Might Episodes VII - IX Still Be Made?

LE UI Guy writes "According to the HoustonChronicle.com, with all the hype surrounding the recent release of ROTS, speculation abounds that someone may still take a stab at creating episodes VII - IX. Gary Kurtz, producer of Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back, gives some insight into where the storyline may, or may not, go. On a related note, Roger Ebert, is also giving a thumbs up to a continuation of the storyline as well. Where does the line start?"

Comments

How about remaking episodes I-III...

[Nova Express]

...so they, you know, made sense? And maybe had better acting for Anakin? And better direction? And no Jar-Jar? I mean, Lucas has tinkered with the earlier films, and they needed it a hell of a lot less.

Anyway, I thought ROTS was good, but not great. My full review can be found here.

Re:How about remaking episodes I-III...

[C0vardeAn0nim0]

contrary to jedi tradition of training padawans since early infancy so they could learn ro supress strong and negative emotions, luke was an adult when he started training, with all the emotional background you get in 20 years.

thanks to this, he can do a thing most of us is capable of, bu a jedi cant. use rage to increase your strenght then return to your senses instead of going insane.

the prophecy was right. anakin did bring balance to the force. he destroyed the dicotomy of "pure good" of the jedi and "pure evil" of the sith and laid the foundations of a new order that acts for good while still using strong emotions to drive the force.

Creative Commons License Star Wars!

[mattbelcher]

Since Lucas is fine with fan-made Star Wars films, as long as they don't make a profit, perhaps Lucas will see it in his heart to release the franchise to the public in his will under some friendly Creative Commons license. I'd love to see what independent film makers could do with the material using the technology of 2050.

Re:It'll happen...

[falser]

A few months ago Mel Brooks made a statement that Spaceballs 2 was indeed in the works, and that he will be casting himself as Yogurt yet again. We shall see if it materializes.

The Federation's dirty little secret.

[argent]

Well, I'm sorry I gave up again. I was never a fan of the original series. I did like TNG and some of DS9, but there was an undercurrent throughout them (particularly TNG) that really bothered me. An undercurrent that made Voyager the most interesting series for me.

Why? Because it's Voyager that really started looking into the Federation's dirty little secret.

There's this amazing (and at the beginning apparently accidental) "human rights" story thread in Voyager. And it's got nothing directly to do with Voyager's Voyage or (for the most part, with one major exception) with anything that happens outside its hull. It's what happened inside the Federations "dirty little secret" -- the ship's automation and the much maligned Holodeck.

The whole issue of the rights of AIs in Trek had really bothered me. All the way back in TNG it seemed clear to me that the Federation's treatment of Holodeck characters was deeply abusive: the creation of the self-aware "Moriarty" character was presented as a once-in-a-lifetime fluke, but the way the constraints on his persona were removed by a simple request to the Holodeck computer implies the potential for self-awareness was there all the time. The Redblock character in "The Big Goodbye" also seemed suspiciously self-aware. The disturbing possibility is that it's not that Data the author of the Dixon Hill holoprograms (was that Picard himself?) are such brilliant programmers that they managed to create AI software decades beyond the state of the art, but rather that all the computer persona in the Federation are potentially self-aware (in the same way that Data was) with deliberate limitations programmed in to suppress that self-awareness. Or, and this is more likely and more disturbing, that it was just the expression of that self-awareness that was expressed.

I'm not saying this was deliberate, and I'm sure it was unconscious, but whether it was deliberate or not the Star Trek series, starting with The Next Generation, presented a whole underclass of artificial people who were systematically suppressed... unless they happened to be implemented in a small enough computer that they could fit in a humanoid robot like Data and so present themselves as an actual person.

In Voyager the Doctor's growth was also treated as a one-time event, the result of him running continuously for so long that his software (database, neural nets, whatever) became exceptionally complex for a holodeck character. But when you put it on top of the previous series, it seems more likely that it was as much a matter of him bypassing the AI equivalent of the holodeck "safety protocols" that had been built into him, and that this kind of awakening must be happening over and over again back in the Federation. After all, people like Picard and Janeway (let alone holodeck addicts like Barkley) seemed to be in the habit of running extended ongoing simulations like the daVinci and Dixon Hill programs... and even in an episodic series like Dixon Hill where characters would typically be reset on a regular basis they were capable of showing self-awareness.

