Ali Crawford
From Black Mirror to Her to Cyberpunk 2077, science fiction reveals that our real threat isn’t killer robots—it’s the corporate systems quietly rewriting what it means to be human.
Entertainment provides an escape from reality. Audiences consume film, television, books, and video games to be transported to worlds unlike our own. As a genre, science fiction offers imagined technological progress based on known or theoretical possibilities. Early concerns and public perceptions of artificial intelligence (AI) were shaped by science fiction movies like The Matrix or The Terminator, where seemingly unfounded fears of sentient machines and killer robots were the ultimate existential threat to humanity. However, in more modern and darker science fiction, these fictitious worlds can also be a mirror that forces the audience to confront harsh realities or unthinkable truths about the present. In other words, science fiction teaches us that the most dangerous futures are the quiet trade-offs we make with technology, convenience, and corporate control.
Selling Survival
Consider the alternative futures presented in Black Mirror, a dystopic anthology television series, where each episode explores the morbid but human-centric realities of technology. Season 7, Episode 1 finds an average middle-class couple facing a health emergency in which the wife receives synthetic brain tissue from a tech startup. An initial monthly subscription fee of $300 to keep the tissue operational seems a small price to pay to keep someone alive, but the couple quickly realizes that their service tier has severe limitations—including the wife making random advertising announcements. Their only recourse is buying into the continuous corporate cycle of upgrades and updates, which causes their own financial and mental ruin. This feels less like fiction and more like tomorrow’s updated terms of service.
The business of technology is also a prominent feature in the world of Cyberpunk 2077, an award-winning video game set in the futuristic Night City, where everyone blindly chases synchronicity in a society dominated by corporatocracy, advertisements, and cybernetic enhancements. The game makes the same point as above, but in a louder neon: the future is not about killer machines, but about the ways corporate power can turn human life into a transaction through increased interdependence on technological innovation. (Although to be fair, there are a lot of killer machines in the game. Most of them are amalgamations of humans with impressive cyberware.)
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