What all sci-fi movies get wrong
If you’re a sci-fi fan, this article might not be for you. But if you are the kind of person who watches movies to tickle your imagination bone while still being realistic, I’ve got something to say.
Most sci-fi movies get everything about the future almost entirely wrong.
Now, this is pretty self-evident if you watch any movie released before the 2010s. Films like Back to the Future look very weird now. But all movies currently being released are also doing the same mistakes. And I believe there are some good reasons for this, so let me explain-
- All future technology ideas are always based on the current knowledge and technology of humans. It’s like people in the 19th century trying to imagine faster horses or infinitely faster horses. What they couldn’t do was take the leap of faith that humanity eventually took to completely make everything based on machines.
We tend to iterate our way into imagining the future world. As if all humanity is going to do is improve existing stuff ad infinitum. And even when we are taking risks by imagining flying cars and hovering skateboards, we are doing this on the backbone of technologies that already exist in the present.
A good solution is what great inventors generally use. People who actually end up making the technologies and the world of the future, almost always begin making new things by reimagining current problems.
So instead of thinking of a better version of cars, we need to ask for a better version of moving people or things from point A to point B. Questions like do we even need vehicles, do these vehicles need tires, what will be the bottlenecks that would make current cars obsolete, etc; will then be pretty evident. - Another thing we get massively wrong is individual human behaviour. It’s quite eerie to think that even while the whole world around us would change, our choices and decisions would still remain the same decades later.
A movie that does a good job of questioning basic human assumptions is Arrival. Rethinking how we communicate in the future is a very good fundamental question to ask. After all, language was a major event in the building of our current society and thus will probably be the most affected thing by technologies that improve the human experience.
Arrival can make you think why would we even require words at all in the future? How would our human senses fit in a world where information will flow infinitely faster between people? It’s a glimpse at least of the weird stuff possible.
On the same note, would we still continue odd habits of following rituals like blowing candles on a cake for no good reason? It seems like a very small thing but such things that we do every day, sometimes in the name of religion, are probably going to be impacted as well. It’s a wonder to my brain whenever I see future generations (in movies) still struggling with minor human problems like decision-making, biases, information asymmetry and many such problems that can easily be made obsolete by technology. - Now if we are getting individuals wrong, just imagine how wrong we are getting our entire society. Our entire species might not have borders in the future, or democracy, or economic systems, markets, religions or the most fundamental of human things- society itself.
It’s probably the hardest to predict. But a good bet is to always go non-linear here the farther you are going in the future. As we become better at handling smaller problems like poverty, health and education, we’ll have plenty of time to conclude much larger debates of politics and philosophy.
Even more interestingly, our core principles of cooperation and empathy may become useless in a never-ending world with endless stuff. A world where everyone would have the perfect information and probably millions of years of simulated experience in a virtual world, would make a good place to start experimental things we never dared yet. - Lastly, we get the entirety of the physical world completely wrong. Most people don’t notice this but beyond the digital world, we have also largely changed our physical world too in the last century. And as fields of material science and biotech keep on innovating, I am sure how we interact with atoms, cells and molecules would fundamentally change in the future.
Getting rid of almost every single disease is a good start. Growing food without plants also sounds like a fundamentally good idea. A great third would be the construction of our world including simple things like buildings, roads, etc in radically new ways using radically different materials.
We are very primitive in this right now but Moore’s law has started working for biotech and the day isn’t far when immortality and superpowers might be lame words. Where becoming the God of our lives may become a closer reality. Where we’ll order evolution like we order fast food.
I am pretty sure I have not seen many great sci-fi movies that do a beautiful job of building the completely unknown world of the future. And there definitely are tons of books that take everything to the next level. Plus, I have only presented an optimistic world scenario and a world limited to either our planet or our dimensions. We might fare worse than now but even that destruction would be something new.
At the very least, most movies get at least one thing right. Even for Back to the future, they definitely got video calling (somewhat) right.
I hope as a species we are far bigger visionaries for our own future. At least in the stories we tell ourselves, if not our actual world.
