While interesting (and a somewhat expected trend), what would be more helpful is the dual analysis and factcheck of "Who Saved the World". I.e., if the world avoided the worst, how did it happen? Was it magical thinking or something real that we can actually embrace and build on?
The increasing gloominess around our predicament is to a large degree due to the persistent failure of positive forces and behaviors to mitigate destructive trends. There is no point imagining a unreachable utopia if we can't indicate a real path towards it.
Its not that there is strictly zero evidence on our ability to avoid a major civilizational setback in the visible future. There is at least the open source movement. This is a remarkable, highly non-trivial behavior and it has already affected our reality. It is still little-known outside tech circles. Maybe there are other such positive stories in other circles. Somebody should base a sci-fi scenario on them :-)
Its a most remarkable story but how would one "scale" this type of behavior to make a difference? If you zero-in on his state of mind during the incident:
> the influences on his decision included that he had been told a U.S. strike would be all-out, so five missiles seemed an illogical start; that the launch detection system was new and, in his view, not yet wholly trustworthy; that the message passed through 30 layers of verification too quickly; and that ground radar failed to pick up corroborating evidence, even after minutes of delay
So you have a highly trained and informed person applying a mix of reasoning and intuition to guide their action rather than blindly and lazily follow instructions - or worse, be pushed around by fears, group think, peer pressure, etc. without regard to actual impact.
Clearly if the majority of people would exhibit such behaviors we'd be in much better shape, but how do we get there?
It’s an interesting presentation and I like the analysis of how science fiction has changed. This bit seems like feel-good anti-growth boilerplate though:
> What if we reject the notion that the economy must produce more and more, but rather embrace the notion that a functioning society is only as successful as its least privileged soul?
Among other things, I think the world is going to need a lot more air conditioners, and the energy to run them. Economic growth is a vague abstraction, when you get more specific, there are some important needs.
The key part is the second bit - a world where we build loads of air conditioners so that a few people can comfortably cool their mansions in the desert while others boil in their apartments or on the streets is unacceptable.
Presumably we need more air conditioners precisely because there are currently people without them..? I think the guy you're responding to believes there's a need for more AC to prevent exactly what you're describing.
And re; what you're describing, if you have an AC you (generally) don't need more AC's, that'd be pretty pointless. AC units aren't a thing that makes any sense to hoard away, so the future you're imagining where people in "mansions in the desert" somehow have all the AC and everyone else is just "boiling" away doesn't really seem like a realistic concern. Especially so if people agree that building more AC's will help.
Please look at Qatar or the UAE, as I feel that will pretty much clear up that feeling about it being unrealistic.
I don't mean look at some specific mansion, I almost even mean the entire countries, particularly Qatar. If you've ever been there, it's mind-boggling how much extravagant waste is displayed everywhere. I mean true extremes of marble and gold foil everywhere, along with the relevant aspect of HUGE air conditioned structures.
I mean so truly excessively huge where vast amounts of empty space are being cooled for nearly nobody within large malls, indoor plazas, mansions, etc.
Also, while I can see a valid point being that maybe they're more corrupt and wasteful than most, I'd just wish to then say I've seen some pretty tremendous waste in western countries, there's just usually more of an attempt to disguise it. And related to your point about hoarding, I'd ask you to consider what the benefit of extra private yachts or the Nth additional mansion or apartment is for a very rich individual are. Why hoard away ships, or trinkets, or homes that won't be occupied? It's a difference of mindset and desires/goals.
Extravagant, wasteful wealth obviously exists, and yes, waste is bad.
But if your goal were, for example, to provide air conditioning to most of Mexico, I don't think reusing existing stuff is going to do it. You're going to need manufacturing.
You'll also need some way of making sure that effort doesn't get redirected, because it will attract people trying to get a cut of it.
It places a moral judgment on economic growth and production.
