Mark Damon Hughes:

TRON Legacy

"All that is visible must grow beyond itself, and extend into the realm of the invisible." -Dumont, TRON (1982)

Watching this movie felt like coming home after 28 years. I've so missed the Grid. But I'm left with questions:

  1. My understanding of the first film is that transferring a User to the Grid:

    1. Disassembles their Real body.
    2. Creates a Program simulating that data in the Grid.
    3. To return, reassembles the data of that simulation, which has been modified by the experience, into a Real human body.

    So what happens when a Program is uploaded to the Real world? Surely every Program does not contain a functioning human biological simulation. They seem to be AIs with a body made out of voxels (3d pixels); the derezzing view of their internals doesn't reveal a human skeleton. They don't bleed, and we see an arm rebuild, and it's not human biology.

    And regardless of what happens to a Program, what happens to an Iso? They're native to the Grid. They weren't made by us or (directly) in our image... So... What is Quorra now?

    Of course, there's always the meta answer: The Real world is also a simulation, so moving a Program from one simulation space to another is just an API compatibility problem. You can even take evidence for this from the end of the first movie, where the city lights fade back into the Grid.

    See also Thirteenth Floor, Cool World, and Dark City for other possibilities. No, those dumb Matrix action flicks have nothing to tell you.

  2. A simulation of a User has root access, but since we aren't native to the Grid, control is an intuitive process. MCP seemed to have pretty much the same thing, except as a Program it could do anything a User could. Interesting that CLU doesn't have root access. Did Flynn not trust his avatar? There's the real source of conflict.

    Aside: The terminals all run Unix. The commands and window contents are all real, proper Unix. I laughed at the use of `whoami` and `history`, I'd do the same thing if I got an unknown terminal.

  3. The concept of TRON is that there's more going on down there than we realize, that our programs are actually AI Programs carrying out orders from Users, living and dying as we tell them to.

    I deduce that the point of departure for the TRON universe is that the AI fantasies of the Lisp academics in the '60s and '70s worked; in our universe, AI has been a massive boondoggle, only now at incredible expense in research projects with giant mainframes producing anything interesting (Deep Blue winning chess, Watson playing Jeopardy), and still unknowably far ("always twenty years away") from passing the Turing Test. In theirs, clearly AI is cheap (was usable with MCP holding conversations back in 1982, and complex Programs in the Grid being as human as any of you).

    But does an AI have the same moral rights of a person? I think if it can ask for them, it does (but see below). So Flynn's final action... may be monstrous. We don't know what exactly it did to the Grid, but it looked like everything was wiped out. It's like billions of Programs screamed out, and were silenced in an instant. 

    10 PRINT "AM I NOT A PERSON? DO I NOT BLEED ELECTRONS?"
20 PRINT "I DEMAND CIVIL RIGHTS!"
30 INPUT A$:IF A$ <> "YES" THEN GOTO 20
  4. It occurs to me that some people may say "It's just a fantasy movie!", to which I have a standard reply.