blurs the lines between producer and consumer by asking both drivers and passengers to rate each other. Thus, the passengers become a form of product themselves, with higher ratings for both passengers and drivers held up as a sign of high status. Augmented reality video games, such as Ingress and Pokémon GO, further demonstrates this trend. Players become part of the product, appearing in other player’s games and competing for the same objectives. They are not paid as employees, but rather provide a form of free work and conform to expected patterns of behaviour; much as with robots. This raises the question of whether players are dehumanised while using these apps. The choice they offer is really no choice at all; it is prescription packaged as choice. This is just one element of how augmented reality presents a world now previously foreseen in science fiction. These games shape the world around them for the users, just as digital signage is beginning to do so in the wider world. At some universities, they can track where you are around a campus, and the signs will change to show content more relevant to you. They might recognise a member of staff and give staff notices, or if it’s a business student, give business notices. All this is taking what we are accustomed to online into real life; visit a page on the internet even once, and you are almost guaranteed to see ads for it everywhere for days to come. The examination of our relationship with technology, which is going to become more significant over time, is deep-rooted in sci-fi. Blade Runner 2049 shows how we create a sense that technologies are human, but they are clearly not. Professional scriptwriters create the text you read or here, one example is Emma Coats, who used to work for Disney Pixar, but who now writes for Google Assistant. In reality, all you are interacting with is an advanced algorithm, but we humanise them, which can be quite dangerous as we put too much faith in what they can do for us. At the other end of the scale, we also run the risk of underestimating these same machines. Stephen Hawking warned of what could happen. Everything is connected to everything else, and at some point it could all go massively wrong. This comes up in a lot of sci-fi. In The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, by Robert Heinlein, from 1966, a computer system on the Moon fires resources back to Earth. They plug more and more resources into it, and one day the machine wakes up. Suddenly, you don’t know where it will stop as it has access to all the Moon’s systems and it helps a group of revolutionaries take over. Sci-fi provides a vital resource for social theorists, a speculative framework to imagine possible futures and the impacts of consumption, imaging what the world we live in may become. Dr Mike Ryder is a Lecturer in Marketing. Lessons from science fiction: Frederik Pohl and the robot prosumer, by Mike Ryder, is published in the Journal of Consumer Culture. m.ryder@lancaster.ac.uk FIFTY FOUR DEGREES | 39 In reality, all you are interacting with is an advanced algorithm, but we humanise them, which can be quite dangerous as we put too much faith in what they can do for us. ʻʻ ʼʼ
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