This is a download from the FM 89.9, the Business Station. It's fun Friday, my name is Jeff Zandu. Is this intro going to be sensible, Matt? Yes, yes, I promise it's going to be alright.
Over the last couple of weeks, CulturePops, Matt Amitech has taken us to what he considers to be heaven and hell. He's shown us two versions of the future based on the same ideas and technology. One where technology extends freedom and prosperity to everyone, and another where an elite has effectively enslaved the majority. But is there any value to us exploring these flights of fancy?
Let's get Matt's planing yet again. Is this because you've seen Blade Runner 2049, Matt? Hey, Jeff, yes, you are along the right lines. For the last couple of weeks on the show, we have been talking about fiction.
That's true. But anything to do with the future is always going to be a fiction, unless you're one of those people who thinks that our destiny is already written or we're living in some kind of computer simulation. So what I try when I've got my future is hat on and what a lot of other futureists try to do is to put the technology that we have, the social and the political movements that are around us at the time, and to imagine how those things may progress and evolve. In the same way we've talked on the show about how sci-fi can influence the future.
And the idea of scientists brought up on Star Trek trying to build warp drives. Yeah, exactly. But it's actually something a little bit more than that. So for example, I was talking about last week's show with a listener because I actually met one and I asked if he found it too gloomy.
Today's show isn't going to be gloomy, by the way. So the listener, and I should say hello to Brian from Masses and Congrats on your weekly event last week. It was great. So Brian told me that he thinks people should consider the kind of scenarios we were discussing last week, that he thinks people are too often complacent in the face of these nudges and development with technology.
Will the future be very similar to the present? Well, exactly that. I think one of the things that I mentioned on the utopia episode, the first fiction one we did. And if you haven't heard that, you can head over to our archives and download the podcast.
On the utopia episode, I mentioned that huge advances in technology can be pretty much invisible when you're looking for the outside. So for example, if you're looking at the world 2010 from the world 2000, it's probably not going to look very different. But the adoption of things like smartphones, high speed broadband, and high speed mobile internet, had already started to make huge changes to the way that we work and the way that we access information. So in the year 2000, people were contemplating what a knowledge economy might look like.
But by 2010, we were already starting to swim in that kind of stream of data. If you want kind of a simpler example, you can take two identical cars, cars rather, one that has airbags, one that doesn't. Both cars will look the same, they'll drive the same, they'll cost pretty much the same. But if you have an accident in one of them, there's going to be a huge difference.
You might say that they were fundamentally different in that one car could actually save your life and the other probably wouldn't. But on the surface, there's nothing to see between the two of them. And a lot of the technology that we have, a lot of these developments year to year are like that, they're just invisible. Essentially what role does fiction play?
Okay, so I can't take credit for this idea. It's not unique to me. In technology, we talk about disruption a lot to the point where everyone is kind of sick of it. So when we do King of the King of the Crowd in Geeks, for example, everything we talk about is a disruption and a transformation.
Even when it's something that you could have a smart fault seller with an app that costs 100 US dollars. So at risk of clubbing this overused term one more time, one of the things that future fiction shows, like the ones we did over the past couple of weeks, one of the things they can do is actually disrupt people's view of the future. We're talking about the future. So what is there to disrupt?
Even Elon Musk can't disrupt what has happened yet. Yeah, you know, and that's the thing that we've come back to a lot recently. It's this issue of who has power. It's easy to assume that, you know, we as little people have no power and that they, whoever they are, have all of the power.
And one of the reasons that I think you get people like Elon Musk making all these pronouncements is because he's trying to influence the future. He's trying to, you know, bend it to his will. And it's almost a confidence thing when you make enough people believe that something is going to happen. And some people will actually find a way to do it.
So for example, you know, he talked about the high blue, now people are actually building high blue, and now other people are building high blue. He sees the market potential of building one himself. So the flip side of that, of course, is that you hope that the rest of the people are passive enough to accept that, you know, this is just some kind of road that we're on and that the future they've designed are going to be the stops that appear along the way. Unfortunately, the model works just as well for things that are negative as it does for the things that are positive, like a high blue.
Like you telling us that there will be no jobs in the future? Yeah, sure. Guilty is charged. It really is a dangerous path.
