7 ms·

Who Killed the World?

88 points by surprisetalk 2y ago

Andrews54757 2y ago
Great article. I've always thought that pessimistic sci-fi dystopias were on the rise, but it turns out most still have positive endings. The observation about walking out of the theatre, and seeing the worst ahead of us is quite interesting. It would be cool to compare with other, non sci-fi stories. EG: I have been noticing the rise of escapist fantasy narratives in popular media — wish fulfillment stories where a Mary Sue like main character rises above all challenges without struggle. You can see this particularly in light novels, manga, and anime in the now popularized "isekai", "cultivation", or "system progression" genres. It would be interesting to find out how the public's fascination with these types of stories correlate with economic, social, or political undulations in the real world.
- devjab 2y ago
  Cyberpunk was always the “real sci-fi” in terms of what was actually going to happen wasn’t it? Murder drones, corporations having more power than nation states, the EU block becoming regulatory, climate havoc, the gig economy and a continuous restructuring of centralised society. It also didn’t have a lot of happy endings. Because the world didn’t end, it just got continuesly shittier.
  - bytehowl 2y ago
    Some would argue we are already living Cyberpunk, just without all the cool stuff. BTW, why single out "the EU block becoming regulatory" as something negative prophesied by Cyberpunk? I have recently watched a video about the timeline of Cyberpunk 2020/2077 (which is just one universe, granted), and the EU sounded like the only ones who had their shit together, even though they were facing sabotage from all directions.
    - p_l 2y ago
      The world of Cyberpunk RPG essentially has EU be a lot nicer NUSA, with considerable economical domination (thus the use of eurodollar, which was one of the names floated for what became Euro currency), Soviet Union as this really schizo place but which on basic human decency scores miles above post-USA America, and an alliance of African nations as the unexpected black horse who made huge resurgence in space (which also contains probably the only really "free" nations - the old ESA space habitats and their allies). This is also reflected (and probably heavily influenced CP2077) in Ghost in the Shell, where European Union, in somewhat fluctuating alliance with Soviet Union, is probably among the best locations to live.
    - devjab 2y ago
      I didn’t mean the EU being regulatory as negative, I was just giving examples of how the cyberpunk I read in the 90ies is basically reality now.
danschuller 2y ago
Reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Hieroglyph https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Hieroglyph but a decade on, it's not had many breakout successes.
dudeinjapan 2y ago
The end reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut's lecture "The Shape of Stories" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOGru_4z1Vc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOGru_4z1Vc
iftheshoefitss 2y ago
[flagged]
chx 2y ago
Cool visualization, perhaps interesting thoughts but alas it is completely worthless as it is AI analysis based. I wish the author warned about that on top instead of the bottom so I didn't waste my time with it.
aaron695 2y ago
[dead]
skybrian 2y ago
It’s an interesting presentation and I like the analysis of how science fiction has changed. This bit seems like feel-good anti-growth boilerplate though: > What if we reject the notion that the economy must produce more and more, but rather embrace the notion that a functioning society is only as successful as its least privileged soul? Among other things, I think the world is going to need a lot more air conditioners, and the energy to run them. Economic growth is a vague abstraction, when you get more specific, there are some important needs.
- idle_zealot 2y ago
  The key part is the second bit - a world where we build loads of air conditioners so that a few people can comfortably cool their mansions in the desert while others boil in their apartments or on the streets is unacceptable.
  - its_ethan 2y ago
    Presumably we need more air conditioners precisely because there are currently people without them..? I think the guy you're responding to believes there's a need for more AC to prevent exactly what you're describing. And re; what you're describing, if you have an AC you (generally) don't need more AC's, that'd be pretty pointless. AC units aren't a thing that makes any sense to hoard away, so the future you're imagining where people in "mansions in the desert" somehow have all the AC and everyone else is just "boiling" away doesn't really seem like a realistic concern. Especially so if people agree that building more AC's will help.
    - funnybeam 2y ago
      We need more air conditioners because of global heating - a problem exacerbated to some extent by air conditioners themselves
      - youngtaff 2y ago
        Suspect we need more efficient cooling so things like heat pumps that can run in reverse and actually cool the building fabric down
thom 2y ago
Sophie’s choice between scrolly crap and a video. No surprise I suppose, given the article focuses on films and ignores the much larger body of sci-fi novels which had no shortage of pessimism in the past and have no shortage of optimism today.
- crngefest 2y ago
  Can you name a couple of your favourite recent sci-fi books that have this optimism? Would love to read something not dystopian once in a while.
  - Filligree 2y ago