Which I find deeply confusing as these precisely correlate with QoL compared to life 100 years ago. E.g. the air conditioner was just invented and way more expensive 100 years ago. With the attitude of "as successful as its least privileged soul", I doubt the air conditioner would be nearly as available today.
This needs a better methodology section. It's not a trivial undertaking to analyze the top 200 sci-fi films of each of the past 8 decades. It says it was automated with LLM sentiment analysis, but how? Did you get access to a content library that allowed you to feed the film stream itself to the models? Did you get transcripts? Do all of these films even have transcripts? Did you generate them if not? How do you deal with transcripts losing out on most of the setting you get from the visuals themselves? Do you have access to the screenplays somehow? Does the context window of these models really fit 1600 films at once?
Sophie’s choice between scrolly crap and a video. No surprise I suppose, given the article focuses on films and ignores the much larger body of sci-fi novels which had no shortage of pessimism in the past and have no shortage of optimism today.
Andy Weir's stuff isn't utopian but is obviously very science-positive. I have slightly mixed feelings about Alastair Reynolds' work (I thought Revelation Space petered out a bit, but that Zima Blue is profoundly beautiful etc) but his Blue Remembered Earth trilogy is a very deliberate (dare I say heavy handed) attempt at a more optimistic universe. Going back a little, obviously there's the Culture series which definitely does examine some of the complexity behind a powerful, galaxy-spanning utopian civilisation and its AI attendants, and some of the books are tragic, but I'd definitely live there. More generally, just google solarpunk and you'll find lots of recommendations. I don't know which authors specifically identify with that genre going forward, I've heard good things about Becky Chambers but haven't read any of her books yet.
Huh, I hadn't even considered Andy Weir to be science fiction. Good stuff, but not thought-provoking in the way "real" scifi should be... in my mind, at least.
I hear you about the Revelation Space series. The first (titular) book is one of the best I've ever read.. but it is painfully obvious there was no plan.
This isn't a book, but the new Star Trek: Strange New Worlds show is pretty optimistic. It shows Earth going through some "Eugenics Wars" very soon, which then escalate into WWIII which kills off 40% of the world's population in nuclear attacks, but after that things look pretty good with humans inventing warp drive and exploring the stars and creating a federation of planets.
Oh yea Star Trek always has been a great example of optimistic scifi.
But I feel it’s a bit dated and rooted in “US American culture” - not a bad thing per se but it feels to me like it’s not real realistic to expect that kind of culture to survive the strive that is coming.
That's the standard Star Trek backstory that was even there in the original 1960s series (the Eugenic Wars, and the character of Khan Noonien Singh, the genetically engineered tyrant, were introduced in the 1967 episode "Space Seed").
No, they modified it somewhat in SNW: they pushed back the start of the Eugenics Wars (there's a time-travel episode explaining it, originally it starts in the 1990s), and then they threw in a bit about a "second civil war" and WWIII killing 40% of the population in the pilot episode.
That doesn't strike me as actually being very optimistic considering that we will be living in the Eugenics Wars and WWIII part of the timeline not the exploring the stars part of the timeline.
There is a cool new subgenre in recent years called Solarpunk, which focuses on optimistic world-building. Some of it can come across as rather preachy regarding climate change, but there is some decent reading in there. My favourite so far is Another Life by Sarena Ulibarri.
Iain M. Banks "Culture" novels. Oh, there is certainly room for many depressing insights in human nature, but the overall picture is dominated by the AIs, having created an utopia.
The Culture is arguably our best possible future, and yet it’s still a world in which the underlying structure of meaning is almost gone. Winning the game is as bad as losing it.
Great article. I've always thought that pessimistic sci-fi dystopias were on the rise, but it turns out most still have positive endings. The observation about walking out of the theatre, and seeing the worst ahead of us is quite interesting.
It would be cool to compare with other, non sci-fi stories. EG: I have been noticing the rise of escapist fantasy narratives in popular media — wish fulfillment stories where a Mary Sue like main character rises above all challenges without struggle. You can see this particularly in light novels, manga, and anime in the now popularized "isekai", "cultivation", or "system progression" genres. It would be interesting to find out how the public's fascination with these types of stories correlate with economic, social, or political undulations in the real world.
