Suckling at the Cloud: What Filmmakers Still Get Wrong About How We Will Store Data in the Future

Suckling at the Cloud: What Filmmakers Still Get Wrong About How We Will Store Data in the Future

Chase the man, the woman, the entity, the android with the thing. There is only one copy of the thing, and we have to get it. Who has only one copy of anything digital these days? We store playlists, photos, contacts, passwords, and almost everything else in the cloud. There is no “only copy” of anything.

I did not have that thought in mind when I watched Alien: Romulus (Disney/20th Century Studios) last week on its opening day. I found the Fede Alvarez film an entertaining romp in the Alien universe with a biological twist at the end that offered up a truly horrifying example of a genetic engineering ethics failure. The entirety of the Alien franchise should remind its viewers that AI isn’t the only technology that requires ethical frameworks, but it has things to say about AI as well. This post isn’t a story about genetics; it’s a story about data that exists in only one place and how that plays into the portrayal of, in the case of Alien: Romulus, humanoid robots.

Robot profiles will be stored in the cloud

Let’s start with the premise that computers and storage will continue to get cheaper and smaller. Combine that with a fictional society capable of creating standalone, fully functional, near-sentient humanoid robots and interstellar travel; then we should also be able to determine that the society is capable of fast local wireless communications and, further, that ships and space stations in that fictional society will have enormous compute and storage capabilities.

Given the very corporate future in which the Alien franchise takes place, robots would likely be considered significant intellectual property (IP). And because they are property, what they know, and experience, would also be considered IP. It would all be backed up.

But Alien: Romulus makes a different choice. The film depicts Andy with a neck slot that we later discover can hold a disk capable of changing his personality and directives. The entirety of the Android’s personality and programming can exist on a single little disk.

Given the assertions that I stated above, that isn’t far-fetched. Perhaps this society has shrunk memory to the point that the instructions for an artificial brain could be stored on a disk. They would, as we see a boot sequence in the film, be implemented into some artificial neural network, but the data that drives the hardware could be on a small disk.

But here’s the problem: that small disk would not be the only copy of that information.

Of course, if storage and computers are cheap, Androids could store many configurations locally, but not exclusively so. The future technology would likely include mechanisms for backing up those configurations. And I would think, for any given Android model, those backups would be shareable.

Think about your iPhone backup. It just happens. If you buy a new iPhone, you restore your configuration from the cloud to a new device. Videos shot on the new camera may be of higher resolution and have new features, such as depth, but the new capability does not negate the access to viewing or editing older videos (and I know, historically, that is not completely true, as anyone trying to open an old Microsoft Word document can attest).

Alien-franchise Androids include a personality, and they learn and maintain memories. It is possible that, again, with easy access to cheap storage, memory and computers, an Android could host more than one configuration, like a Mac running a PC emulator. The coexistence of two memory profiles should not prove problematic as the designers would likely sandbox the memories.

So Andy, the adopted Android brother of Cailee Spaeny’s Rain, should be able to pick out what he needs when a disk is inserted into his neck without rebooting or being overwritten. In fact, the overwrite would be a security violation that his system would likely fight against violently.

The more significant issue is Rain should not need a disk. Enough of the computer infrastructure was working on the ill-fated Romulus-and-Remus to provide access to its Android host system where she can connect up Andy and get him what he needs from the anthropomorphically named Mother, the central sentient computer in the mix.

Rain would have connected Andy to a console (as his wireless clearance may not have been up to snuff, even though he was a discarded corporate model that was still recognized by the ship physically) and either had him explore configurations and update himself with clearance profiles or rebooted Rook to do that for them. The plot requires an exchange of data, not an exchange of medium.

Andy is not the only Android. It appears that Ridley Scott sees Androids as scarce in the future. Given the rest of the technology available, I find that an interesting but logically inconsistent assertion, but we can argue that another day. The late Ian Holmes reemerges across the Uncanny Valley in the form of Rook, the Android science officer aboard the space station. Rain extracts the disk from Rook’s neck.

The disk does facilitate the one tricky item upon which the entire film hangs: how do people or Androids without any clearance gain clearance? If you don’t know the passcode to a system, you can’t work your way around it either through brute force effort or special knowledge about backdoors. That Andy and Rook both have neck slots makes the backdoor visible, which is problematic in itself. Even if the Androids aren’t common, somebody on future Reddit would have shared that these robot models come with memory neck slots that can be hacked. That’s a big design flaw and a poorly kept secret. Just the kind of thing that an interstellar conglomerate would likely prevent.

Employing an easily extracted “disk” isn’t plausible, in any future, for how a major corporation would handle highly secure credentials and intellectual property, such as the learnings of an Android on an interstellar mission to re-engineer humanity.

Hollywood’s obsession with the one data thing

Hollywood has an obsession with the one thing. In Minority Report, Tom Cruz has a thing that people want. Don’t tell me that “thing” isn’t backed up in a world with that much technology. Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning (I’ll leave off the “Part One,” as “Part One” seems as dead as the reckoning) also has a thing at the center, not the decryption key, but the list that it seemingly unlocks. Many spy movies these days include a list that must be recovered, be it on paper or a flash drive.

Even in our nascent technological world, as compared to the advanced worlds portrayed in science fiction, we back up everything to the cloud. Hollywood needs to reinvent the Holy Grail archetype in a world where everyone can drink from the mug of G-d.

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