经济学人:科幻如何影响现实世界?
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发布于: 5年前 5'35" 132wpm
If you’re watching this on your phone, it’s partly thanks to Captain Kirk.
In Star Trek, first broadcast in 1966, he used a pocket-sized device to communicate with his crew. Martin Cooper, the man who invented the mobile phone, says the show was the inspiration for his idea, which launched seven years later.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos based Alexa, the voice-activated speaker, on Star Trek’s talking computer.
Transporters engaged. Welcome aboard.
Sci-fi fan Elon Musk is building rockets that he hopes will one day carry people to Mars.
Submarines, helicopters, rockets, and touch screens – all appeared in science fiction before becoming science fact.
Sci-fi inspires real-world technology. It also provides a way to explore the moral dilemmas that advanced technologies could pose.
Paul McAuley is a scientist-turned science fiction writer.
Paul McAuley: All science fiction is basically about is presence, so it’s about a heightened version of the present. It’s about anticipating where technology is going to go and it’s about our fears of where technology is going to go and what uses or misuses we might make of that technology.
Divers’ information paper’s ready and Techno world, do you need to buy a suitcase?
Utopia, huh? You know they set up shop here, right?
Few films better encapsulate this than Ridley Scott’s 1982 cult classic Blade Runner. The film is set in a dystopian future where synthetic human workers are bio-engineered by a corporate power. In London, fans are arriving for a Blade Runner screening with a difference.
Keep moving, guys, come on.
Let’s go, quickly scan.
Fabien Riggall: We are in World Terminus, checkpoint 4.C. We’re in Los Angeles in 2019. Secret Cinema is a multilayer physical experience. We build these physical sets, creating a world inspired by a film. So instead of just watching a film, you literally buy a ticket, you become a character, and you become part of an interactive theatrical experience.
Hey, you lot in there! You thirsty or what?
Fabien Riggall: I think the science fiction genre allows us to dream about another world. We’ve taken the inspiration from Blade Runner and built an entire world around it.
The film explores the ethical implications of creating highly intelligent robots that have thoughts, feelings, and emotions.
Paul McAuley: My wife’s just back from a convention about AI, artificial intelligence, in Cambridge. A lot of the AI people, you think about what would happen if real AI came on very powerfully and what they’d do to us and that’s one of the things that science fiction has been exploring for quite a long time now.
Steven Spielberg’s latest movie, Ready Player One, explores another emerging technology, virtual reality.
The film imagines a future where overpopulation, pollution, and climate change have forced most people to live in sprawling, slum-like cities. Young people escape the desolation by living much of their lives in virtual reality.
Are you ready?
Although there is a wide gap between the virtual world shown in the film and the capabilities of current VR technology, the idea that young people can get hooked on virtual fantasies is a long-standing concern.
No, no, no, no, no!
To be compelling, science fiction has to be convincing. So writers and film directors enlist the help of designers and engineers. Syd Mead designed the look of some of Hollywood’s most seminal sci-fi films, including Blade Runner, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and Aliens. In the real world, he’s designed cars for Ford and electronics for Philips.
Syd Mead: Because I’m a trained designer, I can imagine how things might be made. People always say that my stuff looks real even though it’s futuristic. The pods for Aliens that I designed were real mechanical articulations. So when they opened, they looked absolutely real for people to be in for long-duration space travel.
I was hired to design the vehicles for Blade Runner. The average vehicle was, in my mind, a decommissioned luxury aerial limousine. It’s overlaying the familiar with the weird and that’s a surefire formula for interesting things to look at.
Science fiction introduces people to real-world science and technology. Some fans develop a lifelong passion. The tech industry is led by sci-fi nerds who are creating the things they read about or saw on screen. We all stand to benefit from their creations, provided, that is, they can avoid the ethical pitfalls depicted in science fiction.
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