I’ve never been a fan of science fiction. I always felt haunted by the lingering, unsettling feeling that sat alongside me watching films like Alien, Blade Runner, and The Terminator. I stopped attending these types of movies because their imagery left me with a cold, mechanized, ominous sense that was hard to ignore. I preferred story lines rooted in human resilience, where people confronted adversity and prevailed through courage, clarity, initiative, and moral resolve… movies like Chariots of Fire, Whale Rider, and When Harry Met Sally.
A Feeling I Couldn’t Shake
What the few sci-fi movies I saw left me with wasn’t wonder or amusement, but dread. They portrayed a world where empathy and compassion have no currency; where technology looms large, grey, and dominant, and were humanity shrinks to react and merely survive rather than shape meaningful advancements. I walked away with the uneasy sense that something essential about being human could quietly slip away.
For years, I dismissed those images as the byproduct of storytelling designed to provoke discomfort and box office returns. But today, those movies feel less like fiction and more like a dress rehearsal for reality, not just in Hollywood, but a few hundred miles north, in Silicon Valley.
When Science Fiction Edges Toward Reality
Increasingly, the world seems to have taken on the tone of the very genre I’ve always avoided. Conversations about the future increasingly revolve around algorithms, automation, and automaton-like efficiency. People are no longer cast in leading roles, but as a side show to technological progress.
It was in this context that Elon Musk’s appearance at the World Economic Forum the other day felt especially unsettling. In his appearance there along with world leaders, he spoke with BlackRock’s Larry Fink about his vision for artificial intelligence, robotics, and the future economy, stating that robots and AI are “the path to sustainable abundance for all” and predicting that robots will eventually outnumber humans. Simply by attending for the very first time, he signaled his role as a potential power broker in shaping the future of how humans will live.
To me, the idea that abundance could exist for humans in a world where robots outnumber people feels absurd. We already live in a world marked by extreme disparities, where wealth, resources, and opportunity are concentrated in the hands of a mighty few, and where one percent of the population controls a staggering share of global wealth and influence.
Abundance for all when systems of power and inequality remain largely unchecked? Really?
Framed as inevitable, this vision of the future feels eerily familiar, less like progress and more like a scene pulled from The Terminator.
Progress Without Moral Grounding
I don’t reject technology at all. It is useful and advantageuos. In medicine alone, robotic-assisted surgery outperforms scalpels in the hands of surgeons. But when machines begin to replace doctors, lawyers, financial advisors, business consultants, and others whose expertise requires years of training and judgment what happens to the non-negotiables like judgment and interpersonal connection? What happens to relationships built on trust, nuance, and lived experience?
The Vanishing Landscape of Work
We are often reassured that humans will adapt, re-skill, pivot, and find new ways to build meaning. We’re told to skip college and become plumbers and electricians, but robots are already being designed to perform these roles as well. When machines replace both physical and intellectual labor, what meaningful work remains? What pathways exist for younger generations seeking purpose, stability, and the hope of raising a family and owning a home?
Power, Fragility, and the Planet
As wealth and power continue to concentrate in the hands of a few, our plant is screaming out under relentless activity of digging, drilling, extracting, building, consuming, and factory-farming. These forces compound one another, intensifying scarcity, instability, and vulnerability, creating a fragile and volatile world that feels enormously unbalanced, one that is giving rise to increasing physical and mental infirmity.
Naming the Fear
The future that’s unfolding today feels hauntingly similar to the science fiction films I instinctively avoided, not because they were surreal but because they forced me to imagine a bleak, barren, mechanized world where robots outnumber humans and aggressively eliminate them.
Today the uncomfortable sense of fear I have is centered on whether “sustainable abundance” will be little more than two words echoing across a world that feels increasingly unsafe and unsustainable.
