by a squad of these things for "only" 60 minutes. Or being pursued through the forest or an urban environment.
Given the current state of these machines, both these environments would favour humans. Even a fairly untrained average Jane or Joe would have no problems outrunning these things in forests or urban environments, let alone a trained soldier. Not to mention the lack of autonomy.
Everything you see in these promotional videos is carefully choreographed, prepared and pre-programmed in advance for days, and edited:
"There were definitely some failures in the hardware that required maintenance, and our robots stumbled and fell down sometimes." - they shot the first part several times and kept the one that worked best. That's not something you can do in the field outside of a controlled environment.
These robots are still long ways away from posing more of a thread to a soldier than much simpler solution, e.g. a Humvee with a mounted machine gun.
> For a glimpse of this, check out the videogame Generation Zero
The game is based on fiction, not fact, though. The required autonomy just isn't there yet and the video game robots clearly run on magic, not electricity or petrol. They never overheat, they are maintenance free, and they move faster than is currently possible w.r.t. motion planning and image recognition.
It's your typical AM/FM affair: BD is actual machines - pre-programmed or remote controlled, very limited endurance and still impractical for most military applications.
The robots in video games and cinema on the other hand are for the most part in the domain of fucking magic - capable of "120 years of continuous operation on a single power cell" like the Cyberdyne Systems series 800 v2.4 (Terminator), turning themselves from "autonomous swords" into screaming humans (Screamers), are nearly indestructible like Vision (Marvel's Avengers) or strange spiky flying thingamabobs like the Sentinels (Matrix trilogy).
While trying to parse the 2016 election I watched Steve Bannon’s magnum opus Generation Zero[1] and was struck by how much certain parts of it felt like an Adam Curtis film, with its heavy use of stock footage for tone rather than exposition. My main problem with Adam Curtis is that he’s more of a political artist than a historian, but his fans treat him like the latter. I guess that’s the problem with Bannon too.
[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bsqu9gh6xhk
Join this to the hedonism and nihilism of post-war generations and you have the Steve Bannon's Generation Zero documentary.
Am I the only one who finds these Adam Curtis "documentaries" pretty manipulative? They seem to reassure and reinforce everybody in their view on the world. I recently watched Steve Bannons "documentary" "Generation Zero" which works pretty similarly. The difference seems to be that it's meant to reassure the other side of the political spectrum.
When you disagree with such movies it's probably easier not to get sucked in too much into the narrative style, so you can separate manipulation and stated facts easier.
Trump may not do what you think -- Bannon hates the hippies/anarchists from OWS, but also despises the capture of the government by the big banks. Watch his documentary/propaganda piece Generation Zero to get an idea of his thinking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3SLtP10NQ8