Hacker Cinema
Elysium
2013 · Film · 109 min
Directed by Neill Blomkamp
Science FictionActionDramaThriller
In the year 2159, two classes of people exist: the very wealthy who live on a pristine man-made space station called Elysium, and the rest, who live on an overpopulated, ruined Earth. Secretary Rhodes, a hard line government official, will stop at nothing to enforce anti-immigration laws and preserve the luxurious lifestyle of the citizens of Elysium. That doesn’t stop the people of Earth from trying to get in, by any means they can. When unlucky Max is backed into a corner, he agrees to take on a daunting mission that, if successful, will not only save his life, but could bring equality to these polarized worlds.
9 positive23 negative3 mixed61 neutralfrom 96 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
115 comments on Hacker News
I think this is way too optimistic. I suspect these things will be only available to the already-quite-wealthy. While the poor (i.e., not billionaires) are left to rot and starve without jobs, property, or livelihoods. Then, when the poors (i.e. us) become too much of a headache, these things will be deployed to murder the poors (i.e. me).
I am imagining a world somewhere between the movie Elysium and Oblivion.
I'm going to be controversial here and say that I think he is a one hit wonder. District 9 was decent (although unsubtle... "fokkin prawns!"). Elysium was a very crude political commentary on healthcare and inequality (and I can't remember much else about the film except people running around going "fok" all the time and shooting things.)
This is like the plot of the movie Elysium
I think it's less Skynet and more Wintermute: Some people saw the movie Elysium or read a summary of the book Neuromancer, and decided those were aspirational visions of how to be Untouchably Rich In Space.
Or perhaps some guy with lots of stock in Rocket Launches and Datacenters has a strong financial incentive to push a story where doing both things simultaneously is the big new thing.
It was a terrible scattered movie, but they want Elysium.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elysium_(film)
The original idea I think was they were biological components in a digital/biological computer complex. The Matrix sets up scenarios, and the human brains interact with them in human ways which are sometimes of use to the machines. Meanwhile, the machines see all of it and can monitor for problem humans. ISTR this was tossed as too intellectual for an action movie.
Another option to either The Matrix or Star Trek is Idiocracy, only there’s an elite group of humans and AI in charge over the deteriorating masses. Let’s not count out The Hunger Games or Elysium.
I have been lusting after a decent visual interpretation of Ringworld ever since I read it decades ago... I was thrilled to hear Halo was set on a ringworld and - because I am diehard Nintendo guy - had to go to a mate's house to see it on his XBox.. I spent ages wandering about looking up, but it wasn't quite what I was after and hey, given the era, the graphics were not up to much. I am still amazed it has not been well done in a film or game or VR to this date - at least afaik, i am open to suggestions. (One of the most visually plausible habitats in film imho was in Elysium and I always feel this film has been a little overlooked. The parallels with the modern world's refugee issues are overstated but I thought incredibly compelling.)
I always wondered what the earth looked like below? Were the Jetson's part of a breakaway civilization like in the movie Elysium?
I don't know if you've seen the movie Elysium. But the premise is that most of humanity lives impoverished filthy existence on Earth, while a tiny class of elite live on a space station in orbit. This is what people in the United States fear about AI. It's why the United States has the greatest rates of AI loathing of all countries in the world. They're afraid of that inequality.
The movie Elysium shows this ruling class in space, proletariat on Earth, scenario in very high fidelity. The movies itself is just OK, but the glimpse of this future is very well executed in the production design and special effects. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elysium_(film)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elysium_(film)
Vast piles of shit destroying jobs of ordinary people and their own jobs to make billionaires richer. Idiocracy and Elysium are both unintentional documentaries.
Another cool project from this person's blog: "Wrist Mounted CD Launcher" -> https://www.aaedmusa.com/projects/wrist-mounted-cd-launcher
It definitely gives off Elysium (film) vibes.
>It'll be like the movie Elysium.
The rich were able to insulate themselves in space which is much harder to get to than some place on Earth. If the rich want to turtle up on some island because that's the only place they're safe, that's probably a better outcome for us all. They lose a lot of ability to influence because they simply can't be somewhere in person.
It also relies heavily on a security force (or military) being complicit, but they have to give those people a better life than average to make it worth it. Even those dumb MAGA idiots won't settle for moldy bread and leaky roofs. That requires more and more resources, capital, and land to sustain and grow it, which then takes more security to secure it. "Some rich dude controlling everything" has an exponential curve of security requirements and resources. This even comes down to how much land they need to be able to farm and feed their security guys.
All this assuming your personal detail and larger security force actually likes you enough, because if society has broken down to this point, they can just kill the boss and take over.
This is the real answer. Eventually, when 95% of us have no jobs because AI and robotics are doing everything, then the rich will just buy and sell from each other. The other 7 billion people are not economically relevant and will just barely participate in the economy. It'll be like the movie Elysium.
I briefly did a startup that was kind of a side-project of a guy whose main business was building yachts. Why was he OK with a market that just consisted of rich people? "Because rich people have the money!"
Every year, the 22nd century looks more and more like the movie Elysium: With a small, ultra rich segment of society living in luxury, physically isolated from the remaining N billion living basically peasant/subsistence lives, working for the ultra rich if they are lucky. That's how things are trending, anyway. I don't think anyone wants to think about the year 2125. They see themselves as increasingly economically irrelevant cast offs.
The future is looking a lot like the movie Elysium, with a few million owners doing all the commerce, safely segregated away from a few billion have-nothings who are barely economically relevant.
I think elysium isn't an effective sci-fi in the sense that it discusses the effect of technology on mankind. It is just a metaphor for the US/Mexico border.
The only takeaway I got from the movie is that the robots look cool, it's the same robot design from chappie. Both half-baked scifi movies, but I would like to imagine they both exist in the same world.
- Population is leveling off and dropping in some countries,
This is a problem https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ufmu1WD2TSk
- AI is rapidly getting better. Not clear how good it gets, but if everything you do for money goes in and out over a wire, you're in trouble.
Or, everything gets so abundant that we can actually have high UBI
This reminds me if why I disliked to movie Elysium. They had a robots that effectively gave free perfect medical care. I didn't buy the premise of the movie that only that rich would be able to use them. Given they were robots, governments, hospitals, could and would make them readily available since ultimately it would massively lower their medical costs.
Very powerful rule of thumb: If someone wants to build a Utopia by colonizing a new space that just so happens to be outside of any country's juristiction, 999 times out of 1000 they are trying to build a tech-dystopia.
The reason for this is that there is no incentive for a Utopia to be built removed from any pre-existing societies. There is no magical tech that existing societies simply refuse to use that could fix all of their problems, they are just really hard problems to solve. Starting fresh in an environment where life is unsustainable almost implicitly requires a separate society in a more favourable environment to sustain it. The caste-system is baked into the concept from the beginning.
In the end it all comes down to the plot of Elysium. A dystopia. Just a bit less extreme because that film was trying to tell the average idiot that it's a bad thing, while these people generally want to convince them that it's a good idea, actually.
The real "techno-utopia" is a walkable city with good public transport, high-speed internet, maybe some high-tech item/food delivery infrastructure to spice things up, and hopefully some glorified roombas to keep the streets clean.
> Who will buy the phones when no one is paid to produce them? The cars? The food and the clothes?
Other wealthy people. I knew someone in the yacht-building business who would say "If you want a business that will last, sell to rich people--they're the ones who have money." We are very quickly moving towards a world where the economic activity (earning + spending + producing) of the median person is insignificant next to the activity of the very rich. There are individuals who have more wealth than the GDP of entire countries.
We're bifurcating into a society like the movie Elysium: A relatively small number of wealthy people who matter to the economy, and a huge number scraping by day to day whose economic activity amounts to a rounding error in the grand scheme of things.
