The science fiction movies that managed to predict the future of science

(CNN) – The great science fiction movies are both fantastic and prophetic. They can take viewers to a galaxy far, far away. or exaggerate real scenarios in a fictional version of our planet.

But the genre is at its best when it shows a “funny mirror of our present” and reveals something about the world we live insaid Lisa Yaszek, a professor of science fiction studies at Georgia Tech.

As an audience, we love sci-fi movies that are both upbeat and downbeat. how are you precisely because they are virtual laboratories where we can imaginatively experience the best and worst that our technologies have to offer in a safe and fun environment,” Yaszek told CNN.

Movies like Gattaca, Her and even the horror comedy M3GAN have predicted what our future would look like if advances in gene editing accelerated and artificial intelligence. Meanwhile, pandemic thrillers like Contagion they look even more realistic than when they were released after covid-COVID-19 drastically changed the world in 2020.

Here’s what some notable movies get right about science and technology, and what remains science fiction.

gene editing in Gattaca Now it’s closer to a reality

Gattaca was inspired by true events that led to its release in 1997, including the launch of the Human Genome Project in 1990 and the successful cloning of Dolly the sheep, Yaszek said, and the film imagines a society obsessed with and dictated by genetic perfection. It appears to “eerily anticipate our own society’s current fascination with home genetic tests like 23andMe,” Yaszek noted, as well as recent advances in gene editing that hold promise for human health.

In the movie, genetics decide social class. Gene editing becomes the norm, and characters born without it are considered “invalids” with a greater potential for hereditary disorders than “invalids”, humans genetically modified to avoid those diseases. Vincent Freeman (Ethan Hawke), an “invalid” cleaner at an aerospace facility, uses genetic material such as the nails and urine of paraplegic former Olympian Jerome Morrow (Jude Law) to fraudulently join an interplanetary mission reserved for “invalids.”

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In “Gattaca,” Ethan Hawke is one of the few people born without gene editing.

Gattaca It came out about 15 years before the introduction of CRISPR-Cas9 as a tool used to make precise edits to human DNA. Although it has been used primarily for research purposes, CRISPR-Cas9 appears to make a remarkable difference in the treatment of genetic disorders: A woman named Victoria Gray said her sickle cell disease symptoms eased significantly after scientists treated her with CRISPR, CNN reported in March.

The scientists removed premature cells from Gray’s bone marrow and modified them. genetically modified cellsonce returned to Gray’s body, seemed to have produced fetal hemoglobin, a type of hemoglobin that makes it harder for cells to deform and stick together.

Current gene therapy trials, including the sickle cell trial Gray was a part of, involve the alteration of cells non-reproductive in what is known as somatic gene editing.

But the process of preemptively manipulating genes in human sperm, egg, or embryos in a way that evokes Gattacacall hereditary gene editing, has raised serious ethical concerns. In 2018, Chinese doctor He Jiankui said that he had modified two human embryos using CRISPR-Cas9 and that the modifications would make them resistant to HIV. The scientific community quickly condemned his work, and he received a three-year prison sentence in 2019.

M3GAN and Her offer opposing visions of AI

Society’s fascination with artificial intelligence has resulted in a plethora of films depicting both its potential to facilitate a more advanced way of life like the hypothetical horror of AI overtaking humanity.

“These movies tend to reflect both our hopes and our fears about our growing reliance on digital companions,” Yaszek said.

In Her by Spike Jonze, Theodore de Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with Samantha, an advanced artificial intelligence operating system that says she returns his affections. Siri, she’s not: Samantha speaks with human affect and has opinions and feelings, or at least she’s programmed to. It’s the rare sci-fi non-villain AI that’s capable of mimicking, or even genuinely feeling, human emotion.

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In “Her,” Joaquin Phoenix finds a deeper connection to an AI-powered trading system than he does to his human companions.

Samantha doesn’t yet have a perfect equivalent in our own world: she could even view the physical world through a lens and comment on it, but there are some realistic virtual assistants powered by AI. Popular chatbots like ChatGPT can closely mimic human speech and have been used to write long essays and answer complex questions posed by users, although they are not perfect. Tech outlet CNET published several AI-generated articles that contained major bugs. And artificial intelligence experts told CNN this year that they fear chatbots could be used to perpetuate misinformation, as they’re programmed to give users more of what they’re looking for and keep their attention.

While Her humanized AI, the horror hit of 2022 M3GAN he played on the fears of viewers. M3GAN is a humanoid doll and caretaker for young Cady, who loses her parents in a car accident, and the two form a sisterly bond. But M3GAN takes her duties as an android big sister dangerously seriously, murdering anyone who threatens Cady or Cady’s trust in her.

Yaszek noted that robot care tools are already in use: Nursing homes in Japan have for years used robots to entertain and engage residents. Studies on whether the quality of care for the elderly has improved in the country are ongoing, but last year several senior care centers in Minnesota followed Japan’s lead and began incorporating robots built by experts from the University of of Minnesota Duluth in the care routines of residents.

There are freelance robots that deliver food, perform stunts at Disney’s California Adventure, and dispose of bombs on behalf of police departments. Trading robots are not as realistic as M3GAN. But its artificial intelligence capabilities, known as artificial general intelligence, which describes a bot’s ability to learn anything a human can learn, are closer to being a reality, said Shelly Palmer, a professor of advanced media at the University of Syracuse and an expert on emerging technology, in an interview with CNN in January.

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In “M3GAN,” the titular doll (center) takes her caretaker role to deadly extremes.

We may both be thankful for these tools, but also a little worried,” Yaszek said. “What happens if these wonderful new technologies fail, leaving our loved ones more vulnerable than ever?

Preparing for a pandemic in Contagion sounds real

During the early days of the covid-19 pandemic, many turned to Contagion by Steven Soderbergh, a 2011 film depicting the astonishingly rapid spread of a deadly virus around the world. Upon release, a scenario in which the world could change so drastically in a matter of days or weeks seemed unlikely. But when COVID-19 sent much of society into isolation in 2020, Contagion it seemed like a prescient example of what a pandemic response might look like.

Even before COVID-19, experts at the Argonne National Laboratory, operated by the US Department of Energy, praised the film in 2012 for accurately portraying the rate at which a society would experience resource scarcity and strain. collective it takes to address a problem quickly: The spread of the virus.

Kelly McGuire, an associate professor of English at Trent University in Ontario, wrote in 2021 that Contagion presents the development of a vaccine as the “end point of the pandemic arc”, when, in our reality of COVID-19, the virus can never will be eradicated despite the wide availability of vaccines and reinforcements against COVID-19.

Although the Covid-19 vaccine has prevented more than 3 million deaths, according to a 2022 study, hundreds of thousands of Americans continue to be infected with the virus and thousands die each monthaccording to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Immunocompromised individuals and those who have not received the vaccine remain at increased risk of severe illness and death.

Reality has often pushed the boundaries of science fiction, said Melissa Monique Littlefield, a professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who teaches courses on science fiction and speculative fiction. Yet even when our reality feels stranger than fiction, stories like Gattaca, M3GAN and Contagion still have something valuable to say about the world we live in and where it could go.

“(Science fiction) doesn’t just predict or simply comment on scientific discoveries or technological phenomena,” he said. “Instead, it offers us the opportunity to continually assess ourselves, our societies, and our assumptions about the world.”

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The science fiction movies that managed to predict the future of science