The best science fiction doesn’t necessarily tell us something about the future, but it might tell us something about the present.
At its best, sci-fi finds something true about human nature or human society and then places it in a new context, where we can look at it with fresh eyes. Sci-fi helps us see ourselves more clearly.
This is a video made by Microsoft in 2011 that shows one sci-fi vision of the future:
This is a utopian vision of technology. Computers exist to make people more productive, to extend the natural capabilities of our bodies, to serve as a true “bicycle of the mind”. Computers are omnipresent, but they are at our beck and call, and they exist to serve us.
This is a video showing a different vision of the future:
This is a dystopian vision of technology. Computers are omnipresent, but instead of enabling us to be more productive or to grant us more leisure time, they exist to distract us, harass us, and cajole us. In this world, the goal of technology is to convince us to buy more things, or to earn points in a useless game, or to send us on odd jobs the computer chose for us.
A similar vision of the future comes from Audrey Schulman’s Theory of Bastards. The protagonist rides a self-driving car, but she can’t turn off the video advertisements because her implant is six months out of date, and so the commands she barks at the car fail with an “unknown” error.
She blames herself for failing to upgrade her implant, in the way you might chide yourself for forgetting to see the dentist.
As the car arrives, she pays for the trip. Then she notes:
“At least in terms of payment, the manufacturers made sure there was never any difficulty with version differences. It was only the actual applications that gradually became impossible to control.”
Between the utopian and dystopian, which vision of the future seems more likely to you? Which vision seems more true to how we currently live with technology, in the form of our smartphones and social media apps?
I know which one seems more likely to me, and it gives me the willies.
The core question we technologists should be asking ourselves is: do we want to live in a world where computers serve humans, or where humans serve computers?
Or to put it another way: do we want to live in a world where the users of technology are in control of their devices? Or do we want to live in a world where the owners of technology use it as yet another means of control over those without the resources, the knowledge, or the privilege to fight back?
Are we building technology for a world of masters, or a world of slaves?
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