In Films, Technology of the Not-So-Distant Future on Display

Samuel Goldwyn Films

In “Robot & Frank," Frank Langella plays a retiree given a robot caretaker by his son.

THERE'S a moment in the film when Frank, an aging retiree with a helper robot installed in his life courtesy of his son, forgets that his caretaker is something other than human. The two are excitedly chatting when Frank gestures at his companion's boxy outfit and asks, absent-mindedly, why he's wearing a silly space helmet.

The dissonance radiating from that scene is twofold. Frank's cognitive stutter pries open the heartbreaking subplot of the film, revealing his slippery grasp on reality and his mind's inability to maintain firm footing in the present; it is sharply recognizable as Frank's advancing dementia.

It's equally discomfiting for reasons beyond Frank's deteriorating condition: the scene offers a mirror to our own dependency on technology.

Who hasn't given a phone an affectionate pat, made room for it at the dinner table, nestled with a laptop in bed or frantically searched for a device gone AWOL, heart racing until its shiny little body is located and stashed somewhere safe? And this is before our devices can carry our groceries, bake us cakes and plant intricate vegetable gardens, as Frank's helper does in the film. What will our relationships with devices and software look like in the future?

This is the crystal ball that the director Jake Schreier and the screenwriter Christopher D. Ford are trying to peer into with their first feature, “Robot & Frank,” due Aug. 17 from Samuel Goldwyn Films. Their vision of the future won't arrive with exaggerated fanfare; it will most likely set up shop nearly unnoticed, possibly even installed in your living room by your next of kin.

“It's not a future where everything is new and has taken over,” Mr. Schreier said during an interview in an ornate meeting room at the Crosby Street Hotel in Manhattan. Instead, the film is set in rural New York, where these advances are “just beginning to creep in.”

Not much is different between the film's world and ours: The cars are a little sleeker and mostly electric-powered, and the phones and tablets are transparent and voice controlled. The interactions between humans and their devices are relatively believable, a struggle for most films and television shows today. Probably no one has ever received a “blast” on a cellphone like the kinds sent in “,” and while plenty of us have accidentally sent an e-mail to the wrong recipient, it probably has never been as mind-bogglingly disastrous as MacKenzie McHale's workplacewide gaffe on “The Newsroom.”

Part of the interpretation of a technology-enhanced future in “Robot & Frank” stemmed from budgetary constraints. It was hastily shot in 20 days for around $2.5 million, so there wasn't much leeway to insert splashy special effects. The displays and menus on the characters' tablets and smartphones were designed by Justin Ouellette, who works at Tumblr, a microblogging site. The robot's costume was designed by Alterian in Los Angeles, the company that also made the dazzling LED helmets worn by the French electro duo Daft Punk. (The robot was voiced by Peter Sarsgaard; Frank is played by Frank Langella.)

The filmmakers found that the rapidly transforming society they were trying to capture was also reflected in their lives. When Mr. Ford started conceptualizing the movie in 2002, the advances he pictured involved tablet computers nicknamed CompuTabs. Fast-forward six years and “during production, everyone had an , so even in that small part of time, part of the script turned from science fiction to reality,” he said. “So then we're all holding our iPads, looking over at the robot going ‘Hmm, how long is that going to take?' ”

Such advances are already under way. On YouTube you can see videos from scientists showing robots folding laundry, performing elegant dances, blinking in confusion and smiling in greeting. ”We think about robots in terms of manufacturing cars or doing something that repeats the same movement over and over again, but there's been a boom in robotics where they're starting to have smarts, and can do complex things like pick fruit,” said Andrew Ng, an associate professor of computer science at Stanford and co-founder of an education start-up called Coursera. “We could see them in homes in 10 to 20 years.” By trying to stay a step ahead of science Mr. Schreier and Mr. Ford join a long line of filmmakers who have attempted to envision the world we may inhabit, and the droids that may someday coexist with us, from the sentient but murderous HAL 9000 in “2001: Space Odyssey” to Skynet's terrifying armies of human hunters in the “Terminator” franchise to the lovable, b umbling droids in and “Wall-E.”

The director Ridley Scott, who delved into similar issues in also explored the blurry philosophical line separating humans from their synthetic counterparts in “Prometheus.” That expansive science-fiction epic, set somewhere in the universe, turned a sharp eye to our responsibilities for the technology we create and what happens if we leave our most precious possessions - our lives - in its hands.

