 They're all offspring sound familiar Because all the animals in Jurassic Park are female ensuring 100% sterility in all Judas females Utilization of suicide gene leading to a life expectancy of 120 to 180 days. When is this thing's gonna die soon anyway? So they built in a fail-safe device, which is what for your lifespan. They were designed to die They are breeding the dinosaurs Our breeding and that's not all they're coming back Occasionally you get lucky Maybe two of your creations will turn on each other and you can slip away or you might get really lucky But more often than not It ends badly I guess we'll never see the genetic engineering feel-good hit of the summer Hey, the park opened and everyone had a great time. There was cotton candy and pretzels shaped like triceratops That just doesn't fit the blockbuster format Hollywood isn't the business of telling exciting stories For the rest of us once the credits roll and the lights come up. We like to leave the scary bits back in the theater. I Don't know if there's anything to worry about with those mosquitoes in Malaysia But I was thinking about that proverbial broken clock that still has the correct time twice a day And maybe there are a couple lessons to learn from Hollywood When the monsters come a call in study the schematics Always carry a zippo lighter There may need to be a blood sacrifice And you know what it doesn't hurt to familiarize yourself with the local subway schedule for slate video I'm Brian Mallow. If you're blue and you don't know where to go to why don't you go where fashion sits? different types who wear Is that the end? Well, that's the thing isn't it science fiction films of this nature in the 50s always ended with a credit card That went up a title card. This is not the end. This is the beginning or a question mark Well, you know what? I thought I was looking at a bunch of science fiction films But it turned out with the exception of Blade Runner I'd have to say all of these films and I'll just tell you what the films we just saw were Jurassic Park Mimic Splice Frankenstein young Frankenstein Blade Runner. I am legend deep blue sea is the shark movie and species They're all horror films really. Yeah, we have an interesting blurring of the genres here I made the the statement at the beginning. I won't bother backering it up But the first science fiction book was Frankenstein by Mary Shelley it's also obviously thought of as the birth of the modern horror genre as well And there certainly is a blurring of the distinction there But horror has a supernatural aspect normally and science fiction has a reasoned extrapolation to it Some of the things we saw here were reasoned extrapolations this notion that you can build in a kill switch Either read all of one gender or have a shortened lifespan A suicide gene that sort of thing is a is a scientific concept The idea that the scientific concept might well go awry That those who have good intentions don't foresee all the possible ramifications is a scientific concept in itself That's right. And it's also very much a core message of science fiction as a literature as well as in film and television The law of unattended consequences is a buzzword in in a business Writing these days, but something that science fiction has been dealing with. Isn't that just murphy's law? It's yeah, what can go along will but murphy You know the the thing about murphy is you can easily see that that's that's a bad idea You know, it's a bad idea Don't do that and the thing about so much of the rosy perspective that You've got Jurassic Park there at the outset welcome to Jurassic Park. You didn't use that clip But you know attenborough is so you a fuse of in in his childlike joy in what he's created And he simply hasn't thought it through and this is often the case and this comes back to our question of governance The people who most enthusiastically want to do something are the least Well Disposed to be the ones who decide whether or not it should be done Right, you know that was I had read Jurassic Park before the movie had come out and I They there were a lot of changes and I think in every case it was the wrong change the right people died in the book The safari hunter security guy He lived in the book He was the only one with the proper respect for them right the founder of the park died the most miserable death Um really he gets eaten. He gets bitten by these little tiny dinosaurs a swarm of them They poison him he's laying there The poison seeking in they're ripping flesh off his face and he's thinking that this is just the programmer's fault And euro Jurassic Park will be fine. He goes to his death thinking everything's going to be fine and in the movie They go i'm not going to support your endorse your part because me neither and they all and they you know The biggest financial success of hollywood's treatment of biotech is the Jurassic Park franchise Now I often make an argument that michael creighton isn't really a science fiction writer He's an anti science fiction writer and again on my website sfwriter.com slash creighton dot htm I make the case at length that this is a guy almost everything I do uh that uh malo.com That this is a guy who made his fortune pandering to the fear The same fear that hollywood has often pandered to there is this desire Uh to want to get bad messages out because they're more