Sharlto Copley b. 1973 (District 9, Elysium, Europa Report)
Tadanobu Asano b. 1973 (Thor, Battleship)
Chin Han b. 1969 (Arrow, Contagion, 2012, The Dark Knight, Blindness)
Fisher Stevens b. 1963 (Short Circuit, Lost, The Brother From Another Planet)
William Fichtner b. 1955 (Elysium, The Dark Knight , Contact, Armageddon, Invasion)
Kathryn Bigelow b. 1951(director, Strange Days)
Gerrit Graham b. 1949 (Star Trek: Voyager, Babylon 5, C.H.U.D. II – Bud the Chud)
Barbara Anderson b. 1945 (The Six Million Dollar Man, Star Trek)
Bruce Lee b. 1940 died 20 July 1973 (The Green Hornet, Batman)
L. Sprague de Camp b. 1907 died 6 November 2000 (author, A Gun For Dinosaur, Conan, Gavagan’s Bar, Viagens Interplanetarias)
Lots of good actors on the list today and the prolific writer L. Sprague de Camp, but to my mind, there is only one icon and you are looking at him. I was just out of high school when Bruce Lee died, and it really hurt to hear the news. I'm stretching a little to call The Green Hornet genre. It wasn't as campy as Batman, no weekly costumed villain to defeat, so I will invoke The First Rule of Blogging, which I first proposed earlier this year: It's My Blog and You Are Not the Boss of Me!
Many happy returns to the living.
Prediction: These new machines have a great capacity for upsetting the present basis of industry, and of reducing the economic value of the routine factory employee to a point at which he is not worth hiring at any price. If we combine our machine-potentials of a factory with the valuation of human beings on which our present factory system is based, we are in for an industrial revolution of unmitigated cruelty.
Reality: Jeez, Professor Wiener was a cheery bastard, wasn't he? Lots of fun at a party, I'd wager.
There's no exact date on this prediction, which would usually disqualify it from the prediction list, but it's from the same era as a lot of Heinlein's stuff and I think he Weiner hits the nail much more squarely than our old pal Bob did on a regular basis.
Looking one day ahead... INTO THE FUTURE!
It's Turkey Day here in the Good Old U.S.A., but on the blog it's Thursday, so we will hear from our regular Isaac Asimov, with his own view of life in The Machine Age.
Join us then... IN THE FUTURE!
Agreed on the prediction.
ReplyDeleteAlso, two points on the usual topics: Much less hilarious sense of fashion than Old Bob, and pretty good facial hair also, even if it is a bit Colonel Sanders-ish.
There must be a professor somewhere who wears a coat that looks like a sofa cover, but I hope I never meet him.
Deletehe is, after all, named Weiner.
DeleteI read his Wiki bio, he was quite a mathematician and on the very cusp of cybernetics and AI so I imagine he saw the robot assembly lines long before many others. Kevin Drum over at Mother Jones has been writing some interesting blog posts on the replacement of human workers by machine. Worth reading but again, depressing.
DeleteKevin Drum has no facial hair to speak of.
DeleteHe is also a cat person but none are perfect. Actually I used to have a coat much like Wiener's, it was Irish tweed and as heavy and indestructible as armor. I gave it up because I looked like a veterinarian in All Creatures Great and Small.
Delete