There is a general process where people with money use that money to make themselves more powerful (by controlling the media, buying politicians etc) and richer (by investing that wealth and using the power they bought) in a self reinforcing cycle. The two world wars came along and reversed this process for a while, but it is back with a vengeance. I guess modern tech is only going to accelerate the process. I see it ending in one two ways:
Elysium: A tiny group of super rich live in fabulous luxury, while the rest of humanity live in economic slavery and squalor. (Like the film, 'Elysium').
The French Revolution: The bulk of humanity finally have enough of the greed of the oligarch class and do something about it.
Kind of like the movie Elysium but without the space station. Somehow, making dystopias into reality seems like a sort of weird moral imperative to a lot of tech people. I guess techies (wrongly) think that they'll somehow end up on the side of the 1%.
Light: '80s/'90s kids might remember: https://www.buckwiki.com/data/Computer_Council
Serious: Though, if you look at the current big players in AI, rather than being benevolent geniuses, most have obvious major problems, especially with being driven by ruthless self-interest, and even sociopathy.
While there are some parallels with a certain country's national voting behavior (e.g., "Sure, the candidate is a vicious psychotic narcissist, but he's our vicious psychotic narcissist!"), you wouldn't want to trust any of those companies with leadership of the world.
At best, the AI council would collude with each other, against the people they ostensibly serve, while backstabbing each other as a secondary goal. At worst, one would decide, if they can't win completely, then everyone loses completely.
That Buck Rogers AI future for Earth would quickly look less like Star Trek utopia, and more like Hunger Games or Elysium dystopia. If not one of the countless post-apocalyptic film settings that are increasingly easy to imagine or extrapolate.
Some of my favorites (no particular order):
- The Martian
- Arrival
- Snowpiercer
- Annihilation (a bit scary in some parts, but not really horror overall)
- The Congress
- Ex Machina
- Her
- Children of Men
- Blade Runner & the new Blade Runner
- Gattaca
- District 9
- Edge of Tomorrow
- Elysium
- Terminator 1 & 2
- Upgrade
- Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
- Mad Max (new one) and Fury Road
On the cheesier side:
- Demolition Man
- Judge Dredd (both the original and the new one)
- Terminator 3 and beyond
- Matrix movies
Grand vistas but slow and sometimes boring, and often haughty / overbearing:
- The new Dune movies
- 2001: A Space Odyssey and its sequel (some other number, like 2010 or something, can't remember)
- Interstellar
- Inception
------
Of all of those, my top 3 would be the first three (Martian, Arrival, Snowpiercer).
I wish I knew more; between the opening song and the presumably idiomatic[0] exchange between vixen and cub[1], it's probably obvious to anyone who knows if the Zhu-Zhu victors (compare 1:25!) are speaking 南蛮鴃舌[2] or not.
As for Elysium (2013), having watched the trailer and skimmed the synopsis and a review, it sounds exactly like the sort of movie a fox (or at least a maneless lion[3] who hires wolves assisted by vultures to do what his snake tells him to?) would want to show to all the rabbits (or hedgehogs or whatever creatures Machiavelli and Pareto think are below the foxes and lions): a hero's journey in which the One guy of Destiny getting in a physical fight saves everyone; if anyone in that world had been spending as much time knotting up nets as the characters in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_Margin#Plot seem to, it hadn't been obvious to the reviewer.
[0] are they chengyu? if not, they should be, like 高新低人(?).
[1] stepping back and preparing his nets speaks to a fox with lions on the payroll?
[2] Mencius (the original) had best watch out when accusing people of bird-speak; consider Qur'an 27:16, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conference_of_the_Birds#Synopsis
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Hood_(1973_film)#Voice_cast
EDIT: or maybe the flashback should've been https://www.openstreetmap.org/?mlat=22.14364&mlon=113.56283&zoom=15#map=15/22.14364/113.56283 ? I don't know my asian skylines well at all :(
And I thought the plot point of the film Elysium was a bit far fetched.
Is the third movie supposed to be Elysium?
We individual employees had little control over stock and I don't remember anybody being particularly delighted when Patrick left and Ruth took over, despite the stock going up up up. I don't think our GSUs were influencing work decisions on aggregate.
What was influencing decisions was just the same as always: ad revenue. I think people who worked outside of ads at Google probably didn't get the sense of it. I came into Google as part of a competition crushing, monopoly focused acquisition, so I started off cynical. I could see right away what Google was, just a money printing machine with everything else they did a way to flush some of the excess gravy away. And because of that it all lacked purpose or real motivation.
And into that void just crept more and more careerism and empire building.
Agree about the ADD thing, but I think it's more a product of Perf economy than stock price.
I lasted there 10 years for lack of anything else worthwhile to go to in my geo-region, and because the money was too good to pass up. But what a weird, weird, weird place. Wandering around the MTV campus was like being in a real life Elysium (movie) or something. I could never figure out what all those people were doing between free meals. I felt guilty taking the money, the whole time.
As I was reading the OP's, ahem, difficulties with customer-support AI chatbots, all I could think was, I've had the same experience too, and it sucks.
The movie "Elysium," from 11 years ago, depicts what it feels like to interact with one of today's AI chatbots:
https://youtu.be/flLoSxd2nNY
Naturally, in the movie, the conversation with the bot on the counter was mandated due to another bot's earlier lack of understanding:
https://youtu.be/vVhT4X6uLL4?t=99
Let us all hope that AI chatbots will get much better over time. We all need it.
Way out of my wheelhouse but after reading this it leads me to believe "heal machines" like in elysium and other scifi movies may not be that much scifi after all.... block an ion channel here, send a signal there... poof, your arm is back!
Chappie was awesome and Elysium was at least entertaining. Anyway, I was trying to think whose aesthetic a dystopian but wacky futuristic tech movie would suit best
Become enough of a tyrant and you may not live to see old age -- Hitler and Stalin didn't. As for tyrants who do grow old -- is an effectively immortal tyrant that much worse than a tyrant who dies but consolidates power within his family to create a centuries-long dynasty?
Also, once the technology of immortality becomes well-characterized, the cost to replicate the procedures will go down barring price-fixing collusion that involves government regulatory bodies. This is the real problem with movies like Elysium: a version of the cure-all hospital bed that serves as the movie's McGuffin in a critique of capitalism would, in a free market, be readily available at Target or Costco; businesses would rent them like tanning beds; and charities would pop up to provide them at gyms and homeless shelters for those who still couldn't afford one of their own. You couldn't really restrict the availability of something like that to just the rich without the government putting their thumb on the scale somewhere. In fact the rich would respond by allowing themselves to grow old and decrepit; in a world where everybody could be restored to health and vigor, aging would be taken as a status symbol. Kinda like how in a world where photography became easy, having original paintings on your wall is a status symbol.
I think it's quite clear the current trajectory is towards something like Elysium, where the rich party in a satellite and we rest labor for their luxury on a ruined earth.
And a lot of people seem very stoked about such a future.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elysium_(film)
Mass surveillance is, like most absolute power, cancer of the soul. I have read your email, and your IMs; I know first-hand how it corrupts a person. I can, without hesitation, guarantee that the situation is like that in the movie Elysium[0]: "They will hunt you to the edge of the earth for this [capability]."
The most salient point, I think, is that it is worthless, from a LEO perspective, to tap into communication systems used by the masses--whether through provider taps or client-side scanning like Apple's purported CSAM AI--unless what you're really after is a way to monitor the general public at large.
There's no way in hell that a nefarious player with technical resources, or chops themselves, would use one of these public systems to communicate with their compatriots. There are infinite and myriad bespoke channels of covert communications that these laws would never be able to touch which are much more likely to be the hubs of serious malfeasance.
