With President Mushroom now in power, it is becoming increasingly clear that he and his tech bro buddies are basing their plans off sci fi movie villains.
The emperor from Star Wars is the obvious and easiest comparison to make. The empire was based on the Nazis, after all. Recent reports of a plan to put tech companies in charge of the police seem reminiscent of Robocop, I-Robot, and so many other movies, and if the tech companies are in charge of law and order, it won’t be long until they bring AI into it. Argentina already has a plan to have AI predict crime before it happens, and with AI’s penchant for making shit up, this will go bad way quicker than it did in Minority Report.
Since there’s four years of this to go, we thought we’d look at other classic sci fi movies and see if we can predict what might come next.
1. Soylent Green
Likelihood: 1/5
Trump is planning to reverse climate change policies, and the US is already suffering from climate change, with the wild fires in California and the hurricanes that hit Florida recently. With a severe enough drought, there could be famine in the US. It has happened previously, when bad farming practices led to the Dust Bowl in the early 20th century. If America runs out of food, will the tech companies usher in a Soylent Green solution? Okay, probably not, but the film does start with the assassination of a CEO, and that’s something that’s actually happened. Although, why is it an assassination? Surely it’s just murder. Or karma or consequences or the finding out after the fucking around?
2. Alien
Sorry, no xenomorphs. But we might just have a Weyland-Yutani. Wey-yu began in 2012, and dabbled in many areas, such as nanotechnology, FTL, fatal disease cures, and synthetic humans. Meanwhile Musk’s companies dabble in many areas, such as neural links, space travel, electric cars, and communications. It’s not a stretch to see comparisons between the two, although Weyland-Yutani was started by a genius inventor, and Musk is more of a ridiculed con man with a tiny penis. With anyone else in charge, this might have scored higher.
Likelihood: 2/5
3. The Terminator
Okay, yes, the time travel bits aren’t going to happen, and the cybernetic organisms are unlikely, but do you remember what started the Terminator wars? A US company put an AI in charge of the country’s weapons systems. It’s incredibly unlikely this would lead to an artificial intelligence attempting to wipe out humanity if it happened, mostly because there are no currently existing artificial intelligences, but it isn’t inconceivable that some idiot billionaire (Darth Musk) could believe his own hype and put an LLM in charge of nuclear warheads, leading to world war 3 when the stupid computer does something predictable and idiotic.
Likelihood: 3/5
4. Iron Man 3
Chances of Elon Musk saving the day? 0%. Chances of Elon Musk inventing a suit of powered armour? 0%. Chances of him stealing someone else’s idea and claiming he invented it? 100%. Chances of Elon Musk being revealed to be an addict? Wait, that already happened. Okay, seriously though, remember the Mandarin in Iron Man 3? Everyone thought he was the bad guy, but that was just PR. The bad guy was a tech company owner. Mandarin is one of the main languages spoken in China. Likelihood of China being blamed for some evil US tech companies are doing. 100%.
Likelihood: 4/5
5. Jurassic Park
Unfortunately, it looks like it’s going to be nearly 2060 before we can actually bring dinosaurs back. Yes, really. But the main point of the movie and the book wasn’t actually the dinosaurs, it was that capitalism has corrupted science. It’s best summed up in this quote: they were so busy wondering if they could, they never stopped to ask if they should. With tech companies having more power than ever in the US, is it likely that one of them will do something stupid and awful because they think it will make them money? Yes, it absolutely is.
Likelihood: 5/5
That’s our 5 likeliest sci fi movies that might become real in the next four years. How would you score them? Which movie should we have included but didn’t? Let us know in the comments…