Vision - The Movie

When it sees, will we?

About Vision

Produced by Chaotic Sequence, Inc.
Written and Directed by Arthur Vincie.

An independent feature film, to be shot in summer 2009.

Lydia is a genius robotics scientist, working at a top-drawer university. Her robots have been to Mars and to the bottom of the ocean. Her current project, MARC (the Military Autonomous Robotic Combatant) will replace humans on the battlefield.

But Lydia's personal life is a disaster. Her marriage is falling apart. The administration hates her. Her students are fleeing. And MARC doesn't work — it can't see.

Lydia falls behind schedule. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the source of her grant money, delivers an ultimatum: get the robot working or they pull the plug. But the only student available to help her is Nick, who's older and has been waitlisted for not taking the prerequisites. Does she take him on and hope he can pull it together, or try to get the project done on her own?

Lydia reluctantly takes Nick on, and together they tackle the task of teaching the robot to see. They go back to their initial assumptions about how vision works. Human vision, they realize, works the same way language does — small, simple building blocks generate larger patterns, which are integrated into even more complex structures. This leads them to reprogram MARC's vision circuits, with real success. Finally, they're able to get MARC to see.

MARC starts using its visual "grammar" generator/analyzer to augment its other sensory/feedback routines. The machine becomes more "aware" than Lydia had hoped possible.

But their success forces Lydia to "see" her own conflicts. Is it ethical to build a killing machine? Is this what she dedicated her life to? Does she stay on the project, or abandon it — and her career?

Based on existing research on cognition, robotics, and related fields, Vision fortells of a very real debate going on right now. Robots are already being deployed in war zones. At what point will they be "untethered" from their human operators? Who will benefit, and who will pay, for that advance?

For more information, feel free to download a business plan.