Hacker Cinema
The Ice Pirates
1984 · Film · 94 min
Directed by Stewart Raffill
Science FictionActionAdventureComedy
In the not too distant future, where by far the most precious commodity in the galaxy is water. The last surviving water planet was somehow removed to the unreachable centre of the galaxy at the end of the galactic trade wars. The galaxy is ruled by an evil emperor presiding over a trade oligarchy that controls all mining and sale of ice from asteroids and comets.
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3 comments on Hacker News
This has been going on in technology for decades.
1. New productivity enhancer comes out. 2. Everyone thinks, "This is it! Work will get shorter|easier as a result of this!" 3. Instead the work gets faster|more|higher quality and the (time) volume stays roughly the same.
This applies across (almost?) everything: club newsletters that used to take half a day to write out by hand later took half a day to type and lay out with some clip art. It still takes a year or more to make a movie, but now we get Avatar instead of Ice Pirates -- look it up! :-)
When work reduction does happen, it generally happens at a person-quantum level: people hang on to their role until it goes away entirely, and they (hopefully) find something else to do. Rarely is it the case that someone legitimately reduces to part time incrementally as productivity increases.
AI is similar: no doubt jobs will go away as a result, but much less often will AI result in jobs that are easy/part time. For anyone still in the "work" game, even with AI there's still 5x8 hours of work to do.
"Good" is an overloaded word. We use it to mean both "enjoyable" and "well-made".
And we often confuse the two, thinking that if we enjoy something, that means it was well-made. And that if something is well-made, then we should enjoy it.
But it's not. For instance, I like the film, The Ice Pirates. It's stupid, it's cheap, and the plot doesn't quite make sense. But it's fun. I can't quite put my finger on it, but whatever is happening, it's the kind of stupid I apparently like. But I will never say it was a "good" film, in that it was well-made.
To contrast, The Fountain is a mostly well-made film. The acting, cinematography, score, visual effects, etc, are all well done. I cannot deny that. However, I loathe that movie. It is just incredibly mediocre at the end of the day. The story is just banal. It has one message, delivers it real early in the movie, and then just keeps beating that dead horse. And I can see how it's easy to get distracted by the pageantry of the film. But I cannot get over that one hump.
So, yes, Dan Brown may be a horrible writer. His books may have all the problems pointed out by the author of the article. Dan Brown may not write "good" books. That does not mean people don't like them. And it does not mean they are wrong when they do.
Ice Pirates? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087451/