this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2023
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This is superficially funny, of course. But I've seen it before and after thinking about it for a while I find myself coming to the defense of the Torment Nexus and the tech company that brought it into reality.
Science fiction authors are not necessarily the best authorities when it comes to evaluating the ethical or real-world implications of the technologies they dream up. Indeed, I think they are often particularly bad at that sort of thing. Their primary goal is to craft captivating narratives that engage readers by introducing conflicts and dilemmas that make for compelling stories. When they imagine a new technology they aren't going to get paid unless they come up with a story in which that new technology poses some kind of threat that the heroes need to overcome. The dark side of these technologies is deliberately emphasized by the authors to create tension and drama in their stories.
Tech companies, on the other hand, have an entirely different set of considerations. Their goal isn't just to recreate something from a sci-fi novel for the sake of it; rather, they are motivated by solving real-world problems. They wouldn't build the Torment Nexus unless they figured that they could sell it to someone, and that they wouldn't get shut down for doing something society would reject. There are regulatory frameworks around this kind of thing.
If you look back through older science fiction you can find all sorts of "cautionary tales" against technologies that have turned out to be just fine. "Fahrenheit 451" warned against the proliferation of television entertainment, but there's been plenty of rich culture developed for that medium. "Brave New World" warned against genetic engineering, but that's turned out to be a great technology for curing diseases and improving crop yields. The submarine in "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" was seen as unstoppable and disruptive, but nowadays submersibles have plenty of nonmilitary applications.
I'd want to know more about what exactly the Torment Nexus is before I automatically assume it's a bad idea just because some sci-fi writer claimed it was.
I was still a teen when I read the book, but that wasn't really my take from it when I read it. We are still far away from genetically designing human babies. And you also overlooked the part about oppression/control via distractions such as drugs and entertainment.
Actually we're not, it's just illegal.
Iirc we have also removed genetic anomalies from fetuses, too.
My takeaway from BNW was a warning against blindly embracing a society built only on good feelings and numbing anything that forces us to confront pain. The oppression was more or less a side effect of it.
Everyone in the upper classes were okay that lower classes were being oppressed because they all were just as happy thanks to Soma. The pain of the outsiders didn't mean anything because they "chose" to live like that.
Genetic engineering was just a plot device to explain how the classes were chosen.
The brilliant thing in Brave New World was that it didn't at any point make it obvious that people were miserable slaves - they could leave any time they wanted, and lived a life of bliss. Still, as a reader, you end up feeling like you'd rather take the place of the savage than any of the characters living in the hypercommercial utopia. At least that's how I felt.
I haven't read it in a while, but I kind of took the genetic engineering as a metaphor for being forced into the role/ class the ruling body wants you to be in
Gattaca is a good movie about that
Just because some tech bros can make money from the Torment Nexus it does not become a good idea. Profit is not a great judge of ethics and value.
I stopped reading when you said the goal of tech companies is to solve real world problems. The only goal of tech companies is to create products that will make them a profit. To believe anything else is delusional. That's kind of why our society is crumbling and the planet is dying.
Television and increasingly digestible media is turning our brains to mush. If someone had the imagination to write a sci-fi novel about Fox news and the rise of Trump, they would have.
Genetic engineering is enabling us to harvest monocultures that completely fuck up the ecosystem, in the long run not only underlining important dynamics such as species needed for polluting plants, but also the very soil on which they grow.
It's been a while since I read Brave New World, but that also didn't stand out to me as the most central part of his critique to me. In my reading it was about how modern society was going to turn us into essentially pacified consumer slaves going from one artificial hormonal kick to the other, which seems to be what social media is for these days.
Things that seem like short term good ideas, and certainly great business ideas, might fuck things up big time in the long run. That's why it's useful to have some people doing the one things humans are good at - thinking creatively - involved in processes of change, and not just leave it to the short term interests of capital.
You kidding, right? Those stories have been dime a dozen since the late 90s at least.
24 warned us about having an evil, terrorist US president. As have done a few movies in the past. Streaming platforms were pretty much masturbating themselves over "Confederate US AU" script offerings as early as 2014. Not to mention the nowadays trite trodden trope of "Nazi US AU".
Heck, you don't even need fiction. Chile's cup in 1973 was paid for by the CIA as a social experiment to produce the rising and establishment of a dictatorship.
I was referring more to the plot of brain-dead cable and social media algorithms fuelling the death of democracy. But you're right, it's probably been written many times - I'm not very knowledgeable of sci-fi, and there's a lot of brilliant work out there. :)
You don't need a sci-fi novel for that. History books are enough.
No it isn't. Global connectivity is just putting a spotlight on the the fact that most people are and always have been fucking stupid and/or dangerously undereducated.
I mean, it's a challenging hypothesis to prove. I might just be pessimistic.
I think there is some reason for valid concern though. The New York Times memoriam for Clifford Nass is an interesting and somewhat worrying read.
Maybe more practically, it's just hard to argue America wouldn't be in a better place right now if it wasn't for Fox News and Facebook/Cambridge Analytica.
Maybe I read things too literally, but I thought "Fahrenheit 451" was about a governing class controlling the masses by limiting which ideas, emotions, and information were available.
"Brave New World" struck me as also about controlling the masses through control of emotions, ideas, and information (and strict limits on social mobility).
It's been too long since I read "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea", but I thought of it as a celebration of human ingenuity, with maybe a tinge of warning about powerful tools and the responsibility to use them wisely.
I don't see a lot of altruistic behaviour from those introducing new technologies. Yes, there is definitely some, but most of it strikes me as "neutral" demand creation for profit or extractive and exploitive in nature.
Palantir exists, every cyberpunk warned us, and it’s definitely not going to be good for the average person
They named it Palantir! The thing that was awesome that everyone then had to stop using because someone ruined it for everyone else.
they kneeeeeeewwwwwwww!!!!!!!
It’s Peter thiel’s surveillance company. It’s just open and blatant
You don't read much sci fi, do you?
Are you telling me Star Wars isn't a cautionary tale about lightsabers?
No, it's a forewarning of the robot uprising
Droid lives matter
On the other other hand, maybe we only understand the dangers of the Torment Nexus and use it responsibly because science fiction authors warned techy people who are into that subject about how it could go wrong, and the people who grew up reading those books went out of their way to avoid those flaws. We do seem to have a lot more of the technologies that sci-fi didn't predict causing severe problems in our society.
How about the following examples:
This is so naively wrong it's laughable. Ever heard of profit motive?
"Not super rich enough" is a real world problem, smh my head.
Speaking of Fahrenheit 451, weren't there seashells mentioned in that book? Little devices you could stuff in your ears to play music? And those ended up being uncannily similar to the wireless earbuds we have today?
There are some good ideas in this comment, but I'd like to counter that the cautionary tales are an instigating factor in implementing safety for new tech. The wealthy few shouldn't get to blindly and unilaterally decide the future of all through careless and unrestricted development of world-altering tech.
Gene Rodenberry's star trek ethos says otherwise
Gene's star trek ethos is a message
You have not understood the books to which you refer.