[0] https://youtu.be/qUQQerrs52w?t=54
There's two versions of this.
One where the robots/AI do all the work and the world shares the results of this new found productivity and we all live happily in a post scarcity world.
The other is that movie Elysium.
Edit: Movies, unsorted, from the top of my mind:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_of_Control https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Origins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_East_(2013_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter%27s_Bone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contagion_(2011_film) , seen before Covid, deemed to be realistic, and therefore better than stuff like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Andromeda_Strain with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warning_Sign_(film) somewhere in between. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_IV_(1974_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizards_(film) The remakes of the Planet of the Apes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/28_Days_Later , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/28_Weeks_Later a little less so, though it had some great scenes of flying into London City Airport and the modern parts around that. Bladerunner in the original versions, the remake not so much. 2001: A Space Odyssey, the intro and first parts, spaceflight to the moon and such, the rest not. Too boring. I liked the sequel 2010: Odyssey Two better, actually. Avatar. Part one only. All of this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_(franchise) with the exception of the crossover stuff. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elysium_(film) for the almost cyberpunkish fuckedupness of it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dracula_Untold https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beach_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WALL-E https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Island_(2005_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THX_1138 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logan%27s_Run_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropia_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rollerball_(1975_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_Dealer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southland_Tales https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Live https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendence_(2014_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_for_Vendetta_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Puppet_Masters_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Survivalist_(2015_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernova_(2000_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunshine_(2007_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hidden_(1987_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patient_Zero_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capricorn_One https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangar_18_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_One_(2001_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timecop Ron Silverman Badass! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_(2014_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_Blonde https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Are_the_Night_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contact_(1997_American_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truman_Show https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colombiana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowing_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dead_Zone_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphere_(1998_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adjustment_Bureau https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrival_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifeforce_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fourth_Protocol_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_(2013_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_(2009_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Final_Countdown_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paycheck_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypher_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trigger_Point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echelon_Conspiracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anderson_Tapes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Parallax_View https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Seduction
TV-Series: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivors_(1975_TV_series) and the remake linked from there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Train_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jericho_(2006_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Strain_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayward_Pines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silo_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colony_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_All_Mankind_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellowstone_(American_TV_series) and its prequel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1883_(TV_series)
WESTWORLD!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_100_(TV_series) Praimfaya! Yeehaa! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterpart_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ark_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altered_Carbon_(TV_series) All of Black Mirror! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_Experiments_Lain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelers_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falling_Skies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devs_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Peripheral_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Expanse_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helix_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incorporated_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raised_by_Wolves_(American_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/See_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tales_from_the_Loop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutschland_83 and sequels. ÄXZÄLLÄNNT! JAWOLLJA! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humans_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_the_Night_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Worlds_(2019_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_Nova_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Gods_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozark_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_in_the_High_Castle_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascension_(miniseries) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_of_Interest_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_One https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resurrection_(American_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvation_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_the_Dome_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_(2009_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caprica
This all began about 2006 with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlestar_Galactica_(2004_TV_series) after having abstained from possessing a TV, or watching that by other means (with some exceptions for news and documentaries) since 1996, and mostly no cinema either.
That stuff rehooked me in a binge-watching session. Shit happens :-)
Do yoo vanna häff fries wiff thät?
/nerdsnipe off
My friend/coworker made the observation: Elysium. (the movie)
Always felt kind of gross to me.
I think if you interpret "worldview" broadly enough, that's inevitable. Fiction authors write (what they see as) counterfactuals, but not fiction that's fundamentally at odds with how they think the world works, because they wouldn't be able to inhabit such fictional worlds and write about them believably.
The Culture novels postulate a form of luxury space communism for humans, but the plots involve other things. It's not exactly wish-fulfillment; luxury space communism is hardly all good. It seems to me that most post-scarcity futures imply some kind of luxury communism, and if you're writing space operas, they'll necessarily have a mild or extreme form of luxury space communism. You could segregate the haves and have-nots, but then you get something like Elysium (the movie) where the obvious plot involves the have-nots revolting.
I guess I don't understand what you're looking for. You don't want the author to project their worldview, but you do want them to try to predict the future, not too optimistically, but also not too pessimistically? A scifi sitcom, where nothing of note happens that's overly positive or negative? Wouldn't that be projecting the author's worldview too? "Maybe life in the future is going to be just like today"?
If you just don't like scifi in general, or space operas in particular, that's allowed.
Cyberpunk is fairly dystopian, and not really a projection of how the author wishes the future to be, so it's curious that you cite Gibson who wrote proto-cyberpunk, before writers like Morgan and his Kovacs series. Have you looked into those?
KSR's Mars trilogy maybe?
I know you guys are not gonna like this but here we go anyway:
Ok lets just say these "experts" have managed to get their predictions about an extremely complex multi dimensional system (which we barely understand) ballpark right. Lets even go further, lets say sea levels rise by a meter or two.
So what? We lose a huge chunk of Bangladesh, a few tiny island nations, huge chunks of west coast America etc over the span of a century.
Why is this apocalyptic or even considered unnatural/unacceptable.
Did guys ever stop and wonder whats the alternative? I'm specifically talking what happens if we pretend for a second this is apocalyptic/existential to the human species and collectively create a 10 (or even 20) year plan to completely get rid of fossil fuels and other green house generation sources.
Do you guys even know what your asking for? Have you ever wondered the role fossil fuels and these other sources play in the functioning of the modern human civilisation.
Its our lifeblood. You will be sentencing hundreds of millions of people to a lifetime of poverty and you will depriving billions of people a chance to rise above their grave circumstances. You will create the kind of instability and asymmetry your privilege (fossil fuels) affords you to only experience through dystopian movies like Elysium.
To put it in real terms:
- Renewable sources and alternatives are decades away from being a turnkey solution.
- Any transition until then will be disastrous for everybody but the underprivileged will take the biggest toll.
- Adapting to the changing landscape both literally and in metaphorical terms until the tech is ready is the lesser evil.
- "lesser evil" is the key here, the utopian alternatives will in my humble opinion will end modern civilisation as we know it.
Well written, but it side steps the X-risk and even the employment/ capitalism failures looming on the horizon.
2 years ago I thought we were decades away from general purpose AI, this is coming from a guy who implemented transformer models on day 5. My time estimates have been proven very wrong.
I'm equally worried about the value of white collar labour dropping to near zero in my lifetime, and the ultimate centralization of power. The movie Elysium seems less and less science fiction every day.
I am happy politicians and think-tanks are taking this seriously, you should be too.
Not to mention the socio-economic impact of who is chosen and who isn't. The movie Elysium comes to mind. That said, I think research on samples and growing tubes is fine. I hope for the day when we can just grow a new heart or lungs or pancreas for people who have cancer or something. Taken from their own "good" cells so there's no rejection.
What good is it when you have to perform one or multiple menial jobs every day just to exist. That lifestyle doesn't leave you with much mental energy at the end of a long work day to absorb and learn from the world's knowledge at your fingertips. Yes, some folks are probably able to pull themselves out of that situation - but those are edge cases.
On top of that the added anxiety people experience because of living paycheck to paycheck.
It's becoming more and more like in the movie Elysium - all the technological wonders are there - just not accessible to the poor.
I think the movie Elysium makes a decent prediction for a potential near term future.
Exactly. This is an important point to discuss and to solve for otherwise we’ll end up in a world like shown in the movie Elysium.
What will those people do, whose job will become obsolete? Are there support systems available to help people learn new valuable skills society needs?
If only a few people at the top will benefit from these tech advancements and the rest will have to fight for scraps then society will eventually fail or end up in a total tech feudalistic system.
