Films from the Future

by Andrew Maynard

  In this way, the movies here provide what are often quite startling insights into the social challenges and opportunities surrounding emerging technologies. Watching them with an open mind and a critical eye can reveal subtle connections between irresponsible innovation and threats to what people value or aspire to, which in turn have profound implications for society more broadly. And this is where their creativity and imagination have the power to lift us out of the rut of conventional thinking, and allow us to see opportunities and dangers that extend beyond the world of make-believe and into the technological future we are striving to create.

  In other words, I’m a sucker for using the imagination in science fiction movies to stimulate new ways of thinking about risk, and in turn, new ways of thinking about socially responsive and responsible innovation. But there’s another aspect to these movies that also gets me excited, and that’s their ability to break down the barriers between “experts” and “non-experts” and open the door to everyone getting involved in talking about where technology innovation is taking us, and what we want from it.

  A Common Point of Focus

  I was recently invited to a meeting convened by the World Economic Forum, where I was asked to moderate a discussion about how governments, businesses, and others can respond to the potential risks presented by new technologies. Much of our discussion was around regulations and policies, and what governments and companies can do to nip problems in the bud without creating unnecessary roadblocks. But one question kept recurring: How can we ensure the safe and beneficial development of new technologies in a world that is so deeply and divisively divided along ideological lines?

  To my surprise, one of the participants suggested something that didn’t involve politics, regulations, or more effective education: art.

  Naturally, we still need technical experts, laws, and policies if we’re going to get new technologies right. But the question that was put forward was an intriguing complement to these: Can we use art (including all forms of creative expression) to pull people out of their entrenched ideas and get them thinking and talking about how they can work together to build the future they want? Obviously, we’re never going to reach world peace and prosperity by insisting everyone contemplate Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa or one of Damien Hirst’s pickled cows.4 Yet art provides a common point of focus that allows people to express their ideas, thoughts, and opinions, while being open to those of others. And it allows the possibility of being able to do this without slipping into ideological ruts. Art, in all its forms, is a medium that can mitigate our tendency to close down our imagination (together with our humility and empathy), and it’s one that opens us up to seeing the world in new and interesting ways. In this context, science fiction movies are, without a doubt, a legitimate form of art, and one that has the power to bring people together in imagining how to collectively create a future that is good for society, rather than a dystopian mess—as long as that imagination is grounded in reality where it matters.

  This isn’t to say that technical education and skills aren’t important—they most certainly are. Developing technologies that work and are safe demands incredible technical skills, and it would be naïve and irresponsible to discount this. No matter how inclusive we want to be, we can’t expect a random person plucked from the street to have the skills necessary to genetically engineer organisms safely, or to design aircraft that don’t fall out of the sky. That would be crazy. But one thing we’re all qualified to do is think about what the possible consequences of technology innovation might mean to us and the people we care for. And here, pretty much everyone has something to contribute to the socially responsible and responsive development of new technologies.

  This is something that I hope will become increasingly clear through the remainder of this book. But before we dive into the movies themselves, I do need to say something about spoilers.

  Spoiler Alert

  This is a book that contains spoilers. You have been warned. It’s not a book to read if you’re one of those people who can’t stand to know what happens before you watch a movie. But I can guarantee that if you read the book before seeing the movies, your experience will be all the richer for it. Even if you’re familiar with the movies, you’ll see them through new eyes after reading the book. And if you decide not to watch the movies at all, that’s okay as well. Certainly, the movies are engaging and entertaining, but at the end of the day, it’s the technologies that are the stars here.

  Each chapter starts with a brief overview of the movie it’s built around. This is partly to orient you if you haven’t seen the movie, or you aren’t particularly interested in watching it—although I’d hope that, after reading the chapter, you head out to your preferred streaming service to get the full effect. But it’s also to help set the scene for what’s to come. If you know these movies well, you’ll realize that the summaries are idiosyncratic, to say the least. They let you know what I think is interesting and relevant about each film, what grabs my attention when watching them and makes me think. But they don’t give everything away. In fact, I’d hope that, watching any of the movies after reading the book, you’d still be surprised and delighted by unexpected plot twists and turns.

  With that said, it’s time to start the journey, starting with genetic engineering, resurrection biology, and the folly of entrepreneurial arrogance that is so adeptly captured by Stephen Spielberg’s original Jurassic Park. So buckle up, hang on, and enjoy the ride!

  Chapter Two

  JURASSIC PARK: THE RISE OF RESURRECTION BIOLOGY

  “God help us, we’re in the hands of engineers!”

  —Dr. Ian Malcolm

  When Dinosaurs Ruled the World

  I was a newly minted PhD when I first saw Jurassic Park. It was June 1993, and my wife and I were beginning to enjoy our newfound freedom, after years of too much study and too little money. I must confess that we weren’t dinosaur geeks. But there was something about the hype surrounding the movie that hooked us. Plus, we fancied a night out.

