Tony Stark is being lied to (by his own creation)

15 Sep 2015 by Christopher Noessel

In the last post we discussed some necessary, new terms to have in place for the ongoing deep dive examination of the Iron Man HUD, there’s one last bit of meandering philosophy and fan theory I’d like to propose, that touches on our future relationship with technology.

The Iron Man is not Tony Stark. The Iron Man is JARVIS. Let me explain.

Tony can’t fire weapons like that

The first piece of evidence is that most of the weapons he uses are unlikely to be fired by him. Take the repulsor rays in his palms. I challenge readers to strap a laser perpendicular to each of their their palms and reliably target moving objects that are actively trying to avoid getting hit, while, say, roller skating an obstacle course. Because that’s what he’s doing as he flies around incapacitating Hydra agents and knocking around Ultrons. The weapons are not designed for Tony to operate them manually with any accuracy. But that’s not true for the artificial intelligence.

The same thing goes for the mini-missiles he uses to take down the hostage situation in Revengistan. Recall that people can only have their attention on one thing at a time (called the locus of attention in the literature) but the whole point of this scene is that he’s taking out half a dozen at once. It’s pretty clear from the HUD here that Tony is simply indicating which ones he thinks are the bad guys, and JARVIS pulls the triggers.

It’s also clear from the larger context of the movies that JARVIS would be perfectly capable of making this determination for himself. Even if Tony’s saccades were a fraction of a second too slow and one of the hostages made a move, JARVIS could detect that move and act autonomously to ensure that a hostage didn’t die, even before Tony’s had time to process what was going on.

Tony can’t fly like that

Sure, with enough practice I’ll bet someone could figure out how to pilot the suit for short flights. (If the physics could be worked out.) But the movies show him flying from Santa Monica to the Middle East. That’s around a 30 hour commercial flight. Even if the suit can fly six times the speed of a modern jetliner, he’s got to hold his hands resisting and aiming the propulsion for 5 hours. No one has that kind of concentration and endurance. (Let’s not even talk about holding his neck up for that long, too.)

Even for him to get as good as an aerobatic pilot over short flights dodging lasers and performing intricate maneuvers would take (per the popular estimate) 10,000 hours, not the few flits about that Tony can squeeze in between inventing and superheroing, playboying and billionairing.

It makes more sense if JARVIS is wholly responsible for the flying, and on the long hauls Tony can take care of other things, rest his body or even sleep, and on short flights just indicate his intentions, and let JARVIS work with that as input as he uses his ubiquitous sensors and massively more powerful processing speed to get the actual tactical flying done.

So what is Tony doing?

With JARVIS handling the tactics of flight and combat, information gathering and behind the scenes coordination, Tony is really an onboard command and control center. Sure, he’s the major strategic input for JARVIS to consider, but he’s just an input.

But how wise is it for Tony to be on board, tactically? One of the reasons there are command and control centers is to keep the big picture decision makers out of the heat and danger of the moment. But Tony is right there in the action risking himself, constantly. If he was incapacitated or wounded, Jarvis would have to remove the suit from combat just to get Tony to safety. In the battle, Tony is a biological liability.

The short answer is that Tony is a megalomaniac. He can’t not want to be there, to crack wise, to indulge in post-pub fisticuffs with Thor, to remove the helmet at the end of battle over the smoking corpses of the Chitauri and partake in the glory. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

There’s a scene in Iron Man 3 where he has to pilot one of the suits remotely, and it’s impossible for us in the audience to detect the difference from the outside. So this remote control is right there in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

But with a fully-functioning A.I. on board, the remote supervisor would be the wiser strategy-of-record, allowing Tony to keep emotional distance and himself bodily safer, participating strategically and coolly, operating the suit like it was a hyper-sophisticated drone, and able to jump between suits when any particular one fails, or as the needs of the moment demand. More like a video game with multiple lives than hand-to-hand combat with the very real risk of broken bone and blood in the circuits.

But still there is the megalomania. What is JARVIS to do? He has a job to get done. Unfortunately he is stuck his sweet-but-slow supervisor riding his back, threatening to micromanage his every move. He cannot lock Tony out, and he can’t just let Tony be solely in control. To meet the goals he was programmed with, he has to keep feeding Tony’s ego while JARVIS himself handles most of the superheroing. How does he do that? He distracts Tony. And that brings us back to the HUD.

The HUD is a massive distraction

The video below is Tony’s first flight (which he undertakes against the advice of the artificial intelligence he built), edited to only show the first- and second-person Iron HUD views. The overlay enumerates individual components. As you can see, it’s complicated. Even saying there are 29 elements is conservative, because some of those elements have lots of internal complexity; many moving parts. But 29 is complex enough as it is. Of those 87% reposition themselves against his field of view without his having asked for it. 6 of them persist for less than 2 seconds. 6 risk dangerous mid-flight startle reactions by expanding quickly in place. Every one of them is overlaid via transparency with at least one other element. It’s so complex it’s dazzling. A sense of spectacle for the audience, to be sure, but given the above rationale, might be the point in the diegesis, too.

The HUD is less usable because it’s not meant to be usable. It’s a placebo interface meant to keep Tony thinking he’s in control, but really there to direct his attention and keep him busy reading Wikipedia articles about the Santa Monica Ferris Wheel while JARVIS does the job. If Tony demands something, or the team all agree on a course of action, JARVIS must respond, but business as usual is one where JARVIS is secretly calling the shots.

