Why Does So Much New Technology Feel Inspired by Dystopian Sci-Fi Movies? (nytimes.com) 111
In a recent article published in the New York Times, author Casey Michael Henry argues that today's tech industry keeps borrowing dystopian sci-fi aesthetics and ideas -- often the parts that were meant as warnings -- and repackages them as exciting products without recognizing that they were originally cautionary tales to avoid. "The tech industry is delivering on some of the futuristic notions of late-20th-century science fiction," writes Henry. "Yet it seems, at times, bizarrely unaware that many of those notions were meant to be dystopian or satirical -- dismal visions of where our worst and dumbest habits could lead us." Here's an excerpt from the report: You worry that someone in today's tech world might watch "Gattaca" -- a film that features a eugenicist future in which people with ordinary DNA are relegated to menial jobs -- and see it as an inspirational launching point for a collaboration between 23andMe and a charter school. The material on Sora, for instance, can feel oddly similar to the jokes about crass entertainment embedded in dystopian films and postmodern novels. In the movie "Idiocracy," America loved a show called "Ow! My Balls!" in which a man is hit in the testicles in increasingly florid ways. "Robocop" imagined a show about a goggle-eyed pervert with an inane catchphrase. "The Running Man" had a game show in which contestants desperately collected dollar bills and climbed a rope to escape ravenous dogs. That Sora could be prompted to imagine a game show in which Michel Foucault chokeslams Ronald Reagan, or Prince battles an anaconda, doesn't feel new; it feels like a gag from a 1990s writer or a film about social decay.
The echoes aren't all accidental. Modern design has been influenced by our old techno-dystopias -- particularly the cyberpunk variety, with its neon-noir gloss and "high tech, low life" allure. From William Gibson novels to films like "The Matrix," the culture has taken in countless ruined cityscapes, all-controlling megacorporations, high-tech body modifications, V.R.-induced illnesses, deceptive A.I. paramours, mechanical assassins and leather-clad hacker antiheroes, navigating a dissociative cyberspace with savvily repurposed junk-tech. This was not a world many people wanted to live in, but its style and ethos seem to reverberate in the tech industry's boldest visions of the future.
The echoes aren't all accidental. Modern design has been influenced by our old techno-dystopias -- particularly the cyberpunk variety, with its neon-noir gloss and "high tech, low life" allure. From William Gibson novels to films like "The Matrix," the culture has taken in countless ruined cityscapes, all-controlling megacorporations, high-tech body modifications, V.R.-induced illnesses, deceptive A.I. paramours, mechanical assassins and leather-clad hacker antiheroes, navigating a dissociative cyberspace with savvily repurposed junk-tech. This was not a world many people wanted to live in, but its style and ethos seem to reverberate in the tech industry's boldest visions of the future.
Idiocracy feels more like the current society (Score:5, Insightful)
I thought it was meant as a comedy.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Ah, INT vs WIS.
Re: (Score:3)
And CHA of 0.
Re: (Score:2)
Indeed. Lots of high-IQ idiots around. And they are doing damage.
Brave new world 60 years before (Score:2)
> "Gattaca" -- a film that features a eugenicist future in which people with ordinary DNA are relegated to menial jobs
See Brave New World from 1931 with the designing people to be menial workers from birth (actually in utero).
Re:Idiocracy feels more like the current society (Score:5, Interesting)
Idiocracy/Black Mirror
Re: (Score:2)
Demolition Man - where you are fined for cursing.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:1)
The big difference being president Camacho knew there was a problem and he put the smartest man he could find on it. I doubt anyone in the current administration could pass a high school civics exam.
Re: (Score:2)
The big difference being president Camacho knew there was a problem and he put the smartest man he could find on it.
Trump is doing the same thing, with the biggest challenge being he needs to find the smartest people who are also morally bankrupt enough to fix the "problem" he wants fixed. Not that many smart people agree that Democracy is a problem.
Re: (Score:2)
IDK, after seeing Trump elected for a second term, do you REALLY still think EVERYONE should get a vote? Why? People that detest education, can't keep up on current affairs yet still think they should get a vote? Please.
A successful democracy requires an educated, tuned in populace that can be bothered to learn the issues and vote accordingly.