exciting and because it's way easier to invoke a fear response than a thoughtfully reflective response But I always you know, I enjoyed a bunch of his books and I looked at him. I didn't take them to be anti science Oh, they're totally anti science. I didn't really take no others I didn't read that one about the environment and I know he spoke about it But uh next is is one on biotech and it's like it's murphy's law writ large anything you do with biotech people will die But the search for uh, don't you have to it doesn't it have to be about the day that everything went to hell? Otherwise, there's no story. Well, I don't want to get into literary theory here. Although as My my Experimental shtick as a science fiction writer for the last several years has been to write books without antagonists to To get beyond this notion that the only thing worth writing about is a things going wrong and be human beings in conflict with each other um Robert writes uh non-zero had a profound effect on me who was the moderator of the session I was at this morning the notion that in interactions between Groups the outcome can be positive for both sides Whereas the standard fictional and very much the standard hollywood metaphor has been There's a winner and there's a loser in every interaction And I don't think that makes sense and certainly for biotech and the governance of biotech What we're looking for is win-win outcomes where it's good for the economy It's good for those who have a vested interest in it the private sector And it's good for the general public and what we have to try and find is not the hollywood model Where it's just going to go wrong the hollywood message very much over and over again is don't go there There were you know the other title card that used to come up with 1950s science fiction films was There are some things that man was not meant to know and I don't think that's true I don't think that's a rational position for homo sapiens to take man of wisdom to take about anything Yeah, it's pretty limited. I mean the things that make a good movie The store the kinds of stuff that make for good stories and movies are not the same things that make for a good life Here in the real world, right? Now on the other hand there also is a value in the cautionary tale And one of the reasons frankenstein has endured for almost two centuries is that it is A cautionary tale the one that you didn't allude to in the video here that's had several film treatments is probably the first When we really think about biotech in science fiction people don't necessarily think of frankenstein They think of hg wells and the island of dr. Moro, which is about making chimera life forms It was the very first treatment of that and again, it's a what can go wrong with this You know, don't mess with this. This is dangerous stuff kind of a cautionary tale Hg wells got there first on a lot of topics. Oh, man. He did everything. He did everything. He's the father Of the genre and as this genre is social comment too. I think very important man Well, one thing I found right away where I wish if I've had more time and and wanted to make a half-hour video The things that all the movies had in common really struck me and and some of them were subtly there All of them have scenes where people are closing doors and a monster is trying to get in It might be a shark or a bug or whatever it is But there's other weird ones like did you see both credits were three years later? One was mimic and one was iam legend and both of them were three years later But you know that closing door thing, I mean, I will go into literary theory for you. That's pandora's box That is a visual metaphor of pandora's box the notion that if you open the box of knowledge You will never be able to close it again and it comes back to that message There are some things that man was not meant to know now that said my own Hollywood experience of the last 18 months Was flash forward the abc tv series based on my novel of the same name and the notes that kept coming back from the network Were to the effect that every time you talk any science at all you lose a hundred thousand viewers the moment the first Pauli syllable comes out of the mouth of an actor Which means that you don't get to the nuanced argument you get to the exciting uh rampaging monster scene And you know somebody mentioned very thoughtfully somebody sitting over here this morning gattaca the film gattaca Which was a very thoughtful treatment of a lot of biotech issues. I don't think you had a clip from gattaca in there But it made nowhere near The money that any of these other films that gattaca is is really a film that's well regarded But did not scare the bejeebers out of people Well, what became very obvious was that to me was that the language of film and that It doesn't even matter what the story is about. Maybe it's about dinosaurs or a mutated bug But what the actual suspense consists of Is things like how do I get from here to there when there's a monster in the way and how and it's how the director Creates the suspense. So in most of the movies, uh, here's some things that in common I saw helicopters and in at least three or four of them people climbing up and down ladders People climbing up through a hole in the roof to the next level even blade runner has that reached at the end of the And where it's just and