The giants of Silicon Valley are expensive in the series. Fiction no longer hides its worry about the progress of technology and the future it projects. Between the satires (Upload, Silicon Valley) and dystopias (Black Mirror, Westworld), the small screen shows an increasingly dark side of the somewhat wacky prophecies of the big players in tech.
Made for love [Faite pour l’amour, en VF], the adaptation of Alissa Nutting’s book created by Christina Lee, Patrick Somerville and Dean Bakopoulos, tackles brain implants. Aired this Thursday on MyCanal, the series tells the escape of Hazel Green, interpreted by Cristin Milioti (Palm Spring, A to Z), a 30-something stuck for ten years in a toxic marriage with Byron Gogol (Billy Magnussen), a wealthy tech actor. Cut off from the world in the “hub”, a high-tech ivory tower where her every move is monitored and recorded by sensors, Hazel decides to run away when her husband decides to install a brain chip. to merge his brain with his.
Gogol versus Google
From the first episodes, we have a feeling of déjà vu when we see the character of Byron Gogol land, a multibillionaire who plays the demiurges with blows of virtual reality, body control and delirium of all power. From the outset, its name makes you smile when you know the history of the search engine that was to be called Googol, in reference to a mathematical term and which ends up being called Google because of a typing error.
A kind of cross between the most emblematic technoprophets of the United States, his character sometimes suggests Ray Kurzweil, Google’s transhumanist guru who thinks he is defying death, sometimes the serial entrepreneur Elon Musk who believes he can increase the cognitive power of humans with his start-up Neuralink. We also think of Mark Zuckerberg whose invention -Facebook- now has the ability to know the smallest details of the privacy of its users.
In recent years, fiction has taken great pleasure in scratching the image of tech players. Far from presenting a complacent vision of the technological future, it dissects the less glowing aspects of the digital world and shows all its limits. A bit as if fiction played the role of a distorting mirror of reality to force society to question its uses. Silicon Valley explores the toxicity of the very masculine world of American start-ups while Westworld addresses the dangers of overly sophisticated artificial intelligence.
Criticism of brain implants
For its part, the excellent Black mirror anticipates worst-case scenarios in a world that has failed to appreciate the dangers of technology. And the theme of brain chips is not to be outdone. In “Back to image”, the last episode of season 1, Charlie Brooker’s series sheds a harsh light on human-machine interfaces. A chip placed behind the ear allows memories to be recorded and re-viewed. Liam, a young British lawyer, who doubts his wife’s loyalty, begins to watch every moment of his life over and over again, in search of the smallest detail that can confirm his suspicions.
In Made for love, Byron Gogol, who always wants to go further in the control of his wife, installs an electronic chip in her brain so that she can see everything she does. In both cases, the technology makes its user lose his mind, like Chris Dancy, the most connected man in the world whose life has been swallowed up by ultraconnection and who now advocates a moderate relationship. to technologies.
In reality, Elon Musk’s Neuralink has made great strides in the field of brain implants. In a video published in April by the start-up, we can see a monkey controlling the movements of a racquet with its eyes to prevent the ball from falling into the void, as one could do with a joystick, a touch screen or arrows on a keyboard. This video is proof that the implant works, that its algorithms are efficient and that humans will be the next to be fitted. To believe that fiction has decided to say “stop” to Elon Musk.