I'll paraphrase George Carlin for my last line. Just think of how smart the average person is, and realize half of all people are dumber then that. And they get to vot
Re: (Score:2)
IDK, after seeing Trump elected for a second term, do you REALLY still think EVERYONE should get a vote? Why?
Yes I do, because I believe at the heart of Trump's appeal is the fact that too many people have been ignored in our society just because they failed to be successful. I don't expect average people to be capable of voting in their own interest, but I do trust they will burn everything down if they are ignored. Democracy ensures you can't ignore too many people if you want a functioning society, no matter whose at fault for why those people are upset.
Re: (Score:3)
IDK, after seeing Trump elected for a second term, do you REALLY still think EVERYONE should get a vote? Why? People that detest education, can't keep up on current affairs yet still think they should get a vote? Please.
Yes absolutely everyone should get a vote. The business of deciding who is unfit to vote is far more dangerous than stupid people voting for stupid shit. This shit also needlessly erodes the legitimacy of the state.
A successful democracy requires an educated, tuned in populace that can be bothered to learn the issues and vote accordingly.
Governance alone does no and should not determine the health of a society.
Re: (Score:2)
I think we have a decade of empirical evidence that the complexity of the issues facing modern society has exceeded the ability of the average person to understand. In the past, you could just go somewhere else and "farm", not worrying about others. That world no longer exists.
Re: Idiocracy feels more like the current society (Score:2)
Re: Idiocracy feels more like the current society (Score:1)
Fortunately it's irrelevant as the result of voting does not express the will of the voters:
* Deceptive ways of counting votes
* Voter brainwashing - eg Cambridge Analytica
* Rigged voting machines / dead people and household pets voting
* Outright election stealing
And of course, even if it did somehow represent the will of the people (which it doesn't), that will is bas
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, because Trump winning his second term has zero to do with his voter base. Fewer people voted for Trump in 2024 than in 2020. That's the simple truth - Republican voters stayed home because they didn't want to vote. It's just more Democrat voters stayed home as well. Could mean nothing,
Re: (Score:2)
Trump was not elected by the majority of Americans. He won at most 50% of the vote. Turnout was 63% of registered voters. And registered voters is approximately 75% of eligible US citizens. All told that means at most 25% of Americans voted for him. That's still shocking of course. But now you can see why the GOP is all about making voting as difficult as possible so that a mere 25% of the country can continue to force their will on the rest.
Re: (Score:2)
The problem is that as soon as you prevent some groups from voting, that possibility will get abused some time later and hence that makes things worse.
A successful democracy requires an educated, tuned in populace that can be bothered to learn the issues and vote accordingly.
Sure. But nobody knows how to create that. And those on power often have motivation to work in the opposite direction. I think the first rule would need to be that anybody that wants power is to be regarded as unfit and needs to be prevented from ever getting power. But how would that work in practice?
Re: Idiocracy feels more like the current society (Score:2)
I'll gonone step further. Voting should be mandatory for everyone over 18.
Re: (Score:2)
It's not that some some people should be prevented from voting, but rather what they vote on should be significantly simplified. Evaluating the capabilities of a candidate who is significantly smarter than you are is very hard. That's what we're asking voters to do, and as expected, they do very poorly.
A better approach is to only ask questions that people can reliably answer. For example, since almost everyone knows whether their own life is getting better or worse, that should the one and only question on
Re: (Score:2)
Not that many smart people agree that Democracy is a problem.
Oh, Democracy _is_ a problem and not stable and also subject to manipulation. But we still have not found anything better.
Re: Idiocracy feels more like the current society (Score:2)
With a president who solves an existential threat by finding the best expert he can find, and using his own formidable political skills and charisma to run interference for that expert.
Seriously, Comacho was a meathead, but Iâ(TM)d vote for him.
Cause it is. (Score:5, Insightful)
Obviously because the techbros pushing this stuff don't have the self-reflection necessary to go "wait, is this good for society?"
Like just look at "Beast Games" inspiration Squidgame.
There is a morbid curiosity to see if something fictional actually works in reality. When it comes to battle royale/deathgames, you can't do that IRL, but an IRL facsimile where the stakes are not as deadly, may still lead to people being more amenable to psychopathic behavior being normalized.
