Everything is saying something, no matter how trivial. Because statements, fictional or not, have logical and ideological consequences. Pretending that isn’t true is itself an ideological and political statement. If you keep backing out of the fight you’re surrendering the field to those who don’t back out and that’s why things are as they are. You’re burying your head in the sand of fandom. Some of us like to be entertained, and lord knows I understand escapism and filter bubbles, but I also realize what’s at stake. It is coming to a head but it’s MUCH larger than comic movie fandom. Society is about to convulse because technology and demographics are changing the very nature of what it means to be a human citizen.
Transhumanism, automation, climate change. Get ready.
The first step is understanding how much space and matter we have to work with. It’s hard to do that in a qualitative way but my favorite is realizing that every human on earth could have a house with a yard and all fit in texas. And that’s just expanding basically in two dimensions. Obviously a dense city that size could hold one or two orders of magnitude more per square mile.
The second steps is realizing that farming is just a chemical process. Exporting entropy, and directing processes in beneficial directions. Adding energy to dirt (via sunlight and chemicals) and extracting a portion of that energy out as chemical batteries which we consume. (Food.) It’s currently driven by the sun, but it could also be driven by fission, and far more efficiently in terms of anthropocentric concerns.
I’m thinking city sized grow boxes powered by fission reactors ran by robots that import raw materials and export foods of our choosing. We’re soon to be growing meat in vats and skipping the animal phase. I think eventually we’ll do the same for plants as well. What better way to avoid pathogens than completely enclosing the farm?
Think about an apple tree. We don’t care about the tree, we want the apples. All the rest is waste from the perspective of our needs. We’ve already altered all our crops via selective breeding towards a form that is at one infinitely more suitable for our needs and unrecognizably distant from their original forms. The tree can get away that waste because of the super abundance of energy we are all saturated by. That amount in turn is dwarfed by what we could produce ourselves. Did you know that gasoline has the same caloric density as olive oil? That’s carbon bonds. Chemical power. Now compare that to fission… a gram of uranium has approximately the same energy (assuming crude 2% efficient LWR style extraction process) as two million grams of oil. That’s 4,409 pounds. A farm converts electricity into food basically. We can do the same. We can literally eat the dirt.
And we’ll run out of yellow sun (it’ll go red and then eat earth) before we run out of fissile fuel. The ocean thanks to tectonic activity (vents) is an endless supply of fission power. (Like, literally, the sun would run out of hydrogen first before we ever ran out of fissile uranium alone, let alone thorium.)
Power is literally being delivered to every coast line on earth. We just have to decide to act in our own interests with compassion and wisdom. It’s that simple.
What makes this special is a specific combination of factors.
Firstly, obviously, the hardware. Power to weight ratios and storage capacity. Stated as an anti-matter reactor, which would be the most efficient store of energy possible without violating entropy.
Secondly, slightly less obvious, the movements. The actual kinetic, geometric deployment of that power. Parsed in the fiction as a fighting style. But it’s really a translation and direction engine. Translating current into force shapes and positions. Separation, impact, attachment, transfer, etc.
The hidden one is the interface layer between the mind and the apparatus. That one is more impressive and a little harder to explain. Imagine an amateur faking kung fu or trying to drive. They know what they are going for, and the hardware is fine, but they don’t know how to issue the commands yet.
In the fiction this is solved by “training” but that’s just a narrative trick. She didn’t train for the cyber sport. She’s sending an intent command, and some software layer is translating those intentions into body geometry. Moravec’s paradox. That can’t be cheated or hand-waved away, it can only be hidden. Even in fiction unless it’s text, choreography has to be done.
The film makers even with complete control of the universe she was in had to expend enormous processing power deciding her “movements.” In the real world such combat is unilateral. Adding that feedback response combat loop intensifies the processing power needed exponentially. That’s the most extreme thing happening in the screenshot above in a quasi-literal sense. (The metaphor is arguably even more intense, see below.)
She knew what she wanted to do, show off balance and strength, in a specific sort of way. Making that actually work, in gravity and under the constraints she specified, would indeed be staggering, and it was to me. The above scene impressed me more than anything else later shown. It’s the most energy dense moment in the entire film. It screams “liberation.” I am Free she says with a five second kata.
