“Take your stinking tech off me, you damned dirty human!” There, I just wrote some dialogue for the next installment in the “Planet of the Apes” franchise. The one where the chimpanzees react to 2016.
In a new video on Facebook, a chimp named Sugriva is shown using an HTC Vive headset (h/t Business Insider). No, not because Sugriva wanted to watch a laser show while listening to “Dark Side of the Moon.” Presumably, Sugriva is flailing about in that thing for 40 seconds because his handler stuck it on him to see how he’d react.
The reaction looks kind of sad. The chimp has no understanding of whatever images are being projected at him and as he reaches out to touch the virtual world around him, he just seems agitated.
Sugriva already lives in a fake world at Myrtle Beach Safari, which is some sort of game park in South Carolina. These are the folks who thought it would be fun to take him and another chimp to see “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes” in a movie theater, with humans, a couple years back. I didn’t even go see that movie, and I can drive a car and speak in sentences.
Technology can, at times, do a good enough job of making all of us look and act like animals. Maybe it’s best not to (further) mess with the reality of those creatures who don’t have a say in the matter.
