To me, it seems that Avatar could be taken as a “noble savage” dances with wolves trope on a surface viewing, for sure. But a second viewing really shows it as a post singularity society. Every entity on the planet has a neural up-link as a part of it’s organism. The Na’vi venerate a tree called “Eywa” (AI-wa?) that seems to be able to control most of the planet, and even aggressively “seed tags” a known invader only to later invite the invader into a situation that allows for the AI tree to upload the brain of an invader and seek a solution for the problem of the invasion.
For me, it seems that Avatar could be a good example of what a post-singularity AI might look like if the organism that initiated the singularity relied on a biological technology and symbiosis rather than a non carbon system for artificial intelligence.
the problem presented by the evolution of an up-link like ponytail and the seemingly godlike intelligence of the trees is what lead me to this line of thought, and i think when it is explored to it’s conclusion it satisfies Avatar’s formula better than “Dances with Wolves in Space”.
Is Avatar really formulaic?
To me, it seems that Avatar could be taken as a “noble savage” dances with wolves trope on a surface viewing, for sure. But a second viewing really shows it as a post singularity society. Every entity on the planet has a neural up-link as a part of it’s organism. The Na’vi venerate a tree called “Eywa” (AI-wa?) that seems to be able to control most of the planet, and even aggressively “seed tags” a known invader only to later invite the invader into a situation that allows for the AI tree to upload the brain of an invader and seek a solution for the problem of the invasion.
For me, it seems that Avatar could be a good example of what a post-singularity AI might look like if the organism that initiated the singularity relied on a biological technology and symbiosis rather than a non carbon system for artificial intelligence.
the problem presented by the evolution of an up-link like ponytail and the seemingly godlike intelligence of the trees is what lead me to this line of thought, and i think when it is explored to it’s conclusion it satisfies Avatar’s formula better than “Dances with Wolves in Space”.