    Try the Clockwork Rocket trilogy.
  - shiroiushi 2y ago
    This isn't a book, but the new Star Trek: Strange New Worlds show is pretty optimistic. It shows Earth going through some "Eugenics Wars" very soon, which then escalate into WWIII which kills off 40% of the world's population in nuclear attacks, but after that things look pretty good with humans inventing warp drive and exploring the stars and creating a federation of planets.
    - jhbadger 2y ago
      That's the standard Star Trek backstory that was even there in the original 1960s series (the Eugenic Wars, and the character of Khan Noonien Singh, the genetically engineered tyrant, were introduced in the 1967 episode "Space Seed").
      - shiroiushi 2y ago
        No, they modified it somewhat in SNW: they pushed back the start of the Eugenics Wars (there's a time-travel episode explaining it, originally it starts in the 1990s), and then they threw in a bit about a "second civil war" and WWIII killing 40% of the population in the pilot episode.
atoav 2y ago
One thing to think about is the question what capitalisms end game is. Suppose everyone is buying stuff and you're CEO of a nearly 100% efficient corporation, whatever that means. Your job is to somehow make gains every year. The problem is that this was easy in a inefficient corporation within a market where everybody was inefficient. But the things you have to do to keep these gains are getting more and more ridiculous, more and more amoral. This is our problem. The times where easy gains with honest products was possible is long past, now everything has to be a scam, a meta game, some sort of hidden monopoly or so cutting edge that it isn't even profitable.
openrisk 2y ago
While interesting (and a somewhat expected trend), what would be more helpful is the dual analysis and factcheck of "Who Saved the World". I.e., if the world avoided the worst, how did it happen? Was it magical thinking or something real that we can actually embrace and build on? The increasing gloominess around our predicament is to a large degree due to the persistent failure of positive forces and behaviors to mitigate destructive trends. There is no point imagining a unreachable utopia if we can't indicate a real path towards it. Its not that there is strictly zero evidence on our ability to avoid a major civilizational setback in the visible future. There is at least the open source movement. This is a remarkable, highly non-trivial behavior and it has already affected our reality. It is still little-known outside tech circles. Maybe there are other such positive stories in other circles. Somebody should base a sci-fi scenario on them :-)
- TrainedMonkey 2y ago
  Here is at least 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov
  - openrisk 2y ago
    Its a most remarkable story but how would one "scale" this type of behavior to make a difference? If you zero-in on his state of mind during the incident: > the influences on his decision included that he had been told a U.S. strike would be all-out, so five missiles seemed an illogical start; that the launch detection system was new and, in his view, not yet wholly trustworthy; that the message passed through 30 layers of verification too quickly; and that ground radar failed to pick up corroborating evidence, even after minutes of delay So you have a highly trained and informed person applying a mix of reasoning and intuition to guide their action rather than blindly and lazily follow instructions - or worse, be pushed around by fears, group think, peer pressure, etc. without regard to actual impact. Clearly if the majority of people would exhibit such behaviors we'd be in much better shape, but how do we get there?
woolion 2y ago
The analysis seems great and I find the subject interesting enough. However, the presentation is really bad, in a way where it is actually making very difficult to grasp the content. The actual main information from the graphs is hard to read (why isn't it showing all numbers?), with colors that are too similar. It does not support the niceties that html chart provide (like dynamic filtering or alternate views). It is really hard to find where we are in the article, so going back and forth is painful. In terms of accessibility it is also quite bad as it does not show the charts. If the information is presented on a standard format with a ToC I would definitely read it in its entirety.
hyperman1 2y ago
A while ago, the paper 'The fate of empires' by John Glubb made regular appearences on this site. https://archive.org/stream/pdfy-2F_iHS6BLtGJb2ad/TheFateofEmpiresbySirJohnGlubb_djvu.txt https://archive.org/stream/pdfy-2F_iHS6BLtGJb2ad/TheFateofEm... This presentation is a smaller part of that paper: The good old science fiction basically corresponds to The Age of Intellect. Current SF corresponds to The Age of Decadence.
- red_admiral 2y ago
  Brett Deveraux, in his Fremen Mirage series, looks at the trope of "hard times produce strong men" and how decadence leads to decline: https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-part-i-war-at-the-dawn-of-civilization/ https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-... His result is that this is not true. The trope is also related to historically untenable ideas such as the "noble savage" or, if you take it too far, fascism's quest to bring back "real men".
  - hyperman1 2y ago
