Hacker Cinema
Downsizing
2017 · Film · 135 min
Directed by Alexander Payne
A kindly occupational therapist undergoes a new procedure to be shrunken to four inches tall so that he and his wife can help save the planet and afford a nice lifestyle at the same time.
2 negative3 neutralfrom 5 commenters
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5 comments on Hacker News
I cannot believe that the seemingly decent actor who agreed to star in the worst movie ever made, Downsizing, essentially about consuming less(I think? That or finding sex partners in ghettos), had the nerve to pump crypto. Forget jumping the shark, he pole vaulted over it.
Another reply mentioned the Covid-19 vaccines; not quite a survival-of-the-species level problem, but serious nonetheless.
I could imagine scenarios where civilization depended on our ability to create energy or grow food on a scale that required ramping up fission or fusion reactors really fast. For instance, an asteroid or volcanic eruption blocks out the sun and we need to figure out how to keep our cities from starving.
Another technological approach to avert starvation in the same sort of ecosystem collapse scenario is to develop and implement human hibernation, like the cryo-sleep pods from science fiction movies. Thus we drastically reduce the calorie needs of the average person, so that a much smaller population can try to work out the problems and get the world back into a state where it can support a larger population. (There was a movie called Downsizing that was about that kind of solution, except that in the movie they literally shrank people so that their demands on the ecosystem are dramatically reduced, and cost of living is almost nothing.)
Or use the "Downsizing" (Matt Damon movie) approach: reduce humans in size so as to inherently consume fewer resources.
For example, use growth inhibitors to keep people stunted at, say, one meter in height. If applied to every baby today, would eliminate the need for billions of tons of carbon emissions, meat consumption, cultivated land, etc., after about 15-20 years.
That's not going away until we robotize everything. We no longer hunt, all the genetic material for hunting left in us is now just an artefact, we no longer ride horses for transportation, we no longer loose contact from our friends and families for prolonged periods, we no longer do many many things. I think we no longer eat meat too - I mean sure we eat meat but for most of us meat is this thing in the supermarket and we don't have an intuitive understanding from where it is coming from.
Something like that needs to hapen with robotics before we no longer have people who do the undesirable jobs.
There's this movie "Downsizing" about people getting miniaturized and live lavish lives as their material needs get smaller. It's not a very good movie but what stike me in the move was that even in that kind of society they needed to have miniaturized people for the labour that no one wants to do and they had to have slums and so on so that the society works. I find this very realistic because even though we have rich countries and poor countries, we still have to have income gradient everywhere so that some people will do the jobs that others don't want to do.
I don't think that this will go away without eliminating the need for near slave labour.
Strangely relevant, I found Alexander Payne's 2017 movie "Downsizing" (starring Matt Damon) [1] interesting. Too bad, critics' reviews are mixed.
[1]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1389072/