Plot: At an unspecified point in the future, it has become common for people to implant their children with devices that record everything they see and hear. The implants, called “Zoes” (two syllables), are organic, are implanted at the fetal stage of life somewhere in the central nervous system, and “grow” as the child grows. The implants are unnoticeable, and people are only told they have them once they hit adulthood. For technical reasons, the audiovisual contents of the Zoes can’t be downloaded until after the person dies.
Robin Williams is the main character and protagonist. The film starts with a memory from his own childhood where he is hanging out alone during a day trip to the countryside and encounters another boy his age, who is also alone. The two get on friendly terms and explore an abandoned building together. While walking over a narrow beam, the other boy falls over the edge, lands on his head and immediately dies. Kid Robin Williams could have saved him by grabbing him as he was dangling from the edge, but he hesitated and the boy died. He runs away and never tells anyone else about this traumatic and shameful memory.
Years later, Robin Williams has found work as a “cutter”–a sort of futuristic video editor who downloads Zoe recordings from the recently deceased and then edits them down into two- or three-hour movies that show all the milestones and positive highlights of their lives. These recordings are usually shown at funerals, given to loved ones, and serve as semi-official records of what happened in a person’s life.
The editing process entails deleting recordings of bad things the person did (like spousal abuse, child molestation, and everyday acts of cruelty), leaving a happy but false representation of the person’s life. Robin Williams’ choice of this profession clearly stems from his own desire to assuage his own guilty memories of the childhood incident. His character’s last name–“Hakman”–brings the symbolism to an even more obvious level.
The movie’s main conflict arises when Robin Williams is asked to cut the Zoe footage for a wealthy businessman who recently died. After reviewing it, not only does Robin Williams realize the man was a secret pedophile, but he also finds clues that the dead boy from his own childhood might have actually survived and crossed paths with the businessman. Added to the mix is the fact that Robin Williams is under a short deadline to do the cut and return the original footage to the family, and a dangerous terrorist group wants to steal the Zoe footage for blackmail purposes.
The year is never revealed in The Final Cut. Also, aside from the Zoes, the film depicts a world identical to our own–there are no flying cars, laser guns, robots, etc. Most people don’t even have stainless steel dishwashers. It’s a cop-out and makes the film more of a fantasy than anything else. By the time Zoes exist, it will be so far in the future that nearly everything about the world will be different from today.
Analysis:
There will be brain implants that record what people see and hear. In principle, this technology is possible and we already have crude versions of it. Implants that can monitor brain activity and turn a person’s thoughts into written text were recently invented to help people with speech disabilities. More advanced implants that monitor the parts of the brain that processed vision and hearing could someday decode the things a person was seeing and hearing. Alternatively, implants could be attached to the optic and cochlear nerves to directly monitor the stimuli being received by the eyes and ears (respectively), before any of it had been processed by the brain.
Safe, affordable central nervous system implants with capabilities like “Zoes” won’t exist until sometime in the 22nd century. However, average people will be able to effectively do the same type of lifelogging by the end of this decade by wearing the new generation of augmented reality (AR) glasses that are coming.
Brain implants will have “organic” characteristics. The Zoes “grew” along with their hosts, and since they were permanent, lasted a lifetime, and didn’t need to be removed for maintenance, they must have had self-healing capabilities and the ability to extract energy from blood or body heat. The devices thus had “organic” characteristics.
Some technologies will eventually gain organic attributes, and it’s clear this would be especially advantageous for devices implanted in “wet” brains and bodies. As one example, storage of digital information can presently only be done using artificial substrates like hard disk drives and flash drives, but scientists are developing ways to do it using DNA, which is an organic molecule. DNA is an incredibly efficient way to store information (a microscopic amount of it in just one of your cells can hold close to 1 GB of data), and existing cellular self-repair mechanisms are excellent at protecting the data contained in DNA from decay. This might be the ideal data storage medium for brain implants considering the enormous amounts of audiovisual data that would need to be saved.
Beyond that, advanced nanomachines and/or micromachines could fully bridge the gap between organic and synthetic since they would be artificial microorganisms and would allow macro-scale machines to grow, heal, and to move their parts in totally organic ways. Some robots will have supple bodies and will be made of what could be thought of as “artificial cells,” and some humans will have synthetic implants and body parts that look biological and have some properties of organic tissue. The line between “natural” and “artificial” might disappear, leading to life forms combining the attributes of both in refined ways.
Of course, that milestone won’t be reached anytime soon. Again, we’ll probably have to wait until the 22nd century to see this level of technology.
