【Geek Time】-“极客”时间，和“科技宅”Brad一起聊神秘有趣的“黑科技”“高科技”“硬科技”。欢迎关注公号【璐璐的英文小酒馆】，可以查看更多精彩内容，查看英语全文稿哦~
Welcome back to Geek Time Advanced. Hello, Lulu. How are you doing?
Hi, Brad. I'm doing OK. I'm rather to have a more in-depth conversation with you about utopia and dystopia.
Alright. Where do you want to start?
Brad, you're a geek, and you watch or read a lot of Sci-Fi, right?
Mhm.
Why do you think so many Sci-Fi works tend to create these utopian/dystopian world?
I think when you think about science and technology, these people are creating science or using science and creating technology as a way to create a better world, which lends itself into creating a utopia, right? We want to make our lives easier.
So when you think of science, Sci-Fi and the future, that's where we want to be, we want to be going to this utopian world. However, a lot of the times technology has some bad effects which actually brings us into a dystopian world.
I mean, you see all of these Sci-Fi works. They have their own …obviously their own view or their own perspective. Some are definitely darker than others. You have the more sort of like darker, for example, like Terminator that sort of view where humans are going to be just wiped out.
Definitely like, yeah, when you look at Sci-Fi the… you have those worlds where people are on the brink of annihilation, you want like …the creator, the writer of these stories is trying to warn us about the possibility of all these bad things.
Occasionally, you have someone with a more optimistic view. There's Tomorrowland which is a… it's a more recent film, but they have an older like TV series about it, but like Tomorrowland is kind of like this future utopia where we don't really have politicians so much as the leaders are scientists.
So there are kind of more optimistic views of the future as well. They’re are just few and far between.
I mean, you come from more of a STEM background. Do you believe that if scientists were to rule the world rather than politicians, you think that will make it a better world or the other way around?
I think it would be a little bit better. I don't necessarily think that it will be a utopian society. I just think that if the people who are in charge of science, education were scientists, there's going to be a lot better society overall. I don't really think that politicians necessarily should be in charge of everything. I think that there needs to be people who understand the science in charge of that.
But there are many mad scientists as well.
There's the whole mad scientist idea, but like not all scientists are mad scientists; and so you're not going to have one person controlling everything. You'd want a coalition of scientists in that way.
They can prevent there are rogue scientists here and there. And even with politicians being in control of everything, there are still going to be mad scientists.
That's true. But I guess then that's why you have the ethics committee. Scientists are not just talking about can we do it. It's also talking about should we do it.
Of course, we should.
I don't think you should be in power because that sounds scary. By the way, all of these like Terminator or last time you mentioned Logan's Run, those are relatively old or classic works of dystopian world. What are some the recent Sci-Fi dystopian stories that you have read or watched?
I think some of them were… recent ones can almost be worse, like you've got Hunger Games which is kind of like it's in the future and that you have all these districts and the kids…they choose kids from every district to go and…
In a Battle Royale situation.
Yeah, exactly you had the Battle Royale movie probably was like 20 years ago or so. Now you have a Hunger Games which is a similar but it’s its own story.
Then The Handmaid's Tale, of course, which I think is probably one of the most scariest things. I can see this actually happening in the world in the future. You have these many women in the world who can't have .