Why Upload Is Terribly Inaccurate According To Futurists

Science fiction is a tough genre to pull off, as it is usually tasked with commenting on the state of the world as it exists today while also giving fans a look at what the future could look like. This is, usually, done through the lens of technology in one form or another. "Upload," which is a science-fiction comedy show streaming on Amazon Prime Video, is no different in this regard. The series focuses on Nathan Brown (Robbie Amell), an engineer who finds himself uploaded to a virtual afterlife after getting in a mysterious and supposedly fatal car accident.

"Upload" dabbles in all sorts of subgenres, including satire and romance, but at the end of the day, it is very firmly bound in a science fiction world. It uses its more comedic elements to poke fun at the world we live in today, only at a heightened level. Namely, it uses its digital afterlives to comment on the commodification of pretty much, well, everything. "Upload" has been well-received by both fans and critics, garnering an overall rating of 94% on Rotten Tomatoes between two seasons.

However, there's one aspect of "Upload" that real-life futurists have taken issue with.

In 2020, GeekWire interviewed several futurists about "Upload" to get their take on the show and its technology. Richard Yonck, a Seattle-based author and futurist, enjoyed the show but found the upload technology far-fetched, especially given its 2033 setting. "Even the most rudimentary uploading is many decades away," he said. Yonck also took slight issue with the design of the virtual reality headsets, as they are what current headsets look like, but also wondered if this was a deliberate visual joke on the part of the producers and writers.

There was one aspect of the series that Yonck did enjoy a lot, however, and that was the malfunctioning and buggy artificial intelligence and advanced technology behaving in increasingly erratic ways. Yonck believes that this will be the actual reality for a long while after this type of tech is created in the real world. 

Still, while "Upload" may not be perfect or completely accurate when it comes to portraying realistic future technology, few science fiction projects are. After all, "Back to the Future: Part II" predicted self-tying shoe laces and a world populated by flying cars in 2015 and many viewers are still waiting for that to be the reality.