Back in the 60s it was said that future advancements and automation will transform our society into a leisure and more innovative society.
Whatever happened to that vision?
> There's something I don't understand: the current system works great. Cash as well as credit cards. So why change that?
Control. If you're of the mindset that there is an upper-class and a lower-class, you're incentivized to create a form of money that makes both permanent. This prevents competition, generational wealth transfer, and guarantees infinite, cheap obedient labor.
The movie Elysium is a great caricature of where this will lead.
There's a scene in the movie "Elysium" where Matt Damon is standing in some sort of welfare line or something and he talks back to a police robot and it immediately breaks his arm. I stopped watching it at that point.
Who programs a robot to do that?
A police robot that's programmed to commit "police brutality" is a psychological projection of a sick mind.
- - - -
Anyway, these things aren't robots since they are completely under human control so really they should be called something like "remote murder facilitators".
Under a different economic system maybe. Have you seen how our one actually works? See the film Elysium for a more plausible future.
Hard not to remember that AI parole-officer scene from the Elysium movie [1].
The AI was 'detecting' several emotional states in real-time, most notably the sarcasm.
At the movie release this looked quite spot-on about the AI state. Perhaps now it's more able and sensitive/sensible.
[1]: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=flLoSxd2nNY
You may be assuming that the ones benefiting from automation are happy to live in a world where they are hated by almost everyone, and at best kept safe by using some private army. Imagine living in a world where "eat the rich" is not a fringe idea but a campaign promise...
I would argue the rich would much prefer to let everyone live at some <low but "okay"> standard of living than have a few more zeros on their bank totals and live in constant fear.
I think the world shown in the movie Elysium portrays this reality and its possible outcomes better than I can do. Not the be the best movie ever, but it got this part pretty well in my mind...
Have you seen Elysium? It's basically Neuromancer: The Movie, starring Matt Damon.
Do you ever think to yourself that we're gradually headed to some dystopia like in the movie Elysium? Where a growing underclass is relegated to a garbage planet while the elites escape to a satellite world? Or at least parts of our planet?
I'm not even faulting the elites for it really -- how are you, in a non-authoritarian society, supposed to handle when basic services are under attack and can't effectively discipline or enforce law, either because you just can't police enough, people refuse to obey law and order any more, or you're not allowed to use force for political reasons? Or a certain level (or $ amount) of crime is just ok? All you can do is create greater moats around the areas you can protect and see if the underclass can sort itself out.
I see this kind of creeping / boiling the frog effect happening in lots of developments lately. (although I'm sure people of every generation have decried the end of the world too)
Take the Portland (or Oregon?) relaxation of drug penalties, etc. Sure, it only makes sense to stop criminalizing drug use when everyone's doing it and it's loading up your prisons. But you didn't exactly solve the problem. You just found a less bad way to deal with the effects. And you're still on a path where people are using drugs more and more, and the elites flee to their gated communities to let the underclass sort itself out downtown, because it's not "fair" or "equitable" to lock up people for drug use. "We need less policing, more understanding." Eventually you understand yourself all the way into a society that's broken down.
The sad thing is that the people who suffer most from crime and belief that having a system with rules is against them, are the poor and vulnerable.
I don't think our approaches to these problems is working well.
Yeah, that wouldn't work at all but then again, inaccurate science was far from the only problem that movie had imo.
One possible solution is to ionise the air near the walls and then use a magnetic field to contain it. This would not really prevent all air leakage but you don't really have to as long as it's substantially reduced since even the relatively diminutive size of the Elysium habitat would contain a fairly formidable volume of air. There can also be outside magnets that can arrest the momentum of the escaped ionised air enough so it falls back down to Earth. Then all you need is a tether extending down to the atmosphere with an internal air pump and you have a self contained cycle.
The Elysium habitat in the film has (from memory) walls only hundreds of metres high. So there is no way that would contain an atmosphere for any length of time. I guess their could be some sort of high tech field that kept it in, but it would have to be something that doesn't stop a shuttle entering (as they do in the film).
The Elysium habitat in the movie is open topped with walls on a spinning torus not a sealed container like the ISS. On Earth this works because of the combination of gravity and the size of the atmosphere pressing on itself.
https://image-engine.com/case-studies/elysium/
I wish, we will not create world with robots as shown in movie Elysium. I wish we could create a world with universal basic income where warehouse slaves are replaced with robots and people can do something better than picking orders in constant fear of being too slow.
Images of O'Neil cylinders captivated me as a child, and they still do now. So familiar and yet so weird.
Something similar is depicted in the film 'Elysium'. But it is a open torus, rather than a closed cylinder and they never explain how they keep the atmosphere in.
Yea, it seems every year we are moving closer and closer to some dark mixture of Manna, Fifteen Million Merits [1] and Elysium [2], where regular people no longer serve any purpose, and are simply warehoused somewhere to keep them out of the hair of the few rich elite.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elysium_(film)
When I watched the movie Elysium, I always wondered where the restaurant workers, hotel housekeepers, and other service workers on the station lived. Maybe it was all automated. If the rich want to have these rich-only enclaves, they're gonna need to learn how to be a little more self sufficient.
Not stagnating but moving into an "Elysium" (as in the film) type of society.
Welcome to HN and your comments are not in bad faith at all.
Some views here are very ‘boolean’ and lack nuance... presented as simplifying complex matters. But it’s rather a simplistic mode of thinking, which reduces our lives to lives devoid of empathy. This mode of thinking also tends to see ‘working class’ folks who can’t manage their finances as folks who simply lack character.
In the words of Rutger Bregman... poverty isn’t a lack of character, it’s a lack of cash (recommended read: his book ‘Utopia for Realists’)
And don’t forget, what this pandemic has showed us is that lots of working class folks really are essential workers.
Yes, there are some folks who are lazy, but you find that in all sectors.
Letting simple algorithms designed by folks with a very ‘boolean’ worldview determine who is worthy of employment (survival) and who is not leads us to world as illustrated in the movie Elysium.
I for one appreciate your view.
Please continue baptizing ;)
I remember the movie Elysium also had some assembler listings in it. It's not on screen long, but I saw enough to see the "enter protected mode" bit, so apparently x86 is still reigning in 2154.
The still from the movie: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Bb830CJCcAEcqly?format=png&name=small
> > If it's not possible then I think we're destined for a very nasty future.
> Possibly. But if that's the case, it's very important that we acknowledge that fact now and work to prevent it. We can't just say that governments will suddenly become incorruptible because the alternative is unpleasant. We have to face that unpleasant reality and respond to it.
To be clear I'm not saying that government will automatically become incorruptible (we should be so lucky, eh?)
How shall we formalize our response if not through government?
How can we be sure no one is using the surveillance unless we use the surveillance?
> > What would prevent it?
> The fact that it's not working. Even in totalitarian regimes like China, they're not stopping all crime, they're just crushing political dissidents. And they don't even have perfect enforcement on that.
Ugh, give them a minute. :(
To me it seems obvious that you get either: 1) a split-level society, where insiders get away with stuff while the masses live under the panopticon, or 2) you get a universal panopticon that includes the police and politicians and we are subject to the absolute rule of Mrs. Grundy.
I just do not see a realistic scenario with partial surveillance. The technology will become too cheap.
> To get to the point in enforcement you're talking about, we would need an even larger jump in surveillance than what we're talking about now.
Our smart phones are already a surveillance system.
Consider that a fleet of networked self-driving cars will be a surveillance system just as a side-effect.
The economics will drive it even if politics doesn't.
> And even in that world -- it's not lack of surveillance that allows police officers to violate people's rights with impunity, it's lack of prosecution. Enforcement of the law isn't just a problem of finding criminals, it's also wrapped up in the system's own brazenness and willingness to apply different standards to different people.
