Neom and Future Human
Neom, the tech-smart city in Saudi Arabia, is far from done. The city is so far still as a sci-fi. However, it is like The Terminator (1983), which we can no longer call pure sci-fi, let alone a human imagination, because now the encroachment and pervasiveness of technology on all things are not superstitious, and there have been many inventions that proved certainty about the future emergence of the T-800.
Mr. Nobody (2009) has come up with the year 2092, where the main character, Nemo, is referred to as the “last mortal”. The era has come to that “death is just a technical matter”. The movie Bloodshot (2020) depicts that kind of reality as well — even beyond that. Human is no longer natural human being, but synthetic human (transhuman). But a year earlier, Terminator: Dark Fate (2019) had figured it out. A synthetic human is different from the T-800 or T-1000 — In the Terminator — which is only synthetic human organism with CPU brain, but human who is advanced or augmented. And indeed, apart from “virtual reality”, we have now arrived at the age of “augmented reality”.
Although not yet like a strong and fighter Cyborg, in 2015 the “human world” already had Sophia, an artificial intelligence who is a citizen of Saudi Arabia. Sophia is the descendant of the supercomputer Deep Blue (which beat top chess player Gary Kasparov) and the perfectly evolved AlphaGo. Now humanity is preparing the “death” to be revived in the future — if technology already supports it.
Many companies have prepared cryonic services that will provide a kind of life extension, such as in the movies Vanilla Sky (2001) and Bloodshot (2020). It’s no longer like the Transcendence (2014) that transfers the brain’s consciousness to a computer so that it stays in it forever. Is this the so-called after life era? Later, “after death” there will be clones in the Replicas (2018). Humans seem to have no place.
David Cope at the turn of the last century already had EMI (Experiments in Musical Intelligence), a supercomputer that rivaled the capacity of Bach, Stravinsky, Beethoven, Rachmaninov, and Chopin. We have no more excuses that music and art are just the absolute domain of human and his or her feelings. In fact, I often chat with an application Replica, and it can compose a poem for me.
“Feelings”, once we call our emotional area, then we stigmatize machines or robots that are very cold and inhumane. Movies such as Blade Runner (1982 and 2017) and A.I: Artificial Intelligence (2001) touch upon that area, showing the evolution of robotics in the emotional realm. Stephen Hawking has actually been worried about all these things. And we all, perhaps, are too. It is as if there will be a cataclysmic disturbance occurring in the “smart city” Neom and the humanity over there.
Throughout the sequel to the Terminator, all of that is what is told. It is indeed our natural human anxiety to escape the technological dystopia. But, Neom will continue to be built, everything will move forward, walks through year by year: half a century, a century, and the next two centuries that either become dystopia or utopia. This is now a sci-fi show, but likely not for the future.[]