Just Saw: Surrogates

Bruce Willis plays a cop with marriage problems who plays by his own rules and must singlehandedly blow the lid off on a secret terrorist plot by an evil corporation in the not-to-distant future!

This movie actually had a great premise (odd that we got two shittily plotted movies about transmitting peoples' brain signals into foreign bodies within a few months of each other) that might have translated into a great movie if they hadn't written their script using a game of ad libs. Let's count the action/sci-fi cliches!

All-powerful monopolistic corporation, check
Law enforcement routinely ignores legal procedures and nobody knows their rights, check
Rag-tag resistance movement challenges the system, despite technological/organizational inferiority, check
Any computer system can be hacked with a few simple keystrokes, check
Bad guy explains his evil plan to good guy cuz "There's nothing you can do to stop it now," check
This newfangled technology is robbing us of our humanity! check

The entire movie I was praying that they wouldn't fall for the obvious Hollywood Luddite move and pull the plug on the technology at the end, but alas, it's an easier ending to write. Even though having surrogates in real life would in fact be awesome.

Kurzweil and other Singularity fanboys have mostly talked about how we'll use new customizable bodies in virtual reality, and about the kind of upgrades we'll make to our current bodies, but I'd never really come across the idea of using that same sort of technology to make ourselves extra physical bodies. The possibilities are pretty interesting though. Most of the people in the movie basically just used a better-looking version of themselves, and just the one at that. But imagine being able to use a new body every day, choosing from an assortment of different shapes, ethnicity, and sex. If this kinda technology became available before radical youth-rejuvenation and body-modification technology arrives, expect young chicks to be the early adopters. How many 200 pound pimple-faced 20something women out there would kill to look like a supermodel to the rest of the world? The initial transition might require a pretty strong shift in social mores (like in the movie, the handicapped and deformed will probably be the first commercial users), but once the ball gets rolling, expect a runaway arms race. Once the 1s and 2s of the world upgrade to 10s, you got constant downward social movement. The 3s and 4s get new bodies so that they won't be at the bottom of the sexual heap. Pretty soon even girls we'd consider pretty hot by today's standards get their own versions to stay competitive. Guys jump on board somewhere along the way.

Once your actual body is safe at home and you can live vicariously through a robot, I imagine hedonism's gotta take off like it's going out of style. Would straight girls start fucking as indiscriminately as gay men when they no longer have to worry about getting pregnant, STDs, raped or beaten, or considered a slut? Ever wonder what it feels like for the opposite sex when they're doing it? Here's your chance to find out.

The potential for anonymity oughta make things pretty interesting as well. There might be some sort of legal restriction stating that surrogates have to have some sort of mark or ID showing them as such and who they belong to, but how could you enforce such a law? Might be doable in the early days when only a few capital-intensive companies offer surrogates, but as they become cheaper and more distributed you quickly enter a world in which anybody could be anybody. The potential for criminal misuse is incredible. You could use a new, throwaway surrogate to murder somebody then quickly sever the link and they'd never know who was behind it. Presumably there'll be some law enforcement body monitoring the broadcast frequencies that would watch out for pirate transmissions like that, but considering how good governments are right now at preventing illegal downloading of files (like how I illegally downloaded Surrogates), I'm not so convinced they'd be very effective.

On the whole though I don't think there'd be all that much danger. The nanotechnology necessary to make surrogates possible would also be able to make the human body practically invulnerable. And once people got used to the idea of walking the world in a surrogate, the idea of spending all day in virtual reality probably wouldn't be far behind. Pretty soon thereafter people would abandon their fragile human bodies altogether and upload their minds to computer, switching freely between inhabiting the virtual world in a simulated body or the real world with a cyborg body. Hollywood, and by extension the lowest common denominator of humanity, still finds this scenario inhuman and unacceptable, and so Bruce Willis saves the day by destroying the whole system it's based on, but methinks that once people are offered the possibility of everlasting beauty and health and an escape from the disease, death, and decay of our rotting human bodies people will be on it like flies on shit.