Sci-Fi Think

Yes, we came from the future!

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IJburg is a residential first floating neighbourhood under construction in Amsterdam, Netherlands. #architecture #future #floatingcities #innovation #climatechange #environment #nature #sustainability #globalwarming #savetheplanet #ecofriendly #netherlands (em Ijburg - Amsterdam - the netherlands) https://www.instagram.com/p/COTmgnGsjZI/?igshid=xhe78z0gkltk

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Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today - but the core of science fiction, its essence, the concept around which it revolves, has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all.

Isaac Asimov

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Predestination (2014)

Direction: Michael Spierig, Peter Spierig. 2014; Culver City, EUA: Stage 6 Films, 2014. For his final assignment, a top temporal agent must pursue the one criminal that has eluded him throughout time. The chase turns into a unique, surprising and mind-bending exploration of love, fate, identity and time travel taboos.

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AI therapist

In 2013, Terry Gilliam´s Zero Theorem, Dr Shrink-ROM, an AI therapist designed to provide mental evaluation but who ends up diagnosing the protagonist with increasingly dire conditions. [1] The USC Institute for Creative Technologies´ SimSensei is an AI-powered software capable of monitoring patients and learning their emotional signals during conversations. [2]

[1] The Zero Theorem (2013) 

[2] University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies’ (ICT)

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Black Mirror (2011-2019)

An anthology series exploring a twisted, high-tech multiverse where humanity's greatest innovations and darkest instincts collide.

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Charlie Brooker

Screenwriter Charlie Brooker is best-known for Black Mirror (2011-19), which presented insightful science fiction, psychological horror, and the techno-eschatology. It is consistently ranked as one of the best series in television today. Charlton Brooker was born on March 3, 1971 in Reading, southern England. Brooker grew up in the village of Brightwell-cum-Sotwell in Oxfordshire. His first work was as a cartoonist for Oink! magazine in the late 1980s. After attending Wallingford School, Brooker joined the University of Westminster, where he studied Social Communication. Brooker didn't officially finish the course since, according to him, the university didn't accept that the theme of his thesis was Video Games.

Brooker first major success was the miniseries “Dead Set,” written for Zeppotron, part of the Endemol group of production and distribution companies that produces the actual Big Brother, which was nominated for a BAFTA for "Best Drama Serial" in 2009. In 2010, he was given the Best Entertainment Programme Award for Newswipe from the Royal Television Society. At the BAFTA TV Awards 2017, his show Charlie Brooker's 2016 Wipe won for Best Comedy and Comedy Entertainment Programme.

In 2011, Channel 4 aired Brooker’s best known work, Black Mirror. Over the course of its five seasons, the show won eight Emmy Awards for "San Junipero", "USS Callister" and Bandersnatch, including three consecutive wins in the Outstanding Television Movie category. Black Mirror was inspired by older anthology series, such as The Twilight Zone, which Brooker felt were able to deal with controversial, contemporary topics with less fear of censorship than other more realistic programmes. Brooker developed Black Mirror to highlight topics related to humanity's relationship with technology, creating stories that feature "the way we live now – and the way we might be living in 10 minutes' time if we're clumsy."

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Her (2013)

Direction: Spike Jonze. 2013; Burbank, EUA: Warner Bros. Pictures, 2013. In a near future, a lonely writer develops an unlikely relationship with an operating system designed to meet his every need.

Can a Machine Become Self-Aware? Notably, Hans Moravec, an adjunct faculty member in Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute, and author of a number of books on the present and future of robotics, predicts fully intelligent robots before 2050, based on extrapolations of well-established trends in computing speed and data storage capacity [1]. If these predictions turn out to be correct, how will humans and machines interact beyond the singularity? How will we treat our sentient machine and how will we ensure that we don’t become dominated by our own creations?

[1] Home page for Hans Moravec and predictions of fully intelligent robots. http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/.

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MIT Dormio

"Human creativity...derives from conscious access to the underlying and unconscious forces" - Eric Kandel, Nobel Prize winner neuroscientist, Age of Insight (2012).

Imagine planting ideas in your subconscious and collecting in your dreams inspirations for your artistic work and resolutions to your conflicts. MIT DORMIO is an interface to your semi-conscious dreams - with the help of a social robot and a handheld interface you should access the state of Hypnagogia, the way Leonardo DaVinci, Dalí, Tesla and Edison each accessed their dreams.

Or as in the movie INCEPTION (2010), a journey into the mind of a thief who steals corporate secrets through the use of dream-sharing technology until he is given the inverse task of planting an idea in the mind of a C.E.O.