When you float an idea like that, that machines and artificial intelligence will take over all of our jobs, then you also include the idea that it's an inevitability, that it will happen and that there's no point in people fighting it. In that case, tell us then, will machines take all our jobs? Yes. But that's not a reason to be passive and to accept it.
So, for example, there's Bill Gates idea about the robot tax now. I don't think it's a great idea. For that kind of tax in that structure. But I do agree with him that we should shift the tax burden to companies for creating unemployment because under-employment is now going to be a cost of production.
And as a producer, you still need a consumer class to buy your products. So, there has to be something that rebalances that's going. And what if the scales aren't rebalanced? Well, that's where it can help to have these nudges, to give us a jolt, to stop us sleepwalking into a future that someone else is writing for us.
Because it doesn't matter who it is, it doesn't matter whether it's a Zuckerberg, Musk, a Trump, a Sanders, a Gates, even the ghost of sleep jobs. They all have their own agendas. They all want to have greater or small amounts of social benefit occurring from those changes. But their vision of the future, any of them, is not necessarily where you or I want to live.
So, we have to play our own part, our own role in determining that future. For example, one of the arguments in favor of automation is that economists argue that new industries will have merged to absorb the workers whose jobs are now obsolete. But that also has to be incentivized. There has to be a bunch of entrepreneurs with division and the appetite for risk to actually put those people to work.
So, we don't want to end up with a situation where we all end up as roads, we both have toilet attendants, because human labor is of so little value that for menial tasks, we're actually cheaper to run than a robot. You mentioned that people often consider the future to be a road, that it's a journey. And even if it doesn't have an end point, it does have stops along the way. And this is one of the ways that people can be manipulated.
It's about putting images in people's heads. The idea that we're on a kind of road to the future is a false one. A road is something you take from a starting point to a destination. But that's not something that's true of the future.
So, take last week's example. I made a deliberate choice when I said that ordinary people might end up living in coffin cubicles. Now, I could just have said pot hotels or hustles, because it's pretty much the same thing. But pot hotels, while they're cramped, they still sound a bit cool and futuristic.
And they're part of that Japanese convenience culture thing that a lot of people find so fascinating. Coughing cubicles, on the other hand, are pretty much the Hong Kong equivalent of Skid Row. So, by using that example, I was able to disrupt the image that some people have of the future being shiny and clean for something that is dirtier and brineer and kind of hopeless. So, it's portraying the future or this kind of future as a place that you don't want to end up.
So, it's very much about this idea of the future being an unwritten road. So, if you imagine you're sitting in a car, if you're on a road to the future, the road doesn't really stretch much further than the corner in front of you. There will be stops along the way, but they're not written either. So, no matter what people like me or politicians or business people would like you to believe, that future is unwritten and you can be part of shaping that future.
We'll go for a short break. I'm with CulturePops Man, Amadeus talking about science fiction and the road to reality. Well, the FM 89.9. Break from midfield, the FM 89.9.
And we're back. My name is Jeff Sando together with CulturePops Man, Amadeus and we're talking about science fiction and also the road to reality. Matt, you promise that on today's show it wouldn't be gloomy, but it's all been doom and destruction before the break. Are the clouds parting here, Matt?
Is the sun about to shine? Yes, we are heading out to the inclement weather into something a little more balmy. And it goes back to what you mentioned at the top of the show, which is have I seen Blade Runner 2049. I have and I thought it would be fun to spend the next 10 minutes giving out.
Lots of spoilers. Okay, I think probably about half our listeners just switch stations. No, I am joking that there is the gravity to which even I will not stoop, but I do want to talk about science fiction, you know, and we have talked about science fiction many times on the show and how it directly influences, not just the way we think about the future, but also the things that science explores and that innovators try to invent. And the attempts that all of these people make to actually reach the future has been shown, designed in those books and films.
All right, okay. Yes, we have spoken about that. Listeners might ask why we need to talk about it again. Well, they probably wouldn't say that because they're not as rude as you are.
And they know that even if I do repeat myself, you know, I make it entertaining. Yep, that was a wall of silence. In any case, I don't have to justify myself to be the likes of you, Mr Presenter. So this is actually about the work that scientists and futurists do in collaboration with screenwriters and movie directors to bring forward their coherent vision of the future.