Cyberpunk was always the “real sci-fi” in terms of what was actually going to happen wasn’t it? Murder drones, corporations having more power than nation states, the EU block becoming regulatory, climate havoc, the gig economy and a continuous restructuring of centralised society.
It also didn’t have a lot of happy endings. Because the world didn’t end, it just got continuesly shittier.
Some would argue we are already living Cyberpunk, just without all the cool stuff.
BTW, why single out "the EU block becoming regulatory" as something negative prophesied by Cyberpunk? I have recently watched a video about the timeline of Cyberpunk 2020/2077 (which is just one universe, granted), and the EU sounded like the only ones who had their shit together, even though they were facing sabotage from all directions.
The world of Cyberpunk RPG essentially has EU be a lot nicer NUSA, with considerable economical domination (thus the use of eurodollar, which was one of the names floated for what became Euro currency), Soviet Union as this really schizo place but which on basic human decency scores miles above post-USA America, and an alliance of African nations as the unexpected black horse who made huge resurgence in space (which also contains probably the only really "free" nations - the old ESA space habitats and their allies).
This is also reflected (and probably heavily influenced CP2077) in Ghost in the Shell, where European Union, in somewhat fluctuating alliance with Soviet Union, is probably among the best locations to live.
Cool visualization, perhaps interesting thoughts but alas it is completely worthless as it is AI analysis based. I wish the author warned about that on top instead of the bottom so I didn't waste my time with it.
It became obvious to me that it's LLM generated halucinations, when i read the content boxes of "protagonists fight another human". It's totally borked, but the graphics look nice.
It seemingly always says "It's a story of a human vs. an unknown threat", which just doesn't match most movies contents.
You're half-right. It's not hallucinations, but I think the question to the LLM was "do the protagonists fight against the unknown?", when it should have been "are they fighting against another human?". So the LLM is answering about the unknown, when the actual graph talks about human antagonists.
Even then, it's clearly responding some half-true stuff about unknown for movies with clear, known antagonists. It's just trying to put "unknown" somewhere into response.
One thing to think about is the question what capitalisms end game is. Suppose everyone is buying stuff and you're CEO of a nearly 100% efficient corporation, whatever that means. Your job is to somehow make gains every year.
The problem is that this was easy in a inefficient corporation within a market where everybody was inefficient. But the things you have to do to keep these gains are getting more and more ridiculous, more and more amoral.
This is our problem. The times where easy gains with honest products was possible is long past, now everything has to be a scam, a meta game, some sort of hidden monopoly or so cutting edge that it isn't even profitable.
The analysis seems great and I find the subject interesting enough.
However, the presentation is really bad, in a way where it is actually making very difficult to grasp the content.
The actual main information from the graphs is hard to read (why isn't it showing all numbers?), with colors that are too similar. It does not support the niceties that html chart provide (like dynamic filtering or alternate views).
It is really hard to find where we are in the article, so going back and forth is painful.
In terms of accessibility it is also quite bad as it does not show the charts.
If the information is presented on a standard format with a ToC I would definitely read it in its entirety.
This makes me wonder how the stats compare for other forms of media, like TV shows, books, video games, comics, etc. Feels like there's probably more of a mix of attitudes and settings in these mediums, at least from the few I've seen.
Like in television, you've got Black Mirror which usually has near contemporary stories set in horrifically messed up versions of our world, but also Doctor Who and Star Trek, which are far more optimistic and deal with a far wider mix of settings and time periods. Like Utopia, a dystopian story set in the year 100 trillion where the simple passage of time has destroyed all but a handful of worlds via entropy, and the last remaining humans are trying to survive a dying universe.
