Re: REQUEST: Singularity Glossary

Anders Sandberg (nv91-asa@nada.kth.se)
Wed, 30 Jul 1997 20:43:30 +0200 (MET DST)


On Wed, 30 Jul 1997 Yakwax2@aol.com wrote:

> I've been trying to do the exact same thing. The problems I find are: trying
> to be optimistic and still hold the attention of todays audience (who have
> been made to believe genetic engineering will create mosters and AI's will
> eat their children) and trying to present highly complex, world changing
> technologies in a way the audience would understand.

Exactly. Tonight the Lawnmover Man will air on swedish television. I
like the film, it contains several transhuman themes and the graphics
from Xaos Inc was brilliant when it was made. Still, to tell the
story the movie *needs* something gone wrong (at least they did not
use the silly Star Trek idea that superintelligence always leads to
amoralit - the nasty men in suits wrecked the whole experiment).

Maybe one way of getting tension into a basically transhuman movie
may be to have a conflict between two reasonable points of view,
instead of "good guys vs. villains", like (say) transhumanists
wishing to expand human potential and bring life to the universe, and
environmentalists who want to heal the world and live in harmony with
nauture (the movie could end with the transhumans moving off-planet
as "Children of the Sun", leaving it for the "Children of the
Earth"), but I think most companies would prefer the tried and tested
black vs. white theme.

Another way of showing transhuman themes in an interesting way is to
look at their human consequences. What about a movie about a family
where a daughter is uploaded after an accident, something like the
typical movie where the daughter is handicapped and people struggle
to adapt and understand the situation?

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Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension!
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