The Twilight Zone, Black Mirror, and now – 2017 – Electric Dreams are good Sci-Fi TV shows. The latter is based on the works of Phillip K. Dick and wears his distinctive signature all over the episodes. S1E8 (Autofac, directed by Peter Horton) shows us some code! But before getting down to the bits and bytes, the story (spoiler alert): Amazon, oops, Autofac took control of the business and solved once for all the producer-consumer problem with a bit more than a semaphore. The solution reads like this: don’t just make products, make also the consumers! Clever. From our angle, the episode is promising: robots, self-replication, AI, yummy! And indeed, we can peek at some code during an attempt to re-program a robot (Janelle Monáe, Alice) by another robot (aware of its condition – Juno Violet Temple, Emily Zabriskie) to save other robots (un-aware of their condition) from an ecological menace that doesn’t frighten them (a toaster works the same in a luscious garden and a trash dump). And guess what? This AI tour de force is done partly in C/C++! Partly, because we can infer it from the use of MessagePack, a binary serialization format for data exchange between various languages. And we don’t need more to start dreaming of some Smalltalk or Haskell listings. Maybe in another episode…