Just look at death sentences. People want blood when the crime is heinous enough. When pedophiles get sent to prison, the inmates will often murder the convicted pedophile, and everyone will look the other way, including the guards. We need look no further then Epstein to see this, but there is a guy on youtube who has been basically a pro-bono lawyer for inmates and knows this happens.
Social media has people launching death threats at game developers, artists, actors, voice actors, who work on games where their character they have a crush on dies, and can't separate the villain in their fictional work from the person voicing the lines.
That is a problem. So all these dystopian futures we see are basically that long erosion of empathy that religions have as cornerstones. If you have no empathy for people suffering, then you're basically at end-stage psychopathy.
We make these films because ultimately writers are artists, and artists often hold left-center views that greed is bad, and unchecked-green is a slippery slope where life is not valued.
Re:Cause it is. (Score:5, Insightful)
And, I'll just add that free market capitalism knows no bounds without strong regulations. When the greed is unbound, it's a race to the bottom.
Re: (Score:2)
And, I'll just add that free market capitalism knows no bounds without strong regulations. When the greed is unbound, it's a race to the bottom.
Sometimes that bottom even belongs to 11 year old children.
Re: (Score:2)
"that long erosion of empathy that religions have as cornerstones". If you mean the long erosion, then I agree with you. If instead you mean "empathy that religions have as cornerstones", wot? The Inquisition, the European religious wars, Islamic Pogroms (see Indonesia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, etc), Evangelicals, Buddhist massacres, etc.
Yes, those religions do have some empathy in their philosophy, and it is the first thing to go when they feel threatened or if they find something of someone else's that they
Re: (Score:3)
In my view, religion has often been used as a convenient excuse for committing atrocities when it has served the perpetrator's purposes. But those purposes have not stemmed from religious core itself.
For example, the crusaders raped and plundered their way to Jerusalem, paying little heed to which religion their affected had, including the sacking of Constantinople [wikipedia.org] (which was Christian) in 1204.
North American slavers found entitlement to own slaves from some Bible text wherein some important figure had had
Re:Cause it is. (Score:5, Interesting)
Isn't that the primary purpose of religion in all of history? A tool to be wielded by people in power to control the masses and justify their whims and actions? Has it ever truely been used in another way?
Re:Cause it is. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
If good people are doing evil things, then they are not good people.
Re: (Score:3)
The "good" should be just like that, in quotes. I frequently hear the argument from some religious people that, if it were not for rules from a higher power, everyone would be killing, stealing, raping, etc. Whenever I hear that from someone, I have to wonder if, in their minds, they are just holding themselves up as an exception, or if they genuinely would be killing, stealing, raping, etc. if they did not have those rules. Various religious scholars have grappled with that, of course. Some, like Paul and
Re: (Score:1)
Hmm, I'll offer a quibble here. I don't think the primary purpose of religion in all of history is to be a tool to control the masses.
It seems to me religion has several roots: A need to placate and control Nature with things like sacrifices, rituals of shamans going to visit the hidden world, etc. Also, it arises out of a need to feel that one is part of something greater than oneself. Offering hope and comfort when in despair, and part of that comfort is being part of a like minded community. This is
Re: (Score:1)
> Yes, those religions do have some empathy in their philosophy, and it is the first thing to go when they feel threatened or if they find something of someone else's that they like more than what they have.
Empathy means the ability to see the world from someone else's point of view. It does not mean "giving your country to foreigners."
Empathy tends to lead to inqusitions, pogroms and wars because empathic people can understand the point of view of others and don't imagine that those people are "all the
Re: (Score:2)
Just goes to show that a religious upbringing creates mass murderers. Perhaps something to do with the beatings given to their kids to install obedience.
Re:Cause it is. (Score:5, Interesting)
We make these films because ultimately writers are artists, and artists often hold left-center views that greed is bad, and unchecked-green is a slippery slope where life is not valued.
And I think this is where the real root of our current issues lie. Greed has been deemed a good thing by the ruling classes and the big societal decision makers. Greed is god, greed is good, greed is all knowing and is the only method to happiness. These folks running tech companies are also prime worshipers at the altar of greed. Capitalism is a fine tool when used in conjunction with other tools people are capable of understanding, and when morality and ethics are used to study possible outcomes. But when you replace all morality and ethics with, "Gimme as much as possible," because Capitalism has dictated that greed is good, you don't care how you go about achieving that "gimme," you care that you achieve that "gimme."
