КАТАЛОГ СATALOG

DOCU/ТЕХНО DOCU/TECHNO
Viktoriya Khomenko,
site deputy editor, film reviewer
Technology has brought new ways for us to
think, communicate, and eat. Certainly we
watch movies differently as well. Gadgets
and magical software are changing the
everyday routine of our lives. That means it’s
now time to talk about documentaries that
show our surroundings through the lens of
these new technologies – the technologies
that have become the heroes of our time.
While tireless inventors predict a
comfortable future thanks to machine labor,
skeptics see the machines as insidious
demons. All three films in the DOCU/
TECHNO program show the origins of these
demons – and so, they show what our future
will be like.
Robots have become the focus of this year’s
program. The filmmakers of the movie about
3D-printing (Print the Legend), Luis Lopez and
J. Clay Tweel, consider intelligent machines
to be assistants. Their enthusiasm for
3D-printing companies would make Steve
Jobs jealous. Those ‘machine assistants’ are
capable of growing a bracelet, a guitar, a
heart. And they can make a plastic gun as
well. So the directors raise a valid question
at the end of the film: who is to decide what
we should and should not print?
Another perspective is explored by Sander
Burger in the movie Alice Cares. The story
is not about making a doll with artificial
intelligence, it is about the relationship
between a human and a robot. During an
experiment, elderly and lonely ladies receive
Alice, a carebot developed to be their friend.
And the eternal issue of loneliness shines in
completely new, high-tech colors.
Tonje Hessen Schei, the director of Drone,
raises an interesting concern in the light
of ongoing military conflicts. With this film
she puts an uncomfortable question before
the American people, her compatriots: what
should one do when a remote government
of another country has power over their
lives and deaths? A drone is a kind of
military robot. The US military campaigns
of the 21st century in the Middle East have
seen the beginning of their active usage. A
Pakistani whose close friends were killed
by drones admits that a clear sky overhead
is his biggest fear. Only clouds prevent the
drones from seeing his family.
Science fiction writer Isaac Asimov wrote in
his three laws of robotics: ‘a robot may not
injure a human being or, through inaction,
allow a human being to come to harm.’ We
decide on how robots should act in order
to protect ourselves from their possible
aggression, but we have not yet learned how
to build pathways of humanity between us.
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