Universal Basic Superman
We need a vision to rally behind collectively in order to ensure we have a bright future. There's no better example than the ending of James Gunn's Superman.
To many, the future now seems bleak. Authoritarianism is on the rise and technology is disrupting entire industries through rapid advances in automation. Dostoevsky said that “beauty will save the world,” an idea that may seem so trite and quaint on the surface, but there is key truth to it. In order to birth a better future, we must first be inspired by a vision of what that future looks like, a north star that can guide us all towards the right destination over the horizon. In order to make this star as universally appreciable as possible, I suggest we go with an example from mainstream pop culture: James Gunn’s Superman (2025).
This is not to say everyone should be using superpowers to thwart crime — though we are witnessing a blossoming of technology that acts like a force multiplier, and good people need to embrace, rather than eschew, that technology to not be bringing a knife to a gun fight. As much as many people will not want to hear it, the only way to stop a bad guy with an AI is a good guy with an AI.
Particularly, I want to focus on a scene at the very end of the film. Superman returns to the Fortress of Solitude, his needs tended to by robots, as his injures are rapidly healed through processes that seem downright magic all while he immerses himself in videos of his loved ones. “I’m listening to the music with no fear / You can hear it too if you’re sincere,” Iggy Pop croons in the Teddybears’ “Punk Rocker” as we close on or hero and the credits roll.
As silly as it might sound, this encapsulates what the future should look like: humans are liberated from drudgery, problems that once were terrifying are now easily solved, and we have the ability to focus on taking in the parts of life that we love and are meaningful to us, a wide grin on our face. Everyone should be able to experience what Superman is in that moment, one that is, critically, not at all about his extraordinary abilities but simply being bathed in emotional warmth and unburdened from worry.
Obviously, Superman is a member of a different species from a futuristic planet, and realizing this potential is far easier said than done. But technological progress continues to accelerate, and we can now see continual, meaningful, measurable progress towards these goals. AI is rapidly advancing, automated cars are filling the streets, medical breakthroughs are becoming more frequent, and robots are mastering more tasks. GLP-1 agonists have taken the world by storm, though there are a myriad of other peptides with beneficial effects besides weight loss with the potential to revolutionize medicine. Increasingly, we are able to successfully treat cancer through immunotherapy, turning the patient’s own immune system against the tumor.
None of this is to say that the “Universal Basic Superman” outcome is guaranteed — it is a future for which we have to fight. The gains of these advances are not equitably distributed, and even if we attain a post-scarcity level of abundance across a myriad of industries, that does not mean those goods and services will reach everyone’s hands. We have to fight for this future, not simply imagine it.
There is a large contingent of left-leaning people who simply hate any form of automation and root for it to go away “when the bubble pops.” The frenzied venture capital speculation on technologies like AI is undoubtedly unsustainable — but in the same way the dot-com bubble was unsustainable. The internet didn’t disappear when the bubble popped, even if a lot businesses were relegated to the dustbin of history.
Instead of looking back at a past that we can reclaim — a form of conservatism from supposedly “progressive” people — we need to be adapting and preparing ourselves for the world to come. The choice is not between the cyberpunk dystopia future and RETVRN but for 2010s technology but rather between cyberpunk and solarpunk. Simply saying that AI is here to stay will not be enough to sway some people, however, they need a vision of a future for which to fight.
You can call it silly or ridiculous, but nothing in the recent mass media zeitgeist better captures the exact sense we should hope to instill in us all. It’s understandable to be skeptical, but without a vision to rally behind, the future is already lost. So I call upon you all: fight for Universal Basic Superman.