You can Actually Live in a Sci-fi Movie

There is a stage during one's life where you realize that you are not going to succeed at building the spaceship in your nice, grassy back yard out of spare bicycle wheels and the wheelbarrow that you just freed up from last week's train track experiment. "Reality" starts coming into focus as the only thing that actually exists instead.

For some people, me included, this is followed by watching a ton of Star Trek, reading Harry Potter and wishing that you lived in one of those worlds where interesting things happen all the time & you personally have the possibility of making a difference. Unlike the real world, where the only viable business ventures are multinationals that are Really Good At This and are impossible to compete with, where everything that you could sit down & try inventing has been invented already, and everything looks... just... excruciatingly normal.

Specifically, if we were to assign a genre to "reality", it'd be a mix between a boring documentary and a sitcom consisting mostly of filler episodes where the same predictable things happen over and over (with some fun / dramatic / sad parts that you'll remember later).

You eventually learn to appreciate the art in this though. Enjoy it, even. And appreciate that the backstory here is impressively deep; there aren't many plot holes or developments that were only hastily made up by the writers to make things superficially more exciting. True Tolkien level feel of consistent world building here.

Wouldn't be living in a sci-fi movie still kinda enticing though...?

There are some people who do try. As per Elon Musk, "the future should look like the future". So he keeps naming his drone ships after Iain M. Banks starships and has his companies produce things that look like these:

Pretty much anyone can do something similar though; you can just embrace the fact that cool new tech is coming out all the time, and just do something with it. Sit on your balcony with a soldering iron, poking at wifi outlets, and imagine you're doing something important. It already kinda looks like a prop for a cheap-ish TV series.

If you follow up with some Python code to switch on the lights once you open your apartment door, you're already living closer to The Future than about 95% of comparable households in your area.

Or... if you're not into electronics... you could further change how the world looks like by just wearing one of these. And a trench coat.

Except... you might, at some point, start to question the genre of the movie you happen to be in.

It seems to be a common sci-fi trope where they're landing a 4 floor tall alien starship in a back yard, with it being pretty obvious that it's there... and most of the protagonist's family is mostly concerned with the potential damage to the flower beds and the annoying sun blockage, without being even slightly surprised or significantly distracted from paying full attention to the Sunday football game.

Are we entirely sure that this is not what's happening around us.

Just as a reminder, you can talk to computers now. And they understand what you're saying and will respond.

This might feel mildly boring now ("it can't even solve this university level math problem"). But then: imagine that you loaded one of these models onto an SD card and dropped it onto an unsuspecting CS undergrad from 2012. How is that for a movie plot?

... and does plus-minus 12 years really count that much?

Maybe wearing those glasses is entirely appropriate now.

(... credits to "SD card dropping" goes to... someone on X; will add link once I find the thread again)