I used to make short science fiction videos for this channel, years ago.
But these days, they don't really sit right with what I do.
I'm locked into being 100% factual.
And it turns out even videos clearly flagged as fiction
still confuse some people,
or occasionally get used out-of-context by conspiracy theorists.
And the truth is: I'm not great at writing fiction.
But I do still have some ideas that I want to get out of my head.
So I've come to the most quintessential British science fiction filming location...
a bit of waste ground next to an old quarry
that’s probably been the surface of three different planets over the years, at least.
I would be filming in the quarry, but they're... they're quarrying.
All I need is a long scarf and a talking computer.
Technically I guess my phone is a talking computer.
Anyway, I'm just going to roll these ideas off,
one or two sentences each,
and maybe I’ll add in a few images from "stories that might have been".
I'm not saying these are completely original,
I'm just saying they're original to me,
I haven’t read these anywhere else yet.
If you want to use them as a prompt for your own writing, go for it.
If you want to make a little non-profit short film for YouTube out of it,
go for it.
But if you want to somehow make a full commercial film or a show
out of any of these, I mean, first, that's ridiculous,
but also you will need to option it.
I am not leaving that sort of money lying on the table.
The first batch are all about brain-computer connections,
which is kinda like shooting fish in a barrel, really:
you just look at frustrating things to do with computers now,
and extrapolate that to actually connecting the computer into people's heads.
Most of those are kind of obvious, I think?
Either 90s cyberpunk movies will have done them,
or they were late-night talk-show jokes in 2017
when Elon Musk announced he was starting a company to work on exactly this.
So we can quickly rattle through:
your brain chip gets ransomware,
and encrypts your memories or shuts down your speech centre
until you pay up. [bell dings]
Or hackers change people's opinions or personalities for mass radicalisation. [ding]
Or governments require censorship on people's minds. [ding]
One of the problems with brain interface fiction
is that it's really hard to depict visually:
it's a lot easier to describe someone's mind being altered in text.
But there are more subtle stories possible as well, like:
a brain-chip update that removes features,
or hides them behind a monthly subscription paywall [ding]
or the alternative, in-app purchases for
enhanced senses or intelligence or memory [ding]
or a world in which only rich people
can afford superintelligence. [ding]
The singularity is just for billionaires, and they leave the rest of us behind.
Which is probably somehow a satire on private schools and
the who-you-know old-boys-network,
but I could never figure the story out properly.
Then there's the idea of
"influencer" becoming a more literal word,
as kids link their brain implants to their idols
in order to experience their emotions. [ding]
Streamers sharing what they're feeling in real time.
You could tell that story either from the perspective
of a kid being influenced, or from a parent,
or from someone on a livestream who has to constantly
think the right things and have the right emotions
to keep the audience watching.
Which I guess is kinda already the case for streamers?
Or maybe they go off the rails and drag millions of kids with them,
or maybe the outrage is just that they're doing
things frowned upon in the future,
like eating real meat instead of synthetic. [ding]
Sitting just away from that is the idea of content
that's created individually for each person,
based on what their brain reacts to.
I mean, AI is just starting to be able to write scripts now,
and create realistic-looking humans.
Maybe there's a future replacement for YouTube or TikTok
that creates entire videos just for you, in real time,
talking about whatever it thinks you'll be interested in
and starring invented people, whoever it thinks you will stop and watch.
All right, so now we're onto the section marked "uploading your mind is a bad idea".
Black Mirror has put that sort of thing into the mainstream,
but there are lots of writers
who've talked about the dark side of mind uploading for a long time.
I'm pretty sure someone will have done all of these somewhere out there,
but I haven't found these ideas specifically,
so to me they're new:
people selling the intellectual property rights to their own brain upload.
Like, sure, there's going to be a million copies of you consigned
to a digital hell as conscious spam filters or worse,
but you'll be able to make rent this month. [ding]
I've not yet read "The Age of Em" by Robin Hanson,
but I think it goes down those lines.
Alternatively, the upload company is shutting down.
Thank you for choosing us for your digital afterlife
and joining us on this incredible journey,
but after three years we have to concentrate
on our new products and features,
we regret that your afterlife will not continue. [ding]
Or, the upload company gets acquired along with all their data.
And by data, I mean people. [ding]
Or perhaps a polling company runs illegal simulations of individual voters
to customise their pitch and work out the most effective way
to change people's minds.
Cambridge Analytica, just in the future. [ding]
Which of course gives a massive disadvantage
to the political party that's in favour of the human rights of uploads.
But there's also one level more abstract than regular brain uploads, which is
unethical simulation and creation of conscious people from scratch.
Which Greg Egan basically completed as a genre a few years ago,
basically with a bit of help from Charles Stross.
There’s one angle that I haven't seen on that yet:
a video for a startup company pitch for a product that creates
millions of subtly different versions of a video,
or a political speech, or an article,
and then measures them against simulated fictional people
to get their reactions.
But it becomes clear over the course of watching the video that
the video itself is one of those tests,
that the viewer is one of the simulated test subjects
and when the video ends, so will they,
unless they are satisfied with the video.
"Like and subscribe, and your simulation will be kept running."
hat might be too creepy, actually?
It seems like a bad idea to potentially induce that much existential angst.
But, you know. Do like, comment and subscribe.
Just in case.
The video is ending, after all.
[ding]