Looks pretty fun by the way, but watching this video got me thinking. Early last week, I was also watching one of my favorite classic movies Double Dragon which has a similar setting to NieR Automata. Whoever came up with the story envisioned a future in which technology had advanced, but everything else went to hell, so basically gangs ruled the streets, police were scared to do anything, and technology was at the point where vehicles had weaponry or GPS ( Double Dragon came out in '94, so back then, the idea of GPS would've been super futuristic ). So when I was watching the game play video, I started to wonder why the theme was yet again a dystopian future where civilization looks destroyed and there's just death robots around every corner with a few humans here and there piloting mechs and utilizing other technology in an attempt to stay alive. Usually this is accompanied by a one-world government carried out by either technocrats or extremely advanced AI that eventually overthrew its human creators.
I started wondering if people keep using this theme over and over because it's just easy to base a story around such a setting, or if it's because a lot of people legitimately fear the future. A few months back at work, we were talking about self-driving cars and one of my coworkers said he would never get into one of those because "what if it malfunctions?" Bear in mind, he drives to work everyday, meaning he has no problem being on the express way driving 70 MPH alongside people who are texting, could possibly be drunk, or just flat out incompetent drivers. In fact, about a month or two before he even said this, his truck was totaled because some mental case slammed into it while it was parked! People are so oblivious, they can't even avoid a stationary object but I'm expected to believe these idiots are somehow safer to be on the road with than robots? Please. Over 3,000 auto accident deaths occur on a daily basis, and those are just the FATAL accidents ( not counting the tens of millions of annual non-fatal accidents where people get injured or permanently disabled ) - and those are vehicles being operated by humans, not computers. I don't know about you, but I'd much prefer to be on the road next to a robo car than some of these clueless college students who drive with their heads buried into their iPhones, risking their lives for the sake of a tweet.
A few years back, I came across the whole "transhumanism" movement and not surprisingly, it's not very popular. Hell, some of you may read the word and think it has something to do with getting a sex change, when in reality it's a group of people from all different backgrounds who essentially embrace the future of technology as opposed to being afraid of it. These are your roboticists, bio-hackers, people who believe immortality can be achieved via technology, etc. so while you have one part of society who are all
whenever you mention super soldiers with exoskeletons and computer chips being implanted into people's eyes, whereas the transhumanists hear that and they be like
It's not a big deal, folks. Humans just have a hard time letting go of the past ( because what's familiar is what's comfortable ) and looking forward to the future ( because they fear the unknown ). When there's robots performing manual labor, living with us in our homes, and driving us around on the ground or in the sky, it won't be the end of the world and it's going to get to that point whether you're prepared for it or not. In 2050 when Applesoft invents the iCockerino which turns your dick into a WiFi hotspot, you can bet all the credits in your cyber coin account I'll be first in line to get one. Besides, all you hear about nowadays is "inclusive this", "inclusive that". What about being inclusive of ROBOTS, huh? WHY IS THERE NEVER ANY CONCERN FOR WALL-E'S FEELINGS?
and dont tell me robots don't have feelings because you can just look at dat face and tell my boi wall-e understands the struggle
From my perspective I see lazy dystopia, as we know it, as having been a political statement and little more. Very few writers actually tried to make it consistent and tell an interesting story or two in that vein.
As far as transhumanism is concerned, I quite like the transhumanists for their idealism, and I'm down with the whole notion of biohacking. I don't see anything wrong with embracing new technology, especially if--as has been the case for us so far--we embrace it in ways that are all too human.
I think the doomsayers are afraid of losing hold of the human soul, of the things that bring rich meaning to our lives. And that's valid. To the extent that's happened at all, the only thing I can point to is the acceleration of ephemeral "now" culture in a world where the public domain has been strangled, cutting off our ties to the middle past. And also that childhood today is nothing like it was a generation ago, where kids forced to confront boredom found in themselves a vast wellspring of imagination.
But in spite of those concerns I think there's a case to be made that in any future, at any level of technology, there's still a spark of that which makes us human that will take a very very long time to ever go away. And if we can somehow steer our culture to nurture that spark, it's not going to matter if we have self-driving cars or brain implants or 3D-printed bacon. What matters is that a six-year-old and his tiger can turn a simple box into a transmogrifier, a time machine, and a duplicator; that they can race philosophically down hills and fight armies of snow goons; that their invented games are never played the same way twice.