While interesting (and a somewhat expected trend), what would be more helpful is the dual analysis and factcheck of "Who Saved the World". I.e., if the world avoided the worst, how did it happen? Was it magical thinking or something real that we can actually embrace and build on?
The increasing gloominess around our predicament is to a large degree due to the persistent failure of positive forces and behaviors to mitigate destructive trends. There is no point imagining a unreachable utopia if we can't indicate a real path towards it.
Its not that there is strictly zero evidence on our ability to avoid a major civilizational setback in the visible future. There is at least the open source movement. This is a remarkable, highly non-trivial behavior and it has already affected our reality. It is still little-known outside tech circles. Maybe there are other such positive stories in other circles. Somebody should base a sci-fi scenario on them :-)
Its a most remarkable story but how would one "scale" this type of behavior to make a difference? If you zero-in on his state of mind during the incident:
> the influences on his decision included that he had been told a U.S. strike would be all-out, so five missiles seemed an illogical start; that the launch detection system was new and, in his view, not yet wholly trustworthy; that the message passed through 30 layers of verification too quickly; and that ground radar failed to pick up corroborating evidence, even after minutes of delay
So you have a highly trained and informed person applying a mix of reasoning and intuition to guide their action rather than blindly and lazily follow instructions - or worse, be pushed around by fears, group think, peer pressure, etc. without regard to actual impact.
Clearly if the majority of people would exhibit such behaviors we'd be in much better shape, but how do we get there?
It’s an interesting presentation and I like the analysis of how science fiction has changed. This bit seems like feel-good anti-growth boilerplate though:
> What if we reject the notion that the economy must produce more and more, but rather embrace the notion that a functioning society is only as successful as its least privileged soul?
Among other things, I think the world is going to need a lot more air conditioners, and the energy to run them. Economic growth is a vague abstraction, when you get more specific, there are some important needs.
The key part is the second bit - a world where we build loads of air conditioners so that a few people can comfortably cool their mansions in the desert while others boil in their apartments or on the streets is unacceptable.
Presumably we need more air conditioners precisely because there are currently people without them..? I think the guy you're responding to believes there's a need for more AC to prevent exactly what you're describing.
And re; what you're describing, if you have an AC you (generally) don't need more AC's, that'd be pretty pointless. AC units aren't a thing that makes any sense to hoard away, so the future you're imagining where people in "mansions in the desert" somehow have all the AC and everyone else is just "boiling" away doesn't really seem like a realistic concern. Especially so if people agree that building more AC's will help.
It places a moral judgment on economic growth and production.
Which I find deeply confusing as these precisely correlate with QoL compared to life 100 years ago. E.g. the air conditioner was just invented and way more expensive 100 years ago. With the attitude of "as successful as its least privileged soul", I doubt the air conditioner would be nearly as available today.
This needs a better methodology section. It's not a trivial undertaking to analyze the top 200 sci-fi films of each of the past 8 decades. It says it was automated with LLM sentiment analysis, but how? Did you get access to a content library that allowed you to feed the film stream itself to the models? Did you get transcripts? Do all of these films even have transcripts? Did you generate them if not? How do you deal with transcripts losing out on most of the setting you get from the visuals themselves? Do you have access to the screenplays somehow? Does the context window of these models really fit 1600 films at once?
Sophie’s choice between scrolly crap and a video. No surprise I suppose, given the article focuses on films and ignores the much larger body of sci-fi novels which had no shortage of pessimism in the past and have no shortage of optimism today.
Andy Weir's stuff isn't utopian but is obviously very science-positive. I have slightly mixed feelings about Alastair Reynolds' work (I thought Revelation Space petered out a bit, but that Zima Blue is profoundly beautiful etc) but his Blue Remembered Earth trilogy is a very deliberate (dare I say heavy handed) attempt at a more optimistic universe. Going back a little, obviously there's the Culture series which definitely does examine some of the complexity behind a powerful, galaxy-spanning utopian civilisation and its AI attendants, and some of the books are tragic, but I'd definitely live there. More generally, just google solarpunk and you'll find lots of recommendations. I don't know which authors specifically identify with that genre going forward, I've heard good things about Becky Chambers but haven't read any of her books yet.
This isn't a book, but the new Star Trek: Strange New Worlds show is pretty optimistic. It shows Earth going through some "Eugenics Wars" very soon, which then escalate into WWIII which kills off 40% of the world's population in nuclear attacks, but after that things look pretty good with humans inventing warp drive and exploring the stars and creating a federation of planets.
There is a cool new subgenre in recent years called Solarpunk, which focuses on optimistic world-building. Some of it can come across as rather preachy regarding climate change, but there is some decent reading in there. My favourite so far is Another Life by Sarena Ulibarri.
Iain M. Banks "Culture" novels. Oh, there is certainly room for many depressing insights in human nature, but the overall picture is dominated by the AIs, having created an utopia.
Great article. I've always thought that pessimistic sci-fi dystopias were on the rise, but it turns out most still have positive endings. The observation about walking out of the theatre, and seeing the worst ahead of us is quite interesting.