Now we're talking. Did you see the movie Elysium? I didn't finish watching it, because there's a scene near the start when Matt Damon's character is standing in a line and robot police (it's not clear whether they are autonomous AI robots or remote-controlled by humans) come by and hassle him and break his arm. I saw that and was like, Fuck That.
If that's what we end up doing to ourselves I'm not interested.
Why would you program a robot to do police brutality? It makes no logical sense. If the robot is strong enough to break a bone (already a dubious design choice) then it's strong enough to restrain a person without breaking his arm. FFS! At that point we're just watching someone's sick fetish.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elysium_(film)
That's what I mean by "humane tyranny": yes, the police are robots now but they are programmed to be nice.
"Klaatu barada nikto", eh?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gort_(The_Day_the_Earth_Stood_Still)
> He is but one member of a "race of robots" invented by an interplanetary confederation (described as "A sort of United Nations on a Planetary level" by Klaatu, who is a representative of that confederation) to protect their citizens against all aggression by destroying any aggressors. Klaatu describes "him" as one of an interstellar police force, holding irrevocable powers to "preserve the peace" by destroying any aggressor. The fear of provoking these robots acts as a deterrent against aggression.
> ... preemptively getting rid of privacy when we have unequal standards of enforcement will make things worse because the corrupt parts of the system will have even more power.
Right, but I'm not advocating that.
I'm saying that, since privacy is going away anyway, let's use that to make the system work well.
> > I feel strongly that laws should be legitimate or repealed.
> This is a good ideal that we should strive for, but not a practical reality. Marijuana would not have become legal if people couldn't have broken the law. Gay rights would not have become a reality if people couldn't have been secretly gay. Perfect enforcement of the law can stagnate social progress, because the law is fallible. Fallible systems need safeguards that make it possible to oppose them -- and extra-legal normalization of certain behaviors is one of those safeguards.
I get what you're saying but I think you're wrong about the desirability of selective enforcement of "soft" crime because it's hypocritical and because perfect enforcement of "hard" crimes is very desirable.
I'm saying we better stop rounding up potheads and gay people, because we are about to have the power to make our laws stick for better or worse. There are lots of places even today where it's illegal to be gay. If those places get tech before they get hip they're gonna have a bad time.
(I once worked for a startup that was developing a device that could read blood alcohol level and their market was a staunchly Muslim nation. They hadn't thought it through. This nation severely restricts alcohol consumption and you're trying to introduce a fitbit that measures blood alcohol, think it through guys.)
Computers are the "perfection of the executive". (That quote goes back to Babbage BTW. He didn't say it, a fellow said it to him of his machine, and he agreed.)
We are going to get perfect enforcement -or- hypocritical "justice" systems -or- better, more humane laws.
As I see it those are the options. The cameras are already deployed, billions of folks are carrying self-surveillance devices right now.
> There are other ways we could add checks and balances to the law, but I have not seen many proposals from anyone that seem realistic or achievable to me. The reality is that breaking the law is often how we achieve social progress. Again, see Hong Kong and China, or the history of slavery in the US, or any number of social movements.
You make me realize that I don't have any formal proposals in re: my theory (that since tech makes surveillance inevitable we should all just be cool.)
I don't know that there are any concrete things to do. Or that, if there are, I could come up with them.
> > We in the West could do that too but if we don't because we value our personal privacy over the occasional kidnapped kid, well, I'm no fan of the CCP but that doesn't seem like a defensible moral position to me.
> I think it's a completely defensible moral position.
It's really not. Either you're not taking the thought experiment seriously or you don't have children. I wouldn't wish the loss of a child on my worst enemy.
> I think that our privacy is one of the reasons that the US government is not the CCP,
The USA totally spies on us. That's what the "Bumblehive" is for: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center
> and I think that the harm China is doing to its own citizens is pretty objectively greater than the harm that a couple of kidnappers will do. I'm not a fan of kidnappers, but the CCP is building concentration camps. Muslims in China need privacy more than they need protection from kidnappers, it's not a hard trade for me to make.
But that's not the trade.
We can get rid of the kidnappers and the evil concentration camp-building bastards.
In the world I'm envisioning no one could build concentration camps.
Think about it: the CCP say those aren't concentration camps and the very reason they can't lie about it or about the other vile things they do and get away with it because there is too much information!
> > We should be talking about a universal highest-common-denominator of laws for the planet so that the decreasing cost of asymptotically-prefect enforcement becomes a solution rather than a problem!
> I think the solution you're proposing is more difficult and less likely to happen then even the most long-shot of my proposals. The odds of all of the nations of the world uniting under a common set of laws, and those being laws being good are astronomically low. It would be easier to invent an invisibility cloak.
I find it depressing but I agree with you there. Realistically, I think the CCP will pretty much pown the world this next century. Depressing thought but if they can avoid starting a war (and we all don't get creamed by climate change) I think they've got it cinched. Bummer.
It's not just hard, it's also political.
The amount of nuance can be overwhelming. CPI doesn't account for the ability of consumers to substitute inferior goods, but GDP doesn't account for the sacrifice involved in doing so. CPI focuses on consumers, while GDP focuses on all sectors. CPI includes the price of imports while GDP does not. The list goes on. Making all of these choices and keeping in mind the consequences for doing so is exhausting, but you shouldn't just pick someone who looks like the most credible person in the room and trust them because the very nuance that you were hoping to avoid allows people to torture the numbers to say anything they want, and the most credible person in the room might not want the same thing you do. GP argued that OP was torturing the numbers and I argue that GP is torturing the numbers. Who do you believe?
Here's a test to avoid getting lost in the wilderness of nuance: "What would Elysium look like in this model?"
I am referring of course to the movie where a small number of rich people live in luxury on a space station while Earth and its population have devolved into a gigantic poverty-ridden slum. In this case, CPI might show that a basic basket of food, clean water, shelter, and education have become prohibitively expensive for most humans, while the GDP measure would argue that most members of the slum can't afford clean water or proper shelter so those things shouldn't be included in the index. Instead, people live in tents and drink barely-filtered water, which are both still affordable, so what's the problem? More generally, any figure expressed in terms of dollars (GDP, value creation, etc) runs the risk of placing low weight on what happens in the slums and high weight on what happens on the space station. The average (unstated subtext: dollar-weighted) person can afford luxurious accommodation in all facets of life and sees nothing but perpetual economic improvement, so again, what's the problem?
Which metric is the right one? That depends entirely on the point you want to make, but the "Elysium test" is a very basic honesty check that catches the more egregious errors.
I have such mixed feelings about this.
It's not a great movie but this really does remind me of Elysium, in that we're truly heading for a world where those with means can live indefinitely. And those without means...
Thank you for this, I did not know about Syd Mead, but just flipping through the images on that page it's clear how influential he was. Wikipedia lists pretty much exactly the associations I made:
> Mead worked with major studios on the feature films: Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Blade Runner, Tron, 2010, Short Circuit, Aliens, The Spirit of '76, Timecop, Johnny Mnemonic, Mission: Impossible III, Elysium, Tomorrowland and Blade Runner 2049. George Lucas created the AT-AT for his Star Wars saga based on art by Mead.
This is in no way to diminish his work, but the impression I got (and that I'm trying to confirm/debunk, given the wikipedia article doesn't really address this) is that his art really transposes the society of its time into the future. That is, he almost exclusively addresses the technological advancement, while keeping the societal structures largely intact. For example, that's why the retrofitted houses give the impression of still being inhabited largely by working class people, while the ski resort and leisure time imagery with the sports cars still seems to be a luxury only few can afford even in the future. I don't see signs of "fully automated luxury space communism" there.
