WARNING: Rant ahead. Turn back now, or face my blabbering!
I have a problem with science fiction: it’s too pessimistic. I don’t mean this in a “dystopian” sense, either. I mean that visions of the future are haphazard in what technologies exist, and what people will need to do to survive.
In the future, treadmills will suck.
Take James Cameron’s Avatar, for instance. In Avatar there are many vehicles that transport humans around on the alien world of Pandora. These vehicles are all piloted by people. The natives of the planet are actually able to kill off aircraft pilots by throwing spears through the windshield. Now, imagine if these aircraft were piloted by computer, as many military planes are today. No pilot would mean the front of the vehicle could be well-armored. No pilot would also mean that such aircraft could be mass-produced on-site, without needing to ferry pilots in from Earth. There is a scene where the humans attempt to destroy a specific forest by flying a bomb there by hand. Why isn’t the bomb just dropped from orbit? Don’t these people have spacecraft? The worst plot-hole, however, is the justification for fighting the natives of the planet. Apparently there is a rare substance of astronomical value that’s located just below the native’s sacred land. Yes, it works for symbolism, but the substance is needed for, get this, an energy source. So apparently, in this advanced future where they can afford to shuttle people around at 70% the speed of light, humanity has not yet figured out how to get decent energy from nuclear or solar? Pessimistic in the extreme.
![[WALL-E Captain]](http://www.amptoons.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/wall-e-captain.jpg)
“I can go back to playing World of Warcraft now?!”
As another example, let’s consider Pixar’s WALL-E. In the film, humanity abandons Earth for being too toxic, and ends up living for 700 years on a colony ship, where they are catered to by artificial intelligence. These people live each day constantly connected to the computer, and never do so much as get up from their chairs. At one point in the movie, WALL-E (the protagonist robot) bumps into a human, distracting him from his virtual world, the result being that the man is pleasantly surprised. Let me clarify: Pixar is telling us that in the far future, a person who has never known anything but a life of digital entertainment would be pleasantly surprised by being distracted by a dirty little robot. Those video games must SUCK. I understand that the whole thing is commentary on our modern, western lifestyles of excess and entertainment, but that doesn’t change the part of the story where these people are so unsatisfied by futuristic life that they feel a need, at the end of the movie, to return to a life of agriculture. That’s so insanely pessimistic.
The reason for this pessimism, I think, is two-fold:
- people forget that technology actually does improve society (most of the time)
- writers recognize that without problems there is no story
I’ll address these in reverse-order.
Okay, so plots are problems by their very definition. No story ever went “Once upon a time there were some happy people. The end.” We write about problems because, perhaps on a subconscious level, writers are attempting to fix real problems by communicating imagined scenarios (i.e. fiction). The writers at Pixar were hoping to (on some level) make Americans a bit more conscious of their lifestyles in hopes that they’d take better care of the planet and themselves. To do this, the writers tell a story about what would happen if these trends got worse, rather than better. The story of Wal-Mart destroying the world.
My issue is that when you tell a pessimistic story, you confuse the real problem with a hyperbolic one, and run the risk of failing to address the actual obstacles in place. In other words, if your story isn’t realistic then people may throw out the core problem as unrealistic, or they may think that hyperbolic aspects of the plot are actual problems, and focus on the wrong things. The best example I can think of is that of the Terminator, an icon for evil robots everywhere. On one hand, people watch Terminator and consider just how ridiculous it is to have an evil AI (that gets naked when it travels through time) and so they mistakenly throw out the problem as being one of idle fantasy. On the other hand, people get the impression that the mistake was in giving Skynet the keys to the bombs, and so they mistakenly believe that non-military AI serves no threat.
My suggestion: make the problem in a story as close as possible to the actual one, and avoid hyperbole when possible. Millions of people on Earth suffer because of the choices made by affluent people in the West, so tell a story about those people, and how they might come free of their hardship (or not, for a downer-ending).
Now for the second point; people (sometimes) forget that progress is real.
![[Replicator]](http://nailsoup.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/star-trek-replicator.jpg)
Why are there bartenders in Star Trek, again?
