Futurist Reviews Futuristic Movies, from 'The Matrix' to 'WALL-E' | Vanity Fair

hi i'm amy webb i'm a futurist and an award-winning author i'm a professor of strategic foresight at the nyu stern school of business and the founder of the future today institute today we're going to be reviewing some scenes from movies that are set in the future [Music] so i get a lot of questions about my job you know what's a futurist a futurist is somebody who methodically explores signals and data in order to anticipate what might come next we don't predict the future but we certainly track everything that's happening in the present and try to imagine what might be next this is blade runner 2049 directed by denis villeneux officer kd6-3.7 let's begin ready yes sir in the science fiction canon this is kind of a sacred text so this movie blade runner 2049 and the previous version blade runner comes from a story written by philip k dick who's a super genius in the world of science fiction and futures work so what's happening during this scene is that he's taking a psychological test but the psychological test is actually looking to see whether there's corruption in his system not to tell whether or not he's human and that's kind of important because within artificial intelligence the test to tell whether or not somebody is human has always been about deception can the human tell whether or not the machine is human but in this case this test is about proving that the machine is in fact a machine and not human cells cells have you ever been in an institution cells cells do they keep you in a cell cells cells when we think about artificial intelligence and you know blade runner is all about self-aware ai we tend to anthropomorphize it so we tend to put that ai inside of a human container right a body and then the rest of the story is you know what does it mean to interact with somebody who feels human but isn't you know the poorest boundaries between humans and machines but at the end of the day we're already surrounded by meaningful artificial intelligence and sometimes that ai goes rogue and sometimes it doesn't i mean in a way even without the flying cars and always nighttime reigning situation we're sort of living bits and pieces of blade runner in our everyday lives we just don't recognize that that's what's happening this is gattica directed by andrew nichols it's the story of a society in which genetic manipulation is commonplace and people are in a constant quest to build their perfect children i'll never understand what possessed my mother to put her faith in god's hands rather than those of her local geneticist ten fingers ten toes that's all that used to matter so what's so interesting about this movie is that when it came out in 1997 there were a ton of movies about aliens and in this movie it's also kind of about aliens it's just that the aliens are the natural-born humans because in this future world anybody who hasn't been edited is the mutant versus the other way around so this movie is all about the future of genetic engineering and it wasn't too long before this some of you might remember dolly the sheep so dolly the sheep was a cloned animal and it caused this absolute like manic furor all around the world people were really upset that scientists had figured out and had advanced the science enough to genetically not just modify but copy another living being and that it was actually born i mean this freaked everybody out the pope made a special edict president clinton had to have a break-in like with a with a press conference and reassure the american public that don't worry clones are not going to be roaming around the streets outside so in the middle of all this comes this incredible movie datica [Music] neurological condition 60 probability manic depression 42 probability attention deficit disorder 89 probability heart disorder 99 probability early fatal potential life expectancy 30.2 years 30 years in this future world there's a biological case system that exists and people are slotted into different professions based on their genetic makeup what's interesting is that we're kind of in a situation now that's reminiscent of what was in that movie we're going to be entering a period in human history where there will be people who are vaccinated for the coronavirus and people who are not for various different reasons and that's going to create biological levels different sets of permissions throughout all of our societies all around the world that don't really have as much to do with all of the traditional ways that we've sorted people in the past like based on their education or their wealth it's a new type of biological uh system of sorting and tagging people which is profound if you stop and think about it this is the matrix directed by the rochowskis one of my favorite movies and in this scene neo wakes up two things you need to know about the matrix one it is incredibly clever story about artificial intelligence and control two it is a metaphor it's a very clever incredibly well told metaphor so no i don't think that artificial super intelligence is at some point in the future going to give birth to humans and force us to be batteries which is what's happening in that scene the amazing story that's being told is that it's our data that power the systems and in that amazing scene where neo is waking up right he's taken the pill he's decided to learn more and to be disconnected from the system the story that's being told there is he now understands what data are being collected and how the algorithms manipulate people this movie was brilliant and ahead of its time because what's happening right now in american society and other places around the world is that we are waking up people do recognize how the big tech giants are harvesting and scraping and mining and refining their data at some point in the future yes there are generative algorithms there are evolutionary algorithms and at some point they may decide to do things that we didn't intend but the story that's being told here is about what happens when we seed control to algorithms to systems designed by other people for the purpose of rewarding us nudging us and getting us to do what they want here's a crazy little factoid some researchers a couple of years ago at carnegie mellon university calculated that it would take 76 work days to read through all of the privacy agreements and all of the terms of service agreements the average person sees in a year none of us read any of that myself included i mean who has the time but what this means is we humans are slowly going to sleep just as the machines are starting to wake up you know which is my way of saying we rely more and more on automated systems that power our everyday lives and we are more and more disconnected from them we don't understand how they work and so when you find out that persistent biometric surveillance systems