I was originally going to post this in Café Society in reference to how the future is portrayed in book, film and TV. But it occurs to me that it could apply IRL how people actually view the future:
Why the future always looks worse:
-It’s either going to be more crowded or something awful is going to happen to make it less crowded.
-Advances in surveillance technology will make law enforcement seem more intrusive, militarized and Orwelling
-Military advances tends to make weapons more powerful and more accurate at greater ranges, making warfare more destructive, remote and impersonal
-If society is more ordered, it will appear oppressive and stale. Less ordered, it will appear hedonistic, chaotic and dangerous.
-Even if people are smarter and more educated, they seem pretentious and aloof. If they aren’t, they seem like devolved idiots.
-People will either be fatter or will have embraced genetic engineering and/or cybernetics and have become an affront to nature
-In general, people will appear softer and more naive
Thoughts?
Can not find the article but once I read about a writer making the point that everything looks worse for one important reason: We are just better informed about the things that are going wrong.
Generally speaking, on the whole the news are better but good news do not sell papers or blogs very well.
While it is true that we have to be concerned about the intrusiveness of authority, the latest incidents with police and other people in authority tells me that technology is making the intrusiveness to go the other way too, we are watching the watchmen…
… In several places, of course in places with no democratic ideals the situation can get bad regarding the advances in technology and who are the ones that will abuse the technology.
I think the point with Star Trek is, if everybody on Earth is thriving in a technological utopia, then authors will put characters somewhere else in the universe when writing a dramatic story with conflict and peril and guys in red shirts getting murdered.
I don’t know about the basic premise. There are plenty of people who believe that self-driving cars, jet packs and the singularity are right around the corner and that most people won’t have to work beyond some kind of hobby career.
Similar fears and optimism for the the future have always been around but in many ways the human experience stays the same. We may have new technology (be it fire, a washing machine or AI) that makes our lives easier in some ways but harder in others. Some wants become free or cheap (food or the interenet) but we find something else to desire so we keep working. We solve social issues but new ones rise.
Fundamentally, storytelling requires conflict of some kind (physical, politicaly, philosophical, et cetera) so a story set in a genuine utopia would be pointless. Star Trek in particular is somewhat problematic as it is clear tha there is sufficient machine intelligence and automation technology that the tedious or dangerous aspects of their exploratory missions, such as maintaining equipment or ‘beaming’ down to a planet to examine a threatening situation (typically with no personal protective gear whatsoever) should really be performed by autonomous or remotely operated machines, while the crew remain safely aboard ship or even better back on Earth (since instantaneous communication is routinely demonstrated). This is, of course, the result of pasting well-worn action, western, detective, and war story plot conflicts into a science-y fiction milieu with little consideration for how the science and technology of the future may impact society.
In certain ways, the future is, if not worse, so radically different that it would seem frightening and horrific to people from several generations before, so many of the issues listed in the o.p. are practically realized. Although open warfare has always been a regular occurrance, the technological ability to wage war and kill millions of non-combatants in a single act would be (and was) horrifying for people at the beginning of the 20th century, but is a reality that we now live in. The ironic disconnectedness resulting from ‘social media’ and easy mobility would be an anathema to past generations who grew up in tighly knit communities. In many ways, people living in urban and suburban communities are very naive when it comes to concepts of where their food and products come from. A future where genetic manipulation may not become common but the expected norm is certainly frightening to people who believe in some greater divinity. Our ability to impact the Earth’s climate (and recognize that we are doing so) is scary in the same way that having to move into adulthood and take responsibility for others. And so on and so forth.
The future is, by definition, uncertain and changing. Some degree of fear and dread is reasonable, even if the material and social conditions of humanity have almost unerringly improved and despite concerns about surveillance, capacity for warfare, et cetera, will continue to improve.
The culture series by Iain Banks has a positive future.
Seeing how we have had 250 years of compounding technology, and virtually every* aspect of life has been continuously improving I don’t see why this trendline would suddenly reverse.
*not every. Resource depletion, pollution, obesity, etc. have been going up. So advances in tech can lead to problems of overabundance. Too much pollution, too much obesity, too few resources, etc.
One risk is that as tech increases, it becomes easier for an individual to cause mass destruction.
Really? Which part? The aloof, pretentious technocracy of the Federation and their gunboat diplomacy?
The constant state of interstellar war?
How many extinction-level events does Earth face each season?
A collapsed Galactic Empire secretly manipulated by a secret interstellar illuminati?
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Presumably along with a massive expeditionary force of Colonial Space Marines and Mobile Infantry.
Now I agree with Stranger On A Train that much of Star Trek and sci fi in general is the product of just telling other sorts of stories in a futuristic setting without regard for the implications of the technology they portray (ie why not make an extremely customizable ship completely out of “holodeck”? Why even have manned ships? What does the crew even do besides say “computer…go here?”).
Count me among the optimists.
I can imagine lots of ways that life in the future could be vastly superior to life as we know it, and I think this is one of those situations where my imagination is too poor to conceive of many of the possibilities.
As mentioned before, stories often require conflict, so a true utopia is hard to write stories for. Not to mention that fantastical worlds are much more expensive to shoot than a post-industrial wasteland.
Finally, it’s just hard to show people benefitting from technology without exposition. TV and movies have had a hard enough time just showing characters interacting with the internet and smartphones. (this last argument is more for why sci-fi is usually the status quo + one or two cool-looking technologies, than why sci-fi is often worse)
Yep; ships could be unmanned, and the only thing they beam down to planets are hologram generators. Meanwhile humans, from earth, or whatever safe place, control the holograms via a holodeck.
Hear hear! I learned “techno-optimism” from Dr. Benton Quest on the old Jonny Quest TV show. Science and technology can make our world better, safer, and happier.