Combine that with the type of non-empathetic folks who end up running these larger tech firms, and you just know they read/watched these same dystopian warnings we did and sat there thinking, "Awesome." In the end, they'll be capable of toppling entire societies, and they're too non-self-reflective to understand it was them that was the cause of their own demise.
Re: (Score:2)
We make these films because ultimately writers are artists, and artists often hold left-center views that greed is bad, and unchecked-green is a slippery slope where life is not valued.
Writers have a wide range of political and economic viewpoints. You see dystopian futures more often because stories require conflict to be interesting.
Re: (Score:2)
Just look at death sentences. People want blood when the crime is heinous enough. When pedophiles get sent to prison, the inmates will often murder the convicted pedophile, and everyone will look the other way, including the guards. We need look no further then Epstein to see this, but there is a guy on youtube who has been basically a pro-bono lawyer for inmates and knows this happens.
No, I want people that commit murder to be removed from the gene pool permanently because they have shown they through their aberrant behavior that they are not worth keeping around. Same goes for Pedos. You can't fix that and these people will continue to prey on the vulnerable.
I see zero point in housing a murderer for life. Zero. Same for pedos and a few other select crimes. Basically, if you end up with life in prison, we should just execute you, since life in prison means you are deemed unfit to exist
Re: (Score:2)
I see zero point in housing a murderer for life. Zero. Same for pedos and a few other select crimes. Basically, if you end up with life in prison, we should just execute you, since life in prison means you are deemed unfit to exist with the rest of us that can manage. Most of us don't commit such heinous crimes or even the more petty crimes.
Killing people because they are unfit to exist sounds vaguely familiar.
Re: Cause it is. (Score:1)
Also, the system by which people are convicted is at least partly a battle of appearance than of facts - that's not rigourous enough to be an input to an irreversible decision.
Re: (Score:1)
1984 anyone? (Score:2)
No comment.
Re: (Score:2)
More generally, the pessimists are doing a lot better than the optimists. We now have the pervasive surveillance of 1984, the media obsession of Max Headroom, the huge gap between rich and poor of most cyberpunk. We're well on our way to the environmental collapse and mass extinctions of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, the social isolation and over-dependence on technology of The Machine Stops, the hypercapitalism of Snow Crash.
On the other side, the optimistic predictions are doing really badly. Do
Re: (Score:2)
Fahrenheit 451.
Max Headroom.
Demolition Man.
Look at the new "Iron" robot (Score:2)
That must be a nexus-1.
Won't be long before you can have a Leon for the heavy gardening work, a Pris for "company", and a Zhora to take out your enemies.
Perhaps even a Roy to discuss philosophy. Just don't make him mad by referring to the four-year lifespan.
Idiocracy is spot on (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Not so clear what to do about it, although education helps in some countries.
Re: Idiocracy is spot on (Score:3)
It could be interpreted as either biological, nurture driven, or both. The idiot parents who are reproducing en masse raise their kids to be idiots. The warning of Idiocracy is valid regardless of where one stands regarding the hereditary nature of intelligence/IQ.
Art isn't reality. (Score:4, Interesting)
Art distorts reality in order to show us different perspectives and perhaps give a warning.
Could the world of Bladerunner 2049 be a thing? Absolutely. Is it likely to be exactly like that? Probably not. Same with Gattaca.
I love cyberpunk literature. I've been reading it since my teens. It prepared me for everything that's happening these days. And what I really like about that is that some things have been outpaced by reality. In many places we are already in post cyberpunk utopia before we even reached cyberpunk.
As Deni Villeneuve said to the Google engineers:"You guys are making it really difficult for us to write science fiction."
Which pretty much sums up the state of things with fiction vs. reality.
Re: (Score:2)
Science fiction is nothing but reality ahead of schedule.
-- Syd Mead, neo-futurist concept artist (Blade Runner, Aliens, Tron)
Re: (Score:2)
Could the world of Bladerunner 2049 be a thing? Absolutely. Is it likely to be exactly like that? Probably not. Same with Gattaca.