People won’t be able to control their own implants. Another two of the film’s conceits are that people can’t turn their own Zoes off or view the footage they have captured. Only after a person dies can the footage be downloaded (presumably, this involves brain surgery) and viewed (by other people).
Things will never turn out this way. Users will always demand control over their devices and their data privacy, and they will find Zoes useless if they can’t view their own recordings. Actual brain implants we create in the future will be able to transmit and receive data to and from external devices, and will also have simple features allowing users to do things like delete and play back recordings, or temporarily deactivate. (Also consider the legal, employment, and social consequences for a person if it were known that he was always recording everything he was experiencing.) If, for some reason, brain implants lacked these features, then people would instead use AR glasses for their lifelogging.
Machines will be able to recognize what is happening in video footage. A scene I really liked in The Final Cut was where Robin Williams used his computer to scan through the wealthy businessman’s Zoe footage. The data file is thousands of hours long, and the computer rapidly shuffled through every second of it, recognized what the dead man was doing each moment, and categorized each clip appropriately. It automatically sorted clips into groups like “Eating,” “Watching TV,” “At work,” “Walking around,” and “Having sex.” With the basic level of sorting completed, Robin Williams could then go through the clips and use his human judgment to select the ones best representing the man’s major achievements, milestones, and positive traits.
Well before Zoes are invented, computers will become smart enough to do this. In just the last five years, major progress has been made teaching machines to understand what’s going on in video footage, to accurately transcribe speech and recognize sounds, and to identify people through biometrics. Within ten years, a person will be able to upload his lifelogging footage from his AR glasses to a computer and have it sorted with the same speed, accuracy and thoroughness as Robin Williams’ computer. They will even be able to identify locations based on visible landmarks and other clues, and to make other intelligent inferences about the contents of clips.
Far from being a parlor trick or something that is only useful to obsessive-compulsives, this technology could help ordinary people. For example, in 10 years you could ask: “Who was that guy in the white jacket that I talked to at that party last week?” and your AR glasses will understand your spoken question, scan through its stored footage, and answer you, perhaps also offering an instant replay of the episode. It will be like having superhuman memory.
Parents will put implants in their newborn children. In the film, Zoes are implanted in their hosts in early childhood, meaning the decision is made by a host’s parent. It may sound unrealistic for parents to have unnecessary brain surgeries done on their children, but once Zoe-like devices are cheap and surgical techniques are more advanced, it could become common. It might be considered a great blessing for parents to enable their kids to re-live episodes from their childhoods later on. Just don’t expect any of this until the 22nd century.
What might become common much sooner is the installation of health monitoring implants in children. The devices would be smaller, simpler and cheaper than Zoes and would be placed in less vital parts of the body than the brain, making surgery far less risky. Such implants could monitor vital functions (e.g. – heart rate, blood pressure, respiration, temperature, cholesterol, hormone levels, diet, gene expression) and alert parents and doctors to health problems in their earliest phases, and to sudden medical emergencies. The implants might even double as location trackers for use if the children became lost or were kidnapped. If the price and risk are low enough, and the benefits are high enough, the natural parental instinct to do everything to protect one’s children could lead to monitoring implants becoming common in a few decades.
Will tech implants ever be worth it?
But in the interim, body-worn devices will satisfy those functions. As discussed in my Cloud Atlas review, external devices can do most of the same things implanted devices could, but at lower cost and without need for surgery. In my analysis of Ray Kurzweil’s 2019 predictions, I explained how smart watches had become affordable and could continuously monitor many of their wearers’ vital signs, warn them of irregular heartbeats, and alert the local paramedics if they detected “hard falls” followed by user nonresponse. More features, like blood pressure monitoring, will be added with time. Smart watches can also be used as tracking devices.
In my analysis of how accurate my predictions for the 2010s were, I also calculated that it was feasible in 2020 for an average person to record every waking hour of his life with a GoPro, and at a respectable 720p video resolution. The cost of storing the footage would be only $1 a day, putting the whole system well within the financial means of most people in rich countries. Of course, that would require the person to strap a small box to his forehead, which would look so silly few would do it. However, the new generation of AR glasses that will be commercially available by the end of this decade will be sleek and stylish, and have unobtrusive cameras. Hard disk prices will also keep declining, meaning it won’t be long until it costs mere pennies a day to store videos of one’s waking life.
With that in mind, AR glasses that give people the same audiovisual recording abilities as the Zoe brain implants will be affordable and available by the end of this decade. Smart watches that can closely monitor their wearers’ health and provide them with significant medical help will be available around the same time. Improved computer algorithms will be able to pool and analyze all of the data gathered by a person’s various devices to detect patterns and make sophisticated inferences. For instance, it could correlate your early-afternoon headaches with your cup of yogurt at breakfast, and inform you that you are probably going lactose intolerant. Your devices could give you real-time summaries of your health status and make hourly activity recommendations based on the day’s data (“Go for a walk”…”Breathe deeply to calm down”…”Take your medication”).
