Devs
Futures in a deterministic world
Starting note: welcome to all the new subscribers that joined after my interview with Karl Schroeder last week! During the school year I talk about the curriculum at the University of Houston Foresight Masters program, but during the summer I harvest Futures content from the world at large.
I have gotten into an argument on Facebook exactly once1. I was participating in a group where many members recommended the work of James Hollis, especially Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life. I read Why Good People Do Bad Things and thought there were some interesting ideas in it, but it was also twice as long as it needed to be because Hollis kept writing self-indulgent, pretentious prose2 to look smart to his readers. I said as much, and got a wide variety of responses, from people who had bounced off the book hard and had felt like they were stupid, to people defending the book and saying I was way wrong. One comment, though, really chafed me: someone said that, actually, I was the pretentious one, based on my detailed criticism/takedown. I challenged the commenter to point out what, exactly, was pretentious about what I said. After I had cooled off, though, I realized that I should have taken the opposite tack: of course I’m pretentious; that’s why I’m so good at detecting it!
I say this because I’ve decided to embrace the fact that an important part of my taste is a preference for the obscure, the layered, the art-house, the symbolic, the works that tap into the collective unconscious and use the language and logic of deep myth. When I watch something like Class of ‘09 that lays out a by-the-book story that follows the standard television formula, I find it really boring. However, in watching Alex Garland’s TV series Devs — with its weird jarring music choices that takes the form of religious chants, primal sounds, or experimental ‘60s music; wide shots of San Francisco either covered in a brooding fog or showing traffic flowing through like bits on a chip3; rather than a generic server room, the spooky computer is held in a floating gold Sierpinski-carpeted cube; monologues on the nature of reality quoting Yeats4 — I was in my element.
This show is so good and I plan to discuss important plot points and themes, so if you haven’t seen it and you’ve enjoyed my media recommendations thus far, keep this tab open and come back when you’ve finished.
Image of the Future (literally)
Devs depicts a near-future world that is not significantly changed5 from modern-day Silicon Valley except for one key difference: the company Amaya has developed next-generation quantum AI. The goal is to use the power of a huge number of qubits to run a physics simulation that deterministically describes every particle, so it can be run backward to generate a perfect-fidelity representation of the past. By implication, the simulation contains within it a perfect simulation of the Devs system, creating an infinite regress of realities. How is that possible without the computer being the size of the universe? Quantum, bro6! Theoretically the same process could be used to look into the future and see exactly what happens, but they wouldn’t do that, would they?7 Adventure and intrigue ensue, layers of dark secrets start to unfold, etc — the story is fine, and the dissection of the power we give to unaccountable tech billionaires is on point, but I want to talk about the way that the plot dramatizes and exaggerates the problem of foresight.
The show explores the logical conclusions of this kind of predictive technology. If we think about futures as the discipline of increasing a sense of imagination and agency regarding the future, then for a while the relationship between the two is positive: being better able to imagine/visualize the future increases our range of options and our sense that our actions and choices can change our experiences. Beyond a certain point, however, increasing the fidelity of our image of the future (decreasing the width of the futures cone) begins to dramatically limit our sense and experience of agency, until it collapses to zero. This rubs up very quickly against humanity’s religious and philosophical foundations8; people tend to react poorly to being confronted with evidence that free will is an illusion9 and experiencing “agency crash” — in the case of the show, walking through life in resignation to a future you don’t wish for, but you can’t imagine any way to change it. Determinism absolves us of guilt for the consequences of our mistakes (since we couldn’t have chosen otherwise), but it also robs us of any path forward.
However, as far as I can tell, the main issue is not just that simple rules can quickly lead to chaotic and unpredictable behavior, but that the future is often so surprising because it doesn’t exist yet - it’s co-constructed as an aggregation of the choices of all humans and the workings of our technology and institutions, plus the natural world. Using foresight to think hard about the future (in qualitative or quantitative ways) won’t spoil the surprise much, but will allow us to be better prepared for what might come and take more accountability for our future.
I initially joined Facebook soon after it opened to everyone in 2006, but quickly closed my account because I got friend requests from people I didn’t want to talk to, but also I didn’t want to say no? I swear though, I’m fun at parties.
A sample: "In The Hidden Persuaders, Vance Packard noted how the tools and techniques of covert disinformation and value manipulation developed by intelligence agencies during World War II were eagerly grasped by commercial interests after the war, specifically to evoke the unconscious and to provoke positive projections onto products ranging from prunes to Pontiacs to politicians". I may have said that it was the kind of thing I would have written in AP English in 10th grade.
This may not have been a direct homage to the title scene in Hackers, but it sure felt like one.
A strategy I took in Futures Research for my scenario names, though I quickly found that classic poetry isn’t a universal point of cultural knowledge.
I think the only other change I noticed was a prosthetic leg that looked more advanced than I had ever seen. Maybe it’s not set in the future at all?
This is a deeply hand-wavy answer to the corner the plot is painted into, and at face value it makes no sense, but I see it as an interesting alternate take on the problem of dualism Karl and I discussed last week.
In fact, dear reader, they would.
As a specific example, I’ve heard that when Mahdi Elmandjra tried to introduce Futures concepts in the Islamic world, there was a terminology issue - exploring Al Mustaqbal is innocuous, but claiming to have knowledge of Al-Ghaib is blasphemous, because it’s the concealed knowledge known only to God. As a result, foresight was banned for decades in much of the Arab world.
For reasons I don't fully understand, some of my absolute favorite television centers on the nihilism of determinism, from the “time is a flat circle” of True Detective season 1 to the “we can do what we will but we cannot will what we will” of Netflix’s Dark (if you haven’t seen this yet, it should be your first stop, before Devs). It has occurred to me, though, that from the perspective of the viewer, television is deterministic - once it’s recorded, the characters have no control over future actions, and the digital representation (or, even more literally, DVDs etc) are exactly that “flat circle” to be replayed over and over that Rust Cohle talks about. But surely my experience isn’t just my experience of information unfolding that has been artificially created and is immutably hurtling toward a pre-determined end, right? Guys?