Well, I have to say for Gattaca, it was very, very, very heavily stylized in a way that it's pretty certain the world will never look like that. I mean, a number of futuristic movies have used a retro 40's/50's style like Gattaca, but it took it more than a couple of steps further with astronauts launching wearing business suits, etc. The reason was that it was a stylized exercise in examining obsession with status and appearance: financial success, genetics, athleticism, good looks, etc.
My personal theory? (Score:2)
The super rich tech bros are bored and want to see just how far they can push the envelope.
I mean look at people like Bezos, Zuckerberg and Musk. You'd think having made billions in net worth (which isn't the same as actually having billions), at some point they'd be content with their image but noooo...
These people never outgrew their own underdeveloped self-esteem. I mean these poor sonsabitches... They have practically if not literally unlimited money, Everybody knows their names and tens of thousands of
Re:My personal theory? (Score:5, Interesting)
I wonder if they get to see making money as a high score, you "must" be productive at all times even if you have well over enough - people get stuck playing looter games even when they have basically completed it, so much that "end-game content" is a big thing - got to get that latest loot.
So these people never wake up one morning, with the alarm going for a business meeting or whatever, they never sit and think "Wait, I am worth 50 billion dollars, I can just relax and go fishing for the next week, next month learn to paint", whatever. Even if they that for a month or so they'll get bored eventually and go back to chasing that high score.
Unfortunately the high score isn't "Would this be best for society?" - it's "Would this make me money regardless of what it does to society?" If they introduce something that is bad for society it doesn't matter, as long as it makes the extra 20 billion - even if that extra money materially wouldn't make much of a difference to the upper classes lives. I've made this extra money therefor I must be a good person right ? All the anger of the underclass is because they are failures, if only they would have made the business deal that I made, invested that 100G in what I invested in, they'd be winners like me.
Some of the great Sci-Fi involves "what would people do if they had everything" e.g. the Post-Scarcity Culture series. What would bring your life meaning if you had billionaire resources. A question we need to start asking, let alone answering.
And of course you must remember 50% of the human race (probably 90%...) is just not that smart and definitely not capable of introspection. So there's that.
And even when they do start charitable organisations, how often to they even benefit those at the bottom? The homeless people by me all waiting for government funded homing, none get a dime from any charity ? Yes a lot of them do good work e.g. Uncle Bill's foundation releases the Our World in Data series. But then you see them throwing billions around in deals and wonder "does this benefit anyone beyond the odd toilet being built in Uganda?"
IANAE (I am not an economist, obviously!)
Re: (Score:2)
The homeless people by me all waiting for government funded homing, none get a dime from any charity ?
Wow, really? The city near me has a Christian rescue mission that helps tons of homeless people. And that's all charity.
They do way better than any government does about the problem.
Re: (Score:2)
Wow, really? The city near me has a Christian rescue mission that helps tons of homeless people. And that's all charity.
They do way better than any government does about the problem.
Charity through local organizations, religious or otherwise is a problematic proposition. There are a number of issues, but most of them involve inconsistent coverage. For example, the city near you may have excellent support from a Christian rescue mission. However, even if they don't exclude anyone, or have rules or other factors that lead to some people falling through the cracks and not getting help, can you say that every locality has an organization like that available? Consider for example, the probl
Re: (Score:2)
Aren't you making the assumption that the AC you are replying to does not donate or volunteer for charity though? It's not like they said either way, or asked. They just implied that the religious charities are using the charity to proselytize. Whether that is true or not depends, of course. Some religious charities definitely do, requiring prayer and other religious devotions or even joining their congregation, going through religious ceremonies like baptism, etc. in order to receive charity. Others just g
Re: (Score:3)
Someone who gets some large amount of money and thinks "hey, this looks like a lot of money, I will never be able to spend it for the rest of my life, might as well stop working and do something for fun" does not become one of the richest people on the planet.
For example - I work because I need money. If I won the lottery or got a large amount of money some other way, I would put the money in some index funds or wherever that's low risk and live off the returns without having to work anymore. There are thin
Maybe it's just easier? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
FTL, life-extension, space elevators, replicators? That's hard. 1984? Much more straightforward.