    Acoup tought me a lot and changed my mind a few times, and the paper is interesting but far from the state of the art. Even so, I don't think their disagreement is big, and looking at the core of a new empire as barbarians/ noble savages is an incorrect label of the old empire. I'd say the power of a group of people depends on not only the size, but also on the morale and organization. Mr Deveraux mentions something similar at the end of your link. Looking trough this lens, the change in Age from Intellect to Decadence is a hidden breakdown of the organization. Even if the number of people rises, the coherence and trust of the group disappears. The other end of the Glubb paper seems similar. The old empire is less organized than everyone expected, and the 'barbarians' are actually a new group, better organized and more willing to adapt then expected.
snickerer 2y ago
[flagged]
codydh 2y ago
I was really drawn in and thinking deeply about this, until I got to the end: The content analysis of each film and TV show was generated with the ChatGPT 4o large language model. [..] So the content analysis for each film and TV show – as well as the short explanation of its answer – are based on ChatGPT 4o’s responses. I immediately discounted everything I'd just read. I cannot imagine doing this work manually, but I also cannot imagine believing that these effects are real based on ChatGPT's determination. Maybe that's just indicative of my current "AI" cynicism, but it was remarkable to me how immediately my opinion changed.
- _nalply 2y ago
  What if the creator didn't do the reveal? Would you still think about this and feel that you have learnt something? Disclaimer: I don't think it is a good idea not to reveal usage of AI. I just feel it is wrong to dismiss what you learnt just because you read something from an LLM. It is not about something you read being absolutely true or having mistakes or whatever, it is about what happened in your mind, what you take from that experience.
  - pjc50 2y ago
    > it is about what happened in your mind, what you take from that experience Is this fiction or non-fiction? If it's fiction, then sure, yes, enjoy the ride. You can let it change the way you think a little. If you're going to act on it? No. It's like reading a scientific paper and discovering an error in the statistical work: it invalidates the whole thing and you need to forget it. Too many people these days are taken in by clever little just-so stories on social media that have no more validity than Rudyard Kipling's animal stories. (On the other hand, as a piece of media criticism it's totally fine! The observation about pessimism is not new and seems valid even if it isn't and can't be "objective". Separate issue.)
    - _nalply 2y ago
      Even in truth there are grey areas. You read a scientific paper and discover a serious error in a side topic the paper only had a short digress about. Would that invalidate the whole thing? And where do you draw the line of invalidating errors and not so important errors (Sorites Paradox)? This said, there are cases where a contradiction undermines the whole thing. I am a legal and one law professor warned us students, if we say A is valid but not A as well, he will dismiss the complete answer. Once I got a contradictory information from a government agency and I was forced to follow up with a request for clarification. That's bad.
pgsandstrom 2y ago
I think it is interesting that a majority of the changes happened between the 50s and the 70s. I guess it might be attributed to post-war optimism and the golden age of capitalism that lasted just about the same era.
- pjc50 2y ago
  The "up" arc: penicillin, the space programme The "down" arc: thalidomide, Chernobyl, Challenger, oil crisis, "Silent Spring", global warming, and the rise of environmentalism. (someone have that graph about all the good things stagnating in 1971?)
  - guiriduro 2y ago
    What's "down" about environmentalism? Even thalidomide has its virtues, e.g. in Lupus treatment. You just should never give it to pregnant mothers.
    - pjc50 2y ago
      There's what people sometimes call the dark green / bright green distinction: can we solve the problems caused by technology with other, different, technology? Environmentalism and precautionary principle thinking in general steer away from techno-optimism by asking "what could go wrong with this?"
nonameiguess 2y ago
This needs a better methodology section. It's not a trivial undertaking to analyze the top 200 sci-fi films of each of the past 8 decades. It says it was automated with LLM sentiment analysis, but how? Did you get access to a content library that allowed you to feed the film stream itself to the models? Did you get transcripts? Do all of these films even have transcripts? Did you generate them if not? How do you deal with transcripts losing out on most of the setting you get from the visuals themselves? Do you have access to the screenplays somehow? Does the context window of these models really fit 1600 films at once?
bandrami 2y ago
One thing I find really fascinating about the gritty cyberpunk dystopia is that its setting is not actually a prediction, but a memory of a stateless city between China and Hong Kong that was demolished 30 years ago.
- irjoe 2y ago
  I assume you're referring to Kowloon Walled City?
buster 2y ago
It became obvious to me that it's LLM generated halucinations, when i read the content boxes of "protagonists fight another human". It's totally borked, but the graphics look nice. It seemingly always says "It's a story of a human vs. an unknown threat", which just doesn't match most movies contents.
- stavros 2y ago
  You're half-right. It's not hallucinations, but I think the question to the LLM was "do the protagonists fight against the unknown?", when it should have been "are they fighting against another human?". So the LLM is answering about the unknown, when the actual graph talks about human antagonists.
