Stay Home Or Go To The Movies? [Orson Scott Card reviews Eagle Eye and pummels Hollywood]

... Which brings me, at long last, to Eagle Eye.

We went because we like Shia LaBeouf. Period. No other reason. And he came through for us – the same earnest everyman quality that made Nicolas Cage and Tom Hanks such beloved stars. The same combination of kindness and goofiness that makes us care when they are in danger – LaBeouf is the best thing to emerge from the Disney stable since Sean Connery. (Are you forgetting Darby O'Gill?)

Director D.J. Caruso, whose work I had seen none of, is an excellent director of thrillers. Unlike Spike Lee's sometimes incoherent directing of Inside Man, Caruso left us in no doubt of what was happening or what we had just seen.

So, as a pure thriller, I really enjoyed the film. It was a terrific ride.

Unfortunately, it was also a deeply dishonest movie. Because it was a script with a Message. As my 14-year-old said, "Any movie where you know when you're being told the moral is bad."

If you haven't seen the movie, I'm about to spoil the "surprise" – though in fact the movie reveals it fairly early so we can understand what's going on (a mark of good writing).

Eagle Eye posits a supercomputer that has been given access to and control of all the online sources of information in the United States. It can take feeds from every videocam, it can find and hear every cellphone, it can control every train and traffic light.

And it has been given the mission of protecting America. Only it decides that because the president made a decision to strike against a suspected terrorist and turned out to have guessed wrong, which provokes revenge attacks by terrorists, the administration poses the greatest threat to the American people.

Wow, does that sound like this film was made by the Central Committee of the Democratic Party in order to remind people how evil George W. Bush is?

And at the end, sure enough, we get the Moral: Yes, the government must try to gather intelligence in order to protect the people, but Not This Way.

Wait a minute. How incoherent is this movie? It was the crazy supercomputer that acted out the Democratic Party's dream scenario – trying to remove the Bush administration because it made mistakes. There was nothing in the movie that showed that gathering intelligence was bad, or even that the president was evil for having acted on a (ridiculously overprecise) "51 percent certainty" and "abort mission" recommendation.

Presidents have to make vital decisions based on far less information than that, and there is no case where a percentage expression of the "degree of certainty" would have any meaning whatsoever. President Bush went into Iraq having been told, by the director of central intelligence, that it was a "slam dunk" that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

But the "moral" of this movie was not based on any kind of research or intelligent thought. The writers and director and producers came into the movie with an agenda, and at no point did they let common sense, logic or research in the real world interfere with their fantasy.

Here is the truth:

1. There is no possibility of such a computer acting in such a way. Period. Speculation about computers that turn intelligent and stubbornly self-willed have been around for a long time – Heinlein's Mike (Mycroft) in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, Arthur C. Clarke's HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey, the computer in War Games, Jane in my own Speaker for the Dead.

But the fact is that there is no evidence that digital computers are capable of achieving anything like "intelligence." The closest we've come is "fuzzy logic," which has had impressive results – but it does not amount to causal reasoning and the ability to change missions, and unless the programmers were stupid enough to allow a computer to take resources it was not given, it could not ever happen.

Yet that is precisely where the only danger in the movie flowed from. If the same information had been gathered, even with the ludicrous percentages of certainty (a basic tenet of epistemology is that without 100 percent certainty, you cannot even guess intelligently at the degree of certainty you have; and a corollary is that 100 percent certainty is unachievable in matters of causality), and simply provided to human information analysts, there would have been no physical danger whatsoever.

2. The only remaining danger is the bugbear of having the government spy on us electronically. I once sat in a room at a defense department briefing and heard a guy who uses computers to identify cheaters for Las Vegas casinos.

This guy showed how, using his existing software and sources that any business can easily access, he could have, weeks before 9/11, identified all but one of the terrorist conspirators. This was without any access to FBI or CIA or State Department information.

All he would have needed to do was analyze patterns of ticket buying, residences and other connections between the couple of known terrorists and all the other conspirators.

"We would have known something was up," he said (and I paraphrase): "We would have known when they bought their tickets that we had a group of people linked to known terrorists buying passage on four airplanes on the same day at the same time. Arrests for questioning would have been forthcoming, and all the lives lost on 9/11 would have been saved."

Remember – this is data that any business could have gathered, and that businesses routinely do gather. If the government had been this man's client, it could have authorized him to scan data patterns that follow, not "everybody," but patterns within the shifting mass of data. Individual people do not rise to the surface until and unless they become part of a suspicious pattern.

If somebody shows up through innocent coincidence, if the government simply followed existing rules, their individual rights would not be violated any more than our rights are violated by random road blocks to check for drunk drivers.

Just like the scans of international phone calls, nobody's "listening in," they're simply having computers (which do not care who anybody is, since they don't care about anything at all) scan the traffic patterns to find which calls are worth listening in on.

In the real world, computers cannot "understand" human speech, only humans can; and there aren't enough government employees to listen in on all our phone calls, unless half the population were assigned to spy on the other half.

In short, the premise of the movie (the mad computer) is stupid, the slander against the president is faked-up and specious, the danger warned about is nonexistent, and the real-world intelligence gathering methods that gave rise to this concern really do work, without violating privacy more than businesses violate it all the time – but our government is already forbidden to use these ordinary techniques in order to protect us.

Congress already blocked Admiral Poindexter from implementing these Las Vegas-level scans several years ago.

So if the government already can't do any of the things that even resemble what this film warns again, why the warning?

Because it came out during the election campaign of 2008, and the filmmakers wanted to frighten people about the evil Republicans and other horrible monstrous people who actually think one job of government is to keep us safe from terrorist attacks.