So the original Blade Runner is an obvious starting point because of either intricacy and the intent in designing that film, and then as well in unraveling all of that in the sequel, which I'm not going to give spoilers about if you haven't seen it. So if anyone is interested in knowing a bit more about the history of movies and science, then I can cram into this show. There's a great piece up at slate.com. I think we can post the link on the geek page and I'll put it up on the culture page as well.
The article is called Blade Runner and the Power of Sci-Fi World Building and it's written by a guy called Kevin Brankford. And it's about what I was discussing before the break. It's about the power that fictional futures have to shape our reality. And there are thousands of Sci-Fi movies out there.
I'll be going to Kerry Pickett. Well, I'm going to stick with two of the three that Slate.com discusses. So 2001 a Space Odyssey and Blade Runner, largely because Slate's writers have done all the heavy lifting for me. So I can quit from their notes.
We'll mention a third minority report which serendipitously I watched again a couple of weeks ago. And it's not to say that there aren't other equally deserving choices. There are a lot of writers and directors, particularly people like Christopher Nolan, who pay huge amounts of care to the accuracy of the science that underpins movies like Interstellar and Inception. And they work very closely with leading physicists and scientists from other disciplines.
On the flip side of that, there are movies like Shumkel and Dan's Time Cop, which don't do any of those things. But in a lot of cases, the discussions with the scientists actually predate the script and can dictate the direction of the film, as was the case with some of the examples that we're going to mention here. Let's start with the 2001 classic Sci-Fi by Stanley Kubrick. Well, I'm not alone in saying that I find this movie beautiful but baffling.
And it's still quite unbelievable that it was made in 1968. So it's not so much that it was spot-on with its predictions. The turn of the millennium didn't take us all off to the stars or bring us into the orbit of sociopathic computers. But it was accurate in some areas.
It predicts things like digital newspapers, which look a little like tablet computers. You see basic portable phones. But most of all, the film predicted the shrinking of computers. At that time in the 1960s, computers were still building-sized.
That Hal had a voice and compact control panels, four shadows, that shrinking of computer technology that really took rapid pace in the 1970s and moved into personal computing. And then you look today and we're talking about nanobots. So you have to think how far we come from machines that weigh tons and could only do fairly basic statistical calculations to little machines that we're starting to think about putting into our bodies and into our blood stream. And how did Kubrick achieve that vision?
One of the most interesting aspects is actually how closely companies are willing to work with directors to realize this kind of coherent vision of the future. Space Odyssey saw collaborations with companies like IBM, Bell, GE, Honeywell, all the tech giants at their time, the Facebooks and the Googles of their day. And part of that association was because of the team that Kubrick assembled. So rather than go down the usual path of set designers and makeup artists, he went industrial, aeronautics engineers, visual artists who dealt with delighting, people who engineered things rather than just building some Star Trekky cardboard sets with a man who goes whoosh every time the door opens.
So even the spacesuits in the movie were helped along by people who had worked on NASA's genuine astronaut suits. So even the stitching mirrors the stitching on the NASA suits that helps to preserve the oxygen. So it's no wonder that when conspiracy theories about the moon landings began to circulate, a lot of people said that Kubrick was the director and he'd help NASA to fake the landings and the footage. Because again, he was very close to NASA.
Most crucial of all of his tech team seems to be the work of two NASA scientists, guys called Fred Allway and Harry Lang. And they worked on the picture full time for two years and were instrumental in recruiting a lot of the brands I mentioned before because they were actually futurists and consultants for those brands. Does the vision hold up in widescreen? Well, I mean, I take it you mean that the in terms of that kind of wider cultural focus.
But no, it doesn't need to. The movie has quite a narrow focus, which allowed them to go in-depth with science and technology that relate to the things that the movie moves through. So, you know, there's a trade-off. For example, last week I tried to go quite wide with my dystopia.
And that means I have to be a little shallow in the depths in the detail. So if you pressed me for more detail on those things, it would have started to become a lot less holistic and you know, you'd start to see the cracks. So by necessity with anything future related, there are always going to be these smoking mirrors. But it doesn't mean that one approach is more relevant than another.
