I, ROBOT
Steve and I went to see I, Robot last night and enjoyed it very much--much more than I expected. Not only is Will Smith as charming as always, but the script is tightly written and the design creates an immersive experience.
The way the movie simultaneously remains faithful to and subverts Asimov's technocratic rationalism put me in mind of this essay by Greg Benford, who has done his own reworking of Asimov.
Even early sf presumed that elites should rule and that information should flow downward, enlightening the shadowed many. Sf's Shakespeare, H. G. Wells, was welcomed to speak by the Petrograd Soviet, the Reichstag, Stalin and both Roosevelt presidents. This company never doubted their managerist agendas, and Wells had his own.
Today, such mechanistic self-confidence seems quaintly smug. The genre looks to more vibrant metaphors, while cocking a wary eye at our many looming problems.
Sf writers are less interested in predicting and thus determining the future. They see themselves more as conceptual gardeners, planting for fruitful growth, rather than engineers designing eternal, gray social machines.