And there are arguably more stories in those mediums that do deal with outside threats more than internal ones, often due to the 'monster of the week' structure some of these shows and stories run on. If you want sci-fi stories with external threats, virtually every sci-fi game you can think of has you killing hostile aliens and mutants and monsters by the thousand. Plenty that don't have any ties to Earth or current events too, and simply take place in a completely independent setting with entirely original problems.
This isn't a discussion about content. Content on the web is more rich and diverse than it's ever been.
This is, as ever, a discussion about production - about the web having matured around a limited set of standards and frameworks, and web development no longer being as fun as it was, before it was a job for many people here (or at least before expectations became so rigid.)
One thing I find really fascinating about the gritty cyberpunk dystopia is that its setting is not actually a prediction, but a memory of a stateless city between China and Hong Kong that was demolished 30 years ago.
His result is that this is not true. The trope is also related to historically untenable ideas such as the "noble savage" or, if you take it too far, fascism's quest to bring back "real men".
Acoup tought me a lot and changed my mind a few times, and the paper is interesting but far from the state of the art. Even so, I don't think their disagreement is big, and looking at the core of a new empire as barbarians/ noble savages is an incorrect label of the old empire.
I'd say the power of a group of people depends on not only the size, but also on the morale and organization. Mr Deveraux mentions something similar at the end of your link.
Looking trough this lens, the change in Age from Intellect to Decadence is a hidden breakdown of the organization. Even if the number of people rises, the coherence and trust of the group disappears.
The other end of the Glubb paper seems similar. The old empire is less organized than everyone expected, and the 'barbarians' are actually a new group, better organized and more willing to adapt then expected.
Something that this article only touches on indirectly (when it talks about walking out of the theater to the real world) is timelines. Even if a post apocalyptic film presents the hero making the world a better place in the future, we won't be around for that. The part of the timeline that the viewer will experience is the dystopia.
In that respect, I don't see how dystopian/post-apocalyptic fiction can generally be optimistic for the viewer.
I wonder if the ChatGPT analyses of individual films might have biases. For example, since ChatGPT is trained on today's data, it might be better at recognizing social conflicts in themes of today's films, than the social conflicts of the 1950s.
I can’t remember the source, but there’s a quote that goes “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”.
I’ve yet to read any kind of optimistic sci-fi that operates in a capitalist society. The two most obvious (Star Trek and the Culture) both envision a post-scarcity society enabled by technology so advanced it might as well be magic.
At the time when he killed himself Fisher was developing the idea of "Psychedelic Socialism" as a potential counter to Capitalist Realism. I enjoyed this discussion of the idea:
As I understand it, the idea is that "consciousness raising" is a necessary component of catalyzing and maintaining the sense of empowerment, hope, and motivation necessary for a social movement to succeed. Although the consciousness raising in psychedelic socialism could literally be psychedelic drugs, Fisher is mostly using that are a metaphor. Consciousness raising could also take the forms like music & art, yoga, religion, ritual, reading circles, etc.
This suggests that things like the New Age beliefs of the Hippy movement, the Pan-African/Afrofuturist symbolism of the civil rights movement, or the rock and roll of the anti-Vietnam protests were not just trivialities. Rather they were essential to the movement's ability to impact the world.
Note: If you search for discussions of "Psychedelic Socialism" or related terms like "Acid Communism", a lot of the discussion that you will find is (not surprisingly) among proponents of drug/psychedelic exploration.
Personally, although I found some of the specifics of their viewpoints a little wacky (and in particular some of them are disturbingly anti-psychology), I found the overall ideas that they raised useful. That is to say: for your average person I think the best course of action is to just "absorb what is useful and discard the rest" when reading their discussions.
> technology so advanced it might as well be magic
All "optimistic" sci-fi is reliant on a utopian fantasy in some form, I wouldn't be looking to sci-fi authors to actually have a workable recipe for how to achieve any given desired societal outcome..