  - buster 2y ago
    Even then, it's clearly responding some half-true stuff about unknown for movies with clear, known antagonists. It's just trying to put "unknown" somewhere into response.
CM30 2y ago
This makes me wonder how the stats compare for other forms of media, like TV shows, books, video games, comics, etc. Feels like there's probably more of a mix of attitudes and settings in these mediums, at least from the few I've seen. Like in television, you've got Black Mirror which usually has near contemporary stories set in horrifically messed up versions of our world, but also Doctor Who and Star Trek, which are far more optimistic and deal with a far wider mix of settings and time periods. Like Utopia, a dystopian story set in the year 100 trillion where the simple passage of time has destroyed all but a handful of worlds via entropy, and the last remaining humans are trying to survive a dying universe. And there are arguably more stories in those mediums that do deal with outside threats more than internal ones, often due to the 'monster of the week' structure some of these shows and stories run on. If you want sci-fi stories with external threats, virtually every sci-fi game you can think of has you killing hostile aliens and mutants and monsters by the thousand. Plenty that don't have any ties to Earth or current events too, and simply take place in a completely independent setting with entirely original problems.
- krapp 2y ago
  This isn't a discussion about content. Content on the web is more rich and diverse than it's ever been. This is, as ever, a discussion about production - about the web having matured around a limited set of standards and frameworks, and web development no longer being as fun as it was, before it was a job for many people here (or at least before expectations became so rigid.)
cgrealy 2y ago
I can’t remember the source, but there’s a quote that goes “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”. I’ve yet to read any kind of optimistic sci-fi that operates in a capitalist society. The two most obvious (Star Trek and the Culture) both envision a post-scarcity society enabled by technology so advanced it might as well be magic.
- its_ethan 2y ago
  > technology so advanced it might as well be magic All "optimistic" sci-fi is reliant on a utopian fantasy in some form, I wouldn't be looking to sci-fi authors to actually have a workable recipe for how to achieve any given desired societal outcome..
- harimau777 2y ago
  It's from Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher. At the time when he killed himself Fisher was developing the idea of "Psychedelic Socialism" as a potential counter to Capitalist Realism. I enjoyed this discussion of the idea: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/psychedelic-socialism/ https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/psychedelic-socialism/ As I understand it, the idea is that "consciousness raising" is a necessary component of catalyzing and maintaining the sense of empowerment, hope, and motivation necessary for a social movement to succeed. Although the consciousness raising in psychedelic socialism could literally be psychedelic drugs, Fisher is mostly using that are a metaphor. Consciousness raising could also take the forms like music & art, yoga, religion, ritual, reading circles, etc. This suggests that things like the New Age beliefs of the Hippy movement, the Pan-African/Afrofuturist symbolism of the civil rights movement, or the rock and roll of the anti-Vietnam protests were not just trivialities. Rather they were essential to the movement's ability to impact the world.
  - harimau777 2y ago
    Note: If you search for discussions of "Psychedelic Socialism" or related terms like "Acid Communism", a lot of the discussion that you will find is (not surprisingly) among proponents of drug/psychedelic exploration. Personally, although I found some of the specifics of their viewpoints a little wacky (and in particular some of them are disturbingly anti-psychology), I found the overall ideas that they raised useful. That is to say: for your average person I think the best course of action is to just "absorb what is useful and discard the rest" when reading their discussions.
harimau777 2y ago
Something that this article only touches on indirectly (when it talks about walking out of the theater to the real world) is timelines. Even if a post apocalyptic film presents the hero making the world a better place in the future, we won't be around for that. The part of the timeline that the viewer will experience is the dystopia. In that respect, I don't see how dystopian/post-apocalyptic fiction can generally be optimistic for the viewer.
shrimp_emoji 2y ago
"I AM THE MAN WHO GRABS THE SUN!"
joshcsimmons 2y ago
The good news is that none of those sci-fi fears never really came true. Here's to hoping the current "near future dystopia" doesn't break the rule... Contrary to other posters I mostly enjoyed the scrolling art style and presentation.
dash2 2y ago
I wonder if the ChatGPT analyses of individual films might have biases. For example, since ChatGPT is trained on today's data, it might be better at recognizing social conflicts in themes of today's films, than the social conflicts of the 1950s.
Kim_Bruning 2y ago
Horrible scrolling site. Don't recommend.
gaws 2y ago
[dupe]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40947069 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40947069
ksoajl 2y ago
[flagged]

