In the movie Sleep Dealer the director is trying to make us aware of the danger of technology in our near future. Even though this is a fiction movie they are many similarities to what is happening in today’s world. For example we routinely use drones in battle, jobs are performed by machines and by workers outside the country that we never see and every day millions of people post their daily life activities for millions of viewers on internet.
In the film, one of the characters is a virtual pilot who “flies” the plane that kills Memo’s dad safely from a command center in the USA. In today’s military we have being using this type of drone technology since the beginning of the Iraq war. Pilots are safe in the USA while they fly their missions, but the critics have said that this type of technology can also lead to many errors like the reported bombing of the 14 civilians in Afghanistan. Those in favor of drones say the main benefit of using drones is the safety of our service men. While others say the program is flawed and is subject to computer, human and mechanical errors. Just like the movie a mistake is made in bombing Memo’s house as a terrorist target even though Memo was listening for fun to his radio.
Every day we are reminded that many people are losing their jobs to machines like in NYC where recently token booth clerks have been replaced by Metro Card Machines and automated entry gates at some train stations. The world that Alex Rivera’s has created has already come true with the many automated factories all over the world. I recently saw a video of a fully automatic factory that made pizza pies a food dish that everyone has only seen being made by hand. You cannot call a company up without going through a machine first before you get a real person and I have not had to go inside a bank for the last several years due to online and ATM banking. Just the other day I was doing some holiday shopping and my call was handled by someone in India. In the movie the factory foreman says companies get Mexican immigrant labor without any Mexicans. I say we are already on way there.
I bought myself a smart phone for my birthday and now I can take a picture, make a video or write a blog and with one push of a button send it all over the world. I and millions others do it because it’s a way of sharing our lives with each other not because we don’t have our own lives but because we enjoy the connections we make in sharing.Luz sold here memories for money because the people in her world had no lives of their own as they were disconnected from each other because of all the technology they were hooked up to. Besides Luz had to be truthful in her writing something we don’t have to do. Reading other peoples post can be an escape but it’s not the only escape we have. In Sleep Dealers, the people who lived in the cities and worked in the factories had no other escape from their routines because they had no time for anything else and plus the government controlled most of their lives.
The Sleep Dealer and real life have some things in common such as using technology to further business, to increase military weapons and to control our lives. More and more we see how technology is taking control of our military, business and personal lives. Today we see how companies can conduct work by using emails, faxes and teleconferences without ever being present.
Resources
I used these links to find out about recent problems concerning drone use.
I tried to find the number of US Pilots killed in Iraq to illustrate how safe drone are but I was unable to do so. This link was all I could find. http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/war.casualties/index.html
Outsourcing and automated factories
This video was interesting to me more than all the car factory videos I found
Social Networking
Didn’t have to dig deep for this one as I have a facebook, myspace, twitter and of course my very own blogspace account