Really that quote is just asinine stupidity because literally anything undefined is harder to imagine than the end of the world with a side of throwing in of the usual socialist sophistry "everything I don't like is capitalism's fault!". It literally is "It is totally capitalism's fault that I am unable to come up with a better alternative to capitalism!" Never mind that they are the idiots who have spent lifetimes trying to solve economic problems using philosophical divorce-from-reality-is-an-intrinsic-virtue models and economic models that are so bad that they would have been laughed at as a joke by even bronze age merchants.
Divorce-from-reality-as-virtue was stupid back when Aristotle was using triangular models of falling objects and it even is stupider now.
I don't get how so many supposedly smart, educated people fall for things which are so obviously complete and utter bullshit.
Peoples inability to come up with a better alternative doesn’t mean there aren’t issues with capitalism.
Fossil fuels are the easiest and most effective way of powering transport at the moment (and pretty much the only game in town for air travel). Doesn’t mean they aren’t a massive problem.
I think it is interesting that a majority of the changes happened between the 50s and the 70s. I guess it might be attributed to post-war optimism and the golden age of capitalism that lasted just about the same era.
There's what people sometimes call the dark green / bright green distinction: can we solve the problems caused by technology with other, different, technology?
Environmentalism and precautionary principle thinking in general steer away from techno-optimism by asking "what could go wrong with this?"
I was really drawn in and thinking deeply about this, until I got to the end:
The content analysis of each film and TV show was generated with the ChatGPT 4o large language model. [..] So the content analysis for each film and TV show – as well as the short explanation of its answer – are based on ChatGPT 4o’s responses.
I immediately discounted everything I'd just read. I cannot imagine doing this work manually, but I also cannot imagine believing that these effects are real based on ChatGPT's determination.
Maybe that's just indicative of my current "AI" cynicism, but it was remarkable to me how immediately my opinion changed.
Would you still think about this and feel that you have learnt something?
Disclaimer: I don't think it is a good idea not to reveal usage of AI. I just feel it is wrong to dismiss what you learnt just because you read something from an LLM. It is not about something you read being absolutely true or having mistakes or whatever, it is about what happened in your mind, what you take from that experience.
> it is about what happened in your mind, what you take from that experience
Is this fiction or non-fiction? If it's fiction, then sure, yes, enjoy the ride. You can let it change the way you think a little.
If you're going to act on it? No. It's like reading a scientific paper and discovering an error in the statistical work: it invalidates the whole thing and you need to forget it.
Too many people these days are taken in by clever little just-so stories on social media that have no more validity than Rudyard Kipling's animal stories.
(On the other hand, as a piece of media criticism it's totally fine! The observation about pessimism is not new and seems valid even if it isn't and can't be "objective". Separate issue.)
Even in truth there are grey areas. You read a scientific paper and discover a serious error in a side topic the paper only had a short digress about. Would that invalidate the whole thing?
And where do you draw the line of invalidating errors and not so important errors (Sorites Paradox)?
This said, there are cases where a contradiction undermines the whole thing. I am a legal and one law professor warned us students, if we say A is valid but not A as well, he will dismiss the complete answer.
Once I got a contradictory information from a government agency and I was forced to follow up with a request for clarification. That's bad.
I think people's concept of how many items in a spreadsheet you can work through is often miscalibrated.
Does the author of this piece post their dataset? That would allow people to cross-check the results from GPT and see to what extent they think it got it right or wrong.
Categorizing 200 films based on ~10 attributes by reading their wikipedia overviews feels like it would be not significantly more work than building the fancy scrolling visualisation itself.
If there were 1000 films being analysed then I'd definitely be looking for some sort of tooling to help (or crowd sourcing the analysis)
Are a content analysis of films supposed or expected to be Truth - with a capital T? Can they be? We are in the realm of fictional narrative as to what concerns the films. Granted, all fiction and narrative must have a connection with Reality - i.e. 'the real world' (however that may be defined) - anything else is impossible. However, fiction is a playground where you can play with the concepts that exists in Reality, in ways which we cannot do in Reality itself [note]. So it is by nature 'detached' from (but coupled to) Reality.
