Review of No Other Choice — Spoilers
Between unmitigated progress, limited progress, status quo, and chaos what is your choice?
In the movie No Other Choice unmitigated progress comes with AI driven loss of human purpose — at least for the men. Women find solace in family, nature, the arts, and pleasure.
Two wives of “paper men” in the movie frequently remind their adrift husbands that there is another choice. However the movie hints that this alternative lifestyle will be a lesser one for many.
A third “paper man” tries to accept a non paper job / other choice lifestyle, but is regulated to a shoe salesman circle of hell. Even the wives chiding their husbands to forget paper, are clearly uncomfortable with the comparative emptiness of their existence.
The movie shows maturing in general to be a grim process of going from a glorious spring to a cold and rainy autumn. For those talented in the arts, like the daughter of the protagonist, the new world progress offers can be a beautiful one.
However for the talentless protagonist’s son chaos seems a better choice than progress. A lawless future of clinging to other men for comradery beckons to him.
But why not limited progress? Why not, as the Amish do, have each community think long and hard before deciding if a riding lawn mower is allowed or to limit their society to push driven ones?
In the movie limited progress is represented by the protagonist pretending to setup a fake paper company with the motto, “If we don’t use paper who will?” The second paper man applies by paper letter to the fake company and gets no response. Then he suddenly realizes that the response would be by mail and runs to check his otherwise never used mail box.
Both limited progress and status quo (IE zero progress) require a religious devotion that won’t be available to everyone. The Amish lose 20% of their young people to modernity. However the Amish have not rejected modern medicine and so progress that dramatically increases human life span could disrupt even the remaining 80%.
In evaluating the full effect of unmitigated progress the movie gives us a fourth paper man. The fourth paper man has been given everything modern society can give and yet this abundance ruins him.
He has a great job but works too many hours. His marriage is lost in the haze of an ultra-wealthy lifestyle as he chooses a house in nature and his wife prefers the city.
The fourth paper man’s fate is a real problem because in a world where all choices are available, and everyone chooses differently, it is difficult to form a coherent society. The protagonist's daughter is still built for that world as she plays cello solely for her own enjoyment, not others, and the family doesn’t even get to hear until the end of the movie.
So there is another choice and the protagonist’s daughter has made it. However this little girl is so alien to us that her thoughts can only be expressed as echoes of other’s dialogue. Even her musical notation is written in a language of her own invention.
She is capable of learning from her teachers, but already at a very young age only a full professor can teach her. The assumption is that soon only a handful of people on the planet will be able to fully comprehend what she is doing.
On the bright side the movie No Other Choice is doing well at the box office and shows that even in this cold, rainy autumn of human purpose their are still days when the sun shines.