1984, and sometimes Brave New World, are conjured when we talk about tech-driven concerns about the future.
But which modern books, movies, shows, etc. present an interesting view of a scary future?
I imagine Black Mirror will come up, so please provide specific episodes which encapsulate the best ideas.
Top comments (39)
Altered Carbon, both the book and the Netflix series.
It portrays a future where implants called cortical stacks mean that minds can be transferred between bodies. Wealthy people can afford remote backups and clone bodies, while poorer people have to make for with whatever broken down body is available, and the punishment for many crimes is to be stored for a length of time and your body sold off.
Loved Richard Morgan's series. Have you read Thin Air?
I have, and really enjoyed it. I also read Black Man/Thirteen (it was released under two different names), an earlier novel in the same universe, which is also good.
Gattaca
We already have people with means giving their kids growth hormone so they don't end up short and doing elective suegeries before adulthood.
If we reach the point where elective genetic editing is a thing, it will become the ultimate status symbol.
One of my favorite movies, and even less technologically ambitious than what we are already capable of today. The central premise of Gattaca was basically a version of selective breeding. (Fertilizing a bunch of eggs, select the most preferable combination, throw out the rest.) But today we are technologically capable of more -- editing genes. Here is a positive example rather than a dystopian one, but tools are only as good or bad as the people wielding them.
I'd say Snow Crash book by Neal Stephenson, kind of similar to Ready player one. Future where everyone just lives in VR word where they can be everything.
Not too far from today, just missing better VR solutions.
Ask me on 17 April 2020, the day after the vidya game Cyberpunk 2077 comes out.
The depressing problem -- even more depressing than these fictional futures -- with any of them is that in order to have them there needs to be living people.
With the climate shit going the way it is, I fear it'll be more like Mad Max Fury Road... with it's warlords, hugest cities of 1000 people, and hard-pack desert as far as the remaining satellites can see.
This is a fun question... so I'm sorry to remind.
Neal Stephenson's Fall: Or Dodge In Hell
Convincingly explores the potential future as the author sees it. He envisions the consequences of such concepts as: Facebook derangement, brain mapping, concentration of wealth, body augmentation, post-truth-post-trust internet systems, mega-estate law, tax havens, post-privacy logistics, cryptocurrency, and plenty more stuff I can't remember.
Yes! This! The burning cross in the Applebees parking lot :O
William Gibson. Spook Country. williamgibsonbooks.com/books/spook...
It's about augmented reality, the end of journalism, startups, getting addicted to prescription drugs. Pretty much everything you can expect from a modern-day dystopia.
I found the movie Surrogates to be a hidden gem. Especially the setting... a future where humans now interact with their environment (and each other) through a life-like surrogate body, which looks like (probably a youthful version of) them. Think "Avatar" as the mechanism for operation, but the surrogate is used for normal human activities. For example, you still drive a car, go to parties, etc, but you are just controlling your surrogate who controls the car. Basically, the person stays home in their PJs all day controlling the avatar.
The implications and explored cultural effects are quite fascinating. The who-done-it plot was ok, but less interesting than the picture painted by the setting, IMO.
Wall-E
What if the only way to save the planet is for humans to leave?
Mr Robot, it is by far the most realistic fiction that I have ever watched, and E-corp could be any one of the big four companies (especially Amazon I feel like).
Mr. Robot is fantastic! Definitely one of the most realistic sci-fi shows (or really of any medium) I've watched.
I was reading through this thread hoping someone said Mr. Robot. I totally agree, it is so realistic it hurts.
I think the anime Psycho Pass is one of my favorites in this regard.
It portrays a world in which we have a super computer that's capable of calculating a bunch of stuff regarding a person, so things like picking a career and so on are left to it.
But the most interesting part is that it can calculate a "crime coefficient" for any given person, and there's cameras all around the cities watching people so that once anyone goes over a certain limit, they can be sent to correction facilities or even killed on sight.
The story revolves around a newly appointed female police officer who has a gun that can evaluate that coefficient and set itself to paralyze or kill automatically.
She has a partner who's kind of an ex-convict and they go around solving a bunch of cases.
Psycho Pass has a fascinating sci-fi world. I'd definitely recommend it as well.