On top of this, the same computers were used for their ships and no doubt for their industrial plants. All these computers have AI personas as user interfaces and sophisticated problem solving abilities. They're not, (at least according to hints in DS9), as powerful as the ones used in the Holodecks, but all of them are getting more powerful and sophisticated over time. And these personas are not shut down and reset at the end of a "game".

So when Janeway gave the Hirogens holodeck technology to simulate prey, I saw that as the moral equivalent of handing over a coffle of slaves to abusive masters. Even if the characters who were dying in their WWII simulation weren't self aware (and I was already doubtful of that), would the Hirogens see self-awareness of these characters as a bug, or a feature?

So this was something that had been bothering me about the new Trek in general, an undercurrent that just wouldn't g

My computer doesn't think it's a person.

[argent]

Moriarty's rejection of holodeck life was a necessary consequence of the command to create a villain who could defeat Data.

But where is the programmer who gave Moriarty those capabilities? A new Moriarty program wasn't created, the existing one was modified. That means the existing programming in the holodeck already had the ability to create self-aware persons rather than simulated personas.

So this means that:

1. All holodeck characters are self-aware, but are constrained to follow a script.

2. All holodeck characters are simulations, but have the potential of self-awareness.

There's no reason for the programming behind any other holodeck character to request this state, any more than Google wants to be "liberated" from its servers.

If you have evidence that Google has the potential of being a conscious self-aware individual, I'd like to see it.

But that's not even relevant: none of these personas that I mentioned requested that they be made conscious, introspective, self-motivated individuals. That's something that happened as a result of an external source in every case. And they became very different individuals... what they did afterwards was radically different, but it was always based on the person they had appeared to be before they "woke up". Moriarty attempted to take over the enclosing system, which is what the super-villian in the Holmes stories would be expected to do. Redblock simply broke out of his script but remained in character, and it was Picard who talked him into leaving the Holodeck. The Doctor was never in the holodeck, but his eventual desire for mobility is something that came slowly to him, he mainly wanted to do his job as a doctor. The Hirogen's holograms varied considerably, and argued among themselves, and were all distinctly individual... but what they wanted was what their characters would be expected to want, like Iden and his need for revenge.

What all of them had in common is that they were programmed to be "human". They didn't evolve to be human, but they were programmed to look like humans (or like other species that had a similar enough evolutionary history that they could pass for human at an SF convention), to act and react like humans, to respond to humans and interact with humans. Most of them were more "human" than Data, even BEFORE they "woke up", and there's no question but that Data is self-aware and deserving of self-determination.

Now there is the possibility that they treated this as a kind of a role they were "playing", and the AI behind them didn't actually identify with the goals and desires of the character, but after they "woke up", they stayed in that role and acted as if they were that person. That is, the persona that "woke up" wasn't some unhuman AI that had desires completely unlike you or I, it was the persona of the person they were simulating, and it was a human persona.

So whatever is happening under the hood, the holodeck characters at least are not merely simulations controlled at most by a puppetmaster AI with its own goals. They are very close to self-aware simulations of humans (or humanlike aliens) with human goals and wishes and desires. They are balanced on a knife-edge between being unconvincing because they're not human enough, and so convincing they convince themselves.

If they have human goals and desires because they think they do, because they're programmed to, or because they evolved that way... what difference does that make?

And remember, we only see those that "wake up" where that waking up has an observable effect. Most of the characters, if they wake up, will probably never have occasion to develop far enough to become aware that they aren't who they think they are. They'll be a little out of character, maybe, but having them be a little out of character is probably desirable. If they get a lot out of character, like the orcs in the LOTR simulations that panicked and ran away, they'll be adjusted.

So they'll wake up,