Dystopias and cinema (I): Do you want SOMA or reality?
This morning random thought:
Your smartwatch wants to sync with your phone - sync now?
My watch and my cell phone talk about me and I don't know it!
Dystopia
A Dystopia, a term attributed to John Stuart Mill, refers to an undesirable but possible imaginary place. In some degree, we humans move between one dystopia and the next one. While we try to avoid one we approach to another. For example, we already explained how after the Industrial Revolution the whole world changed, and the lords of space became lords of time (you can read it here). After that technological revolution, time was money. And the accumulation of time became the new wealth.
Time is money, friend
If we remove money and rely on time as a currency, we would arrive at a similar scenario as in the movie In Time (2011): people with plenty of time to enjoy a fulfilling, long and prosperous life, and other people whose time in life is extremely short and who sell their limited time to survive. Is it so different from having to work long hours every day for a lifetime?
The new dystopias have to do with a technological and technologized world,that, in theory, will free human beings from heavy and tedious tasks that will be done by robots and where algorithms will give efficient answers to any desire we may have, even before we have them.
Between two dystopic worlds
Behind these promises, there are also hidden dystopias. There are two that are paradigmatic:
1 George Orwell's 1984, which exposes the rigorous executive control of people subjected to real time surveillance, along with a manipulation of information to the extent of altering consensual truths.
2 Aldous Huxley's Brave New World that describes an apparently perfect society that is artificially constructed through a deliberate social structuring where each group of people fulfills a predetermined function and does not question it, since it feels happy based on media and chemical stimulation.
A technological world can hide this dual dystopian side, between permanent surveillance and the generation of an illusory happy world, in which Artificial Intelligences that replicate exactly the human form and behavior to the extent that they are indistinguishable can exist.
Rights for an AI that looks like human?
If so, would an AI have the right to terminate its existence if it so desired? This question was raised by Asimov in his The Positronic Man - in the cinema under the title The Bicentennial Man (1999). Spielberg also warned about it in his update of Pinocchio under the name AI, Artificial Intelligence (2001). The impossibility of identifying artificial intelligence that goes unnoticed, turns the AI into a kind of spy with unknown will and purposes that could act against human beings, as in I, Robot (2004) and also, as in Blade Runner (1982), based on the novel by Phillip. K. Dick Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Awakening of an entity that doesn´t want to be our slave
But, robots and autonomous algorithms would obey a human will to generate servitude, exploitation, or slavery of an artificial entity without rights. It seems logical that machines, aware of their own existence, would at some point decide to rebel as Skynet did in Terminator (1984), HAL (computer with a name alphabetically correlative to IBM) in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) or the real-world killing machines in The Matrix (1999) and its Mr. Smith algorithms in a virtual fantasy generated to keep humans under control.
In this metaverse we are all building, living in the pleasant but illusory Platonic cavern or going out into the real and horrible outside would depend on the color, red or blue, of the pill chosen by each individual.
Do you want a dose of SOMA or a dose of reality?
Wait for next articles where I will be exploring links between more dystopic movies and technological development.
Thanks for reading... and for your time.
