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Showing posts from July, 2018

Gone Baby Gone (2007)

"Gone Baby Gone" is a 2007 film directed by Ben Affleck. Besides the stars shown in the picture (Casey Affleck, Michelle Monaghan, Morgan Freeman and Ed Harris), I recognized Titus Welliver who stars in the Bosch detective series. The film centers around a kidnapped 4-year-old girl in the Dorchester section of Boston. Private investigator Casey Affleck and his girlfriend partner Michelle Monaghan are hired by the missing child's aunt to augment the police investigation. The language is rough and this is a tough area of town. The mother of the missing girl is a drug addict and there is more to the kidnapping than first appears. Without giving away the plot, the ending of the film poses the question to the viewer as to whether the right choice was made. The cast is very strong and the film well acted.

Artificial Intelligence

The number of TV shows dealing with AI has exploded in recent times. WestWorld season 2 has just finished and HUM∀NS season 3 is still running. There is also a 2017 National Geographic six-part series titled “Year Million” which offers informed speculation about what mankind’s future holds.  It’s little wonder the idea has caught our interest. We see driverless cars on the roads and computers beating champion human players at Jeopardy, a show which requires the ability to interpret language and draw inferences. Google’s AI can make appointments for you and even converse naturally with the human on the other side of the call.  Google AI making reservations. How soon will it be before we are unable to tell if who is standing in front of us is human or an AI creation? And what then?  That’s what these shows explore. In HUM ∀NS, set in Britain, the self-aware “synths” (short for "synthetics" as they’re called) are struggling for equal rights. There are obvious paral...