are everywhere in your city or that drones that you can neither see nor hear have been flying around overhead taking pictures of you at a protest or that simply by doing a little bit of online shopping there's a rich profile of what are called personally identifiable information markers or piis about you that divulge an incredible amount of information to third parties that you may never know or see and that entire connected system of data and algorithms are built to try to make decisions for you i mean that is not the future people that is like right now part of what we're being asked to contemplate in the matrix is are we in a simulation or can we see what's happening i mean it's brilliant this movie the matrix about artificial intelligence and super computers and also a post-apocalyptic environmental crisis is just great just great if you have not seen this movie i got nothing to say to you beyond what i've already said this is ex machina directed by alex garland and in this clip nathan explains how he created ava the ai sorry if you knew the trouble i had getting an ai to read and duplicate facial expressions you know how i cracked it i don't know how you did any of this every cell phone just about has a microphone camera and a means to transmit data so i turned on every microphone and camera across the entire plane no and i redirected the data through blue book boom limitless resource vocal and facial interaction you hacked the world's cell phones yeah and all the manufacturers knew i was doing it too couple of thoughts here that whole thing about a single entity pulling the entire world's worth of cellular data into one spot and then i guess having some kind of crazy powerful algorithmic system to parse it all that's not a thing the number of cell phones exceeds the number of people and it's not just cellular devices i mean cell phones divulge or location among other things but we're all connected to many different systems and tools so if i was going to try to build a high functioning ai system there's other ways to do it here we have her mind structured gel i had to get away from circuitry i needed something that could arrange and rearrange in a molecular level but keep its form when required holding for memories shifting for thoughts this is your hardware wet wear you hear them talking about something called wet wear wet wear is actually a real thing one way to think about people is that we are just soft robots we're just containers for code and the squishy computer inside of our heads our brains are what make us work so this concept of wet wear totally on point and it turns out the theoretical chemists have created molecules that can work as what are called qubits so in regular computing we have bits and bytes and in quantum computing we have these things called qubits so what he's describing in that scene when he pulls the synthesized brain out of its of course stainless steel container what he's talking about is com combining sort of quantum and ai so there is something there that does kind of make sense this is wally directed by anderson well then what do you want to do i don't know something wow so wally tells the story of an environmental disaster and humanity has had to leave earth but the rest of the story is much more about capitalism and the free market economy run amok people who are irreversibly distracted who need devices servicing them at all times and really people have lost touch with each other their relationship is with screens and sort of robots that do things with them versus each other in a way the reason that i love this movie so much is because it feels so plausible of all the movies and television shows that have been made about the future in a way wall-e feels it feels very real first of all there are a service class of robots that are working collaboratively today so for the past i don't know 10-15 years researchers have been building out service spots that never really found a market or had a use case there's a company called saviok that has this little robot that sort of roams around and can make deliveries so let's say that you're a hotel you could shove little soaps and towels and then if you call housekeeping rather than having a person come to you a robot would come to you that's not too far off from what we just saw in that clip the world is full of service spots right now and a lot of them you know listen make make our lives easier in some ways but there's another piece of this movie which has to do with humans kind of giving up and uh allowing automation to take over hey drink the butt take the cup i don't know if in the future we're all gonna have a levitating chair you know i don't know that that's necessarily on the horizon but there is something to the idea that we expect technology to do things for us that we ourselves are probably still capable of doing and you know there's also the scene where wally speeds up to one of the passengers on the levitating train and he's trying to get her attention and she's been talking on the phone and looking at multiple screens and wally kind of snaps her out of it and that screen goes away she suddenly realizes oh there's like a whole world out there it's literally passing before my eyes that i kind of forgot about or maybe i didn't know existed i mean doesn't that kind of describe a lot of people who spend or kids who spend a lot of their days constantly plugged into devices so that to me feels like a somewhat plausible future this is 2001 a space odyssey directed by stanley kubrick and in this scene we learn that hal is always watching there's never been any instance at all of a computer error occurring in the 9000 series has it none whatsoever frank the 9000 series has a perfect operational record well of course i know all the wonderful achievements of the 9000 series but uh are you certain there's never been any case of even the most insignificant computer ever none whatsoever frank quite honestly i wouldn't worry myself about that 2001 a space odyssey is about artificial intelligence that at some point is powerful enough that it makes decisions that the humans on board would themselves not make and then catastrophe ensues stanley kubrick had the vision and the desire and drive to tell a story about both space and artificial intelligence and in order to make 2001 a space odyssey he brought on board lots of different experts one of whom was marvin minsky who actually coined the phrase artificial intelligence he was part of this group of people that were advising on the film that were trying to think through an ai system powering the systems um for that ship that they were writing like what would all of that look like there's so much interesting about this movie and i realize that it's kind of slow by today's standards but you've got a bunch so there's persistent surveillance and you've got a super computer system that is making decisions but