(Originally posted on December 24, 2010)
The opportunity to comment on how The Internet of Things is portrayed by Hollywood doesn’t come along often. I hereby lay down a prediction in this post that when Hollywood does speak on this topic, it will always involve an deranged gazillionaire. Here’s my first point of evidence.
In “G-Force” (IMDB link), several rodents, endowed with human-level intelligence, the ability to communicate, often sardonically, via spoken english, and equipped with an NSA-scale budget and a set of cuddly human overseers, take on an evil corporate type who’s made a global name for himself in the small appliances market.
To avoid giving away tooooo much of what could be described as a “delicate” plot line, let me just say that, apparently, every one of the appliances made by this far-thinking guy has an extra special “something” inside that “comes alive” when a secret communications chip is enabled, creating a mesh of “somethings” intent on doing evil. It’s not quite the Singularity… maybe closer to Skynet meets Mr Coffee, I guess.
There are a couple of extra twists in the plot to presumably adhere to some writers union rules, but otherwise, that’s it: the Internet of Things will hit the mainstream consciousness when our espresso makers start spewing hot lead instead of hot coffee.
i see bots 