It would be cool to compare with other, non sci-fi stories. EG: I have been noticing the rise of escapist fantasy narratives in popular media — wish fulfillment stories where a Mary Sue like main character rises above all challenges without struggle. You can see this particularly in light novels, manga, and anime in the now popularized "isekai", "cultivation", or "system progression" genres. It would be interesting to find out how the public's fascination with these types of stories correlate with economic, social, or political undulations in the real world.
Cyberpunk was always the “real sci-fi” in terms of what was actually going to happen wasn’t it? Murder drones, corporations having more power than nation states, the EU block becoming regulatory, climate havoc, the gig economy and a continuous restructuring of centralised society.
It also didn’t have a lot of happy endings. Because the world didn’t end, it just got continuesly shittier.
Some would argue we are already living Cyberpunk, just without all the cool stuff.
BTW, why single out "the EU block becoming regulatory" as something negative prophesied by Cyberpunk? I have recently watched a video about the timeline of Cyberpunk 2020/2077 (which is just one universe, granted), and the EU sounded like the only ones who had their shit together, even though they were facing sabotage from all directions.
Cool visualization, perhaps interesting thoughts but alas it is completely worthless as it is AI analysis based. I wish the author warned about that on top instead of the bottom so I didn't waste my time with it.
It became obvious to me that it's LLM generated halucinations, when i read the content boxes of "protagonists fight another human". It's totally borked, but the graphics look nice.
It seemingly always says "It's a story of a human vs. an unknown threat", which just doesn't match most movies contents.
You're half-right. It's not hallucinations, but I think the question to the LLM was "do the protagonists fight against the unknown?", when it should have been "are they fighting against another human?". So the LLM is answering about the unknown, when the actual graph talks about human antagonists.
Even then, it's clearly responding some half-true stuff about unknown for movies with clear, known antagonists. It's just trying to put "unknown" somewhere into response.
One thing to think about is the question what capitalisms end game is. Suppose everyone is buying stuff and you're CEO of a nearly 100% efficient corporation, whatever that means. Your job is to somehow make gains every year.
The problem is that this was easy in a inefficient corporation within a market where everybody was inefficient. But the things you have to do to keep these gains are getting more and more ridiculous, more and more amoral.
This is our problem. The times where easy gains with honest products was possible is long past, now everything has to be a scam, a meta game, some sort of hidden monopoly or so cutting edge that it isn't even profitable.
Readit News
The increasing gloominess around our predicament is to a large degree due to the persistent failure of positive forces and behaviors to mitigate destructive trends. There is no point imagining a unreachable utopia if we can't indicate a real path towards it.
Its not that there is strictly zero evidence on our ability to avoid a major civilizational setback in the visible future. There is at least the open source movement. This is a remarkable, highly non-trivial behavior and it has already affected our reality. It is still little-known outside tech circles. Maybe there are other such positive stories in other circles. Somebody should base a sci-fi scenario on them :-)
> the influences on his decision included that he had been told a U.S. strike would be all-out, so five missiles seemed an illogical start; that the launch detection system was new and, in his view, not yet wholly trustworthy; that the message passed through 30 layers of verification too quickly; and that ground radar failed to pick up corroborating evidence, even after minutes of delay
So you have a highly trained and informed person applying a mix of reasoning and intuition to guide their action rather than blindly and lazily follow instructions - or worse, be pushed around by fears, group think, peer pressure, etc. without regard to actual impact.
Clearly if the majority of people would exhibit such behaviors we'd be in much better shape, but how do we get there?
> What if we reject the notion that the economy must produce more and more, but rather embrace the notion that a functioning society is only as successful as its least privileged soul?
Among other things, I think the world is going to need a lot more air conditioners, and the energy to run them. Economic growth is a vague abstraction, when you get more specific, there are some important needs.
And re; what you're describing, if you have an AC you (generally) don't need more AC's, that'd be pretty pointless. AC units aren't a thing that makes any sense to hoard away, so the future you're imagining where people in "mansions in the desert" somehow have all the AC and everyone else is just "boiling" away doesn't really seem like a realistic concern. Especially so if people agree that building more AC's will help.
Which I find deeply confusing as these precisely correlate with QoL compared to life 100 years ago. E.g. the air conditioner was just invented and way more expensive 100 years ago. With the attitude of "as successful as its least privileged soul", I doubt the air conditioner would be nearly as available today.
It would be cool to compare with other, non sci-fi stories. EG: I have been noticing the rise of escapist fantasy narratives in popular media — wish fulfillment stories where a Mary Sue like main character rises above all challenges without struggle. You can see this particularly in light novels, manga, and anime in the now popularized "isekai", "cultivation", or "system progression" genres. It would be interesting to find out how the public's fascination with these types of stories correlate with economic, social, or political undulations in the real world.
It also didn’t have a lot of happy endings. Because the world didn’t end, it just got continuesly shittier.
BTW, why single out "the EU block becoming regulatory" as something negative prophesied by Cyberpunk? I have recently watched a video about the timeline of Cyberpunk 2020/2077 (which is just one universe, granted), and the EU sounded like the only ones who had their shit together, even though they were facing sabotage from all directions.
The problem is that this was easy in a inefficient corporation within a market where everybody was inefficient. But the things you have to do to keep these gains are getting more and more ridiculous, more and more amoral.
This is our problem. The times where easy gains with honest products was possible is long past, now everything has to be a scam, a meta game, some sort of hidden monopoly or so cutting edge that it isn't even profitable.