When will we learn? Despite Hollywood’s earnest warnings through the years, it’s astonishing that there are still so many who don’t realize that the inevitable popularity of virtual-reality goggles will eventually lead to a complacent society in which people are killed remotely in unthinkably violent ways by Internet hackers and evil robots from the future. Seems like that should be fairly common knowledge by now. Not that we expect it to do any good, but Bruce Willis’s upcoming Surrogates will once again try to deliver the message. In its bleak vision of the future, humans can purchase robotic avatars to live their lives while they watch comfortably from home (apparently this was green-lit back when Second Life was still a thing) — until, of course, they all start dying after someone hacks into the mainframe (presumably). Surrogates certainly doesn’t look very good, though it’s probably never a bad idea to go over these things again.
