From: Adrian Tymes (wingcat@pacbell.net)
Date: Sun May 07 2000 - 22:25:21 MDT
John M Grigg wrote:
>
> Daniel Ust stated:
> Sadly,though TV science fiction remains way below what it could be. How can we
> change this? Suggestions, aside from violence and destruction, would be
> appreciated.:)
> (end)
>
> To put forth an extropian view of things, I would propose a show about
> a team of scientists and journalists who work for some sort of
> institute lead by a multi-billioniare who wants to steer humanity the
> right way as it heads toward the singularity. He is a very
> strong-minded optimist despite the obstacles the group encounters.
> You would see the characters on tv and radio at times trying to get
> the right memes out to prepare humanity.
>
> The show would take place around roughly 2025, a few years before a
> singularity would be happening, so they would have access to
> incredible technologies such as nanotech, VR, genetic engineering and
> AI, but in the early stages. One of the main characters would be an
> AI. Of course, it would be important to have conflict for the sake of
> the story so the institute could have an evil(or just misguided)
> counterpart who battles them.
Why settle for one? Sure, use a "main" counterpart, but the main enemy
would be fear itself. People are terrified of the unknown, and in a
society where radical (by 19th, or even 20th, century standards) change
happens every day, people come up with all kinds of approaches to deal
with it. Most, to be blunt, suck hard and fail. World governments are
left intact but less and less relevant, as their internal beauracracies
inhibit their reactions to crises, giving the appearance that they no
longer care for their citizens...and clearing the path for institutes
like this one to, as some would (incorrectly) put it, protect humanity
from itself. Among episode possibilities:
* One enclave decides to prevent any "new technology" from crossing its
borders. It fails utterly to prevent smuggling of nanotech stock, and
a few young upstarts decide that it would be a cool prank to dissolve
city-hall-equivalent in grey goo as a protest, using recipies
downloaded through the 'Net. One of their less tolerant members sets
the timer to go off at noon, just as the mayor is holding a live
audience. The institute steps in to stop this, and turns the protest
into a peaceful but effective one when their agents, having been
through customs, demonstrates that they *still* have "new tech". With
the impossibility of shutting it out demonstrated, they suggest
education as the key to being able to deal with it, and offer to help
set up an online briefing center for citizens to learn what they need
to know.
* A group of enhanced humans go sociopath, with predictable (though not
fatal) results against unenhanced locals. Institute does not have the
firepower to take the gang down, but it can and does enhance the local
(remaining) police...and then get the cops to use the fact of their
own upgrades to convince the group that they are not utterly alienated
from the rest of the human race.
* One of the agents dies and gets ressurected; local religious enclave
(melding of several religions) arrests them for being agents of the
devil. Court-drama argument from the books that the enclave worships;
which the institute actually demonstrates better knowledge of than the
locals themselves - thanks to downloads from the AI, but also to an
analysis of the messages of peace and love that the authors of said
works were trying to communicate in the first place. Religious
intolerance is utterly discredited in that enclave (thanks in part to
the media attention the former leaders were whipping up) by the time
the agents are found innocent. Emphasis on this point when the judge
finds the laws of intolerance utterly incompatible with the values of
the community, striking them from the books as "immoral laws" under
the local constitution.
* One branch of institute is raided as a "threat to national security",
which quickly becomes a blatant "you're doing our job better than we
are; stop it". Some of the agents upload themselves to waiting clones
at a remote facility, then suicide their
trapped-and-not-going-anywhere-soon-anyway arrested bodies. One or
two of the agents can't, but after some angst and worry, the prisoners
- who consist of about 90% of the local population, thanks to some
lock-up-happy "elected" government - simply stop working on the prison
farms and burn the crops. When the legislators make a personal visit
to find out why no more food is coming out, they start making more and
more demands on the prisoners and declaring themselves lords. The
guards, who still have some democratic values in them, turn their guns
on the legislators.
* Agents encounter an area where paranoid secrecy is the rule. They
investigate, and find that no one knows what the laws are. Martial
law was supposedly declared, but the status of that declaration is on
a "need to know" basis; the local governor states outright that no one
except himself needs to know. Although he has delusions of power,
thinly veiled with a facade of keeping the people safe which only he
believes, confusion and mild anarchy is the law of the land in
practice. After defusing a number of situations where questions of
authority threaten lives (for instance, "Am I cleared to give CPR to
this person who's just had a heart attack?"), agents explain the
situation to governor's lieutenants, who had their own suspicions but
were too afraid to talk to one another. Lieutenants set to restoring
the former order, with an emphasis on openness and self-determination.
* Briefing center from above gets subverted by propagandists, wrecking
its trust in the community. Mayor begs institute to return.
Institute uses what little trust it still has to track down the
cause - same over-the-top anarchist as before. Turns out he belongs
to an organization trying to discredit anything new in the eyes of the
public, so it can hoard the power to itself. With the cause revealed,
the mayor puts in controls to let the community at large comment on
the information in the briefing center, so that any further propaganda
can be spotted and rejected before it ruins the peoples' trust. But
the institute now has a more tangible opponent...
Ok, the above could use with some improvement. But are they what you
were talking about?
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