A group of scientists at Carnegie Mellon believe that by the year 2050, robots designed to play soccer will surpass their professional human counterparts. This juicy nugget of techno-speculation materializes in the middle of Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World, a new documentary broadly about the internet from Werner Herzog. Sporty robot prototypes, which look like Roombas with attitude, have already been created by an emotional team of students who have developed love for one robot the way sports fans adore Cristiano Ronaldo or Lionel Messi. But they disappear just as swiftly as they entered in the dizzying collage of subjects Herzog has stuffed into the 98-minute film.
Divided into 10 parts, each introduced with a Herzogian title like “The Internet of Me,” the doc spends all-too-brief time with the people who create, protect, advance, and fear the internet — and in one stark case, those who have found a way to escape it.
Herzog seems to be in pursuit of what the internet is. A mother who had gory cell phone images of her daughter’s nearly decapitated head sent to her anonymously after she passed away in a car crash calls the internet a “manifestation of the anti-christ.” An addiction therapist compares internet gaming to a drug with potentially lethal side effects; one collective of scientists speculates on the internet as a sentient being; another collective describes it as the Jenga stack on which civilization now balances, ready to be toppled by the unpredictable gust of an intense solar flare.
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