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Core Memory · 3 min · Oct 28, 2026

Positive science fiction takes more work to imagine

NSNeal Stephenson · Author & co-founder, Lamina1

Neal Stephenson says dystopian films can make an impact with familiar images like the fallen Statue of Liberty.

In this episode

Full episode
  1. 17:25Uncertainty can make an AI arms race hard to pause6 min
  2. 1:27:14Education tools should start with teachers’ real needs5 min
  3. 1:20:32Unproven launch systems struggle to insure payloads2 min
  4. 1:05:58Stephenson left Blue Origin when its work shifted to engineering4 min
  5. 1:14:12A tall tower could double payload mass to orbit6 min
  6. 55:06Fortnite story worlds can use AI without generating their visuals7 min
  7. 25:02Tech leaders' investor duties shape their choices3 min
  8. 47:19Positive science fiction takes more work to imagine3 min
Up next · The Builders with Walter IsaacsonMusk says he stayed in government too long5:22
“you do have to, um, to, to, to do some pretty hard imagining.”
NSNeal Stephensonat 48:43 · Core Memory
48:43

Takeaways

  1. A single familiar image can make a dystopia instantly legible.
  2. Positive futures need more than repurposing today's scenery.
  3. Star Trek is an example of investing in a coherent future world.

About this segment

Neal Stephenson says dystopian films can make an impact with familiar images like the fallen Statue of Liberty. Positive futures require inventing what a better world actually looks like.

NS

Neal Stephenson

Neal Stephenson is author of Snow Crash, The Diamond Age and D: Heavy Water.

Author of Snow Crash and The Diamond Age who coined 'metaverse' and co-founded Lamina1, an open-metaverse blockchain.

  • Ashlee Vance, Host · CEO, Core Memory

    Wrote the best-selling biography Elon Musk; covered tech for Bloomberg Businessweek, The Economist and The New York Times.

From “Neal Stephenson On AI And What Comes Next”, Oct 28, 2026. Watch the full episode

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

  1. 47:22

    make the worst films though yeah well so i mean this is a kind of hobby horse of mine for a long time but i i do think that um in my theory is that the big bang of this was the the last shot of planet of the apes where you see the statue of liberty it's fallen over you know and um it's a super powerful image and um uh but a very inexpensive one right so i mean they got a model of the Statue of Liberty, and they kicked it over and threw some dirt on it. And, you know, uh, so that was a, uh, a really cheap and easy way to make a very powerful image. And so you kind of see this and a lot of post-apocalyptic dystopian movies, you see, um, you see the examples where they've just taken something that exists today and sort of, you know, bang it around and throw some dirt on it. And, you know, it, it looks cool.

  2. 48:31

    Uh, and it doesn't require a big imaginative, uh, investment. Okay. Whereas if you're trying to, uh, show a more, um, a more, uh, positive kind of future, you know, you do have to, um, to, to, to do some pretty hard imagining. Uh, and, um, you know, at this thing I was at this XPRIZE things I was at, one part of the program was, uh, a, uh, documentary called, uh, the 60 year mission, uh, which is a documentary about the creation of, uh, of Star Trek and Gene Roddenberry and, and all of that. And, you know, they had to, uh, put some energy into imagining what that future world was, was going to look like. And, um, so that's the kind of thing that you have to do if you're going to create any kind of positive science fiction. And I don't think it's tremendously hard, but, um, it's just, it seems to be just the path of least resistance for, um,

  3. 49:42

    for for movie companies and tv companies to kind of go the the dystopian route yeah okay okay so they have to try harder be more creative yeah i think so um so there's a person on our staff