This may be me projecting though, hence the question if this is correct. And again, this is not to take away from his work. They are stunning. :)
"With thousands of brainless bodies kept alive on life support," It is questionable, if you can do this without a brain.
Have you seen Elysium? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elysium_(film)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirehead_(science_fiction) alone makes no cyberpunk. It lacks the transnational corporations with their own paramilitary/police/security, their indebted slaves, the mobsters/mafiosi/yakuza interfacing between them and the slums for the unwashed masses, and the punks cybering back frome the slums for some breadcrumbs, upgräydz. Think Bladerunner. Allmighty Tyrell. Or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elysium_(film) , or even this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incorporated_(TV_series)
With Hidalgo, Paris is becoming more and more an "Elysium" movie city-model: only a few decide Parisian of what will piss off everybody else. Remember the end of the movie ? ;-)
Btw... Elysium and Elysée - the Palace of the French President... in Paris - have the same root. If it can help to understand...
When the GP mentioned Elysium I was also reminded of the live-action Ghost in the Shell movie with the AR ads similar to this video.
What kind of society?
I bet it will look like the movie elysium.
I could so see a planet-bound version of the movie Elysium. The elite top 5% live in walled off fortresses, a la Aeon Flux's city, and have everything - while the rest live outside in a daily fight to live against a dystopian environment financially and economically.
I don't think it's inevitable though, so the question is - how do we stop it? We have some of the brighter minds in tech on this forum, what are your thoughts?
California will be Elysium [1] in 50y.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elysium_(film)
I think this is a thought worth discussing.
It’s a problem larger than the field.
I mean, in an ideal world we could even render doctors redundant in most cases by some incredible Elysium(the film)-like medical bed.
The problem is what do we do with our time instead? It’s a question that can inspire all kinds of hope or dread depending on your outlook.
Found comment via CMD-F for "ely" - because these pics look a LOT like what is depicted in the film "Elysium". I do not recommend it, FWIW :P
This reminds me of the movie _Elysium_. In it, Matt Damon's character is talking to a robot, and when he shows frustration the robot responds, "You seem to be experiencing elevated levels of anger. Would you like an antidepressant?"
I like the movie elysium.
Perhaps the deficit of happiness can be better explained by one of Peter Thiel's most excellent reductionist observations:
The countercultural in the '60s was the hippies. You know, we landed on the moon in July of 1969. Woodstock started three weeks later, and with the benefit of hindsight, that’s when progress ended, and the hippies took over the country. [1][2]
Perhaps, for too long, the left has engulfed and held hostage our cultural ideas of progress and advancement. And perhaps that has imbued us with a certain stripe of ideological stagnation not just in the way we perceive modernity but in also the debilitating influence on how we perceive actual technological progress itself and its relevance to the overall happiness of our society.
Perhaps our dominant leftist culture's 'ideological stagnation index' is the unmeasured metric that could explain why we feel the way we feel despite technological progress.
Thiel on the same topic:
Today the counterculture is to believe in science and technology. You know, our society, the dominant culture doesn’t like science. It doesn’t like technology. You just look at the science-fiction movies that come out of Hollywood — Terminator, Matrix, Avatar, Elysium. I watched the Gravity movie the other day. It’s like you would never want to go into outer space. You would just want to be back on some muddy island. And so I think we’re in a world where actually believing that a better future is possible that you can have agency and work towards a better future, that is actually radically countercultural.[1]
[1] Glenn Beck and Peter Thiel On How To Change What's Politically Cool
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IER50pX-FuM&t=3m22s
[2] Technology Stalled in 1970
http://www.technologyreview.com/qa/530901/technology-stalled-in-1970/
Great movie. I liked the way the regular citizens (the non leadership) of Elysium were portrayed as largely oblivious or lacking in any care to the sufferings on Earth.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elysium_(film)
Elysium is the film.
This is an amazing story. I wonder how many years it will take until we can fully reconstruct a face kind of like Elysium (movie) style.
This is completely tangential, but adds to the sort of vision of the world on that stage. Specifically your reference to how hard the world can be for some people.
It's a brilliant and beautifully photographed documentary about the people who ride the cross-Saharan train, sometimes as the core of their livelihood, and the people who rely on this older technology just to be able to eat.
It's titled The Mauritania Railway: Backbone of the Sahara
https://vimeo.com/225516052
edit: I just can't recommend it enough. Just watching a few moments already has me sucked in
To me, the whole present situation seems much closer to the story line in Elysium. I've worked in factories like the protagonist. It's not as distant as it can seem.
The movie Elysium was essentially that. Though you did not mention the homeless population in the Bay Area. Wealth does not make a place clean; the Bay Area is filthy. Of course that’s liberalism for you.
We're almost in the society from the movie Elysium.
The US went from being the land of opportunity to the land of overqualified uber drivers and warehouse workers.
That's a theme in Elysium.
http://imdb.com/title/tt1535108/
I think the deeper problem is that labor has no pricing power. Capitalism works for more people when people who earn a salary can buy things that increase real demand for companies. But workers are strapped for money, and have no real political assistance or prospects for a better future. Earning a living is increasingly a sucker's game.
Unfortunately, America's political system doesn't allow for a nuanced solution that gently puts the brakes on rampant globalization. Instead, talking heads who only play for ALL THE MARBLES see this as an either/or situation. I believe in the inevitability of globalization. The question we need to ask ourselves is, do we need to get there next week? Can we get there just a tiny bit slower? Can we create an economic space where people not living on space station Elysium (the 2013 movie) can have a life not defined by exasperating financial anxiety?
I have always thought there is an optimistic version and a pessimistic version of this.
The optimistic version is that technology creates enough wealth to provide a basic income for everyone when the value of most human labour is diminished. The interesting part here is who 'everyone' is, because in our imagination it rarely includes impoverished countries.
The pessimistic version is that technology could already create enough value for everyone, but what it really does is it increases inequality.
The value of automation might be captured by few large companies and a technological elite in a few countries, which have no incentive to support the rest of humanity other than to avoid a bloodbath. Combine this with vastly increasing populations in developing countries and resource scarcity + climate change in various regions causing mass migration movements, I just do not see how this can really workout peacefully.
If people have seen the movie Elysium, I always feel that this is already happening, just that Europe and the US are Elysium, and it is only about to get worse.
It's heavy handed, but the movie Elysium portrayed this well. It's a dark timeline indeed.
A bit more like Elysium[1], I'd say...
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elysium_(film)
That said, being exposed to a lot of high-energy ionizing radiation and lengthening one's teleomeres doesn't sound like a good combination...
Someone should start writing some unit tests and we could possibly have that healing machine from the movie Elysium https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETreC62bitE
But why can't the people living on earth create their own functional economy?
In Elysium (the movie you are referring to) the answer is clear: Earth is full of sick children, Mexicans and lovable criminals. For reasons I didn't quite understand, those Mexicans are unable to build a functioning economy (perhaps because the lovable criminals cause too many problems).
Do you believe that this is an accurate reflection of reality, namely that the non-rich can't organize themselves into a livable society without the aid of the rich?
Going to repeat a lot of what has been said so far:
- Minority Report (The TV show isn't bad either)
- Ex Machina
- District 9
- Elysium
- Oblivion
- Edge of Tomorrow
- Looper
- I am Legend
- Her
- The Martian
- The Matrix (Only 2 & 3 if you're super bored)
- Basically any of the Mad Max series
- Firefly (TV show, movies are OK)
- Dark Matter (TV show)
- Snow Piercer
- American Ultra
- Last Witch Hunter (more fantasy than SciFi)
- Riddick
- Dredd
- X Files (I mean, it's not NOT scifi...)
