The transformation takes three months in the film. But in real life, Wheatley reckons it would be much quicker.
Three months may have been reasonable forty years ago. Today it would be a couple of days at the most. No-one carries significant amounts of cash any more. If the banking system goes down, or the electricity grid goes down, you have no money. No money at all. And no way of getting any. The panic would be starting within hours.
We're terrifyingly dependent on extremely vulnerable technology. People buy their groceries online! If there's no internet they'll just sit there at home waiting for their groceries to arrive. And there'd be no point in going to the supermarket. Everything is ordered electronically. No power means their orders don't turn up, so no food on the shelves.
And how many people today have the skills to do any of these things manually? They wouldn't know where to start.
Of course you could try to leave the city, but without traffic lights and with the subways not working you'd have city-wide traffic jams. The police could not restore order - you don't have small local police stations any more, you have a few big police complexes (that look like fortresses) and without power and without their computers they'd have no way of sending officers where they're needed. They might have emergency generators but as the chaos starts to build how long would they last? How are they going to get more fuel when their generators stop running if traffic is one gigantic city-wide gridlock with thousands more people every hour making it worse trying to flee the cities.
Our whole civilisation is based on the assumption that the electricity will always be flowing and the internet will always be functioning.
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Three months may have been reasonable forty years ago. Today it would be a couple of days at the most. No-one carries significant amounts of cash any more. If the banking system goes down, or the electricity grid goes down, you have no money. No money at all. And no way of getting any. The panic would be starting within hours.
We're terrifyingly dependent on extremely vulnerable technology. People buy their groceries online! If there's no internet they'll just sit there at home waiting for their groceries to arrive. And there'd be no point in going to the supermarket. Everything is ordered electronically. No power means their orders don't turn up, so no food on the shelves.
And how many people today have the skills to do any of these things manually? They wouldn't know where to start.
Of course you could try to leave the city, but without traffic lights and with the subways not working you'd have city-wide traffic jams. The police could not restore order - you don't have small local police stations any more, you have a few big police complexes (that look like fortresses) and without power and without their computers they'd have no way of sending officers where they're needed. They might have emergency generators but as the chaos starts to build how long would they last? How are they going to get more fuel when their generators stop running if traffic is one gigantic city-wide gridlock with thousands more people every hour making it worse trying to flee the cities.
Our whole civilisation is based on the assumption that the electricity will always be flowing and the internet will always be functioning.