A TRUE VISIONARY

            Are you as tired of the hysterics surrounding AI as I am?  Apparently, legendary writer\director Billy Wilder didn’t have much tolerance for the palaver, either.  After reading these thoughts from his acceptance of the AFI Lifetime Achievement Award in 1986, I’d love to hear what he’d be saying if he were around today…  

         “I’ve been here for over 50 years – that’s more than half a century – and all through those years I’ve watched Tinseltown vacillate between despair and fear.  First it’s going to be the sound that will kill us, then it was going to be television, then cable, then pornography, then cassettes, and now that terrifying new word: microchip.

         They tell me that these guys working in the Silicon Valley, they really believe that pretty soon we will not need theaters anymore, nor studios for that matter.  We will have (or they will have) invented tiny little screens which you can attach to your steering wheel, or big 20-foot screens on the ceiling of your bedroom.  And then someday somebody is going to press a button and send this signal to a satellite which in turn will light up 5 million screens all the way from Albania to Zanzibar.  Fantastic, isn’t it?  All the hardware is there, beautifully programmed, bravo.  Except for one little detail…  What about the software?  What are they going to do on all those screens?  Who is going to write it?  Who is going to direct it?  Who is going to act it?

            For all I know, these wise guys are trying right now to supplant the human factor. Microchips that will replace the human brain, and the human heart.  Mechanical gadgets that can simulate emotions – dreams, laughter, tears – well, so far they have not succeeded. Not yet anyway.  So relax, fellow picture makers, we are not expendable.  The fact is, the bigger they get, the more irreplaceable we become.  For theirs may be the kingdom, but ours is the power of the glory.”