- Treasure Planet (Yes, the animated one)
- Atlantis: The Lost Empire (Gets a bad rap for being animated, but it has it's own language and everything)
- Serial Lain Experiments (anime)
- Watchmen
- The Dark Knight
- Inception
- The Prestige (technically SciFi)
I can go on for hours
So, I was in Toronto in August and used my Netflix account to view movies at the hotel. I think it may have given me the Netflix Canada catalog (since it was over the hotel WiFi). I found that Netflix Canada catalog to be way superior to the one I see in the US. E.g Star Wars TFA was on the catalog, but not there when I got back to the US. Same with Elysium, etc.
It pays to keep this in the context of the events in our recent history which some argue have lead to a certain stripe of ideological stagnation in America, not just in the way we perceive modernity but in also their debilitating influence on how we perceive actual technological progress itself.
Peter Thiel has been steadfastly vocal on this :
I think one of the … you know, the counter-cultural in the '60s was the hippies. You know, we landed on the moon in July of 1969. Woodstock started three weeks later, and with the benefit of hindsight, that’s when progress ended, and the hippies took over the country.
Today the counterculture is to believe in science and technology. You know, our society, the dominant culture doesn’t like science. It doesn’t like technology. You just look at the science-fiction movies that come out of Hollywood — Terminator, Matrix, Avatar, Elysium. I watched the Gravity movie the other day. It’s like you would never want to go into outer space. You would just want to be back on some muddy island. And so I think we’re in a world where actually believing that a better future is possible that you can have agency and work towards a better future, that is actually radically counter-cultural.[1]
[1]
Peter Thiel and Glenn Beck discuss what the counterculture looks like.
http://www.glennbeck.com/2014/10/21/could-this-be-the-new-counter-culture/
(or if your political persuasion forbids you against patronizing Beck)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IER50pX-FuM
Now one must understand why it must be like the movie elysium. Just without a happy end.
I am, also, very much imagining a situation like in the movie "Elysium" being both probable and probably inevitable; the more interesting question is will there be a revolution after?
I agree that equality is not important as a goal, but it's important as a means - I think (i.e. based on my observation of reality) that inequality results in bad outcomes (i.e. takes us further from the goal of "less poverty" or "better lives"), hence my drive to oppose and fight it.
Of course, it would be even better if I/we could simply reduce poverty and improves lives directly (without the detour of fighting inequality), but currently I don't know how (and neither does anyone else).
One of the best, if unrealistic, solutions I see are robots; but between now and when we invent really useful robots, I think it's important to strive to prevent outcomes as displayed in the movie Elysium (or the alternative future in the story Manna).
The problem with Elysium is that it just does not sound plausible once you get into the meat of it. Why would the rich "hoard" their technological advances for exclusive use?
For that matter, what is wealth in such a context anyways? What are they wealthy of? Magical mythical currency that they exchange with other rich people? No, they have to give it to someone to do something. Even if it means giving it to the soldiers that have to police the ever-growing population below.
Really, the whole story just relies on an unproven notion that "wealthy people are evil", as that is the only motive that can hold up. Why couldn't the poor simply pool their resources together (government?) and buy one of these things from the rich people.
I'm really bothered that the narrative in the media and movies is constantly presented as "the poor rise up against the evil rich".
I'm going to dumb it down a bit, and say that I like to think of two movies with different visions of a technologically advanced future: WALL-E and Elysium (aka that Matt Damon movie where all the rich people live on the space station). In WALL-E, nobody works and everybody (well, everybody that survived the initial apocalypse anyway) lives the literal fat life while robots serve them all equally. In Elysium, the abundance of health and life that comes from technological advances are hoarded away for exclusive use by the wealthy.
Of the 2 visions, I always found the Elysium model to be much more likely...actually I would argue inevitable. Given human nature, I just can't foresee a world where everyone lounges around in equally-served harmony. No...there will always be an elite, and the elite will find a way to procure and consume a vastly disproportionate amount of resources. Even in the movie Elysium, after the proletariat storm the space castle at the end, any "victory" will be short-lived and will just produce a new elite.
So I guess I'm suggesting that the proclaimed political/economic system is irrelevant. The reality ends up looking pretty much the same in either case. And that reality will probably not be pretty once human labor is fully commoditized through technology.
Being rich does not guarantee that you will have a good life anywhere. There are numerous other things you have to consider. Yes a rich man can buy a big land for himself and build a wall to keep the beggars outside. He can even move to the countryside and never go out or use a private jets / helicopters.
The thing is that China is a home for a lot of people and is too polluted and crowded because of wealth distribution. If people do not care about the environment, intellectual property and a countless of other things then being rich and filthy rich are too different things.
A wealthy man can walk the streets of european/american cities without worrying too much about its health or not having a space for himself without guards. Do not forget that european / us cities are dwarves compared to Asia in general.
The movie Elysium is a good picture (maybe too exaggerated but hey) of people being wealthy in China.
Yes you can have a good life in a golden cage but it's still a cage.
Primer was great! I liked the gritty, detailed, realistic but fictional engineering in the story as much as anything. That aspect reminds me of the Neill Blomkamp films - District 9, Elysium, Chappie.
You saw the movie Elysium right?
One thing that I’ve found puzzling over the last ten or so years is the anger directed towards people who choose to work hard
I think there is serious merit to that sentiment. Others in this thread have made very keen observations on this all pervasive national attitude that has blanketed America in the past decade or two.
however the biggest issue facing the US is this message that excelling isn't to aspired too, acceptance of who you are and who someone else is is all that matters. It is a self defeating mindset. Don't worry if you fail, you had no choice, you just can't do better. Here let us take care of you....
And fully expecting to be flamed, I give you perhaps, the most lucid and no-nonsense explanation of how this kind of self-defeatist thinking has come about envelope the national psyche, in the form on a nice quip by none other than, Peter Thiel himself:
The countercultural in the '60s was the hippies. You know, we landed on the moon in July of 1969. Woodstock started three weeks later, and with the benefit of hindsight, that’s when progress ended, and the hippies took over the country.
He adds:
Today the counterculture is to believe in science and technology. You know, our society, the dominant culture doesn’t like science. It doesn’t like technology. You just look at the science-fiction movies that come out of Hollywood — Terminator, Matrix, Avatar, Elysium. I watched the Gravity movie the other day. It’s like you would never want to go into outer space. You would just want to be back on some muddy island. And so I think we’re in a world where actually believing that a better future is possible that you can have agency and work towards a better future, that is actually radically countercultural.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9034895
[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IER50pX-FuM&t=3m22s
[3] Technology Stalled in 1970
http://www.technologyreview.com/qa/530901/technology-stalled-in-1970/
I rather have the feeling there wasn't much there. All that new dystopian action movies are just the basic and shallow action movies we had with a distopian theme on it. I watched Elysium recently. You could have this without the SciFi part also.
I haven't seen a good dystopian movie in a long time. I was however also not very happy with Zero Theorem but they tried to do something different at least.
My relationship with Hollywood is this: I'm always happy they do something with SciFi. No matter how bad it is. People like SciFi atm and this brings money to ideas which also rises the chances of one really good movie. Then it all was worth it.
Same goes for TV shows. Black Mirror has been mentioned here. What a great show! But it was a great time for SciFi also. Look how many episodes Star Gate got. I couldn't watch it because it was so shallow but many people liked it and it was great for the genre.
To me the difference in his worldview (as it relates to cost reduction and ethics) versus yours is mostly about theory vs practice.