I kind of thought like what you were saying It's it's the language of film and maybe I was thinking of joseph cambell Like there's always like a journey into something into a dark building into jona You know you mentioned we we had drinks last night in the bar at the hotel and you mentioned, uh, the helicopter thing And I was thinking about why that's a recurring motif and the helicopter is doesn't have a biological analog There is no whirligig life form for flying around It is in fact the airplane does birds bats insects the helicopter doesn't And one of there was some seeds that twirl down But you don't want to be in a helicopter that can only go down believe me you want one that can go up And what the point being there that the helicopter is the thing that we've made that doesn't have a model in nature And yet works very effectively and it actually is appropriate when you're talking about creating We talked about de novo life forms life forms created that don't have an analog in the existing Uh tree of life, uh, and I think that's why you see the helicopter motif there Yeah, I also noticed the monsters have tend to have very good timing As a comedian, I could appreciate this. There's always like some moment where like in Jurassic Park She gets the power on and says into the walkie-talkie. We're in business and then a velociraptor appears And samuel l jackson makes a big speech and the uh giant shark comes up and takes him away um So, uh, I did well, let's let's uh, you know, we've been a bit negative here and of the clips you showed I got to say the most interesting one to me is blade runner to me for two reasons one is it's not a monster movie. No, uh, it's about Replicating humans. I mean we're and and whether or not What rights those humans have what obligation creators have to their creations? And what motivates us to want to do this? It's actually a very intriguing philosophical story Jurassic park, you know the ian melcom character who is the chaos theoretician played by Jeff goldblum. Jeff goldblum Is a fascinating character, but in essence all he does is in tone There are some things that man was not meant to know over and over again in that film And it's easy to make that case when you look around at making monsters or re re animating things that are long dead like a like frankenstein Which was dead to begin with the parts that made up frankenstein's monster or bringing back Mostly critical not Jurassic life forms and Jurassic park But rob wanted to be a paleontologist Before he decided on science that's absolutely true. But but the creation or modification of human life Is the most interesting as you gattica dealt with that and blade runner dealt with that And I think those are the ones if you want to engage philosophically If you were building say a university level course about hollywood's treatment of bioethics and biotechnology issues Those would be foundational films young frankenstein Not so much Yeah, absolutely the most thoughtful one of my favorite films And i'm really disappointed that I couldn't at least get in the scene where he says it's not an easy thing to meet Your maker and it comes face to face with his maker But I just I couldn't really fit it in but beautiful movie and it and actually and the book that it's based on by philip k dick Do androids dream of electric cheap? There's a lot of stuff in there that uh is subtle Especially if you haven't read the book But there's an idea of he was fascinated with the idea of what it means to be human and what defines a human And in this story it was empathy and that's what he comes back to a lot and there's lack of empathy And that's what there's a test the void conf test is about determining whether these creatures even have an empathic response To things like like bugs or animal related otherwise not particularly notable terminator salvation The most recent terminator film deals with that same issue That the fundamentally the human heart metaphorically not physically is what separates us from the machine And somebody at this morning session on science fiction The section that I was in as a science fiction writer I should say Brought up this question if we don't even know what life is we do wrestle with this question And we still have a desire to want to say Viscerally that life has some Special status and that anything created in a lab by a chemist or a biologist or a genetic engineer Is therefore not really life And that's part of the philosophy that science fiction deals with one of the questions science fiction often deals with Is expanding our definition of personhood, which of course historically through time It's gone from being you know male landowners to being all human beings And I suspect we will see it continue to expand right so even if we create a human A synthetic human that's more human than human and even smarter than us and stronger than us It's still okay to enslave it. Absolutely. Absolutely. And then the same thing would have like in no, I mean, that's absolutely the message I don't agree that it's Wow, the canadiens have a dark side. No, no, no I just January 2013 is coming up. It's the 150th anniversary of the emancipation proclamation. I'm all set for my celebrations my friend Well replicants everywhere appreciate that. I'm sure Um, and it's the same issue that we're coming at in another way if we are if we develop