We can look to science fiction as the sort of visionary strategic assessment and evaluation of the possible futures of technology. But..here’s the challenge: suppose the cautionary science fiction tale isn’t read as something to be avoided. Suppose it’s read as a playbook?

We often use science fiction as a way to explore the potential consequences of emerging technologies, to warn us about the dangers of certain paths, and to inspire us toward better outcomes.

At the same time and in the same worlds — these stories are become fascinating tales that are absorbed and processed as instructions as to the possibilities of the future. The stories are read as blueprints for what to build, rather than just cautionary tales about what to avoid.

In some imaginations, Darth Vader is the hero, in some topsy-turvy notion of morality. Otherwise, it’s hard to comprehend the motivations of those who cosplay Darth Vader — to extreme levels of commitment to costuming, craft, cost, fabrication. How does this happen? What movie were they watching? Not a callout — just an observation that you can have a story that is a cautionary tale about the evils of authoritarianism, yet still — the authoritarian is the hero. (Just sayin’..)

While I have always appreciated the literary value of science fiction as a form of a kind of mirror onto the present, I’ve recently become careful about our expectations that it will be read in the “right way”, any mor ethan we can expect to comprehend how anyone could disagree with what one mind sees as patently the right thing to do.

We should also be careful about the ways in which we use it as a tool for thinking about the future. It can be a powerful tool for imagining possible futures, but it can also be a trap that leads us to focus too much on the negative and not enough on the positive.

I mean — things like that Friend device, and Sam Altman directly indexing the supposedly cautionary tale of “Her” when adding voice to OpenAI’s various contrivances — these are all lessons indicating that we may be reading the same books and watching the same movies — and seeing an entirely differently shaped future.

I don’t know the way around this particular point, to be perfectly honest. There was a description of the cultural conflicts that the commentator/comic artist Scott Adams said back in, like..2016 when he predicted that the future would look more extreme right. He said something to the effect of: “it’s like we’re all in the same movie theater, watching a screen but we are seeing different stories.”

That imagery stuck with me.

Some folks are watching the film “Her” and seeing a cautionary tale about the dangers of a deeply seductive intelligence/friend. Others are watching the same film and seeing a blueprint for the future of human-computer interaction, with not a little bit of a 13 year old’s juvenile sense of sexual jouissance. Both interpretations are valid, but they lead to very different conclusions about what to do next.