THE FUTURE…

WALLE is a great movie. It’s subtle commentary wasn’t simply targeted to Americans, but rather the human tendency to want the easy way out. Technology, for the most part, has been used to make life simpler, easier, and more efficient. However, WALLE does a wonderful job of getting the audience to question whether or not “simpler, easier, and more efficient,” is the way to creating a better life. What exactly is life is the question driving WALLE. Who is more human, the robots who feel, think, act, or the people stuck in their chairs going wherever they are told? The idea that this may one day happen is fuzzy, since the economic factor would mean some could grow fat and sit in chairs, while others would not, yet the overall point behind WALLE is brilliant.

Yet, as I ponder the question of the future, I can’t help but see a fork in the road. Certainly human kind growing fat and lazy seems likely. But, just as technology is used to make life easier, it is also used to make life longer, safer, and more idealized. Medicine, gyms, diets are all created based on scientific principals with the basic goal of making human life longer, better, and healthier. In addition, medicine and science has also been used to promote a specific form of beauty based on outer appearance and weight. I can foresee in the future  humans completely encased in metal, much like Ironman. But instead of the metal being used as a weapon, it is simply used as a shield, designed to keep people safe from guns, knives, and germs. It would also keep people from the eventual saggy breasts, laugh lines, and other various signs of aging that are associated with growing older, and therefore closer to death.

The market would explode once these protective metal casings are created and marketed to the masses. People would buy them at lightning-fast speeds, believing it would make life safer. It would also give them a measure of control over what other people saw. The metal outer layer could be altered in any number of ways to look attractive. Of course, people who could not afford this protective barrier would be left vulnerable. Vulnerable to violence, to natural laws, and to time. Perhaps, overtime, these people, the poor people, would disappear as they are killed by illness, age, and bullets.

All in all, I’d say more films need to be made about the future, if only to remind us of the dangers inherent in near-sighted thinking. People at the forefront of technology, medicine, and other sciences need to contemplate their experiments and products with far more wisdom than perhaps the average admission counselor. Contemplating the ways our actions now could lead to a better, or far worse, future is the only way we can ensure a far more happier world than the one depicted in WALLE, 1984, or any other futuristic story.