1528: Film & Commentary 3: Altered Carbon, Star Trek, and the Coming “Consciousness Horror”
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Medium (Personal)
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/10/08
If unmodified humans will not rule the future, which enhancements — genetic, cybernetic, or cognitive — are likeliest to dominate governance and culture over the next 50 years, and how should storytellers depict them to avoid conceptual laziness?
Rick Rosner argues popular sci-fi misreads the future, faulting Altered Carbon and Star Trek for depicting unmodified humans as tomorrow’s rulers despite ubiquitous mind-tech. He praises Star Wars’ “used universe” and Blade Runner’sneon-noir for visual honesty, yet says aesthetics cannot mask conceptual laziness. The genre’s next frontier, he contends, is “consciousness horror”: repeated harm to minds, imprisoning people in games, or trapping them in layered simulations that feel real. While audiences adapt to fakes, writers still lean on indistinguishable worlds. Recent films — Ex Machina, M3GAN, M3GAN 2.0, Companion — show simulated humans driving dread, a trend Rosner believes will intensify very soon.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Let’s start with movies. That’s a good way to begin. Which sci-fi movie would you consider so atrociously bad at predicting the future — either hilariously bad or simply unbearable to watch?
Rick Rosner: The sci-fi show I always criticize for being lazy about the future is Altered Carbon. It’s about portable, replicable consciousness via “cortical stacks” implanted at the base of the skull, and you can swap bodies — or “sleeves” — by moving the stack. Humans in the show still look mostly unmodified apart from the stack port, which bothers me.
Jacobsen: Going back further, what about Star Trek or Star Wars?
Rosner: Star Trek frustrates me for the same reasons: unmodified humans presented as rulers of the future. The original series ran from 1966 to 1969, made on a tight TV budget, which shaped its look. Star Wars did the same thing in portraying unmodified humans at the center of galactic power. That won’t happen. Unmodified humans will not be the lords of the future.
Jacobsen: What about the aesthetics?
Rosner: Star Trek’s visuals were always too clean and minimal, mainly because of that 1960s network-TV constraint. By contrast, Star Warsintroduced a “used universe” — worn, dirty, lived-in technology — in 1977, and Blade Runner (1982) pushed the rainy, crowded, neon-noir city that became the visual shorthand for cyberpunk.
Jacobsen: And the future of horror?
Rosner: We don’t really have it yet, but we should have “consciousness horror.” We already have body horror, which shows all the ways the body can be mutilated. The absolute horror ahead is terrible things happening to your mind, repeatedly. Imagine being imprisoned in a game, killed over and over, unable to escape. That’s one angle. Another would be being unable to distinguish between a real and a simulated environment. Passing through layers of simulated worlds would feel like waking up from one nightmare only to find yourself in another.
Some argue that we won’t be able to distinguish between real and fake. In practice, we adapt; we get better at spotting fakes the longer they’re around. Perhaps that will change, but in the meantime, lazy writers will continue to use “indistinguishable simulation” as a plot device.
And the horror of the future will continue to mine simulated humans. We already see it: Ex Machina, M3GAN and its sequel M3GAN 2.0 (released June 27, 2025), and Companion (2025), where a supposed friend turns out to be a companion robot. That trend will continue.
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