Hacker Cinema
Short Circuit
1986 · Film · 98 min
Part of Short Circuit Collection
Directed by John Badham
After a lightning bolt zaps a robot named Number 5, the lovable machine starts to think he's human and escapes the lab. Hot on his trail is his designer, Newton, who hopes to get to Number 5 before the military does. In the meantime, a spunky animal lover mistakes the robot for an alien and takes him in, teaching her new guest about life on Earth.
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21 comments on Hacker News
> The need for all the content, Moar!! Feed me
"MOAR input!!!"
- Johnny 5, Short Circuit. That was a great film. Seems it was unexpectedly prescient too.
> Thanks again for continuing this conversation! I'm enjoying it. Also, can you recommend me a book or two to read on this subject? Thanks in advance.
Hey sorry for my late reply, I really didn't mean to waste your time, I just got super busy and spun a bit responding. Honestly I haven't read as much as I'd like to after discovering the internet around 1995, so this is mostly what I've picked up online.
To me, wokeism is fundamentally about stuff we can't unsee. It's like being friends with someone in an abusive relationship, where the other partner takes us aside and tells us that if we knew what they knew about our friend's behavior, we might not want to be friends with them anymore. The more we learn, the more that America's origin story becomes a twisted fable of revisionist history, written by the winners to cover centuries of oppression and violence. These stand out to me:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_massacre
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Jefferson_and_slavery
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks_(1781_ship)#/media/File:Slaveshipposter.jpg
I went to South Carolina a few years ago and stood on a small plantation cotton field they keep preserved for tours. It was suffocatingly hot, felt like 100% humidity under intense sun, and not even the hottest time of the year. I just imagined people forced to pick cotton all day, every day, their entire lives. It was soul-crushing.
Then the tour guide called the Civil War the Northern War of Aggression and my eyebrows raised. Reality shifted and I suddenly saw the feelings from that time still running strong today.
Maybe I can relate my experience better through pop culture references..
I grew up on movies like To Kill a Mockingbird, The Color Purple, Do the Right Thing, Glory, Schindler's List and Amistad, to name a few. I never read Black Like Me and never saw Soul Man. I think I may start with these, regardless of if they aged well, to get an impression of where my head is at now vs then.
This search brought back a memory, that in Short Circuit (one of my all-time favorite movies), I didn't know that Fisher Stevens wore brownface to play Indian engineer Ben Jabituya until maybe the 2000s:
https://ew.com/movies/short-circuit-fisher-stevens-regrets-playing-indian-role/
This just goes to show how ignorant people were (including myself) as recently as a couple of decades ago. I think that the makeup in Soul Man is forgiveable because it's explicit and the subject of the film, much like Dustin Hoffman dressing as a woman in Tootsie. Whereas Short Circuit did it for convenience, without considering that it might be offensive.
I also grew up playing with the toy car with the rebel flag on it from the Dukes of Hazzard, completely oblivious to any racist connotations.
And sexual harrassment was so prevelant that we had never even heard of it until Anita Hill vs Clarance Thomas in 1991 before he was appointed to the Supreme Court. I remember that we were really appalled by that, because it was so obvious that he was guilty of the harrassment, even if that didn't bar him from being appointed. This was just after the Rodney King beating and LA riots, but a few years before the OJ Simpson case if I remember right. Racial tensions were running high, but also there was a feeling that minorities were being kept from positions of power, so there was a lot of cognitive dissonance. There was no Me Too movement and we didn't have a words like cancel culture yet. I didn't feel at the time that he should have been appointed, because he gave me creepster vibes. I think his decisions in the time since have shown that he is very, let's just say tempted by financial favors.
> This is sort of like the concept of "original sin", isn't it? The notion that certain people have a debt that is so big that it is impossible to ever be paid back, and so they must forever remain burdened with the guilt of the sin that their ancestors committed. The scale can never be zeroed. The guilt can never go away. The transgression can never be forgiven, because the effects linger down to our day.