People have incredibly short lives, if you think about it. Most people alive today cannot remember getting their family’s first television, much less the first radio. The scope of many people’s lives are such that things seem only slightly different than they ever were. People forget that infant mortality has dropped by a factor of 10 in the US in just the last 70 years. Not having enough XYZ has been a problem for all of my life, so why wouldn’t it be a problem in a hundred years? Because that’s not how technology works.
Slavery existed for nearly the entire course of human history, and just happened to end at the time when complex machinery began making factories feasible. Coincidence?
Aging. Poverty. Slavery. Energy. Transportation. Education. Communication. Disease. Ignorance. Even work itself. These are all finite problems with points where they will be essentially solved. To think else-wise would be to cover one’s eyes to the lessons of history. Even companionship, empathy, security, intimacy, and fun are goals which I think can be solved with technology. When every story of the future paints a picture that says “nothing substantial changed”, we get the impression that science and technology are good for nothing by making shiny gadgets and robot dogs.
Science Fiction stories are our dreams of the future, and dreams matter. They help pull us past the repercussions of our actions and into a brighter future. I have no idea what’ll happen in the next 50 years, but I can guarantee we won’t be anywhere near where we are today. Civilization really only has two end-points: extinction and utopia. Let’s pay better attention to where we’re going.
2 Comments
I think the issue is that some things do change and others do not, and that for the most part people are surprised by the results. There is also the psychological bias pointed out by Colin Wilson, which he called the “St. Neots Margin”, which observes that people are more moved by the removal of difficulty than the extension of ease. In practice this means that mountains of infrastructure improvement are less significant than the power going off, all the ice cream melting, and then the power resuming.
This is only tangentially relevant here, but after years of reading snippets about the theory, I finally read Strauss and Howe’s The Fourth Turning. It’s comparable to the Enneagram of Personality in some ways, but it is a societal metric, not a personal one.
From my maroon leather-covered wingback chair and Volcano vaporizer, I intone that indeed history is cyclical, and finally somebody has come up with a good reason why. Their theory explains a lot and we have a ringside seat to see if their predictions about the next 10-20 years play out as predicted. I highly recommend it to anybody trying to make sense out of intergenerational change in the USA.
I think that there is often a trade-off, just as there is in medicine when you treat symptoms. Yes, slavery was eradicated, but because machines made humans less appealing economically. Also the lowering infant mortality is a knowledge thing, not a tech thing, in that people went into rural areas and convinced people not to have their babies in dirty environments where the mother would be exposed to fever-causing ailments. They also did hard, hard work in trying to convince pre-natal moms to eat well and to feed their children balanced diets. The lowering of mortality was not due to tech, for most people still died in the hospitals where the tech was available. The tech helps (certainly is the reason you’re alive) but is not the sole cause.
I don’t think I can agree with your statement “tech improves society.” Certainly some tech makes many things easier, but some tech does little for society and helps only those few who can exploit it. I think having knives helped society, but I’m not sure that having metal knives helped society–it was just eventually cheaper than glass and stone knives, which are actually preferable. One makes the mistake of looking at tech without the context of economics. Often times a good tech is replaced by the same product made more cheaply and it is not a good thing, such as pottery cookpots being replaced by metal, and then iron cookpots being replaced by aluminum, or clay pipes being replaced with lead, etc., etc. I think you have to pick and choose your tech.
There are many many things that might not have been good. It may not be good to have mass-made shoes. It may not be good to have fabrics made by machine. Both of these techs lead to high waste and degraded people into wearing stuff that doesn’t fit or will wear out too quickly, etc. etc., not to mention fueling the stupidity of fads and such. High tech in the food industry is very bad: not only have we seen terrible results, but the costs of trying to undo all this tech is worse than what it cost to develop it. Ditto with trucking.
Where a transport is good tech and improves society, mass transport does not.
But I agree that future scenarios tend to be bleak. I read an article where people are now concerned that humanity is dying out as birth rates fall around the world! All these years of death by too many humans may be just false. I hope so!
I’ll keep reading, little by little. Thanks for the thought-provoking post!
hugs
me