  That summer, dinosaurs ruled the world. Wherever you looked, there were dinosaurs. Dinosaur books, dinosaur parks, dinosaurs on TV, dinosaur-obsessed kids. Jurassic Park seemingly tapped into a dinosaur-obsessed seam buried deep within the human psyche. This was helped along, of course, by the groundbreaking special effects the movie pioneered. Even now, there’s a visceral realism to the blended physical models and computer-generated images that brings these near-mythical creatures to life in the movie.

  This is a large part of the appeal of Jurassic Park. There’s something awe-inspiring—awe-full in the true sense of the word—about these “terrible lizards” that lived millions of years ago, and that are utterly alien to today’s world. This sense of awe runs deep through the movie. Listening to John Williams’ triumphant theme music, it doesn’t take much to realize that under the gloss of danger and horror, Jurassic Park is at heart a celebration of the might and majesty of the natural world.

  Jurassic Park is unabashedly a movie about dinosaurs. But it’s also a movie about greed, ambition, genetic engineering, and human folly—all rich pickings for thinking about the future, and what could possibly go wrong.

  Jurassic Park opens at a scientific dig in Montana, where paleontologists Alan Grant (played by Sam Neill) and Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) are leading a team excavating dinosaur fossils. Just as the team discovers the fossilized skeleton of a velociraptor, a dinosaur that Grant is particularly enamored with, the dig is interrupted by the charming, mega-rich, and, as it turns out, rather manipulative John Hammond (Richard Attenborough). As well as being founder of International Genetic Technologies Incorporated (InGen for short), Hammond has also been backstopping Grant and Sattler’s digs. On arriving, he wastes no time offering them further funding in exchange for a quick weekend mini-break to his latest and greatest masterpiece, just off the coast of Costa Rica.

  We quickly learn that, beneath the charm, Hammond is fighting for the future of his company and his d
ream of building the ultimate tourist attraction. There’s been an unfortunate incident between a worker and one of his park’s exhibits, and his investors are getting cold feet. What he needs is a couple of respected scientists to give him their full and unqualified stamp of approval, which he’s sure they will, once they see the wonders of his “Jurassic Park.”

  Grant and Sattler agree to the jaunt, in part because their curiosity has been piqued. They join Hammond, along with self-styled “chaotician” Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) and lawyer Donald Gennaro (Martin Ferrero), on what turns out to be a rather gruesome roller-coaster ride of a weekend.

  From the get-go, we know that this is not going to end well. Malcolm, apart from having all the best lines in the movie, is rather enamored with his theories about chaos. These draw heavily on ideas that were gaining popularity in the 1980s, when Crichton was writing the novel the movie’s based on. Malcolm’s big idea—and the one he was riding the celebrity-scientist fame train on—is that in highly complex systems, things inevitably go wrong. And just as predicted, Hammond’s Jurassic Park undergoes a magnificently catastrophic failure.

  The secret behind Hammond’s park is InGen’s technology for “resurrecting” long-extinct dinosaurs. Using cutting-edge gene-editing techniques, his scientists are able to reconstruct dinosaurs from recovered “dino DNA.” His source for the dino DNA is the remnants of prehistoric blood that was sucked up by mosquitoes before they were caught in tree resin and preserved in the resulting amber as the resin was fossilized.5 And his grand plan is to turn the fictitious island of Isla Nublar into the world’s first living dinosaur theme park.

  Unfortunately, there were a few holes in the genetic sequences that InGen was able to extract from the preserved blood, so Hammond’s enterprising scientists filled them with bits and pieces of DNA from living species. They also engineered their dinosaurs to be all females to prevent them from breeding. And just to be on the safe side, the de-extinct dinosaurs were designed to slip into a coma and die if they weren’t fed a regular supply of the essential amino acid lysine.6

  The result is a bunch of enterprising scientists reengineering nature to create the ultimate theme park and thinking they’ve put all the safeguards they need in place to prevent something bad happening. Yet, despite their best efforts, the dinosaurs start breeding and multiplying, a compromised security system (and security specialist) allows them to escape, and they start eating the guests.

  Even before the team of experts get to Jurassic Park, a disgruntled employee (Dennis Nedry, played by Wayne Knight) has planned to steal and sell a number of dinosaur embryos to a competitor. Nedry is the brains behind the park’s software control systems and believes he’s owed way more respect and money than he gets. At an opportune moment, he disrupts the park with what he intends to be a temporary glitch that will allow him to steal the embryos, get them off the island, and return to his station before anyone notices. Unfortunately, an incoming hurricane7 interferes with his plans, resulting in catastrophic failure of the park’s security systems and a bunch of hungry dinosaurs roaming free. To make things worse, two of the guests are Hammond’s young nephew and niece, who find their trip to the theme park transformed into a life-and-death race against a hungry Tyrannosaurus rex and a pack of vengeful velociraptors.