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Mercedes Benz 2020s Vision AVTR

James Cameron’s Avatar inspired Mercedes Benz Vision AVTR revealed at this years #CES2020. While the reveal of the futuristic Vision AVTR (“Advanced Vehicle Transformation”) came as a surprise to most at this years annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, in hindsight it was a very clever way to show off Mercedes Benz’s futuristic design capabilities while offering a subtle side note reminder of the impending movie sequel.

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Andrew Niccol

Born in 10 June 1964, is a New Zealand screenwriter, producer, and director. He wrote and directed the sci-fi films Gattaca (1997), Simone (2002), In Time (2011), The Host (2013), Good Kill (2014) and Anon (2018). He also wrote and co-produced The Truman Show (1998), which earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay in 1999 and won him a BAFTA award for Best Screenplay. His films tend to explore social, cultural and political issues, as well as artificial realities or simulations.

The films foreground posthuman issues such as media surveillance and simulation (The Truman Show), cloning and genetic engineering (Gattaca), virtual reality and digital media (S1m0ne), biometrics and neoliberalism (In Time and Anon), and mediated war and unmanned aerial vehicles (Good Kill).

Variants of the humanist solution to these issues include an authentic real, a space beyond mediation, an outside of media ecology (The Truman Show), a human spirit that is not reducible to materiality (Gattaca), an authentic identity, and actual rather than virtual reality (S1m0ne), an innate sense of justice and outside to the flow of neoliberal finance (In Time), and face-to-face rather than screen-to-screen relationality, and a real war in comparison to a virtual war (Good Kill).

[meuuniversocosmico]

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Space Time Travel

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The Zero Theorem (2013)

Direction: Terry Gilliam. 2013; EUA: Stage 6 Films, 2013. A hugely talented but socially isolated computer operator is tasked by Management to prove the Zero Theorem: that the universe ends as nothing, rendering life meaningless. But meaning is what he already craves.

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SpaceX 2020s Dragon 2

“Anything you dream is fiction, and anything you accomplish is science, the whole history of mankind is nothing but science fiction.”

― Ray Bradbury

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Battlestar Galactica (TV Series 2004-2009)

When an old enemy, the Cylons, resurface and obliterate the 12 colonies, the crew of the aged Galactica protect a small civilian fleet - the last of humanity - as they journey toward the fabled 13th colony, Earth.

What makes a good science fiction? Because the best science fiction is not only about spaceships, robots or laser weapons. The best science fiction will make you think about what you believe, rethink your concepts, challenge your preconceived ideas and prepare you for a place that all of us, regardless of our human condition, will go, for the future.

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Ernest Cline

Born March 29, 1972, is an American novelist, slam poet, and screenwriter. He is known for his novels Ready Player One and Armada; he also co-wrote the screenplay for the film adaptation of Ready Player One, directed by Steven Spielberg.

In June 2010, Cline sold his first novel, Ready Player One, a book that takes place in a dystopian vision of the 2040s. The book is about a kid who tries to solve the keys to find a billionaire's wealth in a sort of competition. The book was sold in a bidding war to the Crown Publishing Group (a division of Random House). The film rights to the novel were sold the following day, to Warner Bros., with Cline co-writing the screenplay. Ten months later, with the hardcover release coinciding with the paperback release, Cline revealed on his blog that both the paperback and hardcover editions of Ready Player One contain an elaborately hidden Easter egg. This clue formed the first part of a series of staged video gaming tests, similar to the plot of the novel. Cline also revealed that the competition's grand prize would be a 1981 DeLorean. The prize was awarded in 2012. The paperback is currently in its 17th printing.

Cline's second novel, Armada, was released on July 14, 2015, by Crown Publishing Group. On December 7, 2015, Cline announced the sale of the film rights to Armada to Universal Pictures for a reported seven-figure sum.

A third novel was announced in August 2015. It has been confirmed that this novel is to be a sequel to Ready Player One.

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Gravity (2013)

Direction: Alfonso Cuarón. 2013; United States: Warner Bros. Pictures, 2013. Two astronauts work together to survive after an accident leaves them stranded in space.

“Those among you who have seen Gravity, the film by Alfonso Cuaron, will have noticed, I am sure, that once again a blockbuster’s special effects offer a powerful symbol of a drastic change of mental state. For the human race there is no space anymore, at least no durable occupation of outer space. That is, there is no way to escape from the Earth”. — Bruno Latour, Telling Friends from Foes in the Time of the Anthropocene.