Pixar's "Cars" universe -- explained!

[Darren Dirt]

http://www.cracked.com/forums/index.php?topic=77148.msg1703658#msg1703658

^ in a discussion about Cars 2. Logical, articulate explanation of "cars that rule the earth" (i.e. what happened to the humans?)

if you watch the Cars movie a little more closely, you'll see the subtlety of the truth, hinted at in passing.

The humans aren't dead at all.

The idea, it seems, is that at some point in history, man created sentient vehicles. Likely the logical extension of On-Star, Cruise Control, GPS, etc. Darpa is working on something similar already. But as is the way of sentient machines, they took control of the planet from the humans. We're inefficient meat machines, and we know it. That's why we build computers in the first place. So it's not surprising that our prediction based scifi so commonly shows AI taking over. What is interesting, and, I would think, likely, is that in this case, the new rulers do what most new rulers do, rewrite history.

Thus cars are the dominant life, and always have been.

But this leads to weird questions. From the obvious, "Where do baby cars come from?" to the less obvious, "Who refines the gasoline?" to the indirect, "Why do they have tractors / learjets?"

The answer is the human slaves.

Humans still design and build them, though are heavily assisted (and largely supervised) by machines. AI generally lacks the imagination to create wholly new designs. The tractors are a key example of this. What's the purpose of an animal intelligence machine that acts like a beast whose main use was food that they cannot digest? The purpose is to replicate a culture they didn't fully understand. They have the inherent desire to pretend to have a food chain, even though it makes no sense.

That's why the building are all in general disrepair. The humans have to be called to fix small things, that the sentient vehicles don't have the coordination, nor tools, to fix. Even the little things, like the decals on the race car. Or adding water to their batteries. Or replacing sparkplugs.

So if you really want to understand the movie, think about it this way. This is the cartoon vision of what the world would look like, 30 years after the movie Maximum Overdrive. Except the comet never left. And only effected cars.

[Lazybones]

What use to the tiny "bugs" serve that look like VW Beatles?

[Mr. Analog]

What use to the tiny "bugs" serve that look like VW Beatles?

Spies!?