Above and beyond shameless commericialism, product plugs for Ford, and hollywood silliness (explosions, car chases, gun battles, etc.) there is something to like about the movie Paycheck.

Namely, it asks the question of if you were to give up three years of your life to devote it to a certain organization in a rather total way (giving up memory for that period as lose analogy for signing over intellectual property) in order to gain a substainal monetary award of 90 million dollars. What if that knowledge was used to create a devise that promised absolute rationality throughout the world, leading to a complete predictability of actions and subsquent world destruction? Is it still worth it?

Rationality and the Control over the Technologist

The first question is one that plagues the scientific and technological realms, particularly as the pot has become a lot less sweet in the beginning of the 21st century, with the reccession. People in these industries, regularly legally sign away certain rights that any autonomous individual has: namely freedom of thought and action in a sphere away from work. Work for many is not a 9-5 job, but contains strings to all parts of life, limiting what people can do in their life, moonlighting, etc.

Many companies prohibit intellectuals from taking their skills/knowledge directly from one job to another company that produces a similiar product. This is strikingly different from the mechanic, who almost never signs such an agreement, and can have free movement from job to job: he own's his own skills, he is only contracted on a temporary bases to work for a company, he only has to have loyality to the company as long as he draws his menial paycheck.

Money is power, it is a controlling force over people. It's amazing what you can force people to do, by exerting monetary leverage over them. You can get them to give up freedoms that they normally take for granted (well, to a certain extent: depending on the intellectual capcity of indivdual and his thirst for money will depend on the defination of acceptable trade off).

I see this issue to be a serious one plaguing the future scientific community. If the terms of employement are too anti-freedom, people with brains will just quit it and go for another realm: the land of the irrational, one free of the calculated dominance of state and capitalism (of course not free of the unfair domaince of nature and luck).

This demostrated in the movie, in the conclusion, where a man and his wife give up their jobs attempting to manupliate the 4th dimension of time for running a greenhouse. The symbolism of choosing agriculture over science is great, if not a bit ironic (as so much of farming is scientific nowdays). But at least farming (for the most part) is done with labor, and can not be owned by others, unlike intellectual property.

The Issue of Rationality and a Future

The movie towards the end demostrates what would happen if the future was totally predictable: world destruction. If the ends are fixed and you can note what is going to happen, you can change the means to change the ends. Which leads to an ever escalating arms race of the future, attempting to always out maneuver your opponet.

Of course, such a situation is unlikely if true rationality was equally distributed: instead a more deadly thing might happen, not discussed in the movie: a flattening of the world. If everybody could see the consquences of their actions, society would be in a political morass, where nobody would move in fear of being responsible for destruction.

But ultimately, true rationality would have benifits that would overcome the limited/artifical rationality of the society we live in today. No longer would rational thought be little more then just a minimal group of theories, limited by the ability of human focus.

Conclusions

It's not a great movie, but it asks some rather interesting questions, that I have briefly discussed here. Most who see the movie as little more then just your standard 'boring' Sci-Fi movie, but the symbolism and the questions it provokes extends far beyond the movie. Spend $8 bucks on it? I'd go for it as it's better then most movies.