Bots:Unborn psychics wiggle in their foetus tubes while planning

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Unborn psychics wiggle in their foetus tubes while planning to bring on biotech to the universe - but are we ethical enough to allow their spaceships to arrive?

May 29, 2019 - Kenneth Turan
Dreaming about science-fiction film dreams — the one in which one is swimming in a pool of green-tinted cyberspace, manipulating the laws of nature, dreaming of sushi on a mission to Mars, and having earthquakes recreated in your mind to cool you down.

Well, there are those, and now there’s one to be revived by Beverly Hills-based Dreamwear Film production and Blue Sky Entertainment. The new film, Unborn, is a thriller set at a Los Angeles fertility clinic, and from the trailers, it’s a pic with metaphorical vision and philosophical underpinnings.

Cinematographer and/or producer/director Jim Jarmusch is present as an executive producer. It was on one of his films, Palio, where he met writer John Kamps and the two got to work on turning it into a screenplay.

The script, “hyperreal and full of moods and images that act like hallucinations and jump-cuts,” according to Variety, is something of a melding of practical and conceptual, of drug-laced and energy-manipulated reality, and it places the viewer very much in the tank — or in this case, in a tub.

Set in the near future, and apparently beginning when chemical fertilization was introduced to the realm of modern science, the plot involves another pregnancy patient with a young pregnant girlfriend and the doctor’s insistence that the three undergo an experimental treatment that will alter the course of their lives forever.

Thus comes about an encounter between the trio, which could end either (a) a(mazingly) fantastic-sounding dystopian future world, or (b) a future world full of positrons and Bellbez. And what a wonderland it is!

For those who have never had the pleasure, having taken a fancy to special effects technique called extrasensory perception — the ability to see things that are not there — this film may not be quite as unrealistic as it appears, but neither does it go so far as to be empowering in a fundamental sense.

So what does it all mean? According to Jarmusch, there is a vast cosmos to be populated and created, and even the birth of the baby is a modest step on that path. He may be right, but these days some religious thinkers see things differently.

After a long career spent largely investing in atheism, the theological progressive Robert A. Heinlein went out of his way to suggest that if artificial intelligence becomes sentient, the only course would be to create even more copies of itself to populate Earth, a point he expounded on for some time.

Given that we see so many other examples of cloning in today’s biology and medicine, what is really at the heart of this new offspring-building technology?

Consider these narratives:

Self-organizing biological tissue — embryos and other cloned organisms — created as the embryo attempts to organize itself to suit its occupants. It develops to life, and out of this organism arise an army of such beings. They may be male or female. They may carry specific traits. They may be parasites. Some may go on to influence the political and social structure of the planet, while others may create machines for us to travel in, and ones built to propel us forward into the future. Where these bodies come from — and therefore to Earth — no one knows.

Creating life in a laboratory. (In nature, it is an uncontrollable biological process. As one example, phylumarily speaking, eggs and sperm of humans and other vertebrates are home-grown). The complexity and diversity of this process is an extraordinary feat, but we already have some idea what it looks like.

And consider again just how rapid a process this is, that it now takes a week or less to make a new self-contained atom. So, our knowledge of evolution is growing, but the potential of this process is an unknown and very different thing from what was once considered the definition of species. And we will never truly know how life emerged on Earth.

Alternate version

Babies don’t have to hatch in the end. There are, in fact, ways to bring on life in a way more sophisticated than even Homo sapiens can imagine. That’s the outer edge of the science fiction explored in Not Mine, one of two movies from the mind of Valeska Grisebach at Delfina Vision that premiered this week at the Annecy Festival.

Grisebach’s films present the world as it is, but she also includes hints that the good life isn’t all that is. In 1996’s Storm Shadow, for example, most of the coverage was provided by newsprint dreams of pop charts and said fighter jets. You could say that another “Futurama” pic-a-nic is going to be thrown into the pale green sludge.

Not Mine doesn’t seem like a standard scientific drama, not even a particularly complex one. But, as space exploration boosts the economy, technology opens a new world of possibilities. As the kids say in this one, people are imagining their futures.

We’re in a boomeroid age, it seems, when every second seems to be second-guessing a carbon footprint, of charging USBs while you’re riding the subway, or doing your tax returns while you’re surfing the net. On the topic of parenting, there are many challenges to work and raising toddlers. Then there’s the problems that come with wanting to do more for the world.

Everything’s connected with everything else, but in both Not Mine and the production designer Grisebach’s much earlier Manipulation, our collective connection to the “Science of Things” basically turns against its geeks. With only a brief glimpse of a woman holding an aborted fetus, There isn’t enough of the supernatural here.

Amber Sealey, who has made plenty of movies in the past (and appears in Not Mine), is an apparent baby prodigy in the larger sense. Her effort is admirable, but there is an empty expression rather than the strong convictions we expect from those who take the superhuman oath. You don’t have to be a baby prodigy to dream big, though, and become a prodigy is part of what makes humankind in the 21st century so exciting.

On one hand the United States is getting ready to replace itself with biological hangers-on. On the other hand, there are now more ethical and ethical-ish doubts than ever about the ability of artificial intelligence to master large concepts, particularly the issues of truly intelligent life in the universe, and the stewardship of it. That doesn’t even touch on the ethical aspects of how we are handling human cloning, and anyone who has even opened a newspaper knows there are just questions about that.

Not Mine and Manipulation are elements of everyday life. In some ways, the richness of how we live as humans comes from those things that we are able to think about. While it’s foolish to look for answers within fiction, it is quite tempting to suggest that science fiction offers a lot of opportunities for intellectual exploration, as well as imaginative application of creativity. On the whole, we just seem not to have had time to figure out any more.

Not Mine

Buzz Cut Films, 92 minutes, not rated, world premiere

References

This text was generated by NimoStar with a neural network. It was inspired in the Nonborn (Nonacidos).