It's Time To Reject The Reboot Of The Jetsons and
Posted by freedomforall 1 month, 3 weeks ago to Technology
Excerpt:
"The original Jetsons was the opposite of transhumanism. All that would really change is that everything would be speedier. The cars would fly. We would live in the clouds. We would have a video phone. Robots would do the chores. Teachers would be electronic. We would travel with ease. Buildings would appear much more quickly, and be torn down too.
There would still be cops on the beat, thieves on the loose, lessons to learn at school, and teenage daughters that spend too much money. Hilariously, the little robots flying around always had puffs of smoke coming out of them as if powered by natural gas. You still had to fuel them.
That’s what made the series so delightful. The future promises to be wonderful but not solve all our problems. Human nature itself would still be present, unchanged, and present the usual challenges and dilemmas. The series both ramped up our expectations and dialed them back.
...
he series was rebooted twenty years later, in the mid-eighties. It had better production values, and some new characters. The biggest change was that the mood was darker. The gadgets changed from happy and friendly to vaguely burdensome even to the point of being menacing.
The machines started talking back and even pushing back. Humans were less in charge and machines more so. They became a source of oppression rather than a universal force of emancipation. They seemed almost to have volition. In a brilliant anticipation of “artificial intelligence” humans seemed to lose some modicum of control as the machinery became ever more imposing.
I never liked the rebooted series probably because it was suggesting something that I did not want to hear. I did not believe back in 2011 when my book came out that my glorious phone and my wonderful websites would eventually turn on me. But, as it turns out, the reboot of the series was precisely right, as we began to learn some twenty years later. "
"The original Jetsons was the opposite of transhumanism. All that would really change is that everything would be speedier. The cars would fly. We would live in the clouds. We would have a video phone. Robots would do the chores. Teachers would be electronic. We would travel with ease. Buildings would appear much more quickly, and be torn down too.
There would still be cops on the beat, thieves on the loose, lessons to learn at school, and teenage daughters that spend too much money. Hilariously, the little robots flying around always had puffs of smoke coming out of them as if powered by natural gas. You still had to fuel them.
That’s what made the series so delightful. The future promises to be wonderful but not solve all our problems. Human nature itself would still be present, unchanged, and present the usual challenges and dilemmas. The series both ramped up our expectations and dialed them back.
...
he series was rebooted twenty years later, in the mid-eighties. It had better production values, and some new characters. The biggest change was that the mood was darker. The gadgets changed from happy and friendly to vaguely burdensome even to the point of being menacing.
The machines started talking back and even pushing back. Humans were less in charge and machines more so. They became a source of oppression rather than a universal force of emancipation. They seemed almost to have volition. In a brilliant anticipation of “artificial intelligence” humans seemed to lose some modicum of control as the machinery became ever more imposing.
I never liked the rebooted series probably because it was suggesting something that I did not want to hear. I did not believe back in 2011 when my book came out that my glorious phone and my wonderful websites would eventually turn on me. But, as it turns out, the reboot of the series was precisely right, as we began to learn some twenty years later. "