It's not the technology that's difficult to grasp, it's how difficult it is to imagine how we might weave these technologies into a functional society. Just like how it is easy to break something than to create it, it is easier for an author to break future societies than to build better ones.
Read the book "1984" (Score:2)
Creators of technology (Score:5, Insightful)
Because the people in charge of creating this technology don't necessarily understand that the movies and books it's inspired by are meant to be dystopian.
Increasingly, when you read an interview or random comments from techbros or just C-suites of a multinational it becomes more and more clear that these people just don't think the same way that normal people do. Like when Zuckerberg suggested that people may want AI friends with seemingly no understanding why people would find the idea disturbing. These days to be a top CEO you basically have to be a sociopath. The richest among them seem to be such complete sociopaths that they don't understand the fact that they are sociopaths. Sort of like moral Dunning-Krueger. So if any of those people watched Black Mirror they would probably think it's a utopian show, sort of like near-future Star Trek.
Re: (Score:1)
I doubt Zuck is quite this stupid, but i do get the feeling he's the kind of guy who would casually drop amoral bombs on his friends in conversation with zero understanding that he just damaged the relationship.
A mostly fictional example of the thing I'm talking about would be like getting invited out to lunch by indian co workers, going somewhere vegan, and then telling everyone at the table that it's good that there's no meat on the menu because he's pledged to kill all meat he eats with his own hands for
Re: (Score:3)
I believe that they DO understand the fiction.
They justify themselves to themselves in a few ways:
1) "I'm just creating the gadget, nothing to do with the context"
2) In those dystopias people on top have it really good, I am/will be on top, ergo: let's do this.
3) The dystopias are bad on the "small people", f*** that [immigrant/white] trash it's going to make me a buck.
Re: (Score:2)
I think many of them do understand what they are. Calling a surveillance software company Palantir is very self-aware. The rest is spot-on, though. The sociopathic kids grew up on dystopian science fiction of the 1980s, but unlike average people they read it and thought "what a great idea". And now they are adults and try to implement the dystopia they liked so much. And they basically admit it themselves:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Really not going to mention surveillance tech? (Score:2)
Everything comes proprietary with phone home capability instead of open protocols and inability to run fully locally. It is by design.
Mostly the other way around (Score:1)
The Torment Nexus (Score:4, Insightful)
Science fiction missed the real threat (Score:2)
Our collective greed and selfish behaviours.
In a perversion of survival instinct and Darwinism the humans ate their world and died. The end.
It's the story 'You cant have it all because you'd still want more' and not knowing what 'enough' or 'happy' looked like.
Science fiction missed the misadaptation threat (Score:4, Interesting)
Thanks for the insightful post. And to build on your survival instinct misadaptation point, consider that our preferences were tuned through evolution or a scarcity of certain things (salt, sweet, fat, excitement, novelty, startling, etc) and work against us when there is abundance of those things made possible by modern technology (e.g. ultraprocessed foods, algorithmic feeds, several scene changes a second in Videos, etc). See:
https://www.healthpromoting.co... [healthpromoting.com]
"Dr. Douglas Lisle, who has spent the last two decades researching and studying this evolutionary syndrome, explains that all of us inherit innate incentives from our ancient ancestors that he terms The Motivational Triad: the pursuit of pleasure, the avoidance of pain, and the conservation of energy. Unfortunately, in present day America's convenience-centric, excess-oriented culture, where fast food, recreational drugs, and sedentary shopping have become the norm, these basic instincts that once successfully insured the survival and reproduction of man many millennia ago, no longer serve us well. In fact, it's our unknowing enslavement to this internal, biological force embedded in the collective memory of our species that is undermining our health and happiness today."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
"Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose is a book by Deirdre Barrett published by W. W. Norton & Company in 2010. Barrett is a psychologist on the faculty of Harvard Medical School. The book argues that human instincts for food, sex, and territorial protection evolved for life on the savannah 10,000 years ago, not for today's densely populated technological world. Our instincts have not had time to adapt to the rapid changes of modern life. The book takes its title from Nikolaas Tinbergen's concept in ethology of the supernormal stimulus, the phenomena by which insects, birds, and fish in his experiments could be lured by a dummy object which exaggerated one or more characteristic of the natural stimulus object such as giant brilliant blue plaster eggs which birds preferred to sit on in preference to their own. Barrett extends the concept to humans and outlines how supernormal stimuli are a driving force behind today's most pressing problems, including modern warfare, obesity and other fitness problems, while also explaining the appeal of television, video games, and pornography as social outlets."
https://tlc.ku.edu/ [ku.edu]
" "We were never designed for the sedentary, indoor, sleep-deprived, socially-isolated, fast-food-laden, frenetic pace of modern life." - TLC Principal Investigator Stephen Ilardi, PhD"
And to take that even one step further, see my sig: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."
