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Star Trek, tech companies, and the death of futurism in cinema

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Re: Star Trek, tech companies, and the death of futurism in cinema

#51

Post by sbierwagen »

Star Trek isn't interested in predicting the future, because most of the stuff just beyond the horizon is either deeply scary or plays havoc with plots that depend on putting the characters in danger.

If you have a hundred backup copies of your mind all over the solar system, what do you care if one of you gets killed? How can you possibly write a plausible plot that includes a weakly godlike AI that doesn't involve it instantly solving any problem that faces the protagonists? How can current audiences relate to a world where the population of the Earth is 100 trillion, all of them running as uploaded minds on computers?

(Disclaimer, I'm not a fan of Star Trek: http://bbot.org/badtranscript-startrek2.html )

Re: Star Trek, tech companies, and the death of futurism in cinema

#52

Post by romanovic »

> If we spent the last thirty years inspired by what we saw in Star Trek, what’s going to inspire us for the next thirty?

Futurism isn't lost in the Star Trek reboot. The tech seen in the new Star Trek movies, rather than diminishing futurism, serves to show us that the future that Star Trek introduced to us these past few decades is just around the corner. They are using devices we are now starting to see every day, and some tech that we can imagine our children using in the very near future.

Maybe that's not as exciting to some, but to have that mix of technology and design from the present day feels like a confirmation that a lot more Star Trek tech might become reality within our lifetimes :).

Re: Star Trek, tech companies, and the death of futurism in cinema

#54

Post by Zimahl »

vec wrote: post #17
doktrin wrote: post #10

I had this very thought while in the movie theater. However, I chalked it up to being a re-launch of a franchise with a very established lore and universe. This isn't just a "movie about the future". It's Star Trek . With legacy comes baggage. I'm sure there's a small encyclopedia detailing the available technology at the time the movie takes place, as well as potentially canonical books, stories, graphic novels, etc…

Plus since it's (kinda) supposed to be a prequel to NextGen/DS9/Voyager it has to cram itself into that thin wedge between more futuristic than now and noticeably less futuristic than we imagined a decade ago.

Let's talk about this thin wedge (hopefully without spoilers). I understand that this is a relaunch of the series but I think they did it wrong. It probably would've been blasphemy to throw it all out the door, and 'historically' the same things can happen but they really should be ignoring everything from TOS.

Will we see VGER? The monolith from 'Voyage Home' (ST4) must make an appearance, right? I mean we have to assume that whales are still extinct in the alternate timeline. Will Praxis explode resulting in 'Undiscovered Country' (ST6)?

Re: Star Trek, tech companies, and the death of futurism in cinema

#55

Post by [deleted] »

sbierwagen wrote: post #51

Star Trek isn't interested in predicting the future, because most of the stuff just beyond the horizon is either deeply scary or plays havoc with plots that depend on putting the characters in danger. If you have a hundred backup copies of your mind all over the solar system, what do you care if one of you gets killed? How can you possibly write a plausible plot that includes a weakly godlike AI that doesn't involve…

[deleted]

Re: Star Trek, tech companies, and the death of futurism in cinema

#56

Post by ahomescu1 »

zipppy wrote: post #14

I tend to have an opposite reaction -- I get annoyed with futurism that is unrealistic compared to how far in the future the story takes place. Even Star Trek is completely unrealistic - it takes place less than 25 decades from now. There's no way we have space vehicles so advanced so soon. (edit: even ignoring 'warp speed')

Just think about where we were 250 years ago (that's around 1760), and how far we've come technologically since then.

Re: Star Trek, tech companies, and the death of futurism in cinema

#57

Post by peterhajas »

saurik wrote: post #37
jherdman wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You saw the same movie, but you missed his point: this is the same future that folks in the 70's were predicting, and not one as his own generation sees it.

If it wasn't the same future as predicted in the 70's, it wouldn't have been Star Trek: they may have thrown away all of the later canon, but they couldn't just start over... it wouldn't be the same universe.

(Hi, saurik!)

Even TNG reimagined the technology of the future through the lens of the 80's and 90's, though. Holodecks, the Borg, Geordi's visor, Data. I think this movie could have been more forward-thinking.

Re: Star Trek, tech companies, and the death of futurism in cinema

#58

Post by sukuriant »

icebraining wrote: post #34
jack-r-abbit wrote: post #21

I think today's films still have futurism but we don't want to see it as that because they predict the future will be a burned out and destroyed Earth with us living elsewhere. And that is depressing.

Dystopias have always existed; a few decades ago it was nuclear holocaust, now it's ecological destruction, but visions of a destroyed Earth are nothing new.

Could the dystopian future : happy future ratio be a valid metric for how our society feels that society and the future itself is going? If so, then perhaps we, the general public, no longer (or infrequently now) see a happy future, but a dystopian one, at least in the next 200 years

Re: Star Trek, tech companies, and the death of futurism in cinema

#59

Post by r00fus »

sbierwagen wrote: post #51

Star Trek isn't interested in predicting the future, because most of the stuff just beyond the horizon is either deeply scary or plays havoc with plots that depend on putting the characters in danger. If you have a hundred backup copies of your mind all over the solar system, what do you care if one of you gets killed? How can you possibly write a plausible plot that includes a weakly godlike AI that doesn't involve…

Read Altered Carbon [1] - this book addresses this question.

[1] http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40445.Altered_Carbon

Re: Star Trek, tech companies, and the death of futurism in cinema

#60

Post by nknighthb »

pseudometa wrote: post #6

Spoiler Alert, HCI elements will plateau at voice control and touch displays. Why? Because the human body is what it is. It isn't going any further than that until it jumps to something matrix style, but that movie has already been made. Alien Computer Interaction however could offer some interesting opportunities. Forget hoverboards and dick tracy watches, Star Trek still has plenty of imaginitive technologies that…

We've been directly stimulating the acoustic nerve since the 1960s. The first commercial "bionic eye" was FDA approved in February. Various brain-computer interfaces, invasive and not, have proven practical if still rather crude over the last 20 years.

"Matrix style" is already here, it just doesn't use a giant SO-239 in the back of the head.

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