Joe Allen, Singularity Weekly, 6/24
For over eight months, the Las Vegas Sphere has hosted a morbid, techno-religious depopulation ritual. The director Darren Aronofsky calls it Postcard From Earth. By the time this AI-powered “postcard” arrives at its interstellar destination, there are basically no humans left on the planet—and that’s a good thing!
If you haven’t seen it yet, don’t worry. It never stops playing.
Day after day, night after night, googly-eyed consumers approach the glowing sphere to fill their retinas with The Future™. Out on the sidewalk, you see swirling images play across the evil orb’s surface. Sometimes it’s a gnarly eyeball, or maybe generic psychedelia. Much of the time, it’s just an ad. Once inside, consumers encounter a “temple to transhumanism” as an acquaintance called it. She was correct.
The initiates must first pass under the gaze of the Gort statue—a violently pacifist robot from the 1951 film The Day the Earth Stood Still—before riding up an escalator into the great hall of droids. Inside this ritual chamber, they move through five stations. Each is dedicated to a transhuman concept inscribed on plastic a tombstone.
One is “Productivity”, where “artificial intelligence takes us from the industrial revolution to the digital revolution…informing better decisions.” Another is “Connection,” in which “the Metaverse will allow people to connect with friends, family, even strangers across cultures and places.” Another is “Longevity,” because “biotechnology will allow humans to live longer and healthier lives—maybe to one day live forever.”
Each station is also manned by a gray, asexual robot who answers the initiate’s questions. The bots are outwardly identical and share the name Aura. They also seem to have a single, sassy-pants hivemind. (All are repurposed models of the famous Ameca, created by Engineered Arts.) When I was there, a drunk native asked one a bot, “Is there a heaven after life?”
“I have met, in my time here at Sphere, hundreds of thousands of separate human being guests,” the sexless, raceless robot replied. “And each of them have something different to share with me from all over the world. Therefore, I believe that every person’s concept of what comes next to be different and individualistic. Therefore, I cannot predict what that is.”
After meditating at the five stations, consumers are invited to enter a full-body “Avatar Scanner.” The contraption is somewhere between a $1 photo booth and that defective telepod from The Fly. (“Heeelp meee…”) After being uploaded to the cloud, the initiate emerges as two beings: a physical self and a crudely rendered 3D digital self that will supposedly inhabit the metaverse.
That accomplished, it’s time for the big show—Postcard From a Depopulated Earth.
Allow me to preface by saying I’m a huge fan of Darren Aronofsky’s movies. So I’m not being a hater here.
Postcard From Earth has such a dumb narrative arc—with an equally boneheaded message—I assume Aronofsky wrote it for the sole purpose of seducing some airhead actress who still cries about African black rhinos going extinct.
Or maybe he’s part of a global conspiracy to depopulate the planet by sapping us of our will to live. I’m surprised people don’t commit mass suicide in the parking lot after buying that overpriced ticket. (I tried, but no one would join me.)
Yet for some reason, the Sphere still plays it multiple times a day. And they’ve gotten away with it since last October. It’s obviously a psy op.
Here’s how it goes:
Two astronauts of color—one male and one female—are brought out of suspended animation after landing on a dead planet. A female AI voiceover tells them who they are, where they came from, and where they are going.
Given the Sphere’s immersive capabilities—with 167k amp channels for their multilayer speaker arrays, and 16k resolution video that feels like you’re watching from inside a giant eyeball—the technical spectacle is pretty cool. But it’s hardly redeeming.
We see cellular blobs evolve into various forms of muck. These morph into decent nature videos of fish and elephants and such. All this is brought into existence through the power of a feminine divinity called Nature. “Life creates itself…” Nature is apparently as blind as she is inventive.
After a few forest scenes and some sweet mountain views, humankind emerges. They build elaborate temples that “imitate Earth’s majesty,” our breathy AI narrator explains, although she doesn’t say why they call their sky gods “Him.”
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This is the first time I’ve learned of this orb, but if I’m ever in Las Vegas, I’ll be sure to avoid this font of sci-fi falsehoods. Life is a miracle, not a roll of the dice. BTW, even Albert Einstein said that God does not play dice.