And Blade Runner is an example of that wider, more shallow approach. Yeah, and I love the direction that its vision came from. Because the direction actually came from a car designer, a guy called Sydney who worked on futuristic concept cars to Ford. And a lot of people might wonder what relevance a car designer has, especially when it comes to developing a world as dense as a one that was in Blade Runner or even the sequel that's just come out.
But car designers are natural futurists. I've spoken to some of the NWs leading designers in the past. I've been inside the top secret concept lab in Tokyo and I've spoken to the director of that lab. And to design cars, you have to see the future.
And I've always found that car designers are really, really good at encapsulating that vision. Because you have to design the car to fit into that future. You have to understand where the architecture and infrastructure are headed. You have to anticipate what trends are going to happen and what people's needs are.
I mean, it's not by accident that cars have got larger and devolved with lots of cup holders. It's because this is what people are demanding. But these guys have to anticipate those demands. So they have to imagine where all the other technology is headed as well.
And Sydney did that for Blade Runner with obsessive detail down to individual advertising holdings and even the lighting and the price tags on parking meters. How much it would cost per second to park or per minute to park? Was it accurate? I mean, the Blade Runner vision is a lot darker than most of our realities.
But it's not far off. To if you look at the kind of the neon and the density of people, you have that super bright element of cities like New York or Bangkok or London. You have that coffee and cubicle aspect of Hong Kong that people are being priced out of the market. They're being crowded out.
But land is being filled up and there's nowhere to build except up. So you have this idea of affluent extreme, affluent extreme poverty. So, you know, tech-wise, they're probably a little bit off. Nobody wants public video phones.
We don't even want personal ones. But you can see that it is our world in the same way that the new movie, 2049, undoes a lot of our world. So you're fascinated by the reverse case, by the desolation and the destruction and the realization that technology didn't save the world. And in both films, it's not spoons.
Actually, you aren't really being told why things are like this. You just have to accept that this is the reality. And we're slightly running out of time as usual, Matt. But can you sum up the effect of science fiction, especially movies, has on the way we live?
Well, very quickly, I'll bring up the minority report. So Spiel wanted to do both. He wanted to go deep and he wanted to go wide. He didn't want to create science fiction.
He wanted to create the reality of the future. And I think minority report doesn't really get the respect it deserves. Maybe it's not old enough yet to have that kind of status of 2001 or Blade Runner. And we tend to remember it for smaller things like the advertising targeting and, of course, those hand-wading gestures in front of control screens.
So the production designer, Alex McDowell, he's actually gone on to build an academic syllabus around the film. So big is its influence that it has apparently inspired more than one hundred patents, although I haven't had time to track those down. And perhaps partly because it was a product of the early digital era, it's quite on point with technology like wearables, regs, and scanning, and these really pervasive targeted ads. And I think our current climate of global political turmoil has also led to an increase in the numbers of people worldwide who are locked up for crimes they might commit, which is the central premise of minority report.
You're not being locked up for things you have done. You're being locked up for things you might do. So especially when we see the web terrorism rate, a lot of people are being locked up for crimes that they might commit. So there is this question in our society of that same push and pull that they show in the film.
And a lot of the technology, even things like gesture control, which are quite innocuous, it's something that we want because it looks cool, they're not necessarily the way that technology should be headed. Apparently Tom Cruise had to take loads of respirators during filming because his arms got so tired, waving them around to control computably. And I'm pretty sure that Tom Cruise is quite a bit fitter than most of the rest of us. So it really is a case of being careful what you wish before I sign off.
If you are interested in this whole idea of science and movies colliding, you might want to check out a podcast called Science Fish where actual scientists who also movie bust take individual movies and in each episode and they discuss the science behind it. Junk science, whether it's fantasy, whether it's real. So that's really where the listeners enjoy today. All right.
Man, I'm going to talk to us from the future, of course, as always, talking about science fiction in the road to reality. We'll be right back with Geeks after this, BFM 89.9. Thank you for listening to this podcast. To find more great interviews, go to bfm.my or find us on iTunes, bfm 89.9, the Business Station.