As Seen On TV, But Filtered Through Dall-e
This Is Not The Time Travel We Were Promised
I was born in the year 1984.
Pro tip: Maybe don’t be born in the same year as a famous dystopian novel.
It has not escaped me throughout my life how vaguely ominous that sometimes felt. I mean, the book could just as easily have been titled 1983 or 1985, but it wasn’t. My parents just happened to pick an unfortunate year to decide to conceive me. Thanks Mom and Dad.
Was it an omen? No, but it does feel slightly uncanny given the way things have unfolded.
Like many kids tend to be - I was into video games. First the original Nintendo, then the Sega Genesis, then N64. But for me it was with the advent of the Xbox and Xbox 360 where things really began to feel like ‘the future is now.
The future started to be less and less polygons, and more and more progressive scan high-def. Inching towards ‘photo realism’ in video games was exciting and cool. It sure beat Pong and Frogger.
And honestly, up until around 2021, there was still ‘excitement for the next console generation’ - the advancements in game engines and the dawn of 4K (aka 2160p).
VR games had debuted, but not quite taken off. VR technology was still young and while it was improving, it was causing headaches and nausea for some (including me).
Then generative AI broke onto the scene and subsequently broke the internet (and our brains).
While that infamous first video of Will Smith eating Spaghetti was admittedly tacky and laughable - more than a few wise people still saw past the hype, mockery, and memes, and saw something more serious coming.
Generative AI not only stuck around - it has evolved at an absolutely staggering pace.
It took video games 4 decades to go from the first decent 3D games to ‘nearly photo-realistic’.
It took less than 4 years to go from Chat GPT debuting to gen AI as we now know it being nearly indistinguishable from reality.
The wild thing - AI has even become clumsily capable of mimicking video games:
I still remember how good Half Life 2 looked and felt when it came out in the mid 2000s. It was ‘the next step’ in video games.
There have also been other very visually impressive games in recent years like Death Stranding, Control, and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. Again, not photo-realistic per say, but closer than ever.
To get to be alive when this is a ‘modern video game’, when I started with games like Pong and Tetris? That feels awesome and fortunate.
But the thing is - we know these are all of simulations of reality. They make no effort to convince us otherwise.
Yes, developers want their games to look highly realistic. But no one is booting up Remedy’s award winning Control like they’re going into the actual matrix (thank goodness). It’s escapism entertainment.
In terms of video games - the future is effectively now. The games we dreamed of as kids, they are now in our hands. I would say ‘what a time to be alive’, but…
Generative AI doesn’t feel quite the same.
Yes, it can still be a form of escapism, and certainly can provide entertainment - but in more and more cases various entities are now trying to pass it off as actual reality.
Even for those of us who know what to look for with deepfakes, they can still be tricky to spot. We used to call out images that were photoshopped, but it turned out that was child’s play compared to what we have now.
I have mentally bookmarked that anything that released or was posted prior to 2022 can’t be a deepfake, because the tech wasn’t good enough yet at that point.
Now in my 40s and approximately half way through my life, I feel like so much dystopian sci-fi is coming true.
Society is becoming unrecognizable in some ways, and my excitement for the future has morphed - almost like a re-generated second ‘take’ of an original image prompt in Midjourney.
Cue Jack Shephard:
But we can’t go back.
Well, unless we get another Carrington Event.
The Carrington Event (1859) was the most intense geomagnetic storm in recorded history, and caused telegraph machines (the modern communications technology of the time) to spark and catch fire (but also continue to work even if unplugged).
It was caused by a Coronal Mass Ejection (aka a Sunburst), and if something like that hit us now (which almost happened in 2012), it would likely cause continent-scale power grid failures, long-term transformer damage, satellite disruption, GPS collapse, and major communication outages.
It would be very catastrophic for society, though still better than nuclear war because at least earth would still be habitable.
My whole life up until a few years ago, the future couldn’t have been anything other than cool and exciting.
Dystopian sci-fi never seemed like it could actually come true. We got touch screens, and internet, and ‘pretty damn good’ simulations via video games. But then it warped.
Now in the age of gen AI and deepfakes, never knowing what is actually real is much scarier and more disconcerting than I could have imagined.
What is that infamous line?
“We’re excited to announce that we’ve successfully built the Torment Nexus from the popular novel Don’t Build the Torment Nexus!”
I still feel excitement for video games, and I am glad that AI has been able to help achieve health and science breakthroughs.
Technology is a tool and as with any tool - it matters who wields it and what their goals are.
For example, this video reveals that AI developers knew many decades ago that ‘AI psychosis’ was inevitable under certain conditions, yet current AI companies are dishonestly shrugging and saying ‘we’re just as surprised as you are!’
I have concerns that AI is being used primarily to steer us towards a future of control, rather than actual liberation - the outcome we’re being ‘sold’ on.
We’ve time-travelled ‘half way’ from the world I was born into, and the world that has been depicted in so much future-based fiction. What I am seeing unfold ahead is not quite the future I was dreaming of every Christmas Eve when I was younger.
Millennials are a hinge generation: born before the internet and forced to adapt to a world destabilizing faster than human norms can keep up.
Our generation is named after the turn of the millennium, and the generations before us placed some degree of hope into us of building a brighter future. And despite being surrounded by bright LED screens everywhere, reality can feel dark more often than I’d like.
I really want to say that I have more hope for the future, but just as deepfakes are making the now a blur, the reality I am seeing out the front window of the car feels like a fever dream I can’t seem to wake up from.
Dystopian science fiction was meant to be a warning, not a spoiler.
So what do we do?
We can’t put the AI genie back in the lamp any more than we could undo the internet. But we can choose what we build with the time we have left. Before the contrast between our real and digital worlds collapses entirely.
We can create spaces where truth and reality still matter. Where humans still make the art, and where the conversations are genuine - both thoughtful and vulnerable. Because that’s what real people are.
This way, we maintain the contrast between signal and noise.
That’s what I’m trying to do. Not out of optimism exactly, but out of stubborn refusal to let the Torment Nexus be the only choice we have.
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Lacey Artemis (she/they) is a neurodivergent speaker, consultant, and media producer. She is the founder of Neuromix Consulting which provides sensory comfort and accessibility consulting. She also writes the Beyond Quiet Rooms blog, also on Substack.
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