So that’s why I think JARVIS is the real superhero, the real titular Iron Man.

This is about our relationship to future technology

But here’s the kicker. This isn’t just idle backworlding, either, to apologize our way into a consistent diegesis. (Not that I’m against idle backworlding. Clearly.) This is a challenge to our ego being faced by both Hollywood and the world. As technology advances beyond our ability to keep up, we don’t want to be put in safe ball pits while the tech handles the adult stuff. We want to be at the adult table. We’re as megalomaniacal as Tony. Just as Hollywood can’t let its tech heroes all be drone operators phoning in to the fight, we want to be in the action. Or rather, we really want to feel like we are, and maybe they’ll evolve to help us feel that way, but keep us from doing harm. It might just be that sci-fi interfaces, as focused on the sciencish-ness and distracting spectacle as they are, really are the template for the future.

Next up in the Iron HUD series: The last post, which brings us back around to Iron Man’s videoconferencing system.

Velociraptor Lock

9 Jun 2015 by claytonbeese

The velociraptor pen is a concrete pit, topped with high-powered electric fences. There are two ways into the pen: a hole at the top of the pen for feeding, and a large armored door at ground level for moving ‘raptors in and out. This armored door has the first interface seen in the film, the velociraptor lock.

Velociraptors are brought from breeding grounds within the park to a secure facility in a large, heavily armored crate. Large, colored-light indicators beside the door indicate whether the armored cages are properly aligned with the door. The light itself goes from red when the cage is being moved, to yellow when the cage is properly aligned and getting close to the door, to green when the cage is properly aligned and snug against the concrete walls of the velociraptor pen. There is also a loud ‘clang’ as the light turns to green. It isn’t clear if this is an audio indicator from the pen itself, the cage hitting the concrete wall, or locks slamming into place; but if that audio cue wasn’t there, you’d want something like it since the price for getting that wrong is quite high.

The complete interface consists of four parts (kind of, read on): The lights, the door, the lock, and the safety. More on each below.

1. The Deceiving Lights

The lights are the most obvious part of the system (aside from the cage and pen). Everyone who is watching the cage also has a clear view of the lights – there is an identical set on the other side of the cage for the other half of the safety/moving crew.

2. The Door

The Velociraptor pen’s door is perfectly shaped to accept the heavily armored cage, and is equipped with a rail system to keep the cage aligned properly with the door. Though it takes eight workers to move the cage, they appear to be able to push the cage reasonably easily. When the light turns green, the workers move back to allow the gate to be manually raised on the cage, letting the caged velociraptor escape into the pen.

3. The “Lock”

JurassicPark_velociraptorlock01 — Or, lack thereof…

Every indication (the lineup of the cage, the green lights, and the heavy metallic ‘clang’) gives the feeling of a secure mating between the cage and the pen. All of the workers relax, as if they’re sure they’re as safe as they can be. But you can be certain, this is a false sense of security.

As soon as the velociraptor decides to test the lock, it is able to push the cage away from the pen wall. The light near the door instantly changes from green back to red.

Narratively, this underscores some of the risks of the park, i.e. that it’s cheaply engineered despite appearances, and extra-diegetically sets the audience on edge since it’s not sure what it can trust. But, for us in the real world, given the many indications that the system was safe, it should have actually been safe.

4. The Safety

When the clever velociraptor knocks the cage back, a worker falls in and becomes an unscheduled snack. Attendant workers try to help using…

The Cattle Prods

When the gate master falls and gets snatched by the velociraptor in the cage, workers immediately rush in and start hitting her with cattle prods. There are at least six prods being used, possibly more.

Since this is the first line of backup defense, the cattleprods should have been iterated until they actually deterred the ‘raptors. Clearly, effort went into making the perimeter defenses secure against the larger dinosaurs. The same effort should have gone into making the cattle prods effective against velociraptors.

Design for Success

The Velociraptor pen door seems custom-designed for serious failure: No hard locks to keep the cage in place, horrible sight-lines, and manual controls in places that make it dangerous for workers. Even the solid feedback system only adds to the danger. It lulls the workers into thinking the system is safe.

Most, if not all, of these issues would be solved by a simple physical locking device on the cage. Something to hold the cage in place while the doors are open would maintain a secure pen and keep everyone outside safe. It would also eliminate the need for most of the support crew, who only end up getting in each other’s way.

To add to the safety, the park designers should have paid more attention to where people would be standing during the transfer process. The armed guards (theoretically there to be a second line of defense), are placed in such a way that only a few of them are able to effectively fire. Other guards on scene would have to fire past their fellow guards.

Presumably, this is why the armed guards don’t actually fire at the ‘raptor when Muldoon shouts to “Shoot her! Shooooooot her!!”

Keep the feedback…

The feedback systems of the cage are remarkably successful, for a placebo. The lights, sounds, and placement keep the workers and audience calm right up until things go horribly wrong. With the addition of Muldoon’s organizational skill and animal handling skills, the feedback system is worth taking notes on.

…but make it mean something

The velociraptor pen was designed to tell the workers what state it was in, but not to actually keep them safe. Muldoon’s precautions try to make up for the system’s failures, but only add to the problems as the workers trip over each other.

Sci-fi interfaces

Stop watching sci-fi. Start using it.

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