But also, reality sets in. Plot contrivance is the only thing keeping her alive. Power asymmetry like that never lasts. That’s a double edged sword of history. The society she’s in by her very existence is now as precariously balanced as she is on the palm of her hand. Leaning in any direction forces a massive reconfiguration at minimum to avoid collapse.
Imagine it’s 1985 and somehow you have a phone from 2019. Just game that out in your head. Setting aside the time travel aspect, just imagine what it would mean for your life, your town, your country, your planet, having that lump of smart sand. How long do you think it would stay in your possession? What are your options really?
That’s the case for Alita as well. She IS that phone from the future. She’s now the MacGuffin for every high level player in her world. Her world is going to tear itself apart trying to tear Her apart.
Personally I would go into hiding but start using myself as a solution book for current problems. I would reverse engineer myself and then open source my findings, very carefully. What I share, and how would demand considerable thought. You don’t just hand children a propane tank and walk away.
So much in a single image. This is why so much overwhelms me. I see like this when I look at things. It doesn’t do me any good. Typically, I find, the best option is just, stealth. And a sturdy filter bubble.
Bear with me here some personal stuff is relevant: My first and only so far standardized psychological diagnostic (WAIS III) concluded I was narcissistic essentially for recognizing my own intelligence and some other things. (It then proceeded to tell me how above average my intelligence is. /smh) I feel like this is wrong but I have no way to disprove it. If anything I have excessive empathy. I can’t play multiplayer competitive games for example because I feel guilty when I win. I don’t like “entrepreneurship” because I feel like I’m exploiting information asymmetry. I worked myself out of a job repairing computers so well my clients no longer needed me. I’m vegan 99% of the time because I find the idea of enjoying the product of torture unconscionable. My girlfriend finds me to be quite loving and compassionate and I do genuinely care about the happiness of those around me. I’m against all forms of punishment because in my view crime is either desperation or illness. I strongly agree with the phrase: All who do evil are suffering. I feel like I could think up other examples. Is organizing two disaster relief charity drives the kind of thing narcissists typically do? /snark
That said, I also recognize the primacy of power, having basically none in my life thanks to being unable to drive or make phone calls. Which finally brings me to my point here. Disability turns me down repeatedly because I can’t properly complete the process or hire a lawyer. For me it’s impossible to get or fetch records being in a small town that pretends email doesn’t exist still.
Socially, until I get some other diagnosis or official label. I am simply lazy. And holy crap if that’s not one of the top five awful social labels to endure. It’s like a secular version of original sin. Economically and socially being male and jobless means I am lazy until proven otherwise by income or exception. I specify male because until recently being an aspiring homemaker was a perfectly valid social option for women, and still is in many areas of the nation. But men have been expected to win bread since its invention as far as I know. If that’s wrong, so be it, my point is that right now, my society thinks all males who fail to work are lazy by default. And that all laziness should be punished. (Preferably by austerity, homelessness, and death apparently.)
Further, I think psychology as an institution refuses to challenge this out of fear. For example, how come no disorder has excessive laziness as a symptom when literally every other aspect of human psychodynamics if carried to a harmful extreme is part of some disorder or other? Seriously, pick a sensation or behavior and mentally carry it to the extreme, you’ll find that as a symptom somewhere.
All except laziness. Interestingly, disturbingly, even horrifying physical wasting diseases that merely somewhat look like laziness get the same treatment. I.E. Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. (That disease is nightmarish, and our loathsome society scolds people who have it.)
So why this omission? I’ll tell you. Because if our medical establishment recognized laziness as a legitimate medical phenomenon then the shame and blame that justifies homelessness (the pillory of our era) would be undermined and the whole capitalist ideology would have to go to war with the psychological sciences because they would find them literally attacking capitalism.
Incidentally this tells us something about the social pecking order as well. Clearly medical science comes second to corporate interests. You already knew that if you ever had your doctor told no by an insurance company, or you ever noticed one of those “this office does not perscribe narcotics” signs in the waiting room of same.
Science always serves power. That’s why politicians always commend PHDs instead of having them.
