Films from the Future

by Andrew Maynard

  Google “top science fiction movies,” and you’ll probably be overwhelmed by a deluge of “top 100” lists, “best ever” compilations, and page upon page of the last word (supposedly) on must-watch movies. People are passionate about their science fiction movies, and they have strong opinions about what should be on everyone’s watch list, and what should not. Some of the movies in this book appear regularly on these lists, Jurassic Park (chapter two) and Minority Report (chapter four), for instance. Some are hidden gems that only the most dedicated fans cherish, including films like The Man in the White Suit (chapter ten), and the anime movie Ghost in the Shell (chapter seven). Others are likely to raise eyebrows, and I suspect there’ll be a few movie buffs wondering why the collection includes films like Transcendence (chapter nine) and Inferno (chapter eleven).

  This is a fair question. After all, why write a book about science fiction movies that aren’t listed as being amongst the best there are? The answer is that this is not a book about great science fiction movies, but a book about how science fiction movies can inspire us to see the world around us and in front of us differently. Each of the movies here has been selected because it provides a jumping-off point for exploring new and intriguing technological capabilities, and the challenges and opportunities these raise. Some of the resulting stories are life-affirming and heart-warming, while others are deeply disturbing. Individually, they provide fascinating accounts of the sometimes-weird and complex landscape around emerging technologies. Together, though, they paint a much broader picture of how our technological world is changing, and what this might mean to us and the generations that come after us.

  The movies themselves were selected after many hours of watching and soul-searching. There are some quite wonderful science fiction movies that didn’t make the cut because they didn’t fit the overarching narrative (Blade Runner and its sequel Blade Runner 2049, for instance, and the first of the Matrix trilogy). There are also movies that bombed with the critics, but were included because they ably fill a gap in the bigger story around emerging and converging technologies. Ultimately, the movies that made the cut were chosen because, together, they create an overarching narrative around emerging trends in biotechnologies, cybertechnologies, and materials-based technologies, and they illuminate a broader landscape around our evolving relationship with science and technology. And, to be honest, they are all movies that I get a kick out of watching.

  In pulling these movies together and writing the book, I wanted to explore the often complex relationship we have with emerging technologies. But I also wanted to highlight some of the amazing advances we see beginning to emerge in science and technology. We truly do live in incredible times. Scientists are learning how to write and rewrite genetic code with increasing precision and efficiency. Nanotechnologists are designing and engineering materials that far exceed the properties of anything that occurs in nature. We are already creating artificial intelligence systems that can operate faster and smarter than any human. There are self-driving cars on our roads, with autonomous people-carrying drones just around the corner. Researchers are working on brain-computer interfaces and mapping the human brain down to its individual neurons. And we may well see people walking on the surface of Mars within the next decade. Until recently, these and many more scientific and technological marvels were the stuff of science fiction, yet the frenetic pace of innovation is rapidly catching up with some of our wildest imaginings.

  This is heady stuff to the physicist in me—at heart, I must confess, I’m still a technology geek. And yet this stupendous technological power comes with a growing obligation to learn how to handle it responsibly. Despite the speed with which we’re hurtling toward our technological future, we are still grappling with how to do this in ways that don’t end up causing more harm than good. This isn’t because scientists and engineers don’t care about who gets hurt—most of them care deeply—but because we’re charging headlong into a future that’s so complex, it’s becoming increasingly challenging to work out what could go wrong and how to avoid it.

  Navigating this future is going to require every ounce of insight we can squeeze out of our collective brains. And because the consequences of how we use new and emerging technologies will end up affecting us all, we all have a role to play here, including individuals who are all too easily overlooked by scientists and engineers—in fact, especially these individuals.

  Faced with this task, science fiction movies simultaneously remove barriers to people talking together about the future, and reveal possibilities that might otherwise remain hidden. Every one of the movies here can be appreciated as much by someone who flunked high school as by a Nobel Prize winner. Because of this, they are tremendously powerful for getting people from very different backgrounds and perspectives thinking and talking together. But more than this, they have a way of slipping past our preconceived ideas of the world and revealing things to us that we could so easily miss.

  It’s these unexpected insights that I’ve tried to draw out from each of the movies, building on my own work and experiences, as well as those of others. In doing so, I’ve been amazed at how powerful they are at revealing connections and ideas that aren’t always obvious. I’ve been surprised and delighted at how these reflections have taken unexpected and serendipitous turns, opening up new ideas around how to approach beneficial and responsible technology innovation. But I’ve also been taken aback at times by the very real harm we could cause if we get things wrong—not just to humanity as a whole, but to communities that all too easily slip between the cracks. And as I immersed myself in these movies, I’ve become more certain than ever that, fascinating as the minutiae of individual technologies can be, it’s when they begin to converge that the really interesting stuff begins to happen.

  The Power of Convergence

  In June 2007, the first generation of the Apple iPhone was released to the public. From the perspective of today’s crowded smartphone marketplace, it’s hard to realize how seismic an event this was at the time. Yet, looking back, it started a trend in how we use and interact with technology that continues to reverberate through society to this day.