Ya that's a good point, I hadn't considered that. It reminds me of how young people in post-WWI Germany felt that it was impossible to pay back the war debt that their elders faced when they lost the war. So they felt oppressed by who they viewed as Jewish elites in banking, eventually using them as scapegoats and starting WWII against the countries whose loans they were defaulting on.
Which has eerie similarities with the dissilusioned feelings of young men in America today, who due to wealth inequality can't earn the level of income needed to provide for a spouse or family, as they watch women and minorities rise without them. Blaming liberal and Hollywood elites, as well as immigrants, for bruising their egos instead of the real culprit, late-stage capitalist patriarchy.
I think what we're talking about is: how can the rights of individuals be upheld when our debts to previous generations are so high that we'd lose ourselves in an attempt to pay them back?
I guess my only counter to that is, if winners and losers resulted from the inequities of previous generations, leading to the vast wealth inequality we see today, then what would healing look like? Letting it go without making ammends, or going too far with violence as a result, both seem extreme.
I feel that affirmative action and taxing the wealthy are two solid approaches. But I don't feel that either have been tried to a degree nearly approaching reparations. Because if they had, then Congress might be 50% women, we wouldn't have such a large national debt or high poverty rate, etc.
> In the case of the LA fires, and for the additional reasons you've given, I agree, DEI was not to blame and is being used as a scapegoat. I wonder, if the fire chief were instead a straight white male, and if there was no firefighter that "looked like you" but instead, was capable of saving your life, would people still have blamed DEI, or would they instead shift their focus towards the "real problems" that you mentioned? Perhaps if these people weren't in these highly visible positions to begin with, DEI would not have been undermined as it was.
Ya, DEI probably wouldn't have been blamed had the people involved in the response fit prejudiced notions of what they should look like.
It seems that we both agree that DEI wasn't the cause of the fires. But maybe we should ask if putting such priority on DEI is undermining the cause of reaching equality. With so much political manipulation happening these days, it makes for an attractive scapegoat for those wishing to distract us from the real issues.
I don't know the answer, or if DEI should be put on hold temporarily. What I do know is that with controversial issues like gun control, we can find ourselves on hold indefinitely. So I am suspicious of calls to halt DEI when the problem of discrimination in hiring still exists. It feels too opportunistic IMHO.
> preface: I would like to think that everyone on the board has in mind the good of the entire company, and that the men don't just have in mind the considerations of men, and that the woman is not the only advocate for all the women of the company.
> Given the above, what injustice is there? Assuming that everyone earned their seat on the board fairly, without nepotism, sabotage, or shady backroom deals, why do you consider there to be an injustice happening here?
> The only way I can see there being an inherent injustice in a board room like this is if my initial assumptions aren't true, and that the men aren't advocating for the concerns of the women. But that would be to assume the worst of people. That sort of thinking is racist and sexist. That leads to tribal thinking, where people think that people from other demographics are similarly only looking out for "their own group".
Ya good point about the dangers of tribalism, since that is the single greatest threat facing the US today. We've grown so divided and provincial that we can't seem to work together, and that's undermining our credibility in the eyes of the world.
And I agree that people don't just work towards their own best interest, and that assuming they do is putting them in a box.
What concerns me though is that some people only respond to authority, not what society deems common decency. So without a law in place, they will return to discriminatory practices.
Trump just issued an executive order revoking Lyndon B. Johnson’s Executive Order 11246, promoting affirmative action in federal contracting:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/01/23/trump-revoked-equal-employment-opportunity-order/
Even though this move claims to encourage merit-based hiring, it will undoubtedly have the opposite effect. Because authoritarian-minded people will no longer be forced to practice nondescrimination. So they will hire candidates who appear to fit their own projections and stereotypes, causing them to overlook similarly-qualified candidates from other demographics.
When the laws aren't there, companies have a track record of accepting a certain level of human cost if it raises profits. Seatbelt laws, pollution laws, etc reflect the need for those regulations.
Now, we can argue whether the free market would take care of discrimination on its own. But in these times of little or no antitrust enforcement, often workers have few alternative employment options, so are at the mercy of employers. I'm not seeing politicans in favor of deregulation also calling for antitrust enforcement, so they are having their cake and eating it too, making this argument suspect.