Mr. Scott spun this question around an anatomically correct android named David (played by Michael Fassbender) that eats, sleeps, longs to learn and lovingly cares for members of a spaceship crew as they travel into the far regions of the universe, despite their disregard and suspicion of him. David, already autonomous, begins to interfere with the mission. The inability of the humans to control David and their failure to notice his machinations is an apt metaphor for a world in which we are only beginning to understand how the major corporations in which we're placing our trust and data - like Apple, Google and Facebook - could someday be twisted in ways we cannot foresee.

“People have embraced the convenience of technology, but I don't know that the average person understands the potential of the data that is being aggregated through our devices,” said Barbara Kahn, a professor of marketing at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. “The enormity of it is amazing. This is just the first wave. The next step is the Internet of things. It's not just GPS knowing where I am, it'll be devices knowing what I'm doing.”

While the future in which is set exists much further along the timeline than “Robot & Frank,” there are traces of those hyperadvanced technologies visible in our lives even now. It's easy to glimpse the sophisticated, 3-D navigational charts used by the Prometheus spaceship crew in the holographic performance by Tupac Shakur this summer at the music festival. The United States Navy already uses autonomous drones to sweep underwater terrain for mines - not entirely dissimilar from the flying “pups” that map out the topography of the film's temple. And David's less-than-subservient attitude to his human counterparts is reminiscent of the sassy responses that Apple programmed into its virtual assistant software, Siri. But while “Prometheus” and other films offer a dystopian view, showing us how close we are to a world full of technology gone haywire or spiraling out of control, “Robot & Frank” isn't trying to impart such lessons. “It's wrong to be afraid of t he future in a knee-jerk way,” Mr. Schreier said. “You almost always end up on the wrong side of history by the end of it.”

He and Mr. Ford merely wanted to examine the implications of our increasingly intimate symbiosis with technology. “It's not bad or good but it will change the way we relate to each other,” Mr. Schreier said. “There's no stopping it.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: August 11, 2012

An article on Page 14 this weekend about robots, movies and the future, misstates the release date for “Robot & Frank,” about an aging retiree who has a helper robot installed in his life by his son. It is scheduled to come out on Friday, not the following Friday, Aug. 24.

Under Copyright Pressure, Google to Alter Search Results

By AMY CHOZICK

6:58 p.m. | Updated
Big media companies won a battle in the fight to combat online piracy on Friday when Google said it would alter its search algorithms to favor Web sites that offered legitimate copyrighted movies, music and television.

Google said that beginning next week its algorithms would take into account the number of valid copyright removal notices Web sites have received. Web sites with multiple, valid complaints about copyright infringement may appear lower in Google search results.

“This ranking change should help users find legitimate, quality sources of content more easily - whether it's a song previewed on NPR's music Web site, a TV show on Hulu or new music streamed from Spotify,” Amit Singhal, Google's senior vice president of engineering, wrote in a company blog post.

The entertainment industry, which has for years pressured Google and other Inter net sites to act against online piracy, applauded the move.

“We are optimistic that Google's actions will help steer consumers to the myriad legitimate ways for them to access movies and TV shows online,” Michael O'Leary, a senior executive vice president for the Motion Picture Association of America, said in a statement.

Cary Sherman, chief executive of the Recording Industry Association of America, also commended Google's move. “Google has signaled a new willingness to value the rights of creators,” he said in a statement.

But the two men expressed caution and urged Google to carry out the change with the vigor it adopted in combating pirated videos on YouTube, which Google owns.

“The devil is always in the details,” Mr. O'Leary said. While Mr. Sherman added, similarly, that changing the search algorithm “is not the only approach and of course, the details of implementation will matter.”

The announ cement comes just over six months after a heated battle between big media companies and technology companies, who were sparring over proposed legislation intended to crack down on pirated online content, particularly by rogue foreign Web sites.

In January, media companies like Viacom, Time Warner and the Walt Disney Company backed two antipiracy bills, one in the Senate and the other in the House of Representatives, while Internet activists and companies like Google and Facebook argued the bills would hinder Internet freedom. Buoyed by a huge online grass-roots movement, and aided by Wikipedia's going black for a day in protest, the bills quickly died.

That tension has decreased somewhat as media companies have met with Silicon Valley executives over how to solve the problem to everyone's satisfaction.