artificial intelligence Mid-century like Ray Kurzweil and some other well This is very interesting because at the opening session this morning there We tried to bring together the two emergent technologies We're talking about which are biotech And information technology and in fact that's where they overlap the most is life actually Carbon-based organic chemistry means carbon chemistry is it carbon-based? By necessity or is life something else and I think where you really are going to see the intersection of those two Is when we start making thinking self-aware conscious machines to be way More interesting to debate that issue whether that is life Rather than the the pretty obvious case that's made by a movie like blade runner that Obviously roi baddie the character rootger howler plays is obviously alive the the character Rachel in the film is obviously alive and the message that's clear in the director's cut of the film if not in the original theatrical cut that decker the Harrison Ford character who is a replicant and also is obviously live. That's the easy question If it quacks like a duck, it's a duck. The hard question is if it's in silico instead of in carbon. Is it in fact precluded from our definitions of life and I would argue. No, it's not precluded in the past couple years I've read some great science fiction That deals with issues of like mind uploading and so an example would be my novel mind scan exactly The this is a great Subject and you know some stuff that seems very far-fetched if you look at things, you know the whole idea that we're moving away from You know everything becoming bits. So it's already happened to our music collection very few people no one has records Very few people have CDs. That's all been digitized. I have a huge library I'm sure all the writers here have very large libraries and which we treasure and we can't imagine partying But the younger generation of people coming up. I always I feel like I'm gonna be that guy, you know, mr. Mallow, what are those? Those are books, you know Put down that Kindle and you know like But and as far-fetched as it seems that's the next thing It's like digitizing all this stuff if they make developments give them 50 or 100 years if you can digitize consciousness Why travel in this meat bag? And this is the profound the profound point that was made in the foundational talk this morning Is in fact that life dna the genetic code is a digital code It's a four and it's it's quaternary instead of binary It's a four base code instead of a two base code that we normally use for when we talk about digital information But it's a code and you can represent it and it either is adizine Or it is thymine or it is guanine or it is cytosine it is not In between it is one or the other life is one or the other or the other the other life is digital in that sense life is information That can self-replicate and that I think is the fundamental message that science fiction has been way on the leading edge of getting out Yeah, like even this could be a simulation. Oh, I alluded to that this morning. Absolutely We might indeed be a simulation either a digital simulation or somebody's advanced science project So I we've got a two minute warning. Do you have something really to sing? Where's our mic? No, no, but where's the mic for you? That's what I'm saying to our runner here But go ahead. We don't have time to No, there's 25 minutes. There's no room for a lot of nuance. We're trying to get to the core of the issue in a very limited time Yeah, I would say contrary to that Actually that ambiguity and poetics are the core of the matter much as much as if not more And so now that's what with all this imagery. It's too, you know, it It lacks that if I could just say that and no projection of the digital model onto any living activity can override that A digital is from zero to one, but it has to go from one to the other It is a digital projection onto an analog process in many ways. So I think DNA is not an analog process DNA is actually fundamentally a digital process and I got to say no no it is and it's based on four basis We only have a matter of seconds And and the other point that I want to very quickly make is I think we're in a way better place right now as a species When we treat as a binary question whether or not you're a person then saying that a black american is three fifths of a person It's way better to be Totally on or off on personhood than to be nuanced about it They're good questions great. They're totally good questions great That was kind of the point there. It's like that's the hollywood vid That's not our perception of the issue But that's the only story that hollywood that with some exceptions like blade runner and gattaca Um, this is the kind of you know, hollywood's pretty limited everything has a The the Jurassic Park book didn't have a love love interest story. There was no love story They needed it for the movie though, right? So is there anything we could say about the hollywood percent like is there anything? You know the one thing we all you talked about here was uh film and I got to say hollywood is also television Very interesting debate about these questions of artificial life versus Non-artificial life in the re-imaging of battle star galactica very worth watching for that philosophical debate. Yeah Well, I think we're out of time, right?