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To borrow a line from the classic movie Short Circuit, it's a machine! It doesn't get scared, it doesn't get happy, it doesn't get sad, it just runs programs!
A computer does not have a consciousness that feels emotions. Sure, it can create output that seems like it does, possibly even well enough to cause humans to feel empathy. The movie "AI" explores this concept pretty well.
The world is going to become an interesting place once we create humanoid robots that you can actually talk to. We're at a point now where you can use ChatGPT combined with very convincing CGI face to talk to an AI.
People don't have a clear concept of what life is. Remember the movie Short Circuit: some military robot gains AGI then the machine and the people around it start claiming it's alive. Or in Star Trek, when Captain Kirk and his crew teleport in the middle of a forest and Spock, consulting his tricorder, promptly declares there is no life on this planet. What the writers of those shows thought life is is an open question, but it seems compatible with the idea of an LLM "coming to life".
It pretty much was just like that (I was there). One of my favorite "biographical" movies that nobody's ever heard of is Explorers:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089114/
The "More like this" section at the bottom has some other goodies, although a bit campy: Flight of the Navigator, *batteries not included, Short Circuit, Harry and the Hendersons, etc. Mainstream movies like The Goonies and The Breakfast Club are uncannily accurate. My friends and I basically rode BMXs and played Nintendo and drank Mtn Dew by the pool while REM played on the radio. We had analogs for everything today except the internet and cell phones, and much of it was actually more functional (didn't require instructions). And politics was a joke back then, like it was common knowledge that Reaganomics would dismantle Social Security and leave no money for Gen X (which hadn't been named yet) but we were rapidly heading for the 2015 Back to the Future Part II where we'd have our own fusion reactors so it wouldn't matter anyway.
Oh and my friend had a VCR that could pause without jittering, because in most models the magnetic head had to move slightly to pick up a signal from the tape. My other friend had access to a Video Toaster (can't remember if it was at the A/V club or a local TV station) that could add words and FX. But really the best work had the smeary transitions where we pressed record. And mixtapes often had part of the radio station's jingle or missed the first few seconds of the song. Everything was a bit dreamier because we were doing original things ourselves, not watching other people do it on YouTube. That's probably what I miss most.
These are all generally highly reviewed can lead to interesting discussions:
Gattaca - interesting take on genetics/DNA discrimination
Europa - hard science fiction, maybe a bit slow for a 12 year old
The Net - older movie but the concept of digital exile resonates today
City of Ember - post apocalyptic civilization that lives deep underground
First Man - dramatization of Neil Armstrong and the first moon landing (not realy "fiction")
Arrival - first contact situation, tastefully done
Contact - another first contact situation that explores how politics, skepticism, and fanaticism react
The Martian - easily as fun as the book
The Prestige - competing magicians in an industrial age setting
The Hunger Games - extreme class divide in a future setting
Jurassic Park - the original not the sequels
Stargate - wormhole travel to another planet (be careful with the TV shows though, SG1 on streaming has full frontal nudity and "not ok" scenes which were obviously not on the broadcast version and a total shock when we watched it as a family)
District 9 - has some graphic gore and language, so it might be 14+, but is an interesting look at aliens as refugees
Contagion - a look at how a pandemic could play out. Premiered before COVID.
The Maze Runner - interesting setting and look at group dynamics
Honey, I Shrunk the Kids - fun setting
The Village - scary movie with a sci fi twist
Galaxy Quest - comedy
Short Circuit - old movie that deals with AI sentience
Innerspace - another old one, but has some fun concepts
Nobody mentioned it yet, but the original Short Circuit is actually quite good as well. There are plenty of cringeworthy bits, especially Fisher Stevens as an Indian person in "brown face", but the movie overall is a classic.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_Circuit_(1986_film)
The first Ghostbusters is hilarious, and one of many exemplar 80s movies - back to the future (as mentioned), crocodile Dundee, short circuit, die hard, ferris bueller (just off the top of my head) that embodied that decade and often saw stodgy corporate types as the enemy of fun. I've never even thought about it as a libertarian parable, and I believe doing so is a revisionist strawman coming from opponents and reading too much into it coming from supporters. The movie was good clean fun of the kind that existed fleetingly around that time.