Re: (Score:2)
Who or what is the protagonist in the story?
I accept a Bhuddist truth that life contains an element of suffering and we spend a lot of resource trying to manage that unskilfully, not recognising the pain that comes from our perception.
My hope is we will see a movement emerge to counter point "get rich or kill the planet trying". Part of this is a "less is more" philosophy that we don't need gold bath taps, but we could do with more time to look after our physical and mental wellbeing, preparing for our deat
What kinds of minds flourish in a given society (Score:2)
Not an anthropologist, but reading the news makes it appear that either psychopathic, obsessive minds with self-serving morality flourish in contemporary society, that and/or there are extremely powerful, cynical people who find and use them. Whether tech entrepreneurs have ever learned how to analyze literary works as opposed to just consuming them for entertainment is another good question. Likely it is a lack of imagination.. like an LLM what people ingest ends up percolating to the top of the mind. And,
Re: (Score:2)
I don't think it's necessary just contemporary society. Those with the most ambition and lowest moral fiber are always going to get ahead of those that are more conscientious and of lower ambition. It's just how humans are.
Really, if a future AGI takes over, it would very likely be a net gain for the average person but only if the AGI truly gets to control everything and is not itself controlled by the most ambition and lowest moral asshole we can find.
Given how humans work, I don't have much hope.
Re: (Score:2)
Really, if a future AGI takes over, it would very likely be a net gain for the average person but only if the AGI truly gets to control everything and is not itself controlled by the most ambition and lowest moral asshole we can find.
This is just an anthropomorphism of technology coupled with baseless beliefs in existence of eightfold paths, hwnata hakhta hvarshta.. ad nauseam. If only the computer was smart enough it would see the righteous way and not do stupid shit... completely disconnected from reality.
Necessity is the mother of invention (Score:2)
Tech bros missed the plot point (Score:2)
It was supposed to be a warning - not an inspiration!
Not unusual (Score:2)
The meme picture (1984 / Bablyon 5) "It wasn't an instruction manual you idiots" seems apt to point out here.
What's next? Larry Niven's "Patchwork Man" in the US? Maybe "Oath of Fealty" br
Re: (Score:2)
"Oath of Fealty" wasn't a dystopia, it was an attempt at utopia, that wasn't working out all that poorly. Nobody who didn't want to take part was forced to do so. Some people liked it and other people didn't. A few people hated it. The viewpoint character's assessment was (paraphrase)"not all cultures need to be the same".
Re: (Score:2)
Good luck trying to get that point across to a Karen.
Re: (Score:2)
"Oath of Fealty" wasn't a dystopia, it was an attempt at utopia, that wasn't working out all that poorly. Nobody who didn't want to take part was forced to do so. Some people liked it and other people didn't. A few people hated it. The viewpoint character's assessment was (paraphrase)"not all cultures need to be the same".
Except you'd see it boiled down to anarcho-libertarian-capitalism with people screeching "Think of it as evolution in action!" Finally them saying corporations should be all powerful and so on.
The Tech Bros think they’re smarter than . . (Score:1)
. . . Mr. Orwell.
This time it’ll work. Sure. Enough said.
Science fiction is not about the new shiny things, (Score:2)
Itâ(TM)s about how human beings react to new shiny things. I would ballpark science fiction as being about 50% cautionary tales and 50% hopeful inspiration. If you miss those lessons youâ(TM)re going to focus on the shiny things. Kurt Vonnegut wrote about ice nine because his brother Bernard was helping figure out how to freeze clouds and create weather. A fable about how scientists donâ(TM)t always look at the full effects of what they create. If you want the phasers, but donâ(TM)t want
We are what we read? (Score:2)
Well, but then we are also what we watch. And, of course, we are what we eat. And our overall health is an indictment of the stuff that we stuff ourselves with.