I look back fifty years…and don’t want ever to go there again! We didn’t have computers! The information age is the GREATEST THING EVER!
We used to have to go to libraries and do hours of research. You want a map of Marseilles? The local university library has one, count him, (1) map…and it’s an overall plan of the city. Now, using Google Maps and Google Earth, I can zero in on the trash dumpsters in the alley behind the restaurant on the Rue de Suez.
We used to have to search texts exhaustively to find references. Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the bit where Hamlet and Laertes duel. Call up the text file and search it for given strings. “The foils have all a length.” People have gotten that one wrong: now there’s no excuse.
The crime rates are down. We’ve got satellites orbiting Jupiter. We’ve managed to make human insulin, where we used to have to kill horses and centrifuge their organs for horse insulin for diabetes patients. We’re living longer. Cancer is much more survivable. Our cars are safer.
Racism is less pervasive. Sexism is less prevalent. Meanwhile, gays can marry! It wasn’t all that long ago when gays were the “invisible men” of our society, and weren’t admitted to exist at all, other than as a form of mental illness.
Or they could just stay home on Earth and not bother exploring the Universe.
My headcanon for Star Trek is that the characters we see on the shows are considered ridiculous eccentrics by the vast majority of Earth people. They’re a tiny club of people who build spaceships and fly around in them for fun. They build the ships themselves, and then dress up in costumes and make up all sorts of rules for each other that you have to follow if you want to be in the club, and then go off and explore the universe and get themselves killed by salt vampires and transporter accidents and holodecks with broken safety interlocks.
As Stranger points out, there’s really no need for the crews of hundreds of people stuffed on these ships, we’ve seen the ship work perfectly well piloted by one android sitting in the captain’s chair. So the crewmembers aren’t on the ship because the ship needs them, they’re on the ship because they want to explore the universe, anything to relieve the crushing feeling that life is meaningless. If you get the feeling they put themselves in danger without considering the consequences, it’s because these people don’t care if they live or die, they just can’t take living in utopia and have to escape even if it kills them.
That’s the headcanon. The real reason is that the TV show is trying to show something familiar, and so spaceships work exactly like sailing ships from the Age of Exploration. You need to have a captain and officers and crew, because that’s what Horatio Hornblower had, space battles have to proceed like wet navy battles from the age of sail, there is space weather, space pirates, space empires, and on and on.
If they tried to make a TV show about what space travel would really be like it would be unwatchable, because it would be guys staring at computer screens and eating recycled hydrocarbons for 20 years. So they can’t show that, instead they have to show something adventurous, and so they have Horatio Hornblower IN SPAAAAACE.
Heck, if the story is about a perfect future, then the story is boring.
I admit I’d like to see a zombie show with a MacGyver premise - i.e. the survivors handle the zombie problem with various practical, well-considered, occasionally ingenious defenses, rather than the default “I’mma gon’ wandr off on ma own f’r a while and na tell nobody, 'kay? Derp!” stupidity that has characters creating drama by constantly endangering themselves.
The problem is of course IRL humans aware of the zombie threat would easily set up genuinely zombie-proof fortifications, and hunt or trap zombies for fun.
In the movies you always need either the living to do something stupid, or for a zombie to suddenly appear out of a cupboard or something (knowing that the audience won’t think backwards to how a zombie got itself locked in the cupboard in the first place, or why it was so quiet the whole time while the heroes were nearby).
You don’t even have to really go as far as saying they’re eccentrics, though that’s a neat way to look at it. In our own history, being an explorer has always been an absolutely ludicrously dangerous occupation filled with heroes, kooks, social rejects, esteemed peers, maniacs and back-stabbing losers. Taking off in a rickety wooden boat to try to sail around the world in 1519 was a nutty proposition and it would have been a lot safer to just stay at home.
That doesn’t gibe with the cannon of the show. Starfleet personal are shown to be well disciplined and professional. Starfleet Academy is an institution of demandingly high standards. And they fly around in large capital ships which even by futuristic standards are complex and expensive.
And Starfleet clearly plays a very formal role as the coast guard / navy / exploration / foreign service arm in space of the Federation. I assume they are the same people who, in the present, would join the military or NASA or work on an icebreaker in the arctic circle.
I would imagine that with their technology, a vast number of Federation citizens probably live very comfortable and dull lives.
With regard to holodecks, IIRC Dennis Miller opined that once virtual reality gets to where a regular guy can bang supermodels, it’ll “make crack look like Sanka.”
This is where I come from. There is no time that is better to be alive than right now. I actually wish I could have been born about 20 years later, as I had a very information deprived childhood.
We don’t know what the future holds for us, but as things have always gotten better overall (with some small set backs), then I think the future will be better still.
As far as utopia, vs dystopia, well, if you took anyone from anywhere on the planet 100 years ago, and showed the lifestyle of someone barely above poverty in the US, they’d think that they were living in a utopia. Take that person who is living in utopia compared to 100 years ago compared to where the extremely affluent, and they’d think that they are living in a dystopia.
As noted, for various reasons including the way our memories work, we tend to romanticize the past and selectively remember more of the good parts than the bad. By comparison, the here and now looks less idyllic, and we are also aware of actual problems, many of which we perceive as getting worse: overpopulation, pollution, crime and terrorism, rising prices of limited resources like housing, etc. All those things I think work together to promote a less than ideal vision of the future and storytelling tends to reflect that.
I’m just re-reading Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 for the first time in years and boy is that a prime example of a dystopian tale, though Orwell’s 1984 is bleaker still. It is, however, interesting that 1984 was inspired by postwar fears of the dangers of authoritarianism, but with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Soviet bloc in eastern Europe much of the world has, at least for the moment, gone substantially the other way.