2024: The Year That Wasn’t (I Hope)

By Gordon Hopkins It is a new year and I like to start the new year by looking at some of the predictions made by old science fiction movies and laugh at how wrong they got it.Well, I don't feel much like laughing this year. Indeed, there is one movie at least that I look at and find myself most discomfited.A lot of old movies seemed to think 2024 was going to be a dystopian wasteland. “Beyond the Time Barrier” from 1960, for example, is about a U.S. Air Force test pilot that flies through a time warp and ends up in a future where nuclear testing damaged the Earth's atmosphere and allowed dangerous cosmic rays to cause a “cosmic plague,” with the requisite mutants.Another is “Highlander 2: The Quickening” (1991) one of the dumbest movies with one of the dumbest subtitles ever, in which the immortals of the first movie are revealed to be aliens. The movie takes place after industrial pollution has destroyed Earth's ozone layer, not that the plot matters in the least.Then there is “A Boy and His Dog” (1975), which begins with the words, “World War IV lasted five days.” This one is the most wastelandy of all the cinematic dystopian wastelands, in which a thoroughly amoral and not very bright young man wanders through a post-apocalyptic desert with his much smarter, telepathic dog.Based on the Nebula-award winning novella by Harlan Ellison, it is far more intelligent that the previous movies mentioned but so brutal and unpleasant that the satirical aspects tend to be lost on a lot of viewers.None of these movies bear much, if any, resemblance to the world we see around today, even if they do contain elements that reflect the concerns of our world.One film, however, has shown such disconcerting prescience that it is being mentioned all the time in conversations, essay and even news stories. It should be pointed out that the movie doesn't take place in 2024. Instead, it takes place in the year it was made, 1984.The movies is, of course, “The Terminator.” While the titular time-traveler heads to 1984 to kill the mother of a future war hero, the audience learns that an artificial intelligence (AI) will take over the world, or destroy the world, or something like that. It's been a while since I've seen it.Per the movie's exposition, we learn that AI will become self-aware and lead to the downfall of humanity in 40 years, 2024.Most people agree we are now watching the world be reshaped by AI. Exactly what that shape will be, no one seems to know. Like a lot of folks, I like laughing at dumb predictions of old science fiction. When 2025 rolls around, I really hope I can laugh at this one.

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