New York, NY (Top40 Charts) Today, we're thrilled to share a peek at an ambitious project, the likes of which I think we can safely say we've never seen before: A Marvel Comics-backed hybrid graphic novel/sci-fi/rock opera. Marvel's 'The Prox Transmissions' launches today, and we have the exclusive excerpt. The collaboration between electrical engineering PhD/lead singer of
Starset Dustin Bates and fan favorite writer
Peter David (Ben Reilly:
Scarlett Spider, Spider-Verse), suffice to say it's pretty wild, fun, stuff. As you read, listen to the
Starset soundtrack, embedded below:
And before you dig into the comic, here's a preamble from
Dustin Bates, on the genesis of the project:
"As an electrical engineer researching for my PhD, I worked on a number of forward-leaning projects and became hyper-aware of the duplicitous effect of various emerging technologies. An autonomous vehicle, for instance, might reduce road deaths by orders of magnitudes while simultaneously replacing millions of service industry jobs in the taxi, ride sharing, trucking, and insurance industries. An unmanned robot might save a child from a burning building, or it might be redesigned as a frightening weapon of war. A UAV-enabled persistent surveillance system might save military lives by uncovering where killer IEDs were sourced, but it could also be used to spy on citizens indefinitely. It was this understanding that led to some of the technological explorations featured in The Prox Transmissions. The
Everything Machine, for example, represents the hyperbolic extension of the rise in automation we see today—the singularity in production—a machine that can print anything in abundance with no required labor. This seems wonderful on the surface, but with some exploration, it becomes clear that a society structured such as ours almost inevitably begins to devolve under its unintended consequences. It is The
Starset Society's intention to use examples like these to shed light on our own modern issues. Although we can't yet print complex items on a whim, we are at least heading in that direction-replacing vast swaths of labor jobs with automation. As the required labor pool collapses exponentially, can our societal systems keep up? Will the benefits of having greater production outweigh the ramifications of having fewer owners and benefactors of production? And will we still be able to distinguish the difference and employ free will in our economic decisions? These questions are rarely explored in the general discourse, and as just one effect, we are witnessing the rise of politicians and talking heads who create scapegoats rather than address the greater ramifications of technological advances. And it's only just getting started."