In theory, freeing people from labor as a necessity is a good thing where we all gain time to pursue our creative passions instead of putting in 40-80 hours as wage slaves; in practice (based on economic trends and prevailing contemporary political views that seem unlikely to shift in the near term), it appears to be hurling us towards something vaguely like the society that was presented in the movie "Elysium"
Actually literally everything in the universe guarantees that we will reach a stable solution. That's how things work. That stable solution may end up killing billions of people but eventually you get a status quo. Systems gravitate towards low energy states.
Also an Elysium like scenario? That movie was a joke and made no sense. If you're gonna believe in science fiction as the model for the future at least go for something that isn't terrible.
I believe that "Toroidal Colonies" inspired heavily the movie Elysium (2013)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1535108/
This is a big problem with current envy-driven politics surrounding wealth.
This is not envy driven. Not wanting bonuses for bankers who were bailed out by public money has to do with bonus-driven bad decisions being a fundamental cause of the crash that cost everyone else trillions of dollars in wealth, economic growth, unemployment benefits and bailouts. Look up "moral hazard", and note that they are up to the same shenanigans that got us into this mess.
Furthermore, if the banks are, effectively, government guaranteed, then bankers should be paid as government employees. Greater pay is for greater skill and risk, their risk is borne by everyone but themselves and as for skill... So it is only proper (and not "envy") for the taxpayers to get those bonuses.
..old money children who have inherited a fortune but seem to have contributed little of value themselves
This is also a huge economic and social problem, no need to invoke "envy". The moneyed elites have started to decouple themselves from the rest of the world. I went to a prep school in Michigan where this was quite apparent, and scary. There was also a recent study that warned that this decoupling of the elites from everyone else could lead to (or contribute heavily to) the collapse of civilization [1]. For an artistic rendition, see "Elysium". What's so scary about that film is not the dystopian outlook, but rather how real a lot of it already feels.
They're envious of highly paid sporting or artistic celebrities who get more salary in a week than most of us make in a year.
Again, there are good economic arguments for this being a problem. Pay way in excess of the ability to consume creates a huge overhang in liquidity with which people start to gamble in the international financial casino, creating instability[1] See also "Giant Pool of Money"[2]
And so they support punitive rates of tax for those who earn noticeably more than they do
The rates are not punitive. They are stabilizing. Where this rate starts is a good question to which I don't have a good answer.
Unfortunately, what that usually does in practice is hit highly qualified professionals or modestly successful entrepreneurs
Not according to any statistics I have seen. References?
However, the people these punitive taxes don't hit are the ones that the popular moneylust craves, because the super-rich are the people who have the flexibility to move their assets and/or themselves around to avoid high-tax environments. Absent serious international co-operation to overcome the naturally competitive tax environment that today's globalised society creates, these people will continue to be super-rich no matter what
So should we not do this because it is wrong or because it won't work? It seems it can't work if we don't start somewhere. Certainly finance has globalized, so it seems it is time for enforcement to catch up. This seems to start happening, see the crackdown on Switzerland as a tax-haven/money-laundering center.
[1] http://www.sesync.org/sites/default/files/resources/motesharrei-rivas-kalnay.pdf
[2] http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.spiegel.de%2Fwirtschaft%2Fhoeness-und-die-finanzkrise-kolumne-von-wolfgang-muenchau-a-958205.html
[3] http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/355/the-giant-pool-of-money
Elysium is fascinatingly weird film - so they had all those ships packed with wonderful medical technologies and robots standing by on minute's notice and still refused to spare any of it because of pure spite, despite not even needing them at all, as they all have the same things in their homes, so only reason why they also had all those ships with medical robots would be to heal Earth people - but they never did, so why they built those medical ships in the first place? Just to taunt poor earthlings?
They have the technology to reassemble human body on molecular level and they still need millions of humans to work in degrading conditions to build those robots - because those molecular-precision technologies somehow not applicable to building robots? And yet despite their dire need of those workers - they not only dispose of them without second's hesitation but also allow their robots to mutilate them for no reason, thus degrading their productivity significantly. This movie really doesn't led itself to any thinking - it just falls apart like wet toilet paper if you start to think about it.
> The entertainment industry has just never really been able to get their heads around how to best develop a new, sustainable business model
The entertainment industry seems to be doing better than ever. Did piracy actually reverse growth at any point in their history?
Today you can buy new-release movies from your PC, smartphone, tablet, set-top box or smart TV and either download or stream them instantly. You can buy combo-packs in store that come with both physical discs you own and a digital download license. The download-only rights for new releases cost substantially less than discs; charging the same was a common complaint of pirates on messages boards for years (e.g. today you can buy Elysium on Amazon at $3.99 to rent, $12.99 for digital purchase, $19.99 for DVD or $27.99 for BR+Download). The digital versions are available as soon as, or even earlier than, the disc versions. Tens of thousands of movies that few would want to purchase are available on a dozen streaming services for less dollars a month than buying a single movie outright.
Almost every objection to legal purchases made by pirates over the years has been answered; the studios gave us what we asked for. Their content is available at reasonable prices virtually wherever and whenever you want it, at least within their own countries (international licensing is still a mess). BitTorrent's share of US internet traffic went from 33% in 2006 to 21% in 2011 to less than 7% in 2013. I don't think that's coincidental.
Technological innovation alone leads to a capitalist dystopia like the one seen in the movie Elysium.
Disclaimer: I am not a STEM guy so don't go calling me an elitist.
This might seem like a callous view but I think it's better to invest money on helping the scientist caste (wherever they might have been born) than to simply cure a bunch of random people. In the movie Elysium (2013), they send magic machines to help the masses, which achieves nothing since they are just as poor as before but a bit healthier. I left the movie theater feeling depressed and angry.
What we need is real technological progress. If we could for example synthesize objects or food easily à la Star Trek, we would solve poverty and inequality more efficiently than thousands of years of social programs.
Consider the fact that Isaac Newton's scientific output was worth more than 99% of the work of every other intellectual in the world in the past few centuries leading up to his birth. What's even more amazing is that Newton spent only a tiny fraction of his time doing actual science; he was obsessed with mysticism and other pseudo-scientific doctrines. So giving a billion dollars to the next Newton will be many order of magnitudes smarter than spending that same billion curing laborers. However, it's not politically correct, so I doubt it will be feasible.
I saw Elysium on Monday and this was shown before the film. That's why they are calling it a trailer.
These articles are funny, coming up with all the negative possibilities of future technology. Elysium (new movie) showed another one, allowing a full download of people's brains, also to ill effect.
I can't wait until this technology is improved, so I can "search" my own brain to find all the stuff I seem to forget. I'm sure it's locked in my unconscious somewhere...
OP is not alone. I saw the trailer for elysium and immediately thought, Rendezvous with Rama ( 50 yrs old ). For me, part of the problem with envisioning a future that is so much 'more' than what we have today, on the order of how Star Trek was in the 60s, is a consequence of how much our scientists understand 'limits' today than they did then. Elevated freeways, and floating cars, simply aren't practical given our understanding of physics and energy. The most practical 'sf' that we've seen lately is about human simulation, and as far as the big screen goes, that's pretty boring. Also correct me if I'm wrong, but since the transistor, we've seen three waves of digitization, digitization of tools ( calculator ), digitization of human society/social interaction ( message-boards -> facebook ), and finally we are beginning the third and final stage, digitization of ourselves ( quantified self, implantable bio-tech ). This 'second renaissance' if you will seems to end with human virtualization ( after which no reasonable extrapolation seems plausible ).
From a SF big-picture sort of movie archetype, this stuff seems pretty tired, thin and boring. I think we are only beginning to understand the societal implications of the first two waves of digitization, and even the most hardcore dystopia hasn't yet captured all the avenues of the third. Seems to me, Hollywood can only make blockbusters profitable, and the type of SF that we are envisioning now is a lot more subtle.