Who Killed the World?

While interesting (and a somewhat expected trend), what would be more helpful is the dual analysis and factcheck of "Who Saved the World". I.e., if the world avoided the worst, how did it happen? Was it magical thinking or something real that we can actually embrace and build on?

The increasing gloominess around our predicament is to a large degree due to the persistent failure of positive forces and behaviors to mitigate destructive trends. There is no point imagining a unreachable utopia if we can't indicate a real path towards it.

Its not that there is strictly zero evidence on our ability to avoid a major civilizational setback in the visible future. There is at least the open source movement. This is a remarkable, highly non-trivial behavior and it has already affected our reality. It is still little-known outside tech circles. Maybe there are other such positive stories in other circles. Somebody should base a sci-fi scenario on them :-)

It’s an interesting presentation and I like the analysis of how science fiction has changed. This bit seems like feel-good anti-growth boilerplate though:

> What if we reject the notion that the economy must produce more and more, but rather embrace the notion that a functioning society is only as successful as its least privileged soul?

Among other things, I think the world is going to need a lot more air conditioners, and the energy to run them. Economic growth is a vague abstraction, when you get more specific, there are some important needs.

This needs a better methodology section. It's not a trivial undertaking to analyze the top 200 sci-fi films of each of the past 8 decades. It says it was automated with LLM sentiment analysis, but how? Did you get access to a content library that allowed you to feed the film stream itself to the models? Did you get transcripts? Do all of these films even have transcripts? Did you generate them if not? How do you deal with transcripts losing out on most of the setting you get from the visuals themselves? Do you have access to the screenplays somehow? Does the context window of these models really fit 1600 films at once?

Sophie’s choice between scrolly crap and a video. No surprise I suppose, given the article focuses on films and ignores the much larger body of sci-fi novels which had no shortage of pessimism in the past and have no shortage of optimism today.

Great article. I've always thought that pessimistic sci-fi dystopias were on the rise, but it turns out most still have positive endings. The observation about walking out of the theatre, and seeing the worst ahead of us is quite interesting.

It would be cool to compare with other, non sci-fi stories. EG: I have been noticing the rise of escapist fantasy narratives in popular media — wish fulfillment stories where a Mary Sue like main character rises above all challenges without struggle. You can see this particularly in light novels, manga, and anime in the now popularized "isekai", "cultivation", or "system progression" genres. It would be interesting to find out how the public's fascination with these types of stories correlate with economic, social, or political undulations in the real world.

Cool visualization, perhaps interesting thoughts but alas it is completely worthless as it is AI analysis based. I wish the author warned about that on top instead of the bottom so I didn't waste my time with it.

It became obvious to me that it's LLM generated halucinations, when i read the content boxes of "protagonists fight another human". It's totally borked, but the graphics look nice. It seemingly always says "It's a story of a human vs. an unknown threat", which just doesn't match most movies contents.

One thing to think about is the question what capitalisms end game is. Suppose everyone is buying stuff and you're CEO of a nearly 100% efficient corporation, whatever that means. Your job is to somehow make gains every year.

The problem is that this was easy in a inefficient corporation within a market where everybody was inefficient. But the things you have to do to keep these gains are getting more and more ridiculous, more and more amoral.

This is our problem. The times where easy gains with honest products was possible is long past, now everything has to be a scam, a meta game, some sort of hidden monopoly or so cutting edge that it isn't even profitable.

The analysis seems great and I find the subject interesting enough. However, the presentation is really bad, in a way where it is actually making very difficult to grasp the content. The actual main information from the graphs is hard to read (why isn't it showing all numbers?), with colors that are too similar. It does not support the niceties that html chart provide (like dynamic filtering or alternate views). It is really hard to find where we are in the article, so going back and forth is painful. In terms of accessibility it is also quite bad as it does not show the charts. If the information is presented on a standard format with a ToC I would definitely read it in its entirety.

This makes me wonder how the stats compare for other forms of media, like TV shows, books, video games, comics, etc. Feels like there's probably more of a mix of attitudes and settings in these mediums, at least from the few I've seen.

Like in television, you've got Black Mirror which usually has near contemporary stories set in horrifically messed up versions of our world, but also Doctor Who and Star Trek, which are far more optimistic and deal with a far wider mix of settings and time periods. Like Utopia, a dystopian story set in the year 100 trillion where the simple passage of time has destroyed all but a handful of worlds via entropy, and the last remaining humans are trying to survive a dying universe.

And there are arguably more stories in those mediums that do deal with outside threats more than internal ones, often due to the 'monster of the week' structure some of these shows and stories run on. If you want sci-fi stories with external threats, virtually every sci-fi game you can think of has you killing hostile aliens and mutants and monsters by the thousand. Plenty that don't have any ties to Earth or current events too, and simply take place in a completely independent setting with entirely original problems.

One thing I find really fascinating about the gritty cyberpunk dystopia is that its setting is not actually a prediction, but a memory of a stateless city between China and Hong Kong that was demolished 30 years ago.

A while ago, the paper 'The fate of empires' by John Glubb made regular appearences on this site.

https://archive.org/stream/pdfy-2F_iHS6BLtGJb2ad/TheFateofEm...

This presentation is a smaller part of that paper:

The good old science fiction basically corresponds to The Age of Intellect. Current SF corresponds to The Age of Decadence.

Something that this article only touches on indirectly (when it talks about walking out of the theater to the real world) is timelines. Even if a post apocalyptic film presents the hero making the world a better place in the future, we won't be around for that. The part of the timeline that the viewer will experience is the dystopia.

In that respect, I don't see how dystopian/post-apocalyptic fiction can generally be optimistic for the viewer.

I wonder if the ChatGPT analyses of individual films might have biases. For example, since ChatGPT is trained on today's data, it might be better at recognizing social conflicts in themes of today's films, than the social conflicts of the 1950s.

The good news is that none of those sci-fi fears never really came true. Here's to hoping the current "near future dystopia" doesn't break the rule...

Contrary to other posters I mostly enjoyed the scrolling art style and presentation.

Reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Hieroglyph but a decade on, it's not had many breakout successes.

The end reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut's lecture "The Shape of Stories" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOGru_4z1Vc

I can’t remember the source, but there’s a quote that goes “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”.

I’ve yet to read any kind of optimistic sci-fi that operates in a capitalist society. The two most obvious (Star Trek and the Culture) both envision a post-scarcity society enabled by technology so advanced it might as well be magic.

[dupe]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40947069

I think it is interesting that a majority of the changes happened between the 50s and the 70s. I guess it might be attributed to post-war optimism and the golden age of capitalism that lasted just about the same era.

Horrible scrolling site. Don't recommend.

"I AM THE MAN WHO GRABS THE SUN!"

I was really drawn in and thinking deeply about this, until I got to the end:

The content analysis of each film and TV show was generated with the ChatGPT 4o large language model. [..] So the content analysis for each film and TV show – as well as the short explanation of its answer – are based on ChatGPT 4o’s responses.

I immediately discounted everything I'd just read. I cannot imagine doing this work manually, but I also cannot imagine believing that these effects are real based on ChatGPT's determination.

Maybe that's just indicative of my current "AI" cynicism, but it was remarkable to me how immediately my opinion changed.