is also meant to be subservient to the humans in this case the people who are on the ship you know another thing just occurred to me well as far as i know no 9th house computers haven't been disconnected 9 000 computers ever found out before that's not what i mean well i'm not so sure what they think about it let me blow your mind for a moment so one of the things that you see happening is that there's something called computer vision that's being used to interpret what's being said in the pod the pod may not have listening devices but it doesn't mean that the thing isn't riddled with sensors the computer hal doesn't need audio content to understand what's being said now out in the real world we're totally headed into a future in which machines don't need just audio or just our faces to recognize who we are and what we're saying and what we're meaning we've actually built systems already that can recognize who you are and how you might be feeling by monitoring your posture and your gait we're all kind of obsessed with machines and cameras looking at our faces but truth be told i don't need your face to know who you are so to answer the question because everybody's thinking at what point in ai's development do we wind up with a supercomputer like hell that starts making its own decisions and potentially puts up us in harm's way and the answer to that question is exactly what date that i don't know are we building a situation in which that could happen in the future yeah there are lots of different research groups around the world that are building ai systems that are intended to learn on their own without having a human in the loop some of these systems don't just complete sort of a single narrow task which would be called artificial narrow intelligence they're actually capable of doing many more things at once and they've started to make decisions that humans would not make so there's this research group called deepmind and they've been working on a computer system and training it on how to play go an ancient game that was played in china and japan it's got white and black pieces on a giant grid and what's interesting about this game is you can't brute force your way through all of the mathematical populations the rules are a little different so this deepmind team builds this system called alphago and has different iterations of that system and over time this thing beats every human go master that is willing to play it i mean it's like bad none of the humans can beat the system and at some point it wasn't just that the system outmaneuvered because it understanding could sort of calculate all the different plays the reason that the system kept winning was because it learned the human strategy and then decided to throw it out and it invented its own strategy and started using it and played in a way that nobody had ever seen before and that quite frankly on the back end it was doing this in a way that people didn't quite understand so we are already in a situation where machines are starting to make their own decisions doesn't necessarily mean that the future turns out bad for the humans but it doesn't necessarily mean that it doesn't not turn out bad for the humans this is total recall directed by paul verhoeven and in this scene we learn a little bit about the technology that powers the perfect vacation would you like do you dream of a vacation at the bottom of the ocean but you can't float the bill have you always wanted to climb the mountains of mars but now you're over the hill then come to recall incorporated where you can buy the memory of your ideal vacation cheaper safer and better than the real thing so don't let life pass you by call recall for the memory of a lifetime what's really interesting is the use of what's called synthetic media so a lot of this movie is all about storing memories creating memories and planting memories erasing memories using a variety of different types of technology like ar and virtual reality the part of what powers that something called synthetic media so this is like using the data from everyday life and generating realistic looking people and characters we're at the very very beginning stages of that right now so there's like all different pieces of this ecosystem currently being built and that's what makes total recall so fascinating because when i first watched it in 1990 i was like oh this is another great philip k dick story this is a great movie and here we are like 20 years later and some of the crazy futuristic world that's being described there is actually now being built there's a lot of virtual reality that's being used something that a lot of people don't know is that vr was kind of invented to help treat people with ptsd and the idea is you put on an immersive headset you know in headphones and whatever that traumatic experience that you might have gone through in a virtual reality environment doctors treat ptsd using exposure therapy or trying to to sort of confront the memory or change the memory so this sort of idea of using all of these technologies to change or implant memories in people has a basis in the real world so it's really interesting right to think about a future in which you don't strap into a headset in a vr environment to escape your past but couldn't you also if you were exposed enough times start to alter your own reality there's definitely stuff in total recall that is totally plausible in the future everything from taking virtual you know vacations and actually feeling like you were there to having a new kind of therapy to potentially like erase or at least mute old memories even enhancing your loved ones the vr version the hollywood version of your spouse that is plausible we that could actually happen and maybe your thing is arnold younger arnold schwarzenegger like that's a possibility so in all of these clips that we've seen you're looking at the future but these depictions of the future are actually based in all of the signals that are being collected in the present which means that you know filmmakers and show runners do work that's pretty similar to the work that i do we look at the signals we think about their next order outcomes and we imagine alternative futures and we ask what if this is what we're seeing then what next

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Keywords: futurist, futurist reviews, reviews, expert review, expert reviews, future review, futuristic movies, future fact check, vanity fair reviews, experts review, futurist reviews future, futurist reviews futuristic movies, futuristic movie, futuristic movie scenes, futuristic movie scene, the matrix vanity fair, wall-e vanity fair, wall-e, wall-e review, futurist reviews the future, amy webb, amy webb vanity fair, future review vanity fair, future vanity fair, vanity fair

Id: 2ws3YfsAYDw

Length: 25min 31sec (1531 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 18 2020