  The iPhone stands as an iconic example of technological convergence—what happens when different strands of innovation intertwine together (a topic we’ll come back to in chapter nine)—and the social and technological transformations that can occur as a result. These days, smartphones integrate hundreds of different technologies: nanoscale-featured processors and memory chips, advanced materials, cloud computing, image processing, video communication, natural language processing, rudimentary artificial intelligence, biometrics. They’ll even allow you to make phone calls. They are a triumph of our ability to weave together separate technologies to make devices that are not only more than the sum of their parts, but are also transforming the ways we live our lives. But as the capabilities of smartphones and other personal electronics expand, there’s a growing fear of serious unintended consequences, so much so that, in 2018, JANA Partners LLC and the California State Teachers’ Retirement System—two investors in Apple—requested the company actively address the potential impacts of iPhone use on teenagers.1

  Smartphones are a useful, but still rather crude, example of technological convergence. Expanding on this, we’re now beginning to see convergence between biotechnologies, materials science, robotics, artificial intelligence, neurotechnologies, and other areas that are rapidly catching up with what used to be limited to deeply futuristic science fiction. This is seen across the movies in this book, from the use of genetic engineering in Jurassic Park (chapter two) to human augmentation in Ghost in the Shell (chapter seven). The power of convergence between different technological trends particularly stands out in the movie Transcendence (chapter nine). Here, the technology we see on the screen is firmly rooted in Hollywood fantasy. Despite this, the film captures the scale of technological leaps that become possible when technical knowhow from one area is used to solve problems and a
ccelerate progress in another.

  Transcendence is, at heart, a movie about transcending our biological and evolutionary heritage. Inspired by the ideas of transhumanists like Ray Kurzweil, it imagines a future where convergence between biotechnology, neurotechnology, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence leads to a profound shift in capabilities—albeit one with sobering consequences. There’s a scene relatively early on in the movie where artificial-intelligence (AI) genius Will Caster (played by Johnny Depp) is dying, and his only hope is for his consciousness to be uploaded into a revolutionary new artificial-intelligence-powered computer. But, to achieve this, his colleagues need to use equally cutting-edge neuroscience and sensor technology to record and store every nuance of Caster’s brain. In true movie fashion, they succeed just before he passes away, and Caster becomes a human-machine chimera who transcends his biological roots.

  The science and technology in Transcendence are fanciful. But as you peel away the Hollywood hyperbole, the movie hints at a coming level of technological convergence that could radically change the world we live in. This is rooted in our growing ability to blur the lines between physical technologies like materials, machines, and electronics; biological technologies like gene editing and biomanipulation; and cyber technologies like machine learning, natural language processing, and massive-scale data collection and manipulation. What unfolds in Transcendence is scientifically impossible. But what is not impossible—and what scientists and engineers are becoming increasingly adept at—is our growing ability to merge together and integrate seemingly different technologies, to transform the world we live in.

  This is perhaps most apparent in emerging gene-editing technologies, where scientists are developing the abilities to rewrite the DNA-based code that underpins every living organism, something that is only possible through converging technologies. But we’re also seeing this convergence leading to massive advances in areas like designer materials, artificial intelligence, human-machine interfaces, and many others. For perhaps the first time, we are getting close to being able to far outstrip nature in how we design and engineer the world around us.

  This is where the true transformative power of convergence lies, and it’s also where some of the greatest potential pitfalls are. Through converging technologies, we’re developing capabilities that could radically improve lives by eradicating diseases, providing cheap and plentiful renewable energy, and ensuring everyone has access to nutritious food and clean water. At the same time, there are tremendous risks. We don’t yet know how large-scale automation will affect jobs in the future, for instance, or how access to technologies may simply lead to the poor getting poorer and the rich richer. We have little idea how to wield increasingly powerful gene-editing technologies responsibly. And we’re not sure yet whether the rapid development of artificial intelligence is going to make the world a better place or lead to the end of humanity as we know it! The harsh reality is that, while convergence is massively accelerating our technological capabilities, we still have little if any idea what might go wrong, or what the unintended consequences could be.

  This is a theme that runs deeply through this book, and it’s one that gets to the heart of the morality and the ethics of the science and the technologies we develop and use. If we’re going to navigate the world of these converging technologies successfully, we’re going to have to start thinking more creatively and innovatively about where we’re going as a species, what could go wrong, and what we need to do to make things go right. Of course, movies are not the most reliable guide here, and I’d hate to give the impression that surviving and thriving in the twenty-first century is as easy as watching a few films. But they do provide a platform for exploring some of the more intriguing and important emerging and converging trends in technology innovation, and the tension between developing them responsibly and ensuring they reach their full potential. And here they touch on another common theme that threads through the following chapters: the challenges and opportunities of socially responsible innovation.

