From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Wed Aug 14 2002 - 07:52:59 MDT
On Wed, Aug 14, 2002 at 07:58:20PM +1000, Avatar Polymorph wrote:
>
> Conclusion: Regarding background tech, this is a movie addressed to
> suburbia, to make them come to terms with what was happening in 1990.
Yes. Or rather, create an understandable movie. If you take the average
sf novel it is rather incomprehensible to the average reader because it
hinges on a lot of shared assumptions - the reader is supposed to know
what hyperspace is supposed to do, what an airlock is and how to
interpret a phaser (let alone cryonics, nanotechnology and cyberspace).
As you point out, a lot of tech shown ought to have changed society a lot
(such as the robotics), and this is usually the problem with most sf
scenarios. Thinking up the broad matrix of social, technological and
economic changes bringing each about is hard.
But I also think we should be careful not to think that any movie of
2050 that doesn't show near-singularity ageless transhumans doing witchy
nano stuff is shortsighted. That vision of the future just happens to be
a popular one on this list but it is just a vision of the future, not
anything preordained other scenarios have to include. We can argue and
should analyse the likeliehood of a radically transhuman future, but we
shouldn't take it as a given even as transhumanists. If we ignore other
possibilities we both miss the chance to learn from them and the freedom
to select likely paths towards our preferred future.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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