Ask A Genius 705: Addendum to “The Future Doesn’t Care About Us”
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/01/30
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Addendum to last session, go ahead.
Rick Rosner: It’s kind of known among people who know science fiction that the worlds presented in science fiction tend to like… when somebody sets a story in the future they set it way too close to now like I just happened to come across a Will Smith movie from 14 years ago maybe called I, Robot in which the world is newly flooded with helper robots and it’s set in 2035. So, say it was made in 2007; so they predicted that 28 years from then the world would be overrun with anthropomorphic robots and something like that may happen but it sure as fuck won’t happen in 2035.
A little twitter deal was made out of I think the world in the original Blade Runner took place in 2019. And so when 2019 actually happened everybody’s like oh yeah this is blade runner time and it happens a lot when you present a transformed world, you set it 20-30 years in the future and that much time passes and we’re still maybe 20 percent of the way to this transformed world when that date turns into reality. Just off the top of my head I’m thinking maybe if you set the robot world in 2035 that’s close enough that the viewers of 2007 can picture still being alive in 2035 and maybe you get an increased sense of wonder by kind of telescoping the time and time until all this amazing shit happens. When they said 2035 they showed Los Angeles of 2035 and you had monorails and some flying cars and a bunch of shit that will take 100 years to happen or may never happen.
We don’t give a shit about more than a hundred years from now. Maybe you make a movie set in the future more exciting by just making it slightly in the future 20 years or 30 years. There was a show I didn’t like called Altered Carbon that was 300 years in the future and it was bad because 300 years in the future humans still all looked like humans and were mostly interested in looking hot and fucking which I don’t buy for 300 years in the future. Sure, I mean fucking will be among the things that people still do but it won’t be… Anyway what else? Star Trek is 250-300 years in the future and people still look like people on an interstellar faster than light spacecraft; again, fucking unlikely.
So, I guess the point of this is we’re bad about predicting when things will happen and usually err on the side of having things happen too fast.
[Recording End]
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