Of Plutonium and Profits: Why Doc Brown Wouldn't Get Funded

Some writer with too much time on his hands decided to get weepy about Back to the Future turning 40. Forty. Christ. I’ve got bottles of whiskey younger than that, and they’ve seen twice as much action. But the piece landed on my screen this morning, wedged between an ad for a memory foam mattress and another one for a goddamn AI that promises to write my emails for me. The irony was so thick I could’ve cut it with the dull knife I use to slice limes.

The article gets one thing right: Doc Brown was the real deal. A glorious, wild-eyed lunatic burning through his family’s money on a vision he got from falling off a toilet. You can’t make that up. That’s pure, uncut, 100-proof humanity. He wasn’t trying to “disrupt” the horse and buggy industry or “optimize” temporal displacement. He just wanted to see what was coming. He was a man with a magnificent, stupid, brilliant idea, and he chased it down with the same kind of doomed intensity I see in the eyes of the guy at the end of the bar trying to convince the waitress he was almost a contender.

Doc built his time machine in a garage, surrounded by junk and half-finished inventions. It ran on stolen plutonium. It was dangerous. It was beautiful. It was the product of a singular obsession, the kind that keeps you up for three days straight, fueled by cheap coffee and cheaper gin, until you either have a breakthrough or a breakdown. Usually both.

Now look at the clowns running the circus today. The article nails it with this Sam Altman character. The new Doc Brown. He wouldn’t be caught dead with grease on his hands or a crazy glint in his eye. His hair is perfect. His words are focus-group-tested. He talks about “elevating humanity” and “artificial general intelligence” with the same dead-eyed sincerity as a mortician selling you a deluxe casket.

Where Doc Brown stole plutonium from terrorists—a messy, desperate act for the sake of science—this new breed of messiah hires retired generals to glad-hand the Pentagon for defense contracts. The rogue is gone, replaced by the board member. The mad scientist has been swapped out for the PR-managed CEO who uses words like “governance” and “alignment” to mean, “How can we make sure nobody stops us from printing money and owning the future?”

They talk about safety, but it’s the safety of their stock options, not our souls. It’s a different kind of obsession. Doc’s was the obsession of an artist. Theirs is the obsession of an accountant. They’re not trying to see the future; they’re trying to issue a press release about it, to get ahead of the Q3 earnings call. They want to version it, patent it, and sell it back to us as a subscription service. Future-as-a-Service. I need a drink just thinking about it. Let me just top this off. The ice is melting, just like my patience for this whole damn charade.

The real magic of that DeLorean wasn’t the flux capacitor. It was the flaw. It was the chaos. Marty McFly gets sent back and immediately screws everything up. He almost erases himself from existence by accidentally becoming a romantic prospect for his own mother. It’s a story about the glorious, unpredictable mess of cause and effect. It’s a warning that you can’t poke at the timeline without getting your fingers burned.

These new gods of code don’t see the mess as a problem to be avoided; they see it as an inefficiency to be eliminated. They want to smooth out the bumps. They want to predict your choices, nudge your behavior, and engineer your desires until the timeline is a clean, straight, profitable line from cradle to grave. They call it “personalization.” I call it a cage with invisible bars.

Humanity isn’t a problem to be solved. It’s a condition to be lived. It’s about making mistakes. It’s about falling for the wrong woman, betting on the wrong horse, getting into a fight you know you can’t win. It’s about the freedom to be a magnificent screw-up. These guys, with their talk of AGI and scaling solutions, they’re trying to write the code that edits out the screw-ups. They think they’re building a utopia, but what they’re really building is the world’s most boring prison.

I’ll light another cigarette. The smoke curls up and obscures the screen for a moment, and it’s a relief.

The article mentions that Doc, at the end of it all, decides to destroy the time machine. He looks at this incredible, terrible power he’s unleashed and says, “No more.” He chooses humanity over the machine. He tells Marty his future isn’t written yet. That’s the real kicker. It’s an act of monumental humility. It’s a genius admitting he created something too dangerous for anyone, including himself, to handle.

Can you imagine one of today’s tech titans doing that? Can you picture them standing in front of Congress and saying, “You know what? This whole AI thing is a bad idea. We’re lighting the servers on fire and opening a bait and tackle shop instead. The potential for catastrophe is too high.”

Of course not. They’d rather risk global annihilation than a dip in their company’s valuation. They’ll talk about “guardrails” and “ethics boards” while their engineers are in the back, bolting a bigger engine onto the damn thing. They have no humility. They’re not chasing wonder; they’re chasing omnipotence. They don’t want to be Doc Brown, the brilliant crackpot who took a peek behind the curtain. They want to be the curtain. And the stage. And the guy selling the tickets.

So, yeah. Back to the Future is 40. It feels like a lifetime ago. A time when you could still imagine an inventor who wasn’t also a billionaire with a god complex. A time when the future was a mysterious country you might one day visit, not a product being designed in a boardroom to control you.

They say the future is whatever you make it. Fine. I’ll make mine with a glass of bourbon in one hand and the middle finger of the other extended firmly in the direction of anyone who tries to sell me their pre-packaged, optimized, and utterly soul-crushing version of tomorrow.

Time for another. The bottle’s not empty yet.

Source: Back to the Future turns 40. What it says about tech in the AI era