The remake was based on only one premise- it will be women instead. It wasn't funny and had none of the cultural centering (especially the whole vibe of 80s New York) that the original had. It was a shitty movie. So it failed.
There is not some broader political message. A good movie that hit the mark for its era was successful, a lazy remake was not
Honest request: re-do Short Circuit so the “Indian” character played by a white guy just looks and speaks more like a white guy. I tried watching that movie for fun but the blackface or whatever you would call it really tanked it for me.
Also in your promo video you show “traditional dubbing” to English and I really expected that to be followed by your system on the same clip but instead you moved to other languages, which I can’t really grasp.
Edit: I see I’ve gotten a downvote. You can hear from the actor himself how he feels about playing that role: https://www.dailywire.com/news/fisher-stevens-regrets-playing-an-indian-man-in-short-circuit
Short Circuit (mostly a kids movie) has some interesting aspects to it from a software engineer / hardware engineer perpsective.
Also some very very funny lines:
Newton Crosby: Where are you from, anyway?
Ben Jabituya: Bakersfield, originally.
Newton Crosby: No, I mean your ancestors.
Ben Jabituya: Oh, them. Pittsburgh.
----
No. 5: Stephanie, change color. Attractive. Nice software. Hmmmm.
Stephanie Speck: Boy, you sure don't talk like a robot.
----
edit: how do you add newlines?
Short Circuit movie remake ?
When I was a kid in the early 90s (in Czechoslovakia), I watched Wargames and Short Circuit, and they influenced me a lot to become interested in artificial intelligence. I found the idea of intelligent computers fascinating. Although the anti-war message in these movies sorta went over my head at the time.
I still like Wargames today, although I appreciate very different things about it. I also really like the library montage, which just so nicely captures the effort sometimes needed to solve a problem.
Thank you for this, I did not know about Syd Mead, but just flipping through the images on that page it's clear how influential he was. Wikipedia lists pretty much exactly the associations I made:
> Mead worked with major studios on the feature films: Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Blade Runner, Tron, 2010, Short Circuit, Aliens, The Spirit of '76, Timecop, Johnny Mnemonic, Mission: Impossible III, Elysium, Tomorrowland and Blade Runner 2049. George Lucas created the AT-AT for his Star Wars saga based on art by Mead.
This is in no way to diminish his work, but the impression I got (and that I'm trying to confirm/debunk, given the wikipedia article doesn't really address this) is that his art really transposes the society of its time into the future. That is, he almost exclusively addresses the technological advancement, while keeping the societal structures largely intact. For example, that's why the retrofitted houses give the impression of still being inhabited largely by working class people, while the ski resort and leisure time imagery with the sports cars still seems to be a luxury only few can afford even in the future. I don't see signs of "fully automated luxury space communism" there.
This may be me projecting though, hence the question if this is correct. And again, this is not to take away from his work. They are stunning. :)
That was a movie too -- Short Circuit (1986).
"Wouldn't you like to be a Pepper too?"
To quote the movie Short Circuit "Robots don't think, they just run programs".
If the software is racist, then the robot is, if the software is not racist, neither is the robot.
Therefore, robots cannot be racist. Only programmers can be racist. (which are people)
We had the technology to build human-level artificial hands in the 80s, I remember seeing it in movies and on PBS:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_Circuit_(1986_film)
We arguably even had the knowledge to build the neural nets to run them. Had more people been exposed to functional, declarative and data-driven programming back then, I think it would have seemed straightforward to wire up large networks as spreadsheets. Sadly, most of those older approaches have been replaced with opaque and buzzwordy approaches that bury concepts in terminology.
Arguably there was no market back then for AI. But I think what really happened is that AI arrived simultaneously with neoliberalism and supply-side economics which treat workers as commodities. Rather than letting everyone replace themselves with robots and keep their paychecks, they were instead forced to work longer and longer hours for less pay and compete with companies overseas that have few labor or environmental protections.