88 points by surprisetalk 2y ago

Great article. I've always thought that pessimistic sci-fi dystopias were on the rise, but it turns out most still have positive endings. The observation about walking out of the theatre, and seeing the worst ahead of us is quite interesting. It would be cool to compare with other, non sci-fi stories. EG: I have been noticing the rise of escapist fantasy narratives in popular media — wish fulfillment stories where a Mary Sue like main character rises above all challenges without struggle. You can see this particularly in light novels, manga, and anime in the now popularized "isekai", "cultivation", or "system progression" genres. It would be interesting to find out how the public's fascination with these types of stories correlate with economic, social, or political undulations in the real world.

devjab 2y ago
Cyberpunk was always the “real sci-fi” in terms of what was actually going to happen wasn’t it? Murder drones, corporations having more power than nation states, the EU block becoming regulatory, climate havoc, the gig economy and a continuous restructuring of centralised society. It also didn’t have a lot of happy endings. Because the world didn’t end, it just got continuesly shittier.
- bytehowl 2y ago
  Some would argue we are already living Cyberpunk, just without all the cool stuff. BTW, why single out "the EU block becoming regulatory" as something negative prophesied by Cyberpunk? I have recently watched a video about the timeline of Cyberpunk 2020/2077 (which is just one universe, granted), and the EU sounded like the only ones who had their shit together, even though they were facing sabotage from all directions.
  - p_l 2y ago
    The world of Cyberpunk RPG essentially has EU be a lot nicer NUSA, with considerable economical domination (thus the use of eurodollar, which was one of the names floated for what became Euro currency), Soviet Union as this really schizo place but which on basic human decency scores miles above post-USA America, and an alliance of African nations as the unexpected black horse who made huge resurgence in space (which also contains probably the only really "free" nations - the old ESA space habitats and their allies). This is also reflected (and probably heavily influenced CP2077) in Ghost in the Shell, where European Union, in somewhat fluctuating alliance with Soviet Union, is probably among the best locations to live.
  - devjab 2y ago
    I didn’t mean the EU being regulatory as negative, I was just giving examples of how the cyberpunk I read in the 90ies is basically reality now.

danschuller 2y ago

Reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Hieroglyph https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Hieroglyph but a decade on, it's not had many breakout successes.

dudeinjapan 2y ago

The end reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut's lecture "The Shape of Stories" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOGru_4z1Vc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOGru_4z1Vc

iftheshoefitss 2y ago

[flagged]

chx 2y ago

Cool visualization, perhaps interesting thoughts but alas it is completely worthless as it is AI analysis based. I wish the author warned about that on top instead of the bottom so I didn't waste my time with it.

aaron695 2y ago

[dead]

skybrian 2y ago

It’s an interesting presentation and I like the analysis of how science fiction has changed. This bit seems like feel-good anti-growth boilerplate though: > What if we reject the notion that the economy must produce more and more, but rather embrace the notion that a functioning society is only as successful as its least privileged soul? Among other things, I think the world is going to need a lot more air conditioners, and the energy to run them. Economic growth is a vague abstraction, when you get more specific, there are some important needs.

idle_zealot 2y ago
The key part is the second bit - a world where we build loads of air conditioners so that a few people can comfortably cool their mansions in the desert while others boil in their apartments or on the streets is unacceptable.
- its_ethan 2y ago
  Presumably we need more air conditioners precisely because there are currently people without them..? I think the guy you're responding to believes there's a need for more AC to prevent exactly what you're describing. And re; what you're describing, if you have an AC you (generally) don't need more AC's, that'd be pretty pointless. AC units aren't a thing that makes any sense to hoard away, so the future you're imagining where people in "mansions in the desert" somehow have all the AC and everyone else is just "boiling" away doesn't really seem like a realistic concern. Especially so if people agree that building more AC's will help.
  - funnybeam 2y ago
    We need more air conditioners because of global heating - a problem exacerbated to some extent by air conditioners themselves
    - youngtaff 2y ago
      Suspect we need more efficient cooling so things like heat pumps that can run in reverse and actually cool the building fabric down

thom 2y ago

Sophie’s choice between scrolly crap and a video. No surprise I suppose, given the article focuses on films and ignores the much larger body of sci-fi novels which had no shortage of pessimism in the past and have no shortage of optimism today.

