- 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.
[techno 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 Villeneuve.
[ominous music]
- [Man] Officer KD6-3.7, let's begin.
Ready?
- [KD6-3.7] 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 Phillip K. Dick
who's a super genius in the world of science fiction
and futurist 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.
- [Man] Cells.
- [Machine] Cells.
- [Man] Have you ever been in an institution?
Cells.
- [Machine] Cells.
- [Man] Do they keep you in a cell?
Cells.
- [Machine] 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 porous 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-raining 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 "Gattaca", directed by Andrew Niccols.
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.
- [Man] I'll never understand what possessed to my mother
to put her faith in God's hands, rather than those
of her local geneticists.
[baby wailing]
10 fingers, 10 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 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 with a press conference,
and reassure the American public that, don't worry,
clones are not going to be just roaming around
the streets outside.
So in the middle of all of this
comes this incredible movie "Gattaca."
[baby crying]
- 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 is a biological caste 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 gonna 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 system
of sorting and tagging people, which is profound
if you stop and think about it.
This is "The Matrix", directed by the Wachowskis,
one of my favorite movies.
And in this scene, Neo wakes up.
[eerie music]
[gagging and gasping]
[electricity buzzing]
[dramatic music]
Two things you need to know about "The Matrix":
one it is an 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,
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 cede 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.
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 PII's,
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 supercomputers, 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 fucking planet.
- 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,
but 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 your 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
on a molecular level and keep its form when required.
Holding for memories, shifting for thoughts.
- This is your hardware?
- Wetware.
- You hear them talking about something called wetware.
Wetware 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 wetware?
Totally on point, and it turns out that theoretical chemists
have created molecules that can work
as what are called cubits.
So in regular computing, we have bits and bytes,
and in quantum computing,
we have these things called cubits.
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 combining sort of quantum and AI.
So there is something there that does kind of make sense.
This is "Wall-E" directed by Andrew Stanton.
- My cabin all morning, so let's hover over
to the driving range and hit a few virtual balls in space.
- Nah, we did that yesterday.
I don't wanna do that.
- Well then, what do you want to do?
- I don't know; something.
- Wow.
- So Wall-E tells a 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 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 bots
that never really found a market or had a use case.
There's a company called Savioke that has this little robot
that sort of roams around and can make deliveries.
So let's say that you're a hotel.
You can 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 bots right now.
And a lot of them, you know, listen,
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 allowing automation to take over.
- Hey, drink-bot.
Here, take the cup.
Hey, take the cup!
Whoa!
- Uh oh.
- [chuckling] I don't know if, in the future,
we're all gonna have a levitating chair.
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 Wall-E 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 her phone,
and looking at multiple screens, and Wall-E kinda
snaps her out of it, and that screen goes away,
and 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 an instance at all of a computer error
occurring in the 9000 series, has it?
- [HAL] None whatsoever, Frank.
The 9000 series has a perfect operational record.
- Mm mm.
- Of course, I know all the wonderful achievements
of the 9000 series, but are you certain there's never been
any case of even the most insignificant computer error?
- [HAL] None whatsoever, Frank.
Quite honestly, I wouldn't worry myself about that.
- In "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,
the 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 we're trying to think through an AI system,
powering the systems for that ship that they were riding,
like what would all of that look like?
There's so much interesting about this movie.
And I realize that it's kinda slow by today's standards,
but, you've got a bunch.
So there's persistent surveillance,
and you've got a supercomputer system
that is making decisions,
but it's 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.
As far as I know, no 9000 computers have been disconnected.
- No 9000 computer's ever fouled up before.
- That's not what I mean.
Well, I'm not so sure what I 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,
'cause everybody's thinking it,
at what point in AI's development do we wind up
with a super computer like HAL
that starts making its own decisions,
and potentially puts 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 will 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 Deep Mind,
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 calculations.
The rules are a little different.
So this Deep Mind team builds this system called AlphaGo,
and has different iterations of that system.
And over, 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 understand
and 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 to ski Antarctica,
but you're snowed under with work?
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 Rekall, Inc. 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 Rekall 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, implanting memories, erasing memories,
using a variety of different types of technology
like AR and virtual reality.
But part of what powers that
is 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 Phillip 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,
and 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 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 vacations
and actually feeling like you were there,
to having a new kind of therapy to potentially erase,
or at least mute old memories.
Even enhancing your loved ones,
the VR version, the Hollywood version of your spouse.
Mm, that is plausible!
That could actually happen.
And maybe your thing is 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 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 of outcomes,
and we imagine alternative futures.
And we ask, "What if?
"If this is what we're seeing, then what next?"