Chris McCausland: The Future Review – The comedian can’t hide his feelings in this amazing show | television

IA celebrity has won a Strictly Come Dancing award, along with the Glitterball trophy, and they can expect the BBC to offer them a variety of vehicles for their new audience. Stacey Dooley ran out on New Year’s Eve and gave a makeup challenge. Rose Ayling-Ellis has had two documentaries and a guest spot on Doctor Who. Now, 2024’s hero, comedian and geek Chris McCausland, makes his major feature debut: Vision of the Future, a deep dive into the growth of artificial intelligence and technology and what it means for him and others with vision loss.

Most of the action takes place in Silicon Valley, where McCausland, who has gradually become blind in his early twenties, explores whether the land of big tech can give him “a whole new level of independence.” We meet McCausland as he uses his iPhone to choose his outfit for the day. He holds up a navy T-shirt, and the AI ​​app tells him — in an alarmingly human cadence — that it is clean but has some wrinkles that he might want to remove. Before the advent of voice-controlled smart assistants, McCausland had to cut the labels on each item of clothing into shape and use touch to figure out what he was looking at. It’s a primer for anyone observing how far technology has already come, and how, for many people with disabilities, such innovations aren’t just fun—they’re life-changing.

With that, McCausland is on his way to seeing the future, and AKA meets with the head of accessibility at Meta. There’s a quick line about Facebook’s parent company’s issues with “privacy and data governance violations,” which is like describing Hannibal Lecter as having problems invading personal space. I wonder if the producers missed a trick in not exploring the tension caused by having the lives of people with disabilities improved by corporations that cause so much harm to the wider society. But McCausland put on his meta smart glasses before we had a chance to philosophize, and you can’t blame him for putting any concerns aside. “When you have a disability, you have to depend on others,” he admits. “And sometimes, you feel like a burden.” “The AI ​​doesn’t seem to be bothered.”

One feature of the glasses that’s not yet on the market is “live AI,” which can respond in the moment — as McCausland poignantly puts it — and answer “any of my questions about the world around me.” He points his face at the camera crew filming him and jokingly asks if they look like they’re doing a good job. The AI ​​vets the guys and makes sure they look really professional, as they’re using high-quality cameras and they seem to be focused. At this point, viewers of a certain age may find themselves experiencing flashbacks to the World of Tomorrow unveiling a new invention called the cassette player and feeling the fabric of time folding in on itself.

However, there is not a single minute to think about our death. We are facing a car that drives itself! San Francisco was one of the first cities in the world to introduce self-driving public vehicles. “My first time in a car by myself and it’s moving,” McCausland smiles from the back of a taxi as the front wheel turns on its own.

McCausland is a very likeable and charismatic host but not the type to give the producers any range of emotions. He gazes out at the bay in his smart glasses, and later claims that he “couldn’t care less” about bodies of water (he wants to use the glasses to go vinyl shopping and order a cheeseburger). But when he looks up at the blue sky and the AI ​​describes how the plane flies through the clouds, he can’t hide the fact that he’s clearly moving, if only for a moment.

After finishing on the West Coast, McCausland goes to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston (MIT). There’s a lovely scene in which he tests out a bionic limb designed by a scientist after becoming an amputee himself, but it’s the possibilities of healthcare that make for amazing television. In addition to treating conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease, the nanochip — which is injected into the bloodstream and reaches a 10,000th of the width of a human hair — could in the near future be used in brain surgery to effectively replace the photoreceptor cells that cause McCausland’s blindness. Deblina Sarka, a technology engineer at MIT, told McCausland that she could not only restore his sight, but make him superior to other humans.

This happens when another presenter has a tearful speech on camera. But it’s McCausland. So he suggests they make a follow-up documentary where he allows Sarka to inject his brain to give him high-definition night vision to “defeat you all at Laser Quest.” You can almost hear the BBC executives calling their insurance provider.