And very importantly, putting on these or other body-worn devices won’t require surgery, and if they ever broke or became obsolete, you could simply take them off and and throw them away. That won’t be true for body implants. So are cyborg implants merely another poorly conceived sci-fi trope, like laser pistols, which will never materialize?
No. Body implants like Zoes will ultimately make sense for humans to get, and will have important advantages over body-worn devices, but it will take a long time for the implants to become common.
AR glasses can only record what you are seeing and hearing, not what you are tasting, smelling, or feeling on your skin. Only a brain implant like a Zoe could capture those senses, as well as your moment-to-moment emotional states. If you wanted to truly re-live happy memories, an implant would be needed.
And while smart watch technology will reach impressive heights, it will be handicapped by its inability to access the wearer’s bloodstream. Devices inside a person’s body could monitor hormone levels, glucose levels, immune system activity, gene expression, toxin levels, and other important metrics, in addition to doing everything smart watches do. Implants could even stimulate your body with things like electric shocks to your heart, hormone dumps into your bloodstream, or neurotransmitter releases into your brain to counteract health problems. Even without any future cures for diseases or breakthroughs in reversing the aging process, such devices by themselves would significantly improve public health and lifespan.
These and other cybernetic devices will migrate into our bodies once we have found ways to make them totally unobtrusive and reliable, and once the cost and invasiveness of surgery dramatically improves (robot surgeons that work for free might help). Some limited ability to self-repair and to internally reconfigure to account for technology updates will also be needed, and the radically advanced nature of such technology is is why I don’t see the cyborg era dawning this century.
Four final points that weren’t covered in the film:
- Ubiquitous surveillance will reduce bad behavior. If people know they’re probably being recorded and the recordings will be stored forever and possibly shared with millions of people, they’re less likely to commit crimes or behave uncivilly. The effect is greater if they know that biometric analysis like facial recognition or voice recognition can easily uncover their real identities from video footage. Thanks to everything being recorded and to the world being populated by intelligent machines and posthumans that will lack berserker emotions and extreme stupidity, the 22nd century will probably be a very polite era.
- Having implants in your brain and body that monitor your surroundings, your behavior, and your physiological state could lead to a spooky condition where your personal assistant AI that is watching them could anticipate your thoughts, actions, and needs. If gifted with high enough intelligence and tasked with furthering your long-term enlightened self-interests, your AI could find clever ways to nudge or even control you. As a simple example, it might act like an angel on your shoulder and tell you through your ocular nerve “Don’t eat that pie. You’ve already consumed 2,300 calories today. You get a break on your health insurance premiums if I report you’ve been eating well.” More paternalistically, it might be able to release synthetic dopamine into your brain to calm you down from fits, or just plain take over your body if you were doing something highly illegal or self-destructive. Mind-influencing and mind-control could, along with ubiquitous surveillance, give rise to a very peaceful and harmonious world (or a dystopian one).
- Ubiquitous surveillance will create interesting tensions between peoples’ memories and what actually happened. The film touches on this when the brother of a recently deceased man remarks to Robin Williams that the video clip of a childhood boat trip was at odds with his own recollection. It’s beyond the scope of this essay to discuss this issue in depth, but the replacement of fuzzy human memories with clear, unchanging recordings will be a two-edged sword. Past traumas and failures would never be forgotten, but people would also be able to see their own actions through unbiased lenses and to see themselves in a more honest light.
- There will be “snitch apps” in the future. Once people have AR glasses, they will be able to download apps that automatically compare the faces of every person they encounter with mugshots of all known criminals and terrorists, and then report sightings to law enforcement. Even if just 0.1% of the population used these when in public, it would be highly effective. There might even be crowdsourced “Wikis” of non-criminal rude people (ex – “Karens” who had public outbursts made notorious by YouTube) whom you could also set your devices to look out for and to highlight for your avoidance or mockery. Likewise, your own reputation would be viewable to other people wearing their own AR glasses.
Links:
- “AI video analytics” is a rapidly developing field of technology devoted to improving machines’ ability to understand what they are seeing in video footage.
https://www.machinedesign.com/automation-iiot/article/21171867/the-rise-of-ai-video-analytics - Implants that can do simple functions like monitoring blood cholesterol levels already exist. As they get cheaper, smaller and better, they will get more common.
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-21841829 - DNA can be used to store computer data.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/29/science/using-dna-to-store-digital-information.html?_r=0