crngefest 2y ago
Can you name a couple of your favourite recent sci-fi books that have this optimism? Would love to read something not dystopian once in a while.
- Filligree 2y ago
  Try the Clockwork Rocket trilogy.
- shiroiushi 2y ago
  This isn't a book, but the new Star Trek: Strange New Worlds show is pretty optimistic. It shows Earth going through some "Eugenics Wars" very soon, which then escalate into WWIII which kills off 40% of the world's population in nuclear attacks, but after that things look pretty good with humans inventing warp drive and exploring the stars and creating a federation of planets.
  - jhbadger 2y ago
    That's the standard Star Trek backstory that was even there in the original 1960s series (the Eugenic Wars, and the character of Khan Noonien Singh, the genetically engineered tyrant, were introduced in the 1967 episode "Space Seed").
    - shiroiushi 2y ago
      No, they modified it somewhat in SNW: they pushed back the start of the Eugenics Wars (there's a time-travel episode explaining it, originally it starts in the 1990s), and then they threw in a bit about a "second civil war" and WWIII killing 40% of the population in the pilot episode.

atoav 2y ago

One thing to think about is the question what capitalisms end game is. Suppose everyone is buying stuff and you're CEO of a nearly 100% efficient corporation, whatever that means. Your job is to somehow make gains every year. The problem is that this was easy in a inefficient corporation within a market where everybody was inefficient. But the things you have to do to keep these gains are getting more and more ridiculous, more and more amoral. This is our problem. The times where easy gains with honest products was possible is long past, now everything has to be a scam, a meta game, some sort of hidden monopoly or so cutting edge that it isn't even profitable.

openrisk 2y ago

While interesting (and a somewhat expected trend), what would be more helpful is the dual analysis and factcheck of "Who Saved the World". I.e., if the world avoided the worst, how did it happen? Was it magical thinking or something real that we can actually embrace and build on? The increasing gloominess around our predicament is to a large degree due to the persistent failure of positive forces and behaviors to mitigate destructive trends. There is no point imagining a unreachable utopia if we can't indicate a real path towards it. Its not that there is strictly zero evidence on our ability to avoid a major civilizational setback in the visible future. There is at least the open source movement. This is a remarkable, highly non-trivial behavior and it has already affected our reality. It is still little-known outside tech circles. Maybe there are other such positive stories in other circles. Somebody should base a sci-fi scenario on them :-)

TrainedMonkey 2y ago
Here is at least 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov
- openrisk 2y ago
  Its a most remarkable story but how would one "scale" this type of behavior to make a difference? If you zero-in on his state of mind during the incident: > the influences on his decision included that he had been told a U.S. strike would be all-out, so five missiles seemed an illogical start; that the launch detection system was new and, in his view, not yet wholly trustworthy; that the message passed through 30 layers of verification too quickly; and that ground radar failed to pick up corroborating evidence, even after minutes of delay So you have a highly trained and informed person applying a mix of reasoning and intuition to guide their action rather than blindly and lazily follow instructions - or worse, be pushed around by fears, group think, peer pressure, etc. without regard to actual impact. Clearly if the majority of people would exhibit such behaviors we'd be in much better shape, but how do we get there?

woolion 2y ago

The analysis seems great and I find the subject interesting enough. However, the presentation is really bad, in a way where it is actually making very difficult to grasp the content. The actual main information from the graphs is hard to read (why isn't it showing all numbers?), with colors that are too similar. It does not support the niceties that html chart provide (like dynamic filtering or alternate views). It is really hard to find where we are in the article, so going back and forth is painful. In terms of accessibility it is also quite bad as it does not show the charts. If the information is presented on a standard format with a ToC I would definitely read it in its entirety.

hyperman1 2y ago

A while ago, the paper 'The fate of empires' by John Glubb made regular appearences on this site. https://archive.org/stream/pdfy-2F_iHS6BLtGJb2ad/TheFateofEmpiresbySirJohnGlubb_djvu.txt https://archive.org/stream/pdfy-2F_iHS6BLtGJb2ad/TheFateofEm... This presentation is a smaller part of that paper: The good old science fiction basically corresponds to The Age of Intellect. Current SF corresponds to The Age of Decadence.

red_admiral 2y ago
Brett Deveraux, in his Fremen Mirage series, looks at the trope of "hard times produce strong men" and how decadence leads to decline: https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-part-i-war-at-the-dawn-of-civilization/ https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-... His result is that this is not true. The trope is also related to historically untenable ideas such as the "noble savage" or, if you take it too far, fascism's quest to bring back "real men".
- hyperman1 2y ago
  Acoup tought me a lot and changed my mind a few times, and the paper is interesting but far from the state of the art. Even so, I don't think their disagreement is big, and looking at the core of a new empire as barbarians/ noble savages is an incorrect label of the old empire. I'd say the power of a group of people depends on not only the size, but also on the morale and organization. Mr Deveraux mentions something similar at the end of your link. Looking trough this lens, the change in Age from Intellect to Decadence is a hidden breakdown of the organization. Even if the number of people rises, the coherence and trust of the group disappears. The other end of the Glubb paper seems similar. The old empire is less organized than everyone expected, and the 'barbarians' are actually a new group, better organized and more willing to adapt then expected.

