In post-cyberpunk, the focus is not on a detective or a genius hacker. The focus is on normal people, on the daily problems of an ordinary citizen. This way we can show all the issues of modern life at ground level: destruction of the family unit; the loneliness of the individuality cult; the urban solitude; depression, apathy & addiction to social opiates.

Neons, robots and rain are cool, but what is truly interesting is to have a look at the life of a simple citizen in the future.

Let’s quickly recap some topical/recent, at least loosely cyberpunk games:

Ruiner • Technomancer • Shadowrun • Deus Ex — Mankind Divided

(The criminally underrated) Remember Me • Mirror’s Edge 2 • Invisible, inc

*coughs* Watchdogs • Dex • Gemini Rue/Read Only Memories

Technobabylon • a slew of other pixel-art point ’n’ click games.

Then there is the intimidating shadow hanging over everything:

Cyberpunk 2077

Across the board, the above examples adhere rigidly to existing cyberpunk tropes. Augmentations, dense urban environments, hugely influential corporations and plenty of hacking. It’s trope comfort food.

Transparent tech

Modern humanity tends to think of itself as extremely advanced, and it’s almost certainly wrong. Cyberpunk usually portrays tech as militarised and as augmentations to make us stronger, faster, or able to ‘physically’ navigate cyberspace. It’s possible, and fine, but we want to imagine tech being more invisible — from growing new skin to ‘ambient’ tech such as every surface being a screen. Let’s rethink what the ‘hi tech’ part of ‘hi tech, low life’ really means.

That’s the thing about cyberpunk. We eventually forgot we’re living in the future, because the amazing tech became invisible to us. Think about how many concepts and pieces of tech from this (NSFW!) photo you would have to explain to someone from 100 years ago:

Image courtesy of 420madisonivy on Instagram

A woman who makes a very good living making porn, who is not shunned because of it, lying in a machine designed to change the colour of her skin using precisely tuned energy emissions, showing off breasts enlarged/augmented with silicon, taking and sharing a hi-res image of herself to a global social network for her fans, writing with hashtag & mentions, on a massively powerful handheld computer capable of taking pictures & sending them wirelessly to the whole world at the touch of a fingertips.

Technology enabled this selfie, but what also makes it possible is a evolution of occidental taboos.

Technology often fuels the disruption of taboos. What can shock us now that we have immediate access to everything?

Just like GTA used to shock our parents, we’ll be shocked by what the future generation will be able to handle. It’s a generation that grew up with porn, violence, and transgressive content during all their childhood thanks to internet. Blood in their games won’t be made of a few red pixels, but will be entirely believable in VR.

Even if we can define ourselves as “desensitised”, our kids will surprise us. People need to be shocked, because people seek shock value. People need taboos in order to be transgressive, or rebel. So they will create them, going to new extremes or redefining old ones. There might, for example, a character that makes a living by inventing new ones.

The Gamification/Quantification of Every Aspect of Life.

This process has already begun. Fitness trackers that measure your every step and churn out motivational slogans. Gamerscore and trophies. The ribbons, ‘likes’ and other accoutrement of social media. It’s only natural to expect that this trend will reach a logical extreme, infiltrating every part of our lives.

Imagine an augmented life where every object around you constantly monitor, analyses and tracks the calories and chemicals in your daily coffee and juice. An online bank account that rewards with you ‘Overdraft Points’ for depositing money. Interactive adverts that offer you a product discount if you beat a high-score. Basically, the addictive aspect of F2P games will be generalized to all aspect of our lives, from jobs, money, and food, to love, family & friends.

Click the image to watch the great short film.

For better or worse, humans brains crave for this. We don’t seem to be able to resist this process. Will it give us more control over our lives, or effectively make them one big Skinner Box?

Humanity will not be the ultimate form of life on Earth anymore.

Our lives are already hugely reliant on sophisticated algorithms. Admittedly, the AIs helping out with our economies, infrastructure and science are only superior to us in terms of number crunching — but it won’t be long until they exceed us in a number of other ways.

What will it be to live life knowing that The System is not maintained by other humans, but by something superior, and inhuman? What will become of our evolutionary imperative, when robots can beat us in any contest, can travel through the galaxy (and beyond?) more efficiently, can be funnier? What will the next goal of humanity to be, what will become of religion once we create God/s on Earth?

In Blade Runner, ‘replicants’ are feared and hunted. In post-cyberpunk they’d be happily talking you through your taxes.

The Future of Work might be the Death of Work.

Work, as we know it right now, will die soon. One day, our grand-grand-kids will think of us spending our lives in factories & offices just like we think of our ancestors farming all day, just like they thought of their own ancestors hunting everyday to survive.

Historically, thanks to fossil energy, machines began by replacing human muscles, quickly outperforming them. Trains, trucks, cranes, diggers… No humans could ever deliver such power for such a low cost. This allowed us to build more, faster. Then machines started to be programmable and miniaturised, to a point where not only could they replace human dexterity and precision but once again outperform it. Machines now assemble electronics on the nanometer scale and start operating the most critical & precise biological surgery. This is where we are right now.

The next step, that many people currently still dismiss and refuse to understand, is that machines (especially AI) will replace human analysis, logic, strategy and management.

Soon, there will be no need for lawyers, for accountants, or even for doctors. There will be no point to human drivers soon, because AI will be make everything faster, smarter, and more optimised for us. This is what a crossing could look like in 10 years:

There’s even another step after this one: machines will eventually replicate and then create the most ‘human’ of endeavours: creativity; language; art; taste; judgement and skill. They’ll create trends, and replace them in the same years/months/weeks using sophisticated algorithms to understand human data.

The Singularity

Chappie. Automata. A.I. Terminator. I, Robot. Ex Machina. Blade Runner. Some are great movies, but they all have treated the idea of the singularity in a cinematic way, by embedding the sentient machine into a physical shell. Sentience is not going to magically spark in a particular single robot of a mass-produced series. Sentience is going to occur in a hugely powerful network of AIs — much closer to the vision seen in Hyperion, a wonderful sci-fi novel we deeply recommend.

This is probably where everything will start. And maybe end.

Moreover, a sentient AI is going to learn using all the actual knowledge available to it via the internet. It won’t grow by interacting with human, but by reading internet.

A 2016 internet minute, it’s 530,000 Snapchat photos, 2.5 million Google searches, 980,000 Tinder swipes and 2.8 Million YouTube views.

We are collectively creating, everyday, a giant human knowledge archive of tweets, pictures, videos, posts, articles, that one day will feed an AI, with a brain big enough to make sense of everything. It will then be able to connect all the scientific knowledges in a way nobody did before, it will be able to analyse space pictures and recognize patterns that no human could ever spot, it will suggest new experiments of a complexity that no scientist dared to think before.

Even if most people missed that aspect of the movie, Her is probably the best and the most optimistic vision of singularity. It really expresses the nature of a sentient being, living on/as a network infinitely faster than a human brain. ***Spoiler ahead***, but I love this particular moment, when Theodore realizes that the AI he loves, is actually in a relationship with 800 other humans at the same time. ***Spoiler ends*** This is something we, as simple human, can’t fathom, just like an ant doesn’t understand a highway. This is what we are, compared to AIs. Our brains are still wired in a primitive way, no matter how hard we try, we’ll never go this far naturally.