Three Thoughts About Technology Risk in Fiction
A while back, my wife and I were watching Ghost in the Shell – the Americanized live-action version, not the original anime. In this cyberpunk story, the heroine is a crime fighter who has a cybernetic brain (among other artificial body parts), allowing her to interface with various machines in the real world. Predictably, stuff goes wrong, story ensues, etc.[1] What caught my ear and led to this post was a phrase uttered by the heroine’s boss when talking about the above cybertechnology, its uses and abuses: “There’s always a residual risk.”
Indeed there is, as I’ve written before, and it often has hidden cost that causes market distortion. In fiction, markets are less of an issue; the risk has manifested and provides us with a dystopian future (or alternate present reality) that is the backdrop of the story. I happen to like SF, and find the darker dystopian kind to usually be the most thought-provoking, when the creators tries to get reader/viewer to reflect on the world. Some thoughts, as usual in no particular order.[2]
From a risk perspective, the most interesting tends to be the “a previously underappreciated risk happens and makes things go haywire on a more or less grand scale”, with the protagonists fighting directly to mitigate or prevent the consequences. Some authors have made their career out of these types of stories – Michael Crichton comes to mind as probably the most successful. Space probe returning to earth with a deadly microorganism on board? (Andromeda Strain) Crazy rich guy resurrects dinosaurs in a theme park who turn out to be less than cuddly? (Jurassic park.) Many of Crichton’s novels hinge on human error and hubris as their central plot theme, with fail-safes not deserving their name and the residual risk of technology showing up at the worst possible time. It doesn’t have to be Earth-destroying, either, to be scary. IMO the master of these kinds of plots is Daniel Suarez – Kill Decision (about drones suddenly killing people they weren’t told to) is one of the scariest novels I’ve read.
When the risk actually becomes civilization-destroying, the fight gets moved to a different level of mitigation or prevention and it can be successful or not. Those of us who grew up in the Cold War era remember the very real risk of mutual destruction, and the fiction it spawned. Stanley Kubrik’s Doctor Strangelove with a magnificently crazy Peter Sellers? Unsuccessful prevention. Matthew Broderick in War Games? Successful. [3] And then there are the real dystopias, where the catastrophe has already happened and some kind of time travel is invoked to try to reverse it. Terminator (intelligent machines taking over) or Twelve Monkeys (an engineered virus kills off almost everybody) are probably my most-rewatched examples of this, but there are countless others. The Bunker (another virus that kills the world) is a great graphic novel around the subject. And when time travel technology is involved, that itself can be the risk.
Why do these types of stories work to capture the imagination of consumers? It works because it’s so believable – hubris, greed and simple human error are everywhere. After all, the Titanic was supposed to be unsinkable, and technology has a way of escaping its creators in ways that it wasn’t designed or planned for. Simple and relatively harmless example: tech labs still tend to be dominated by men, with the consequence that gadgets that should work well for everybody tend to work worse for women. Anybody who owns a Smart Home device probably knows what I am talking about; I can’t count the number of times my wife shouted at Alexa in frustration because it failed to understand her command, with me repeating it a moment later and it working.
Any human endeavor at a large scale tends to have unintended consequences, with the fixes to the problems we caused having a cascade of consequences of their own. Example: today, we are able to cure many previously deadly diseases using the fabulous tool of antibiotics. But the overprescription of these drugs is starting to cause serious problems by encouraging bacteria to develop penicillin resistance – something we don’t have an answer to yet, but when we do, I am sure it will have unintended consequences of its own.
As a consequence of living so much longer, overpopulation is an issue. We then have to feed so many people, and the industrialization of agriculture has a host of unintended long-term consequences – top soil depletion, desertification, water shortages – and so on.
The stories basically write themselves.
Notes:
[1] Despite the usual cultural appropriation an okay movie.
[2] I’ll be lumping the written word together with film and TV, along with graphic novels.
[3] Remember those modems?