So let's just amend the old saying to read "We are what we consume". That covers books, magazines, movies, TV, YouTube, social media, etc, as well as food and drink. And I gotta say that the 'diets' of a lot of us are - on multiple fronts - utter shite!
It's not "tech" (Score:2)
It's fashion and pop culture that happens to use a bit of tech
I'm missing the connection (Score:2)
Article is paywalled, so I can't read the whole thing. But the summary talks about a bunch of dystopian fantasies, but doesn't relate those to things happening in real life. It mentions the partnership between a charter school and 23andMe, but how does that relate to eugenics? They are looking for genetic correlations, but that's a long way from eugenics. The summary doesn't even list the real-life copies of the movie fantasies. Maybe I just don't watch enough TV I guess.
Re: (Score:2)
I think the idea of access to a charter school based on characteristics you have zero control over is the problem. It's no different then having a race based quota, where you replace the word race with whatever characteristic you desire.
It would be different if the way into a charter school was 100% merit based, but we don't live in a merit based society.
Re: (Score:2)
Who said anything about access to a charter school?
There are zero Google search results for anything about a charter school connected with 23andMe to exclude children who don't pass some kind of genetics test. This smacks of a made-up scenario.
Re: (Score:2)
It's literally mentioned in the summary.
You worry that someone in today's tech world might watch "Gattaca" -- a film that features a eugenicist future in which people with ordinary DNA are relegated to menial jobs -- and see it as an inspirational launching point for a collaboration between 23andMe and a charter school.
Re: (Score:2)
This quote is stating a worry, not an actual event.
You worry that someone might...see it as an inspirational launching point for a collaboration between 23andMe and a charter school.
If such a charter school had been founded, you can bet it would be in the news. It's not.
The summary implies that the tech industry is actually *doing* some of these dystopian things.
"The tech industry is delivering on some of the futuristic notions of late-20th-century science fiction," writes Henry.
All of the dystopian concerns listed, appear to just be *worries*, none of them have actually come to pass.
not just dystopian sci fi (Score:3)
My brother likes to say Star Trek also has a lot to answer for. TNGs ubiquitous touch screens are now a widespread infection in nearly all devices today including refrigerators, washing machines, and unfortunately automobiles. No one thought to ask "but is this actually a good idea?". Also Star Trek's talking computer with a conversational interface is now becoming mainstream with llms.
Re: (Score:2)
My brother likes to say Star Trek also has a lot to answer for. TNGs ubiquitous touch screens are now a widespread infection in nearly all devices today including refrigerators, washing machines, and unfortunately automobiles.
Been a while since I've looked for appliances so I just went browsing an outfit that sells them in town. They didn't have any refrigerators with touch screens. In terms of washers most of them had at least one big physical dial and the others had recessed buttons... Not a single touch screen either. Ignoring notable outliers like the swasticar the trend in automobiles is clearly for physical controls not the other way around.
Re: (Score:2)
No Samsung ad-displaying fridges? That's good news.
Re: (Score:2)
That reminds of something... I can't remember what it was actually from, but it was something sci-fi themed, maybe an online comic. In any case it has one character from an advanced alien civilization who has a device that employs switches and buttons and another character who is almost angry that the advanced alien technology just uses interface elements like that instead of voice control, neural interfaces, isn't embedded internally, etc. The alien replies that their civilization is technologically hundre
It's simple (Score:2)
These billionaire dipshits think the corpo-fascism surveillance state was the GOOD PART.
My thoughts (Score:1)
Blade Runner not Star Trek (Score:1)
Because the dystopian sci fi (Score:1)
Was just planting the seeds in our imagination to help bring the technology and the resulting technocratic dystopia into existence.
Not this again... (Score:2)
"Escape from New York" is a work of fiction, not a how-to guide.
Always regretted that Sci-Fi wenr all dystopian (Score:2)
Sci-Fi like Star Trek provided a positive future to aspire to, and I always hoped for more such positive visions to guide us. Certainly felt that a lack of it will hamper our potential. Yet, I never expected the tech bro culture to be stupid enough to actually want to emulate the dark and dystopian visions. Yet, here we are.