And that all that labor-freeing would somehow not result in a renaissance utopia of shared wealth and meaningful free time for all.
I vaguely remember one of Asimov’s stories that explained humanoid robots like this: positronic brains are so expensive that making a single human-like robot that can operate an existing tractor and wash dishes or whatever makes more sense than splurging on a robot tractor and a robot dishwasher. Wasteful!
Asimov was a good scientist and quite a good science fiction author but he really did not understand economics. Tractors and dishwashers do not need complicated brains (tractors need a system for guidance including things like GPS, but the tractor itself doesn’t need to be that clever.)
To be fair to Asimov, another thing futurologists got utterly wrong was how computing would develop. The closest I’m aware of is Pohl and Kornbluth’s The Space Merchants which looks less and less like satire and more and more like prophecy.
Check out the Murray Leinster short story “A Logic Named Joe”; he wrote it in 1946, and it comes surprisingly close to predicting the use of home computers and the Internet.
The willing suspension of disbelief allows us to imbibe one implausible scenario, and encourages all else to be rational.
By having a female lead character in a mainstream movie, we already have our one implausibility.
The studio loves your treatments, but suggests you make her a stay-at-home mom who homeschools her 12 kids (the better to avoid set theory), when not coaching her church’s little league team. Maybe we could work this as a modern, all-girl Bad News Bears thing. Let’s give those gals the Female Empowerment movie they’ve been waiting for!
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