Many years ago, back when I was a professor before my former employer laid me off in a Zoom session, a student asked me a simple question. Why are science fiction movies always dystopian, she asked.
I was not teaching any course that dealt with science fiction. As it happens in any class discussion, we had taken a detour. This time, it was about The Matrix. She then came to my office to continue to talk about that movie and the larger issue of the dark futures in science fiction movies.
As I did when any student asked me a question, I led her to explore it on her own by posing additional questions. She was one of the few students who liked reading and thinking, and she wrote well too, which was unusual. (Later, a couple of terms into graduate school, in an email she appreciated how much another faculty and I had prepared her, and how many of her classmates found it difficult to write quality papers in the grad program.)
Perhaps I led her on a path that I preferred, and she concluded that science fiction is typically dystopian because that's what makes them interesting. Happy forever does not ring true.
The dystopian science fiction suggests that a future with abundance, and free of diseases and other causes of displeasure, is not one that we might enjoy. It is a strange notion that troubles, pain, suffering, help provide us with meaning to our lives and ease our existential angst. And that is what we read and see in science fiction too.
It used to be that science fiction writers, movie-makers, were men. Well, most of the storytelling, especially in movies, was by men.
(In the case of The Matrix, the two brothers who came up with the movie and directed it later went through gender transition: Andy Wachowski transitioned to Lilly Wachowski, Larry became Lana. They now go as the Wachowski sisters.)
Vauhini Vara's The Immortal King Rao is dystopian. A dystopian work of fiction that is authored by a woman. But this is not really new, even in this blog. A few months ago, I wrote about Tahmima Anam's The Startup Wife. While not truly dystopian, this female-authored novel wants readers to think about the direction in which software is leading us.
In the not too far future that Vara fictionalizes, technology seems to have developed enough to upload one's consciousness. In Anam's story, technology allows people to communicate with the dead.
Do we want such a future?
MIT Technology Review--clearly not from the world of fiction--asks: "Technology that lets us “speak” to our dead relatives has arrived. Are we ready? Digital clones of the people we love could forever change how we grieve."
No longer in the future. It "has arrived."
The author of that essay is Charlotte Jee, and Charlotte is conventionally a female name. Everywhere I turn, I see female authors!
Jee writes about testing out an app called HereAfterAI. "The company’s goal is to let the living communicate with the dead."
For some, this tech may even be alarming, or downright creepy. I spoke to one man who’d created a virtual version of his mother, which he booted up and talked to at her own funeral. Some people argue that conversing with digital versions of lost loved ones could prolong your grief or loosen your grip on reality. And when I talked to friends about this article, some of them physically recoiled. There’s a common, deeply held belief that we mess with death at our peril.
I understand these concerns. I found speaking to a virtual version of my parents uncomfortable, especially at first. Even now, it still feels slightly transgressive to speak to an artificial version of someone—especially when that someone is in your own family.
But I’m only human, and those worries end up being washed away by the even scarier prospect of losing the people I love—dead and gone without a trace. If technology might help me hang onto them, is it so wrong to try?
Yes. It is wrong.
AI has progressed in its ability to mimic specific physical voices, a practice called voice cloning. It has also been getting better at injecting digital personas—whether cloned from a real person or completely artificial—with more of the qualities that make a voice sound “human.” In a poignant demonstration of how rapidly the field is progressing, Amazon shared a clip in June of a little boy listening to a passage from The Wizard of Oz read by his recently deceased grandmother. Her voice was artificially re-created using a clip of her speaking that lasted for less than a minute.
As Rohit Prasad, Alexa’s senior vice president and head scientist, promised: “While AI can’t eliminate that pain of loss, it can definitely make the memories last.”
Don't these scientists have real and urgent problems to address? Like fighting climate change? Or finding a cure for cancer?
“The biggest issue with the [existing] technology is the idea you can generate a single universal person,” says Justin Harrison, founder of a soon-to-launch service called You, Only Virtual. “But the way we experience people is unique to us.” ...
The first incarnation of the service, which is set to launch in early 2023, will allow people to build a bot by uploading someone’s text messages, emails, and voice conversations.
Storytellers have always warned us about a dystopian scientific future. I suppose the future always arrives faster than we expect.
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