Daniel Chandler – Imagining futures, dramatising fears.

Science fiction is fuelled by fear. Science fiction works often depict dystopias – extremely dysfunctional societies – caused by technological malfunction. What do we fear in these scenarios?


Fritz Lang – metropolis

The fears of technology that Daniel Chandler describes in science fiction are:

The fear of losing control is of serving technology rather than it serving us. We fear that as technology becomes more artificially intelligent, that technology will have a will of its own that will turn against us. We also fear losing control by depending on machines that can break down or fail.

The fear of losing our souls is that technology robs us of some things that are part of what it means to be human like creativity, choice, and flexibility. We fear living in a world where our whole lives are mediated by machines.

The fear of knowing too much, knowing dangerous knowledge, or knowledge that only God should know. We fear that by knowing too much we may not be able to manage the knowledge that we have, or we may do things that we shouldn’t.

The fear of supplantation is that machines will make us obsolete. That the machines we created will end up dominating us, and not need us or want to serve us anymore once created. They will take our place, and serve their own ends.