Uh oh, a very important person is finally saying what has been obvious for thirty years. Maybe now the venture-idiots will finally stop giving huge stacks of money to idiots like Michael Bay, and I hate to name him because some of his films aren’t 100% stupid bullshit: Ridley Scott. These folks reinvented mass-market sci-fi as a political concern-troll machine.
Michael Crichton probably is most to blame for the “technology is bad” SF meme. Robotics? That’ll create evil Yul Brynner robots. Genetic Engineering? Killer velociraptors. Nanotech? Swarms of killer nanobots, etc., etc.
Well, it’s not like Crichton understands science even a little.
Looks like someone read “The Toynbee Convector” and thought it was nonfiction. Then again, this guy works for Founders Fund, so he’s probably contractually obligated to preach that technology is the one true path to salvation.
It’s too bad John Campbell stopped making comics to address this shit.
Stupid authors, harshing my euphoric capitalist singularity buzz with their art. The only reason we need sci-fi is to serve as a marketing campaign for my latest futuristic startup!
Michael Crichton’s the obvious example, but the propane-explosion-action and woo-botherers have been more insidious.
Am I the only one who has always been looking forward to the sci-fi doom and gloom dystopia?
No, it’s been a trending fantasy since before your dad dropped you in. It just became a mass market money machine about 30 years ago.
It hasn’t seemed to make much of a dent in the real-world appetite for that technology. Most people I know won’t leave the house without bringing along a sophisticated portable computer that can connect wirelessly to a global communications network.
For all the hand-wringing about “Jurassic Park” the truth is that most people would still pay good money to meet a dinosaur. (And NO I DON’T MEAN A BIRD.)
Meanwhile, technology does not care and keeps evolving.
Because while the naysayers outnumber the developers (by the sheer virtue of it being easier to be afraid of something than to make said something), the developers meanwhile plod forward, soldered joint by soldered joint, line of code by line of code.
Dogs bark but the caravan marches on.
And count me to the want-to-see-a-dinosaur crowd. (On a side note, once the way to make animals of more or less any form is understood, the world of designer pets will become interesting. It is quite challenging, though, as the DNA code is apparently less a blueprint and more a seed state for a cellular-automaton style iterative growth. On another side note, at the moment self-assembled fault-tolerant massively 3d versions of CPLD/FPGA chips become viable, we’re in an entirely another world where numerical simulations that today take a supercomputer and days of time will be done in potentially faster-than-real time on a chip not more expensive than the potato kind.)
He should be glad about dystopian science fiction. Utopian science fiction usually show that you can do without capitalism.
I recently finished the first draft of a dystopian novel, maybe I will dedicate it to him.
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