As ChatGPT is an AI language model, is it reasonable to assume that what it can and will produce is always a narrative? Even when asked to make a computer program, are ChatGPT producing 'factual code' or a narrative written as code? Albeit, a narrative that can actually be run through a compiler?
If ChatGPT produces narratives, then the question is not whether analysis of science fiction films are True or False, it is a question of how good the narrative is - i.e. its quality ... I think?
And here only humans can judge the quality of the narrative. It is currently impossible for an AI language model to evaluate a narrative (I contend), as its evaluation will itself be a narrative... (this may be where our humans minds are currently being tricked by our own human invention, the 'AI'...)
So in a way, does a film analysis narrative made by an AI language model about a science fiction film not become science fiction in itself? It is the knowledge about the premise of the analysis narrative that becomes important. But then the premise is important everywhere we meet narratives? It this obvious or non-obvious?
My head is slightly spinning here... as it seems to me that the film analysis is in itself a narrative and is visually presented in a format that shows and indicates a narrative...?
[note] This 'playing' with reality may actually feed back into Reality, and often does. Here I do not relate to entire branches of narrative which is intentionally made to make feedback to reality e.g. so called 'news' (at least modern news and journalism) and political influence/propaganda.
Today, the narrative is to lie about everything. Our sales call it aligning truth so we can receive a paycheck but they are lying again, they just need to lie about everything. But in the end you can see everybody does it. Marketing is leading, politicians are following, adjusting LLM to present data they way they want it is just fine tuning us to accept more lies and get used to them.
Who cares if the results are "consistent"? Whatever that means. The question is whether the results are true, correct. If they are erroneous, consistency is useless.
If they are consistently wrong within a given margin of error, then they are still very useful. I agree that we'd need to define our terms here to have a meaningful debate.
I mean, they're not useful at all, let alone "very useful". Can you explain what the use of this article is assuming the classification of movies in various categories (e.g. future, present, past; world better, same, worse) is consistently wrong? To me it seems clear we can throw it all away, as it is now just a bunch of meaningless words.
I think my concern is less about consistency, and more that I don't know how the LLM is deciding what is, for example, a "dystopian setting." Sure, it could be true that the percent of sci-fi movies since the 1950s that have a dystopian setting has increased from 11% to 46%. An alternate explanation is that the LLM is trained on more modern language, and so is better at detecting modern dystopian storylines. And with this method, we cannot know.
I think that's unfair and definitely being too cynical. I'm pretty skeptical about LLM-AI in general too, and yet can readily admit it's highly effective at certain limited tasks such as.. summarizing things. And I'm sure the author did at least some cursory quality control to make sure it was doing what he expected. Hell, this is LLM-AI being used exactly as it should - to automate away the skutwork it can do well to free up the human for synthesizing something good out of it.
Frankly, my "input" related criticisms are more around IMDB rankings and whatever criteria ended up with "Despicable Me" being considered a science fiction film.
So you read something insightful and thought-provoking, and then realised that the words you read had been generated in a way that you don’t respect. Did the words themselves, or their objective value, change due to your changed perspective?
Of course their objective value changed. I’m not sure why you seem to be taking issue with that. If you heard an impassioned appeal to your emotions and then immediately afterwards discovered the appeal came from a pathological liar, would it affect your opinions?
Words don’t change depending whether they’re true or false but I would hope it’s clear their value does.
The increasing gloominess around our predicament is to a large degree due to the persistent failure of positive forces and behaviors to mitigate destructive trends. There is no point imagining a unreachable utopia if we can't indicate a real path towards it.
Its not that there is strictly zero evidence on our ability to avoid a major civilizational setback in the visible future. There is at least the open source movement. This is a remarkable, highly non-trivial behavior and it has already affected our reality. It is still little-known outside tech circles. Maybe there are other such positive stories in other circles. Somebody should base a sci-fi scenario on them :-)