Google said it would not remove pages from copyright-infringing Web sites from its search engine unless it received a valid copyright removal notice from the rights' owner. “Only copyright holders know if something is authorized, and only courts can decide if a copyright has been infringed,” Mr. Singhal said.

Google said it had received copyright removal requests for over 4.3 million Web addresses in the last 30 days, according to the company's transparency report. That is more than it received in all of 2009.

Amy Chozick is The Times's corporate media reporter. Follow @amychozick on Twitter.

A version of this article appeared in print on 08/11/2012, on page B2 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Under Copyright Pressure, Google to Alter Search Results.

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A Dissenter on Facebook Settlement With F.T.C.

WASHINGTON - The Federal Trade Commission finished a settlement with on Friday over allegations that the company had violated its privacy policy, and in the process said it would re-examine its own practice of allowing companies to settle charges of wrongdoing while denying that they had done anything wrong.

The F.T.C.'s turnabout came in response to a blistering dissent from the Facebook settlement by one commissioner, J. Thomas Rosch, who said that allowing the company to deny charges it was agreeing to settle undermined the commission's authority.

In November, the F.T.C. said that Facebook had deceived consumers by telling them that their personal information would be kept private, while “repeatedly allowing it to be shared and made public.”

The commission voted 3-1, with one abstention, to impose a 20-year consent order requiring Facebook to protect its users' privacy. The company agreed to give consumers clear and prominent notice and to obtain their express consent before revealing information beyond their previously stated privacy settings, to maintain a comprehensive program to safeguard private information, and to obtain an independent privacy audit every two years.

Facebook said in a statement on Friday, “We are pleased that the settlement, which was announced last November, has received final approval.” The company did not repeat its assertion, made in November, that it “expressly denies the allegations set forth in the complaint,” but the F.T.C. still considers that statement to be part of the case record.

A Facebook spokesman declined to comment beyond the company's one-sentence statement.

Mr. Rosch agreed with the general outlines of the Facebook settlement, but wrote in his dissent that the Federal Trade Commission Rules of Practice “do not provide for such a denial” of the charges.

He also advocated further tightening of the commission's rules, which in addition to outright denial allow a settling company to say that its agreement “is for settlement purposes only and does not constitute an admission by any party that the law has been violated.” That is tantamount to a denial, Mr. Rosch said, and should be disallowed.

Mr. Rosch also dissented from the F.T.C.'s settlement with Google on Thursday and in at least one earlier case. The Google settlement allowed the company to deny charges that it misrepresented whether it would place tracking cookies on Apple's Safari browser.

The F.T.C. is not the only federal agency that allows a company to deny facts that it seems to be conceding. In July, the Justice Department settled a case with the pharmaceutical maker GlaxoSmithKline in which the company agreed to pay $2 billion to settle civil charges that it defrauded the government with drug sales. Despite the payment, Glaxo expressly denied that it had engaged in any wrongful conduct.

An example of a more concrete policy, Mr. Rosch said, can be found in the Securities and Exchange Commission's rules, which ban a company that settles a case from denying that it committed the acts in question.

The S.E.C. also states that “a refusal to admit the allegations is equivalent to a denial, unless the defendant or respondent states that he neither admits nor denies the allegations.” That rule would disallow the F.T.C.'s language that a settlement “does not constitute an admission” of guilt.

“I can live with ‘neither admits nor denies,' ” Mr. Rosch said. “That's what we did in the old days.” But with the more recent examples, he said, “We're inviting denials of liability in every case in the future.”

The S.E.C.'s policy, however, has itself been a subject of dispute. A federal judge in Manhattan refused to approve an S.E.C. settlement with Citigroup last year, saying that the agency's policy of allowing a company to neither admit nor deny allegations gave him no basis on which to judge whether the settlement was in the public interest.

The case, heard by Judge Jed S. Rakoff of Federal District Court in Manhattan, is now being considered by a federal appeals court.

A majority of the F.T.C. commissioners disagreed with Mr. Rosch's statement that a denial by a settling company undermined the outcome. They argued that the record of the investigation adequately supported the settlement, regardless of what the company claimed.

But the three commissioners added that they were open to Mr. Rosch's idea, saying they wanted “to avoid any possible public misimpression that the commission obtains settlements when it lacks reason to believe that the alleged conduct occurred.”

In the future, “express denials will be strongly disfavored,” the commissioners said. And in the coming months, they added, the commission will consider whether to modify its policy.