The latest episode of Amazing Circus recently came out and one thing that impressed me is how well Caine's character is handled to make him feel like an artificial intelligence despite having an established personality.
And that reminded me of a complaint about a relatively recent movie.
Spoilers for those who haven't seen the movie: the protagonist is revealed to actually be a robot with inserted memories, created by a manipulative lunatic. So far it sounds good. In fact, it's quite similar to the movie Ex Machina; however, I had read a review a while ago that really made me think, because it said...
The movie "It Doesn't Matter" really shows us that artificial intelligences, even if they seem alive, are not, so I can't relate to the girl because I know she's fake.
This shit... let me thinking. There are many things in science fiction that we take for granted today, almost as if they were a fact, and yet, we also have those kinds of technologies today, and those kinds of technologies have also shown us what the capabilities, limitations, and true way of many things work are. Later, reviewing huge catalogs of modern science fiction stories, I realize a problem...
I think Sci Fi is on trouble
Let me make something clear: the fact that science advances is normal. We know that many things were once simply a way to explain something that would otherwise be considered magic. For example, the early Iron Man comics used transistors as the suit's power source, even though they don't actually work that way. Similarly, the 1950s and 240s movies started with the radiation theme; you could literally put radiation on anything and it would work like magic.
Remember the phrase that "if science is complex enough, it can be considered magic?" Well, this is something similar and at the time it did seem like magic, there are things that just didn't age well because science advances and they become so normal, that well today we know that if you get radiation you will most likely get cancer.
But here's the thing, what happens when we are suddenly able to create the things we see in fiction? What happens when futuristic technology suddenly becomes commonplace?
It seems we're still quite a few years away from reaching the dystopian and retro-futuristic futures of our favorite works, but the truth is that most simply exploit concepts without thinking about any kind of internal logical coherence in the universe and just put it there for the sake of coolness.
For example, nowadays we have a way to make holograms, holograms that are well made enough, and yet they still don't look like the ones in Star Wars. We don't use them like in Star Wars, and nobody wants to use them like in Star Wars; they're simply too impractical. Also, they have many things that would imply some that nobody is willing to accept or do, but anyway, we have holograms; we use them for other things, but we have holograms.
We can interpret the same thing with robots. The work that I at least remember having an older mechanical dog is Fahrenheit 451, in which a six-legged mechanical warm creature is shown that both lives and doesn't live, according to the book's description. It seems like a joke, but when you look at the robots from Boston Dynamics, which look quite similar to dogs, it wouldn't surprise me if this were to happen in the future anyway. If we already have robots that are capable of dancing in K-pop concerts, what makes us think that one that perfectly emulates a warm creature isn't possible?
Another example is that we can create technologies in exactly the same way as fiction, but that are quite close, for example. And while I am aware that this is actually a hoax because they didn't use any kind of ancient DNA, the company Colossal Biosciences created what they call a dire wolf, which has absolutely nothing to do with the real-life animal. But the fact is that they created a new species, or at least something that resembles a wolf, but isn't really a wolf.
This makes the discussion around this event itself about Jurassic Park getting closer and closer, and while of course we can't use mosquito DNA to attract dinosaurs, the novel Carnosaur, which predates Jurassic Park, already proposed a different way of bringing dinosaurs in, not with the same DNA but by reconstructing them like a kind of puzzle, accurate enough to see a creature and say "it's a dinosaur"
Another recent example is something crazy: a fly's brain was scanned and recreated inside a computer. The brain inside the computer, or at least what emulated a brain, was made to believe it was in a completely controlled environment. This thing lives, moves, and consumes within a simulation as if it were a real fly, but it isn't. This kind of thing is quite terrifying. And while at first glance it might seem similar to The Matrix, there's a film that's much more like it: The 13th Floor. In which the NPCs don't know they are in a simulation, but they are sentient. Or heck, Portal, the way Glados is made is by scanning a brain and make her an AI.
What I'm trying to say is that a few years ago I could view these kinds of things with considerable detachment; I couldn't imagine that we would reach this point, at least by the year 3000, as something normalized. And yet, people in the 1900s and 2000s thought the same thing. For them, it was the future, and the future is now.