The most vile lie in the whole film is the idea that terrorists only attack us in retaliation for the evil actions of our government.

Whatever grain of truth is in that idea comes from the CIA's stupid, bungled, illegal and anti-democratic interference in Iran during the Cold War. Iran had a genuine grievance, though it hardly excuses their actions against civilization in the years since the shah was toppled and our hostages were taken.

But what "provocation" did we make that led to Osama bin Laden's "retaliation" against our evil government? American troops actually entered Saudi territory in our preparation to liberate Kuwait in the Gulf War. We were nowhere near Mecca, which is on the other side of Arabia, but because the arbitrary boundaries of Saudi Arabia include Mecca, we were somehow "defiling holy ground" – never mind that we were liberating one Arab Muslim country from a Hitlerian invader.

In other words, they hate us because we exist and because our civilization is a perpetual embarrassment for Muslims, since they cannot come close to matching the achievements of the once-Christian West. Our existence challenges the faith of the fanatics, and so they hate us, and the most evil fanatic among them feel entitled and bound to kill us.

Regardless of who is president. And when we don't "provoke" them by defending ourselves, they do far more outrageous and murderous things than when we do!

Everything about this piece of political propaganda called Eagle Eye shows either incredible ignorance or willful deception. It is an offense against anybody who understands the workings of history, government or computers.

But it's sure a good thriller, with some terrific performances. So you can watch this movie, be vastly entertained and get a dose of malicious stupid juice all at the same time. One-stop shopping, folks!

I've got a lot of DVDs I can stay home and watch. Maybe Hollywood can stop trying to preach their ignorant groupthink dogmas at us and start earning our entertainment dollars again. They certainly know how – make good movies, and we'll be back in the theaters. The movie business did just fine during the Great Depression; it isn't tight money that empties the theaters.

... Everything about this piece of political propaganda called Eagle Eye shows either incredible ignorance or willful deception. It is an offense against anybody who understands the workings of history, government or computers.

But it's sure a good thriller, with some terrific performances. So you can watch this movie, be vastly entertained and get a dose of malicious stupid juice all at the same time. One-stop shopping, folks!

Orson Scott Card - PING [please freepmail me if you want or don't want to be pinged to Orson Scott Card political articles]

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But the fact is that there is no evidence that digital computers are capable of achieving anything like "intelligence."

Nonsense. Human brains have intelligence. Ergo, it is possible (if one assumes that the universe runs by science, not by mysticism) for properly configured matter to acheive intelligence. QED.

a basic tenet of epistemology is that without 100 percent certainty, you cannot even guess intelligently at the degree of certainty you have

WTF???

One cannot be 100 percent certain that a given lottery ticket will win the grand prize. One cannot be 100 percent certain that it will not. According to this statement, it is impossible to declare either of these statements to be more "certain" than the other, which is preposterous on its face.

Card must be getting senile or something.

My preferred review would read something like this:

So, as a pure thriller, I really enjoyed Eagle Eye...a terrific ride.

But then again, I might be a little biased.

key words: “there is no evidence”

“In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But in practice, there is.” — Yogi Berra

(btw, just finished ‘Ender’s Game’ a few weeks ago. Quick, entertaining read.)

I would not rush with the “senile” part. He might be wrong about certainty, the AI is still sci-fi so far, but his pounding of Hollywood’s political agenda, is dead on.

Card must be getting senile or something.

You're focussing on a parenthetical comment that really doesn't have much to do with the overall piece. I think there's a name for that, too.

"But the fact is that there is no evidence that digital computers are capable of achieving anything like "intelligence." The closest we've come is "fuzzy logic," which has had impressive results – but it does not amount to causal reasoning and the ability to change missions, and unless the programmers were stupid enough to allow a computer to take resources it was not given, it could not ever happen."

"Aircraft can't break the sound barrier. It could never happen,"

It was the crazy supercomputer that acted out the Democratic Party's dream scenario – trying to remove the Bush administration because it made mistakes.

And the Seditious Left proclaimed that the so called "Red Scare" was a paranoid overreaction. Meanwhile Communist Party USA is cheering that the guy they picked finally won the Presidency.

Go to a movie? Sorry.
When the price of Popcorn is more than the ticket, 'Houston We Have A Problem'.

Oh, and what is that yellow goo they pour on it? I thought Chemical Warfare was outlawed?

a basic tenet of epistemology is that without 100 percent certainty, you cannot even guess intelligently at the degree of certainty you have

Well, if you knew indeed that you had 100% certainty, then that is the only way you'd know the degree of certainty. If 100% certainty was not possible, how would you ever know how close you were to 100%? That is, you'd have to be able to have a way of knowing that would accurately say 75% of what you know is certain and 25% is uncertain. That presupposes a way of knowing that is 100% correct or certain about the degree of uncertainty. This can obtain only if one is already 100% certain.

Nonsense. Human brains have intelligence. Ergo, it is possible (if one assumes that the universe runs by science, not by mysticism) for properly configured matter to acheive intelligence. QED.

Apples and oranges, Mr. b. Card's assertion pertained to "digital computers," not "properly configured matter."

“for properly configured matter to acheive intelligence.”

Who made the “properly configured matter”? Where did it come from?

Mr. b. Card's assertion pertained to "digital computers," not "properly configured matter."

The two are equivalent insofar as information processing is concerned -- any type of information is capable of being expressed and manipulated in digital form.

You’re asserting that “mind” is the result of “matter”, right?

Just getting your assertion/assumption clear.

Heinlein's Mike (Mycroft) in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress

When is THAT going to be made into a movie? Done properly and with the right editing down of the book, it could be a great thriller.

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