Becca Caddy talking about the future humans in the Pixar movie Wall-E and how that future now looks scary.
I’ve been researching how AI shows up in sci-fi for an article I’m writing, and I keep coming back to Wall-E. Compared to The Terminator or The Matrix, nothing overtly terrifying happens. There’s no war between humans and machines, no extinction event, no malevolent intelligence plotting our downfall.
And yet, Wall-E feels more disturbing than most AI dystopias, at least to me.
Because in Wall-E’s imagined future, humans aren’t enslaved by machines – at least not in the Matrix-y sort of way we usually imagine. But they’re gradually enfeebled by them.
Enfeeblement is a really useful world here. It doesn’t mean oppression or domination. It means becoming exhausted, debilitated and weakened by lack of use. Muscles atrophy, skills fade and agency dulls.
It’s not quite the same as the idea of learned helplessness, but it’s hard not to think of it. Those experiments where animals stop trying to escape from a threat, like drowning. And it’s not because they’re restrained either, but because they’re learned that effort no longer matters.
That’s exactly what happens in Wall-E. Systems move for humans, think for them, decide for them. Until people barely use their bodies, their attention and their capacity to choose at all. Life becomes effortless, deeply comfortable, completely frictionless and smooth.
Wall-E is one of my favourite movies. I still can’t imagine how Pixar pulled it off with no dialogues and only facial features of Wall-E to communicate emotions.
Wall-E came out in 2008, one year after iPhone launch. AI and robots were a far away future. But the movie had the foresight about how AI and robots will transform humans when they become a reality. And now that AI and robots are becoming a reality, the future that Wall-E showed also seems to be becoming a reality. Unbelievable.
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