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Health & Fitness

WALL-E and Life

It's 2:30 in the morning and I'm watching WALL-E. It's been an interesting night. Perusing my Facebook feed, of all things, I saw a news post about an interstellar transmission that scientists recently picked up on. A transmission that, by all accounts, is an utter mystery to the best and brightest minds the scientific community has to offer. Weird. If not just a little bit creepy. I mean, what does that mean? Little green men, the Russians, what?

Further compounding matters is news from a physicist by the name of Louis Del Monte, who posits that by the year 2045, human beings will no longer be the dominant species on the planet. Yes, near the half century mark, the proverbial baton will be passed to the machines as a result of something referred to as "the singularity".

"The singularity" is essentially a theoretical point in the future when the culmination of artificial intelligence and human innovation will have resulted in a greater-than-human intelligence. A machine or computer program (or some mixture of the two) that can think independently and beyond the capabilities of any human being. Yikes.

Del Monte is quick to point out that people shouldn't anticipate a "Terminator" scenario (where killer robots come to wipe out human beings), but does warn that a self-aware machine could rationalize that a planet infested with polluting, warring humans might be a threat to its existence and, well, neutralize us. That's a nightmare scenario I don't find all too comforting.

Of course, at almost three A.M. and verging on sleep, just about anything can start to sound scary, if you think too long and hard about it. So I'm not. The intergalactic radio signals probably aren't from martians, and a robotic Arnold Schwarzenegger isn't likely to be eradicating human life 31 years from now. That's what I'm telling myself to sleep somewhat soundly.

All kidding aside, it really does seem unlikely that the fruits of scientific curiosity will go all Frankenstein's monster on us. Y2K never amounted to more than a spike in bottled water and battery sales, after all. Still, sitting and watching WALL-E, where humans have rendered Earth an unlivable mass of pollution and dust storms, it doesn't quite seem so far-fetched. Or doesn't it?

What is it about personifying animals or inanimate objects that's so appealing to us? Perhaps breathing life into a box of bolts and circuit boards like the robot WALL-E distills the good in human beings down to something tangible, something simple to strive for. With so much bad in front of our faces on a daily basis, it can be hard to remember what makes us good. WALL-E is us at our best.

The wizards at Pixar proclaim that WALL-E was never meant to be an environmental message, but any artist or writer knows that when you throw your creation into the wild, it takes on a life beyond anything you ever envisioned (and sometimes, a life not at all like what you intended). In fairness, WALL-E doesn't bring the hammer down all that hard, if it is acting as an arbiter. We destroy the Earth, and are rewarded with 700 years of summer vacation. It's a celebrity indictment, if anything; not tough, all fluff.

That's not to say WALL-E doesn't teach anything equally important. WALL-E teaches lessons about humanity, for instance. The nominal robot is arguably defective, fulfilling his (I can't call WALL-E an "it") duties, but hoarding and showing signs of curiosity clearly beyond anything his programmers ever intended. What's interesting, though, is that it's WALL-E's defects that make him special, make him unique. If he performed his function and nothing more, the Earth would have remained uninhabited for who knows how much longer.

WALL-E makes me think of all the disabled children and adults in the world; they're technically "defective", themselves, often horribly so, but would the world be more or less rich if someone could have prevented them from ever having been born? I don't believe so, personally. Who's to say what life is or isn't supposed to be? It's the "defective" among us that often teach us humility and the value of life in undefinable ways. "Defective" doesn't have to mean garbage.

Humanity basks in the glory of its advancements, but rarely heeds the advice of Mary Shelley; intelligence without wisdom can be a dangerous thing. Just because people can do something, doesn't necessarily mean we should. At the same time, staying stationary leads to stagnation, and that's not a good thing, either. As with most everything, finding the right balance between two extremes would seem the best way to go. So before the martians and machines come pounding at our doors, hopefully humanity will learn to embrace the best in itself, rather than just look at it from afar.

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