snickerer 2y ago

[flagged]

codydh 2y ago

I was really drawn in and thinking deeply about this, until I got to the end: The content analysis of each film and TV show was generated with the ChatGPT 4o large language model. [..] So the content analysis for each film and TV show – as well as the short explanation of its answer – are based on ChatGPT 4o’s responses. I immediately discounted everything I'd just read. I cannot imagine doing this work manually, but I also cannot imagine believing that these effects are real based on ChatGPT's determination. Maybe that's just indicative of my current "AI" cynicism, but it was remarkable to me how immediately my opinion changed.

_nalply 2y ago
What if the creator didn't do the reveal? Would you still think about this and feel that you have learnt something? Disclaimer: I don't think it is a good idea not to reveal usage of AI. I just feel it is wrong to dismiss what you learnt just because you read something from an LLM. It is not about something you read being absolutely true or having mistakes or whatever, it is about what happened in your mind, what you take from that experience.
- pjc50 2y ago
  > it is about what happened in your mind, what you take from that experience Is this fiction or non-fiction? If it's fiction, then sure, yes, enjoy the ride. You can let it change the way you think a little. If you're going to act on it? No. It's like reading a scientific paper and discovering an error in the statistical work: it invalidates the whole thing and you need to forget it. Too many people these days are taken in by clever little just-so stories on social media that have no more validity than Rudyard Kipling's animal stories. (On the other hand, as a piece of media criticism it's totally fine! The observation about pessimism is not new and seems valid even if it isn't and can't be "objective". Separate issue.)
  - _nalply 2y ago
    Even in truth there are grey areas. You read a scientific paper and discover a serious error in a side topic the paper only had a short digress about. Would that invalidate the whole thing? And where do you draw the line of invalidating errors and not so important errors (Sorites Paradox)? This said, there are cases where a contradiction undermines the whole thing. I am a legal and one law professor warned us students, if we say A is valid but not A as well, he will dismiss the complete answer. Once I got a contradictory information from a government agency and I was forced to follow up with a request for clarification. That's bad.

pgsandstrom 2y ago

I think it is interesting that a majority of the changes happened between the 50s and the 70s. I guess it might be attributed to post-war optimism and the golden age of capitalism that lasted just about the same era.

pjc50 2y ago
The "up" arc: penicillin, the space programme The "down" arc: thalidomide, Chernobyl, Challenger, oil crisis, "Silent Spring", global warming, and the rise of environmentalism. (someone have that graph about all the good things stagnating in 1971?)
- guiriduro 2y ago
  What's "down" about environmentalism? Even thalidomide has its virtues, e.g. in Lupus treatment. You just should never give it to pregnant mothers.
  - pjc50 2y ago
    There's what people sometimes call the dark green / bright green distinction: can we solve the problems caused by technology with other, different, technology? Environmentalism and precautionary principle thinking in general steer away from techno-optimism by asking "what could go wrong with this?"

nonameiguess 2y ago

This needs a better methodology section. It's not a trivial undertaking to analyze the top 200 sci-fi films of each of the past 8 decades. It says it was automated with LLM sentiment analysis, but how? Did you get access to a content library that allowed you to feed the film stream itself to the models? Did you get transcripts? Do all of these films even have transcripts? Did you generate them if not? How do you deal with transcripts losing out on most of the setting you get from the visuals themselves? Do you have access to the screenplays somehow? Does the context window of these models really fit 1600 films at once?

bandrami 2y ago

One thing I find really fascinating about the gritty cyberpunk dystopia is that its setting is not actually a prediction, but a memory of a stateless city between China and Hong Kong that was demolished 30 years ago.

irjoe 2y ago
I assume you're referring to Kowloon Walled City?

buster 2y ago

It became obvious to me that it's LLM generated halucinations, when i read the content boxes of "protagonists fight another human". It's totally borked, but the graphics look nice. It seemingly always says "It's a story of a human vs. an unknown threat", which just doesn't match most movies contents.

stavros 2y ago
You're half-right. It's not hallucinations, but I think the question to the LLM was "do the protagonists fight against the unknown?", when it should have been "are they fighting against another human?". So the LLM is answering about the unknown, when the actual graph talks about human antagonists.
- buster 2y ago
  Even then, it's clearly responding some half-true stuff about unknown for movies with clear, known antagonists. It's just trying to put "unknown" somewhere into response.

