Artificial intelligence is both a science and a dream: a set of algorithms and methods for developing systems, along with a set of ideas about the nature of intelligence to guide that development, and at the same time a vision of our future, in which our technology will no longer be limited to adding machines but will become thinking machines. It is one of those collective dreams so compelling that we are likely to continue pursuing it until it becomes a reality, whatever form that reality ends up taking. It is compelling because of the possibilities as well as the dangers. Just as atomic energy promised a new atomic age, while at the same time engendering the fear of nuclear annihilation, the sci-fi vision of androids living among us, existing only to make our lives easier, at the same time presents us with the specter of a world in which humans have become slaves to our superior creations, obsolete as last year’s technology. This specter will likely haunt us just as long as the vision inspires us.
I recently saw the 1982 movie Tron for the first time, one of the first films, to my knowledge, to incorporate the hopes and fears surrounding AI into its plot. It is essentially a Disney adventure movie, and I don’t want to it make it out to be something much more than that, but the creators did make an interesting choice in setting this adventure in the world of cyberspace, and managed to create a unique vision of that world.
Although they are very different movies, watching Tron was something similar to my experience while watching The Net, in that I could not help but think about how it reflects a certain moment in our relationship with technology, and of the challenges the film-makers must have faced in trying to put this strange new world of programs, bytes and memory on the screen. What would it be like to be inside a computer? Who would you meet in there? Will they be hostile or friendly?
This idea of cyberspace as unexplored territory is something that we may have lost in our current tech-saturated world. Even the word cyberspace has a certain retro ring to it. Tron reflects a time in the evolution of our relationship with technology when the world behind the CRT monitor may have sparked the imagination in the same naive way that someone living in the time before international flights might have conjured up fantasies of far-off lands based on traveler’s descriptions. Instead of imagining people who hop around on one gigantic foot or giant birds that carry off elephants in their claws, the makers of Tron imagined programs as dopplegangers of the programmers who wrote them, acting as their creator’s avatar in the digital world and almost worshipfully refer to them as their “user.” There is even a personification of the “bit,” a floating polygon that can only respond with “yes” or “no,” a creative attempt at personifying a concept from the world of computing.
Note that this post will contain spoilers. Although Tron is a franchise as well as a film, I will be writing here only of the original movie.
Neo & Flynn
Tron shares a number of parallels with that other film about the world within the machine, The Matrix, although it is an inverted Matrix, in which it is the programs themselves who are enslaved within their digital world by the dictatorial Master Control Program (MCP), a rogue AI which embodies fears of totalitarianism along with fears of technology growing out of our control. Instead of popping a pill and waking in a cyberpunk nightmare, Tron‘s Neo (Jeff Bridges as Flynn) starts out in the real world and is uploaded into the world of cyberspace.
It even has some of the same religious overtones as The Matrix, with Flynn playing the part of the messianic figure with the ability to bend the rules of reality to which the rest of us are subject, as Neo stopped bullets with his hands and the Nazarene walked on water, and who will (I did mention there was going to be spoilers) free the captive programs from the rule of the MCP, the Orwellian dictator that not only wants to pit the programs against each other in life-or-death games for its own enjoyment, but wants to convince them that the “users” don’t even exist, as a way to tighten his control on them.
The MCP is something like malware, but also something like Lucifer who fell from heaven because he was too proud to serve—in a world where programs are as smart as their creators, malware will no longer only refer to code written for malicious purposes, but code that has its own malicious intentions.
The World Within the Machine
While not much of what you see in this movie can give you any kind of accurate idea of how computing technology works, what the makers of Tron did pick up on is the concept of a simulation or model: the idea that the real world can be represented in some way in transistors. While the plot works on the idea that that Flynn is uploaded into computer memory, where he is one among a cast of digital entities, the way it is portrayed is more along of the lines of being inserted into a video game, with the characters on the screen, the spaceships and colorful ghosts and so on, conceived of as entities in themselves rather than sets of pixels and screen coordinates and behavior determined by programming logic.
The movie is naturally full of techno-babble, terms from computing being used in something like the way a movie set on another planet might invent words to describe things which only exist in the sci-fi imagination. The MCP ends its conversations with the phrase “end of line”, overlapping the use of a control code in a data stream with a haughty dismissal.
Notably absent is any use, at least to my memory, of words like “virus,” “worm” or other vocabulary from the world of cybersecurity. It may be that this was so early in the evolution of computing that it came before the need for the average computer user to be aware of such things; another example of how a film can be representative of the general consciousness of the technology of its time. While The Matrix was made during a time when computing technology had already gone a long way towards insinuating itself into our everyday lives, but before most people carried a computer around in their pocket, Tron came out during the very early stages of that transition, when most did not have one on their desk.
UI & I/O
It is always interesting to see how movies trying to represent our technological future imagine how human-computer interaction will work in that future. Generally this ends up being a mix of the technology of the time and perceived ideas about what the future will look like, and Tron follows this convention. There are examples of both touch screen and voice interfaces, and yet it still involves a screen displaying something like of a mainframe’s textual interface.
The interactions between the human characters and the programs more resemble a conversation than a set of instructions carried out by an automation, with commands and responses given in sentences having some of the stilted cadence of a text-to-speech system, accompanied by the digitized voice of the program itself. It is an interesting mix of the primitive I/O facilities available at the time and the natural assumption that interacting with something with intelligence, even artificial intelligence, would take the form of a conversation, as this is the “user interface” that comes most naturally to us natural intelligences.
End of Line
As mentioned above I don’t want to give the impression that watching Tron is much more than some early 80’s sci-fi fun, but it does have the distinction of being one of the innovators of the genre of “an Odyssey within cyberspace” films, and does that with an instantly recognizable visual language, influenced by the blinking lights and pixellated images of arcade games and the sprawling traces of printed circuit boards. The special effects are dated, yet there is a unique and coherent vision in this movie that makes it worth watching for that reason alone.