  Fortunately, Sattler and Grant come into their own as paleontologists-cum-action-heroes. They help save a handful of remaining survivors, including Hammond, Malcolm, and his nephew and niece, but not before a number of less fortunate characters have given their lives in the name of science gone badly wrong. And as they leave the island, we are left in no doubt that nature, in all its majesty, has truly trounced the ambitions of Hammond and his team of genetic engineers.

  Jurassic Park is a wonderful Hollywood tale of derring-do. In fact, it stands the test of time remarkably well as an adventure movie. It also touches on themes that are, if anything, more important today than they were back when it was made.

  In 1993, when Jurassic Park was released, the idea of bringing extinct species back from the dead was pure science fiction. Back then, advances in understanding DNA were fueling the fantasy that, one day, we might be able to recode genetic sequences to replicate species that are no longer around, but but, by any stretch of the imagination, this was beyond the wildest dreams of scientists in the early 1990s. Yet, since the movie was made, there have been incredible strides in genetic engineering, so much so that scientists are now actively working on bringing back extinct species from the dead. The field even has its own name: de-extinction.

  More than the technology, though, Jurassic Park foreshadows the growing complexities of using powerful new technologies in an increasingly crowded and demanding world. In 1993, chaos theory was still an emerging field. Since then, it’s evolved and expanded to include whole areas of study around complex systems, especially where mixing people and technology together leads to unpredictable results.

  What really stands out with Jurassic Park, over twenty-five years later, is how it reveals a very human side of science and technology. This comes out in questions around when we should tinker with technology and when we should leave well enough alone. But there is also a narrative here that appears time and time again with the movies in this book, and that is how we get our heads around the sometimes oversized roles mega-entrepreneurs play in dictating how new tech is used, and possibly abused.

  These are all issues that are just as relevant now as they were in 1993, and are front and center of ensuring that the technology-enabled future we’re building is one where we want to live, and not one where we’re constantly fighting for our lives.

  De-Extinction

  In a far corner of Siberia, two Russians—Sergey Zimov and his son Nikita—are attempting to recreate the Ice Age. More precisely, their vision is to reconstruct the landscape and ecosystem of northern Siberia in the Pleistocene, a period in Earth’s history that stretches from around two and a half million years ago to eleven thousand years ago. This was a time when the environment was much colder than now, with huge glaciers and ice sheets flowing over much of the Earth’s northern hemisphere. It was also a time when humans coexisted with animals that are long extinct, including saber-tooth cats, giant ground sloths, and woolly mammoths.

  The Zimovs’ ambitions are an extreme example of “Pleistocene rewilding,” a movement to reintroduce relatively recently extinct large animals, or their close modern-day equivalents, to regions where they were once common. In the case of the Zimovs, the father-and-son team believe that, by reconstructing the Pleistocene ecosystem in the Siberian steppes and elsewhere, they can slow down the impacts of climate change on these regions. These areas are dominated by permafrost, ground that never thaws through the year. Permafrost ecosystems have developed and survived over millennia, but a warming global climate (a theme we’ll come back to in chapter twelve and the movie The Day After Tomorrow) threatens to catastrophically disrupt them, and as this happens, the impacts on biodiversity could be devastating. But what gets climate scientists even more worried is potentially massive releases of trapped methane as the permafrost disappears.

  Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas—some eighty times more effective at exacerbating global warming than carbon dioxide—and large-scale releases from warming permafrost could trigger catastrophic changes in climate. As a result, finding ways to keep it in the ground is important. And here the Zimovs came up with a rather unusual idea: maintaining the stability of the environment by reintroducing long-extinct species that could help prevent its destruction, even in a warmer world. It’s a wild idea, but one that has some merit.8 As a proof of concept, though, the Zimovs needed somewhere to start. And so they set out to create a park for de-extinct Siberian animals: Pleistocene Park.9

  Pleistocene Park is by no stretch of the imagination a modern-day Jurassic Park. The dinosaurs in Hammond’s park date back to the Mesozoic period, from around 250 million years ago to sixty-five million years ago. By comparison, the Pleistocene
is relatively modern history, ending a mere eleven and a half thousand years ago. And the vision behind Pleistocene Park is not thrills, spills, and profit, but the serious use of science and technology to stabilize an increasingly unstable environment. Yet there is one thread that ties them together, and that’s using genetic engineering to reintroduce extinct species. In this case, the species in question is warm-blooded and furry: the woolly mammoth.

  The idea of de-extinction, or bringing back species from extinction (it’s even called “resurrection biology” in some circles), has been around for a while. It’s a controversial idea, and it raises a lot of tough ethical questions. But proponents of de-extinction argue that we’re losing species and ecosystems at such a rate that we can’t afford not to explore technological interventions to help stem the flow.

  Early approaches to bringing species back from the dead have involved selective breeding. The idea was simple—if you have modern ancestors of a recently extinct species, selectively breeding specimens that have a higher genetic similarity to their forebears can potentially help reconstruct their genome in living animals. This approach is being used in attempts to bring back the aurochs, an ancestor of modern cattle.10 But it’s slow, and it depends on the fragmented genome of the extinct species still surviving in its modern-day equivalents.