An impertinent logline of Devs – a Sci-fi television miniseries created, written, and directed by Alex Garland – might recite: ‘San Francisco Ceo spends billions of dollars and kills people to allow scientists to find out that history and philosophy are the best tools to investigate the main human questions: ‘‘Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?’’
This blog-article is not a series review and does not mean to attack Garland, who is one the most influential sci-fi writer of the last decade with visionary movies such as Ex Machina (2014) and Annihilation (2018). On the contrary, I will argue that Garland is a contemporary genius of humanities. In this case I use the word genius in both of its two meanings: (1) a person who has very great and rare natural ability or skill, especially in a particular area (2) a guardian spirit and protector of a place, a group of people, an idea.
The problem is also the solution: Garland is a humble genius with a degree in history of art. His sci-fi works are built on his sense of intellectual inferiority to scientists. Garland himself explains how he crushed the expectations of his Nobel prize winning grandfather and developed this artistically fruitful frustration. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXsnxFJMAXk]
Garland’s personal experience and his works both show an apparent celebration of science and defeat of the humanities.
However, if you scratch the surface everything in Devs is happening in the realm of humanities. The CEO creates the Devs division to work with a super-quantum computer that can reproduce images and listen to sounds from our history. By looking at the past we try to understand the present and the future alongside the protagonists. The main theme tackled in the series is the philosophical debate ‘determinism v.s. free will’ [See for example Pierre-Simon Laplace’s Demon (1814); https://theconversation.com/devs-explaining-the-philosophy-at-the-centre-of-alex-garlands-mind-bending-tv-show-137507]. Even the series finale is an updated version of Plato's allegory of the cave.
Nevertheless, the Devs team includes only know-it-all scientists working on hermetic line of codes. What is striking is that this is totally acceptable for the audience – including me –and the reviewers. As a society we are conditioned to believe that science can find the objective, precise and useful truth with complicated methods that the common man cannot understand. On the other side, humanists create just confusion with their vague words and fixation for anachronistic problems.
As I said, I acritically accepted this narrative too. But the historian in me woke up when the Devs team used the quantum computer to project on a screen the crucifixion of Jesus according to the classic iconography developed centuries later the alleged event. Everybody can open the Wikipedia page Crucifixion of Jesus’ to understand that the classic iconography might not reflect the historical events [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crucifixion_of_Jesus]. If the scientists show us an image of crucified Jesus, the historical debate is closed. Jesus existed, he was white with long brown hairs and blue eyes, and he was nailed on the traditional two-beamed wooden cross by the Romans. The CEO does not need an expert of historical linguistic to state with certainty that Jesus is speaking Aramaic.
Can we trust the quantum computer given that the scientists and the CEO warn that every time they run the projection they’ll get a slightly different outcome? This happens also in our reality where nobody fully understands and can predict how large language models – such as ChatGPT – works. [https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/03/04/1089403/large-language-models-amazing-but-nobody-knows-why]. In this case there is at least scientific transparency, but what about in case of bad actors? It is commonly accepted that institutions and private companies are gate-keeping us. We have to accept their undebatable scientific truth.
Garland knows that we (the average watcher) do not fully understand the ‘magic of science’. Even the CEO behind the curtains fails to grasp what his team is doing: ‘He’s not a fucking genius, he’s an entrepreneur’, reveals a character. Other characters attempt to explain us interpretation of quantum mechanics: Penrose, Broglie-Bohm pilot wave theory, Copenhagen interpretation and Hugh Everett’s deterministic many-worlds theory. ‘It’s just using it as a fancy-sounding buzzword’ affirms Dr. Scott Aaronson, professor of computer science at the University of Texas at Austin. [https://www.theringer.com/tv/2020/4/10/21216149/devs-hulu-quantum-physics-philosophy-alex-garland].
Devs is a trojan horse. This is the genius of Garland, the protector of humanities. The show only seems to be about cutting-edge Silicon Valley technology. If you know how to look at it with humanistic eyes, it is about the eternal questions and the alleged answers by Devs or better: Deus (God). In fact in the last episode, the CEO reveals that the letter ‘v’ in Devs meant to be a Romans letter ‘u’. In the climax of the series, the older member of the Devs team – Stewart – rebels against the CEO by channelling the power of humanities. Stewart relies on Philip Larkin's poem ‘Aubade’, William Butler Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’, and the Roman general Mark Anthony, a historical and Shakespearian character. The CEO ignores any literary reference and cannot even guess. Stewart bitterly states: ‘Such big decisions being made about our future by people who know so little about our past’.
Garland’s Devs gives us hope by establishing once again the centrality of love, relationships and personal views. This shows force us and the scientists to admit our limits in constructive ways. There is always something more that we cannot understand and there is not one truth. When they tell us that AI or any other technology will inevitability dictate our future we can think about Lily, the protagonist of Devs. She is the first free will anomaly, the embodiment of defiance against Deus' predictive algorithm.
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