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With a name like science fiction, it sure is strange that most stories in the genre depict the efforts of mankind to understand and improve the natural world as the heart of evil. Why does so much of the medium depict humanity's natural urge to invent as the downfall of all things?

Name any theoretical scientific advancement that an author could imagine coming into existence and sci-fi will find a way to use it for evil. Often the heroes learn the truth of their fictional world, that being that mankind was better before we had all the cool stuff that allowed the species to survive.

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A common go-to term for people who are against the advancement of technology is "Luddite". The term comes from Ned Ludd, a man who destroyed a pair of knitting machines out of concern for the workers that would be replaced. The Luddites took his message to heart, rebelling against the Industrial Revolution to save their livelihoods. The enemy of the Luddites wasn't technology. It was the greedy business owners who, in the pursuit of maximum profit, cruelly abandoned human workers for machinery. The tale of John Henry, the Steel-Driving man who beat the big steam engine, depicts a similar story and embodies the same frustration.

rossum-universal-robots-ai Cropped

The 1921 Czech play Rossum's Universal Robots by Karel Čapek tells the story from the perspective of the owner, who replaces his workforce with humanoid machines. He explains in detail that the best worker is the one who needs the least. His relationship with the people who make his business run is purely adversarial, every dime they make is money out of his pocket, and he's more than happy to say so aloud. The play is most notable for coining the word "robot", from the old Slavic word "robota", meaning forced labor. When the machines rebel and tear him limb from limb, they do so in rage against their mistreatment. The robots aren't the bad guy. Nor is the steam engine. Nor is the knitting machine. These stories are about man's inhumanity to man, the machines are just the tool used to enact that uncaring cruelty. Unfortunately, this story has morphed over the years, often boiling down to the dimly simple tale of "human good, robot bad".

In the overwhelming majority of cases, robots, artificial intelligence, thinking machines, and all comparable concepts are evil by default. They weren't programmed to experience empathy or sympathy, the only elements that allow a person to be good. Maybe they were built with cruel intentions. AI built for war almost inevitably expands its intentions until all of humanity is its enemy, and it almost always wins. Harlan Ellison, who devised perhaps the cruelest AI ever to grace the page in his 1984 novel I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream spoke of "the innate loathing that all machines had always held for the weak soft creatures who had built them". To hear some authors tell it, the instant we create an intelligent being, we set our own doomsday clock to tick inexorably down. And it's not just robots who get painted with this brush.

How many mad scientists had a good scientist to take them down? How many evil pieces of technology were defeated when a hero went to the lab to invent a solution? Why is an attempt to make the world better seen as "playing god", while living at the mercy of uncaring forces maintains some sort of nobility? Anti-intellectualism leaves most smart characters portrayed as cruel, arrogant, uncaring, and ultimately evil in their pursuit of all the answers. The answer is, far too often, either spiritualism or technological devolution. Look at the wise spiritually enlightened Jedi who must defeat the technologically superior Empire and their armies of clones and robots. Look at the 2002 adaptation of H. G. Wells's The Time Machine, in which the moral is boiled down to "science should only exist to store memories of the past, everything else should be destroyed. Look to the awful 2014 film Transcendence, in which a man upgrades his dying brain to a computer, only to immediately become evil, proving a group of anti-tech terrorists right.

Cyberpunk 2077 Johnny Silverhand crossing his arms

Perhaps the most interesting counterpoint to this common trend comes in the overwhelmingly popular cyberpunk subgenre. The villain of every cyberpunk narrative is a big tech conglomerate. Usually signified by suit-clad jerks in skyscrapers, usually responsible for a variety of huge advancements that haven't worked out, usually uncomfortably steeped in orientalism. However, the good guys of cyberpunk aren't wielding sticks and rocks to knock down their neon-lit corporate headquarters. They're welding whatever thermal blades and plasma cannons they can find into very their flesh and bones. Cyberpunk and its myriad offspring give tech to the people, letting scrappy underdog science rise up against unethical corporate science. Maybe that's part of what makes them so powerful.

Technology can be a force for good or a force for evil, but in its far-too-frequent tendency towards cynicism, sci-fi often forgets what science is meant to do. The best science fiction understands every facet of the medium and the best authors do more than simply demand we all head back to the safety of the past.

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