There Are No Computers In Science Fiction.
“One of the problems with science fiction, is the fact that everything is used up. Every type of spacesuit, every type of spacecraft is vaguely familiar. The corridors are similar, the planets are similar.”
— Ridley Scott
Science fiction is like practice for the future. It’s a way to make believe what’s gonna happen so you can see what happens. Like what happens if robots become self-aware? (The Matrix). What happens if Covid-19 turned us all into monsters? (The Last Of Us). What happens if Elon Musk crashes on Mars all by himself? (The Martian).
In sci-fi, you can sketch out what’s next without the need for budgets or concern for personal safety. There’s no need for NDA’s in sci-fi and if we all become fascists or super duper fat that’s ok. With science fiction, you can pretend what would happen if you built a shrinking machine and your kids broke it (Honey, I Shrunk The Kids) or you broke it (Inner Space) or you used it and it worked great (Ant Man). Science fiction is the safest place to imagine what life would be like today if a newfangled technology just suddenly existed. It’s the testing ground for products that seem like far-fetched ideas and for a version of human culture that’s just out of reach. Science fiction is the best way to problem solve for our future. Philosophical movements like Afro-Futurism use sci-fi (Black Panther) to imagine “possible futures” that aren’t yet possible.
I’ve been trying to see if there’s any innovative idea that is so crazy and so innovative that it never appeared in sci-fi before it was real.
A lot of the time, when an innovation appears, the newer it is, the more disruptive it is, the more it shifts our everyday life, the more likely it is that we’ll recognize it from science fiction. The most popular films on Netflix throughout the Covd-19 situation are end of world disaster sci-fi thriller like Outbreak and 2012…And the Angry Birds movie, because people are the worst.
I’m somebody who as Neal Stephenson says in “Snowcrash”, likes “to condense fact from the vapor of nuance.” So, I’ve been trying to see if there’s any innovative idea that is so crazy and so innovative that it never appeared in sci-fi before it was real. Something so new that it just popped into the human consciousness one day and infected our lives.
To answer this question, I created a quarantine-friendly drinking game called Future Proof.
First, someone has to name a product, and then someone else has to name what movie or book it first appeared in *before it was actually invented*. The game should be played while wearing AR drag from Snap Camera and drinking overproof whiskey.
What I noticed playing this entirely by myself for 16 hours straight, was that from Mr. Fusion to Frankenstein, everything is created in science fiction and then manufactured in reality. So, I made a long list of What Ifs and the places I saw them first. Here’s a small sample:
What if me and my friends built a time machine?
Primer, Hot Tub Time Machine
Drink.
What if Siri actually worked?
Tony Stark’s AI assistant J.A.R.V.I.S.
Drink.
What if computers became sentient?
2001, The Matrix, etc.
Drink.
What if cars could talk?
Knight Rider
Drink.
What if our data meant that people lived forever inside the cloud?
The Fall or Dodge in Hell
Drink.
The echoes of sci-fi are everywhere…
The electric car… Demolition Man. Drink.
The smart coffee machine… Star Trek. Drink.
The surveillance state… Terminator. Drink.
This drinking game works for all technology ideas. Except for one.
There is one huge, pervasive innovation that has changed our lives immensely. When I tell you what it is, the drinking part of the drinking will become really attractive, because it’s a horrible idea. It’s ruining your life, but you use it all day in various shapes and forms. In all the speculative books and movies I’ve ever seen (I haven’t seen and read all of em, but I’ve enjoyed a representative sample for sure), no one ever uses a personal computer.
Why in the world would you wanna buy broccoli with the sex-having machine?
Personal computers make no sense.
No one has ever asked “What If I invented a single machine that could literally do everything, and then I put it within reach of everyone all the time”? No one would imagine a machine that does everything. A single machine for daily tasks, for communication, for creative acts, for travel, for learning, for play, for sex, for socializing…No science fiction writer has ever invented The Everything Machine. Please disprove this theory in the comments, nerds.
That’s because computers are a bad idea and I can prove it. In Sleeper, the Orgasmatron famously allows any two people to have sex digitally without touching each other. That makes sense. What they can’t do is go grocery shopping with the Orgasmatron, because, why in the world would you wanna buy broccoli with the sex-having machine? The Star Trek communicator does one thing really well. It communicates. If the Communicator was also the Phaser and also the Holodeck, it would probably be more expensive, but the red shirts would be overwhelmed by it’s functionality. What a terrible idea! Can you imagine James T. Kirk flipping open a laptop?
The problem with an Everything Machine is that you use it to do Everything. But, it’s inherently less good at doing each individual task. So, you end up trying to get it to work, constantly using a single interface, which gets more and more complicated and layered as you spend energy attempting to focus. And when you use one machine to do everything, you need to use it all the time, which is why it comes in three convenient sizes, Small (phone), Medium (tablet) and Large (laptop) and Super-Sized (desktop tower) that all do THE EXACT SAME THING. What a bad idea. You’re reading this article on one now. Why? You don’t need to be reading this in the same place you watch late-night television and follow Mark Bittman’s fabulous Chicken Under A Brick recipe on the New York Times! And when you’re done (if you made it this far) you can go fly a drone and assassinate someone, buy a shirt or visit the Louvre without even looking up.
Driiiiiiiiiink.
If the Everything Machine is such a bad idea, how did we all end up with one in our pocket? Because it was never actually invented. It metastasized. At first, the personal computer did do one thing. It was a business machine. Basically, a super mega excel sheet generator that could organize an impossible to organize set of information. Great idea, very specific and hard to use which totally makes sense in a science fiction story.
Then, in 1984, Steve Jobs tweaked (to paraphrase Walter Isaacson) the business machine he saw at Xerox, by changing the interface to a user-friendly GUI (graphical user interface) and all of a sudden we had computers in our houses. We didn’t all of a sudden need them in our houses. We just had them. So we needed to use them, but, it was way too powerful for any tasks we had to give it. So, we started finding stuff to do with it. We designed games for it. We organized our desktop, started hyperlinking random information together and did bad drawings. We used it for storing recipes, dating, playing Missile Command and for writing novels.
I need the machine’s help to survive the unrelenting power of the machine.
Have you ever noticed that a Swiss Army knife is like the worst knife and bottle opener? And nobody uses the screwdriver. Because its main feature is that it has lots of things that don’t actually work very well. For decades, we have continued to create things for the computer to do worse than a dedicated device would do it. We’ve found a million ways to use the massive computing power in all of our devices, adding layers of functionality, and security and connectivity. Now, there are over 2.8 million apps available for download on the Google Play Store. And the average smartphone owner uses 30 apps each month. If you look at the top 5 free iPhone apps last year:
1. YouTube
2. Instagram
3. Snapchat
4. TikTok
5. Messenger
They’re all ways to use your phone that don’t actually create any value outside of the app itself, so if the app went away, we immediately wouldn’t need it anymore. Speaking for myself, the really useful apps are the ones that help me organize other apps and the immense amount of information I have to manage throughout the day. I need the machine’s help to survive the unrelenting power of the machine. It alerts me when it needs to be used. It alerts me when something important happens.
What if we put down our Everything Machines for a sec and asked a What If?
What if we step away from our Everything Machines in our pockets, and our desks, and our bathrooms, and our kitchens, and instead make a list of what we need to do today. And then create perfectly designed, dedicated devices to do those things. We can keep them in our old computer bags, and enjoy the type of world science fiction writers have imagined for us, where for good or evil, technology does one thing great, and humans can sit around and think about the type of future we want for ourselves instead of trying to find a way to survive this moment with a machine that won’t stop doing things.
Drink.