And what I'm getting at with all this is that science fiction has reached a point where many of the tropes it uses can no longer be used in the same way, because of course you can have a sentient robot in your movie or story, but at the end of the day it's also going to be much harder to convince the audience that that's how a robot can behave because the audience is already used to interacting with artificial intelligence. They know how it works. For example, the movie Tron: Ares had to be rewritten at least three times because they realized that artificial intelligence had advanced so much that the message of the movie became obsolete.
One might say that this is unimportant at the end of the day, they are just stories, but the thing is that the public is not that stupid, at least not most of the time, and for example, when the "How radiation really works" explanation became popular, that's when the media stopped using it as an excuse for everything. Even one of the most famous fictional characters, like Godzilla, has seen a multitude of different versions that no longer rely on the fact that he is a mutated dinosaur due to radiation.
Of course, this doesn't apply to everything. I don't think War of the Worlds will become obsolete until we're invaded by aliens in real life, and I seriously doubt that will happen. But even stories of that nature already have enormous difficulty remaining coherent in a credible way, at least without falling into the camping aspect, because why would an alien species go to our planet to conquer it considering that we are not even capable of finding a planet where human beings can live 100%? Most of the exoplanets we know of that have an atmosphere and are in an orbit similar to Earth are either too big for our bones to withstand the gravity, or they are too small for people to live there without having to mutate like in All Tomorrows o Man After Man.
That's why many stories with aliens today don't even bother with the idea and concept of first contact itself, but are more allegories for something else. The aliens represent something that we are, whether it's a racial problem, a colonization problem, a political problem, a problem related to how we treat the environment, cosmic terror, etc. But beyond that, the simple fact that aliens exist is no longer explored; instead, they are used as an analogy for something. It would be foolish of me to say that this hasn't always been the case. Once again, the War of the Worlds is an analogy for colonialism, but even that story details and explains the very consequences of aliens existing. That is to say, it doesn't matter what kind of thing you put in the War of the Worlds; they have to be Martians because otherwise the story loses its message. In other stories, you can put some kind of fantastic race and there won't be a problem because the story isn't about aliens as such.
In fact, I think the only story that truly focuses on the consequences and implications of the existence of these things is The Three Body Problem. I haven't seen the series or read the books, but I understand that there's an alien species there with mirrored DNA, which means that at some point this species destroyed the entire universe in a way similar to the Flood.
And the thing is, I feel that science fiction exists to explore these kinds of themes, these kinds of consequences, or at least concepts. In other words, the story can take a backseat because what's interesting here is more how something like this could actually happen or how it could be plausible in a certain way. Everything else depends on the writer's style, but for me, what's most interesting about science fiction is seeing how it uses real science to create these fictional spaces. The moment science fiction stops using science as justification and simply uses concepts that have been repeated ad nauseam is when it enters the "campy" style, which, as I said, isn't inherently bad, but I feel that in that case, it doesn't have a real message to convey. It just entertains, that's all.
Fortunately for me, I must admit that I'm not exactly an expert on modern science fiction. I mean, it's been a long time since I've read a good science fiction book that hasn't come out in the last 10 years. The last one I tried was *The Three-Body Problem*, and I had to abandon it due to university issues. But putting that aside, the truth is, it has been quite difficult to find, and I think that's partly because I haven't looked hard enough. But if that's not the case, if I have a point—and I hope I'm wrong about this—then I don't know what else is there to explore?
I feel like that guy who once said that humanity had already invented absolutely everything since the steam locomotive was the most advanced artifact in history, and obviously he was wrong, but anyway it seems strange to think about all this and say what kind of science fiction there will be when I grow up or how much of this science fiction will go down in history as something almost prophetic. And what remains after the future that was promised to us? Perhaps something post-apocalyptic, perhaps something more abstract. I don't know, but it's because of these kinds of themes that I don't feel comfortable writing science fiction anymore. My friend @julesampere I knew it quite well. I used to consider science fiction my favorite genre, and now I'm moving away from it quite a bit because I feel like there's nothing left to tell. Just waiting to see what happens or not.
This is one of those things I really hope I'm wrong about because it would be quite sad from my point of view.