  Socially Responsible Innovation

  The movie The Man in the White Suit (chapter ten) is perhaps one of the less well-known films in this book, but it is one that admirably highlights this tension between impactful and often well-intentioned innovation and unforeseen social consequences. In the movie, Sidney Stratton is a scientist with a vision. And that vision is to create the perfect fabric, one that’s incredibly strong, doesn’t wear out, and never needs washing. There’s only one problem: He never bothered to ask anyone else what they thought of his invention. As a result, he finds himself attracting the ire of his co-workers, the textile industry, the local union, and even his landlady. Stratton made the classic mistake of thinking that, just because he could do something, others would love it.

  Even though the movie was made back in 1951, it eloquently captures the idea of socially responsible innovation. This is another theme that threads through this book, and it’s one that is deeply intertwined with the opportunities and challenges presented by converging technologies.

  Responsible Innovation (sometimes referred to as Responsible Research and Innovation) is a hot topic these days. There’s even an academic journal devoted to it. The thinking behind responsible innovation is that we don’t always have a second or third chance to get things right when developing new technologies, and so it’s better to think about the potential consequences as early as we can, and take action to avoid the bad ones as early in the development process as possible. There are plenty of formal definitions for responsible innovation.2 But many of these boil down to ensuring that anyone who is potentially impacted by technological innovation has a say in how it’s developed and used, and taking steps to ensure innovation that leads to a better future for as many people as possible, without causing undue harm. This is easy to say, of course, but fiendishly difficult to put into practice.

  This idea of social responsibility comes up time and time again in the movies here. In many cases, a film’s dramatic tension draws directly on some person or organization not thinking about the consequences of what they are doing, or being too arrogant to see their blind spots (this is apparent straight out of the gate with Jurassic Park in chapter two). This makes for compelling narratives, but it also opens the way for surprisingly nuanced approaches to exploring what might go wrong with emerging technologies if we don’t think of who they will impact (and how), and how we can steer them toward better outcomes. And it opens the door to delving into something that is near and dear to my heart: grappling with the risks of new and unusual technologies.

  Most of my professional life has been involved with risk in one way or another. Much of my early published scientific research was aimed at reducing the health risks from inhaling airborne particles. I’ve worked extensively on understanding and reducing the health and environmental risks of nanotechnology and other emerging technologies. I’ve taught risk assessment, I’ve written about risk, and I’ve run academic centers that are all about risk. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years, it’s that I have less and less patience for how many people tend to think about risk.

  The problem is that, while established approaches to risk work reasonably well when it comes to protecting people and the environment from conventional technologies, they run out of steam rather fast when we’re facing technologies that can achieve things we never imagined. To coopt a Biblical metaphor, we’re in danger of desperately trying to squeeze the new wine of technological innovation into the old wineskins of conventional risk thinking, and at some point, something’s going to give. If we’re to develop new technologies in socially responsible ways, we need to realign how we think about risk with the capabilities of the innovations we’re creating.

  This is the idea behind the concept of Risk Innovation, which is where much of my current work lies.3 Over the past couple of hundred years—pretty much since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution—we’ve become quite adept at developing new ways of causi
ng harm. And over time we’ve become equally adept at developing ways of assessing and managing the risks associated with innovation, whether they arise from mining and manufacturing, exposure to new chemicals and materials, or pollution. But these approaches to risk belong to a different world than the one we’re now creating. With emerging and converging technologies, it’s becoming increasingly apparent that, in order to navigate a radically shifting risk landscape, we need equally radical innovation in how to think about and act on risk.

  Perhaps not surprisingly, risk is at the core of all the movies here. Each of these films has a risk-based narrative tension that keeps its audience hooked. Yet it’s not always apparent that it’s risk that keeps you glued to the screen, or holding your breath, or even reaching for the tissues in places. Most of us are used to thinking about risk in terms of someone’s life being put in danger, or perhaps the environment and ecosystems being threatened, and there’s plenty of this in the book. But these movies also explore other, subtler risks, including threats to dignity, belonging, identity, belief, even what it means to be human.

  These are rather unconventional ways of thinking about risk, and they get at what is so important to us that our lives are diminished if it’s denied us, or taken from us. Because of this, they make considerable sense as we begin to think about how new technologies will potentially affect our lives and how to develop and use them responsibly. This is a way of thinking about risk that revolves around threats to what is important to us, whether it’s something we have and can’t face losing, or something we aspire to and cannot bear to lose sight of. This includes our health, our well-being, and the environment we live in, but it also extends to less tangible but equally important things that we deeply value.

  In each of the movies here, the characters we follow risk either losing something of great importance to them, or being unable to gain something that they aspire to. In many of the movies, the types of risks these characters face aren’t always immediately obvious, but they profoundly impact the consequences of the technologies being developed and used, and it’s this insight that opens up interesting and new ways of thinking about the social consequences of technological innovation. And so we discover that, in Jurassic Park (chapter two), John Hammond’s dream of creating the world’s most amazing theme park is at risk. In the movie Never Let Me Go (chapter three), it’s the threat to Tommy’s hope for the future that brings us to tears. And in Ghost in the Shell (chapter seven), it’s Major Kusanagi’s sense of who and what she is. There are also more conventional risks in each of these movies. Yet, by revealing these less obvious risks, these movies reveal new and often powerful ways to think about developing new technologies without causing unnecessary and unexpected harm.