The problem isn't the technology, it's the political climate that can't see beyond jobs and so-called handouts. Which means that alternative societies are going to have to tackle problems all at once rather than piecemeal. There's going to be tremendous pressure to undercut human-oriented economies that focus on self-actualization over the mundane tasks of running the daily rat race (just like we've seen with organic, high efficiency, solar, wind and recycling being disincentivized).
The first thing that came to my mind when reading the title was the movie Short-Circuit :)
You might be confusing the chicken for the egg. ;)
I think the reason robots are so scary in movies is because they inherently are scary. Sharks are scary in movies because they are inherently scary.
I am convinced that robots hold the potential to completely devastate our collective ways of life, due to violence programmed into them, or due to their disruptions of job markets, or perhaps even due to them coming under cotrol of some future AI-type construct. These scenarios are not ludicrous to contemplate, they are, in fact, quite possible, the first two even likely. That's scary stuff, never mind Ally Sheedy's career-destroying performance in Short Circuit...
I think it's a combination of video games and fake corporate videos from movies. This seems like something that would be playing on a TV in a near-future sci-fi movie. Something out of RoboCop or those cut bits of Terminator 2 with the guy who invented the things. Hell, short-circuit for a more lighthearted take on it. We've been bombarded with these sorts of videos being a precursor to bloodshed since at least the 80s.
Maybe the protagonists of a movie are in a research lab that's mysteriously gone silent, everyone seemingly having disappeared without a trace, and they watch this video, trying to figure out what's gone wrong. They flip through a couple more before finding the one where these things start killing everyone. Other 'bots drag off the bodies, and cleaning robots spin across the floor, wiping up the blood. While the characters' eyes are glued to the screen, the viewer sees the "dead" half-disassembled dog-robot on the workbench behind them start to silently shift, then slowly stand up.
See:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ApocalypticLog
It amazes me in 2012 were still not even close to the level of robotics technology they had in the movie short circuit. (I'm receding to the robots at the beginning, not the part where he became conscious.)
still a few more (some are in the works)
* Stargate
* "startup.com" - about the formation of 'govworks.com' i wonder what these guys think about Obama.
* Takedown - 'Kevin Mitnick's story'
* Serenity
* Star Trek: the Voyage Home
* The Last Starfighter
* Johnny Mnemonic
* Short Circuit 1 & 2
* Crest of the Stars (anime)
* Fahrenheit 451
* Equilibrium
* Batman (begins, dark night, the tim burten one)
* Edward Scissor Hands
* Space Balls
* Avalon ( http://www.cyberpunkreview.com/movie/decade/2000-current/avalon/#comments)
* LAIN: The Serial Experiments (anime)
* Cherry 2000
* Dune
* Ender's Shadow (in the works)
* Ender's Game (in the works)
* Diamond Age (in the works for sci-fi, 'a young girls illustrated primer')
* The Arrival
* The Terminator 1,2,3
* The Sarah Conner Chronicles
* D.A.R.Y.L
* Flight of the Navigator
* Explorers
* AI
* Batteries Not Included
* Blade Runner
* IRobot
* Appleseed (anime)
* Bubble Gum Crisis (anime)
* Ergo Proxy (anime)
* Virtuosity
* Metropolis (all of them are good)
* The Last Exile (anime)
* Cherry 2000
* Robocop (this so hold up)
* Primmer
* Probe ( the TV series, it took me 3 months to find the copies of this Issac Asimov based TV series on ABC ) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probe_(TV_series)
* Infest Wisely
* Logan's Run
* Planet of the Apes
* Star Trek: First Contact
* CQ ( if you get it, you'll get why this is a hacker movie , 'la resistance')
* Amelie
* 2046
* Trigun (anime)
* Escaflone (anime)
* Tank Girl
* Twelve Monkeys
* THX 1138
* Bicentennial Man
* The Philadelphia Experiment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Philadelphia_Experiment_(film)
* Seaquest ( some episodes )
* Strange Days ( new yeas hacker style )
* Freejack