'How Silicon Valley Borrowed Ideas From Sci-Fi and Bastardized Them'
It is a truth universally acknowledged that technology barons both love science fiction and chronically fail to understand what science fiction is trying to tell them. The late Iain Banks’ Culture novels, about a utopian socialist society run by artificial intelligences, is often cited by Elon Musk, no socialist, as an inspiration for his Neuralink brain-implant company. Mark Zuckerberg so admires Neal Stephenson’s 1992 cyberpunk novel Snow Crash that he used to require all Facebook product managers to read it, and he named his unenthusiastically received virtual world, Metaverse, after the one in Stephenson’s book—this despite the fact that Snow Crash takes place in a corporate-dominated dystopia where average citizens are forced to live in shipping containers, with dips into the metaverse as their only relief. Upon the launch of ChatGPT-4o, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman tweeted one word, “her,” a reference to the 2013 Spike Jonze film Her, in which a man falls in love with an A.I. voiced by Scarlett Johansson, an attachment that ends badly—though not as badly as some real-life instances of A.I. psychosis.
Why are these moguls—men whom the business media have been praising as geniuses for the past 40 years—so dumb? Musk may very well be the dimmest of the lot in this department. He described the armored Cybertruck as “what Bladerunner would have driven” even though “blade runner” is a job description and not a character, and, as Max Read has written, the hero of the 1982 Ridley Scott movie, Rick Deckard, spends all of Blade Runner recognizing that his work is soul-crushing and inexcusable, even in the context of the urban hellscape he inhabits. “You don’t need the truck that ‘Bladerunner [sic] would have driven,’ ” Read explains for the obtuse (which apparently includes Musk), “because you don’t live in the world of Blade Runner.”
You’d think that would be self-evident, but Silicon Valley persists in trying to realize fictional inventions that are meant to be understood as terrible ideas, apparently just because they look cool. The industry that has been propelling the developed world into the future is dominated by the mentality of a 12-year-old boy. Science fiction has a long history of anticipating and even inspiring technological change, and the genre’s authors have at times been consulted by government—usually the military or security forces—to model potential threat scenarios and ways to respond to them. That work has presented its own moral conundrums, but at least they were the dilemmas of adults, not the overgrown manchildren shaping so much of our daily lives.Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale
Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus
— Alex Blechman (@AlexBlechman) November 8, 2021
