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o-called “hard” science fiction uses speculative concepts and “day after tomorrow” age technology in order to tell us stories about the human condition, society. “Soft” science fiction is less concerned with speculation as to how technology will affect our daily lives than in, well, space opera, giant robot action and things of that nature. In both varieties, you see a lot of high-end advanced technology, and yet, unless the story is specifically about cyber-security threats to this technology (for instance, the hacker-heroes in The Matrix), these films almost never delve into what those threats are. Here’s some of our favorite sci-fi tech that would be ripe for the hacking:
Jaegers, Pacific Rim
One of the questions that needs to be asked of the movie Pacific Rim: Is there really no way for those giant robots to be controlled remotely? We’re willing to bet that even if the people who run them can’t figure it out, it wouldn’t take too long for a well-funded Kaiju-conservation eco-terrorist to find a way to take control of, or at least sabotage one of those big robots. It wouldn’t be the first time military grade equipment had been hacked.
Rekall, Total Recall
Total Recall centers on “Rekall,” a sort of virtual-tourism agency that implants the memory of an incredible adventure, and then wipes out any trace of memory that you had ever gone to Rekall. The process goes wrong within the film, but because of simple technical errors, not because it was hacked. Here’s the first problem: How do you get word of mouth when your business model is that nobody remembers buying their vacation from you? More importantly, if the process is so slipshod and insecure as to go so horribly awry as it does in the film, what’s to stop a hacker from creating their own army of personal soldiers by having an inside man swap some data disks around? Rekall is, after all, just a media-distribution channel, and those aren’t always difficult to break into.
Robocop
The funny thing about the original Robocop is that it didn’t actually foresee the internet. Somebody wishing to hack Robocop would need to somehow sneak up on him and change his firmware. Today, that would be very easy to do remotely, especially considering Omnicorp’s laissez faire attitude towards creating an effective product. Given the public demand for police reform and groups like Anonymous, it wouldn’t be long before a real life Robocop was hacked and Omnicorp lost their government contracts.
Part of the reason movies don’t cover cyber-security in these movies is it would slow the plot down quite a bit to devote a whole twenty minutes to how they plan to encrypt their laser gun firmware. All the same, you do have to wonder what an IT guy’s job looks like on the Empire’s Death Star.