CM30 2y ago

This makes me wonder how the stats compare for other forms of media, like TV shows, books, video games, comics, etc. Feels like there's probably more of a mix of attitudes and settings in these mediums, at least from the few I've seen. Like in television, you've got Black Mirror which usually has near contemporary stories set in horrifically messed up versions of our world, but also Doctor Who and Star Trek, which are far more optimistic and deal with a far wider mix of settings and time periods. Like Utopia, a dystopian story set in the year 100 trillion where the simple passage of time has destroyed all but a handful of worlds via entropy, and the last remaining humans are trying to survive a dying universe. And there are arguably more stories in those mediums that do deal with outside threats more than internal ones, often due to the 'monster of the week' structure some of these shows and stories run on. If you want sci-fi stories with external threats, virtually every sci-fi game you can think of has you killing hostile aliens and mutants and monsters by the thousand. Plenty that don't have any ties to Earth or current events too, and simply take place in a completely independent setting with entirely original problems.

krapp 2y ago
This isn't a discussion about content. Content on the web is more rich and diverse than it's ever been. This is, as ever, a discussion about production - about the web having matured around a limited set of standards and frameworks, and web development no longer being as fun as it was, before it was a job for many people here (or at least before expectations became so rigid.)

cgrealy 2y ago

I can’t remember the source, but there’s a quote that goes “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”. I’ve yet to read any kind of optimistic sci-fi that operates in a capitalist society. The two most obvious (Star Trek and the Culture) both envision a post-scarcity society enabled by technology so advanced it might as well be magic.

its_ethan 2y ago
> technology so advanced it might as well be magic All "optimistic" sci-fi is reliant on a utopian fantasy in some form, I wouldn't be looking to sci-fi authors to actually have a workable recipe for how to achieve any given desired societal outcome..
harimau777 2y ago
It's from Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher. At the time when he killed himself Fisher was developing the idea of "Psychedelic Socialism" as a potential counter to Capitalist Realism. I enjoyed this discussion of the idea: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/psychedelic-socialism/ https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/psychedelic-socialism/ As I understand it, the idea is that "consciousness raising" is a necessary component of catalyzing and maintaining the sense of empowerment, hope, and motivation necessary for a social movement to succeed. Although the consciousness raising in psychedelic socialism could literally be psychedelic drugs, Fisher is mostly using that are a metaphor. Consciousness raising could also take the forms like music & art, yoga, religion, ritual, reading circles, etc. This suggests that things like the New Age beliefs of the Hippy movement, the Pan-African/Afrofuturist symbolism of the civil rights movement, or the rock and roll of the anti-Vietnam protests were not just trivialities. Rather they were essential to the movement's ability to impact the world.
- harimau777 2y ago
  Note: If you search for discussions of "Psychedelic Socialism" or related terms like "Acid Communism", a lot of the discussion that you will find is (not surprisingly) among proponents of drug/psychedelic exploration. Personally, although I found some of the specifics of their viewpoints a little wacky (and in particular some of them are disturbingly anti-psychology), I found the overall ideas that they raised useful. That is to say: for your average person I think the best course of action is to just "absorb what is useful and discard the rest" when reading their discussions.

harimau777 2y ago

Something that this article only touches on indirectly (when it talks about walking out of the theater to the real world) is timelines. Even if a post apocalyptic film presents the hero making the world a better place in the future, we won't be around for that. The part of the timeline that the viewer will experience is the dystopia. In that respect, I don't see how dystopian/post-apocalyptic fiction can generally be optimistic for the viewer.

shrimp_emoji 2y ago

"I AM THE MAN WHO GRABS THE SUN!"

joshcsimmons 2y ago

The good news is that none of those sci-fi fears never really came true. Here's to hoping the current "near future dystopia" doesn't break the rule... Contrary to other posters I mostly enjoyed the scrolling art style and presentation.

dash2 2y ago

I wonder if the ChatGPT analyses of individual films might have biases. For example, since ChatGPT is trained on today's data, it might be better at recognizing social conflicts in themes of today's films, than the social conflicts of the 1950s.

Kim_Bruning 2y ago

Horrible scrolling site. Don't recommend.

gaws 2y ago

[dupe]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40947069 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40947069

ksoajl 2y ago

[flagged]