I've long found the notion that the lesson of Jurassic Park, if a fictional story like that must be taken to have one, should be something like "science/genetic engineering is bad" or "you can't control nature" to be a bit silly, given that, well, it's a zoo. With pretty big animals, to be sure, but dinosaurs were animals still, not kaiju or dragons or whatever other fantasy monster, and some genetically modified to be somewhat bigger and lack feathers would still be such. It's a story about some people building a zoo badly because they didn't do their due diligence about the animals they had and cheaped out on staff and the systems they had for containing the animals, and somehow people get the take away that "these animals are special and can't be safely contained" rather than "letting rich people cheap out on safety is a bad idea".

Were one to write a broadly similar story where someone cheaps out on a park containing elephants and tigers, and they get out and maul some people, it'd be obvious, but give the tigers scales and make them born in a lab and suddenly it's a monster movie.

So... in the actual book(s), the problem is a bit of both.

The 'science' goes wrong because... well, they do not have complete dinosaur genome sequences.

And they fill in the gaps with a lot of DNA from a certain kind of frog.

A frog, that is later discovered to change its sex, transform from female into male, in environments/situations that are not sufficiently male/female balanced.

The explanation as to why the dinosaurs will not be a problem is that they only make female ones, so the population will remain exactly as they engineer.

... this does not work, because some of the dinos transform their sex, and begin breeding, which they essentially entirely did not account for.

So... 'the science' absolutely fucked up there.

...

Also in the book(s)... Hammond is much, much more clearly an unscrupulous capitalist... think roughly somebody that would have their accounts managed by Patrick Bateman, or maybe like a modern techbro, but his tech isn't crypto or ai or hyperscaling whatever bs app... its genetic engineering.

(cough 23andMe cough)

The original movie makes him into... much more of a genuinely enthusiastic, but more innocently naive, and sympathetic character... he is much more straightforwardly a thinly veiled corpo asshole in the book.

...

So the books feature capitalism, capitalists, as another majorly bad thing that fucks up.

The idea as I see is that... these two things, when both unrestrained and pursued recklessly, well one of them would be bad enough on their own, but when you combine both of them, shit gets real bad, real fast, high likelihood of catastrophic co sequences.

Its the 'tech is not inherently good nor evil, it all depends on how a society uses it' line of thinking.

It just says hey, here's a worst case scenario for you to chew on, how seriously you should consider this.

Like maybe a modern version of this would be LLMs.

Theoretically, an LLM on its own, used reasonably, responsibly, can be a tool for arguably mostly good. You could theoretically power one of these things with wind, solar, geothermal, have a societal structure where its provided as a controlled and regulated public good, not a private for profit business.

But when you couple this with the ravenous nature of capitalism, well, a whole fuckton of shit starts cascading out of control into negative consequences... vital processes and info get fucked up by LLMs hallucinating shit and make heuristic decisions en masse that lead to say, millions of people being denied or charged out the ass for healthcare...

Major corporations massively downsize their work forces and replace them with 'good enough' (but not really, actually) LLMs... which then craters demand in a consumption based economy, so now we have a Great Depression 2.0...

And the widespread usage of these things to answer anyones questions and do everyone's home or coursework, means that now humans are net stupifying themselves, as they no longer need to learn how to do critical analysis, research and source verification, etc.

...

Its been a while since I've seen the original movie, fhe first sequel... and then yeah, never saw anything after that, because they just look immensely, increasingly stupid and nonsensical, not even having internal logic that is coherent or consistent... so I can't well comment on how the movie universe has evolved.

if you build a perpetual motion machine and it eats the postman from seinfeld... you still made a perpetual motion machine

If anything Jurassic park is basically a lesson in properly vetting your staff.

Everything that happened happened because Dennis was the only IT guy and basically could do whatever he wanted with zero oversight. It's not like the dinosaurs were going to break out on their own, even the raptors only got out because the fences were turned off.

No no no, it's all about paying your IT people well and being nice to them. If John had been nice to Needry, then Needry wouldn't have needed to betray him. Pay your IT people, be nice to them and everything would have been fine.

Would be nice to have an pet velociraptor. Never shown correctly in the Jurasic Park movies. They are not bigger than a turkey

The new movies suck ass because they try to make science the bad guy, but not only is that a shit story we all see through, but it still reads as capitalistic greed and hubris, but now the movie feels like it doesn’t know what it’s talking about.

Jurassic Park is about capitalist hubris.

Jurassic World is about why we should not allow BD Wong to create the reptilian equivalent of the torment nexus.

I mean, it's about both, but... do people really not catch the whole angle about capitalism and greed? Newman straight up gets everyone killed for a pay day, and doesn't even make it out himself. The only way it could be more obvious is if it had giant flash red text.

gloriously right

Not really. The dinos were half-baked imitations, not exact replicas. And they evolved in ways the scientists didn’t anticipate, because their reach exceeded their grasp.

There’s definitely an anti-capitalist message, but don’t dismiss the warning about prematurely greenlighting high-stakes scientific initiatives. That’s relevant to the modern world, no matter what our economic model is.

LLMs come to mind. There’s a section of the AI-skeptic folks that say the only problem with AI is the profit motive. I’m not so sure. People will use tech to do all kinds of horrible shit even if they don’t stand to materially benefit. Just look at 4chan.

I saw one of the more recent-ish movies. One of the dinosaurs removed its subdermal tracking device and the humans find it because it has a big blinking light bulb on it. A big blinking light bulb on a subdermal tracker. Are these movies self aware? Was that supposed to be a joke?

I mean, the science did go wrong too. They tried making dinosaurs all one gender but used DNA from an animal that can spontaneously switch genders. Sounds like they fucked up to me.

A cautionary tale about Tech-bros. Should have listenend to it.

Well... As they point out in the World movies the creatures were never dinosaurs. They were generic chimeras that looked like dinosaurs.

I never understood the whole "They're making a weapon" plotline though. Unless the weapon makers are either nihilists or libertarians. Oh!

Edit: caveat, I've only seen one of the world movies and then a trailer for one of the others.

It's much more clear, especially if you read the book, that JP is about accountability. All throughout the book, as shit's going sideways and people are dying, everyone's playing hot potato with accountability. At the end, Grant forces Genero into investigating a wild raptor nest with him, in spite of Genero's protests that he's "just the lawyer" because somebody has to take some accountability.

Even the capitalist hubris is done wrong.

They knew how to activate the dwarfism gene. They could have been selling pygmy raptors and rexes as pets to everyone. At the right size they'd be no more dangerous than dogs or cats.

But no; we need a theme park that eats people.

It's funny though, reading those books it seems that Michael Crichton has deep disdain for scientists.

They spared no expense.