Monday: The Future Is Its Own Worst Enemy

[elfs]

Still tired. Still not sure why. An average day with the wrists... didn't do much writing but they still ached on and off. Better than the first few days of the injury, though, and I think they'll heal completely soon enough.

I decided finally to clean out my mailbox. I had nearly nine hundred emails in there, and now I'm down to about 130 or so. But they're the hardest to respond to, because each of them deserves an honest and serious response. That's a few hours of work. If you've sent me any mail in the past couple of months or years, I'll be replying as soon as I'm able.

Anyway, WarStoke made a response to my post about flash crowds, wondering aloud how soon it'll be we're all living in the future. It reminded me of Spider Robinson's recent rant about how too many "SF" fans are really just fantasy fans pining for a "good old days" that never were and that damned little science fiction is about "the future." The same point was made in a recent article in the Toronto Globe and Star, about the latest WorldCon, called A Genre In a Time Warp. The author of that article states, "Today, it is hard to imagine science fiction shaping or challenging social conventions, particularly when its core fans seem increasingly ritualistic and intent on celebrating aging giants whose best work is decades behind them."

There's a reason for that. The future is scary. It used to be that the future was hopeful-- that we'd have really neat starships, and robot servants, and meet nifty aliens, and stuff like that. Or the future was desolate, a wasteland, an apocalypse-- but these were warnings, meant to scare us off and discourage us from these toxic, radiological, biological disasters.

Now, neither of these seems that likely. Instead, we've got the computational future: the human species will separate into three groups: the Statics, who eschew all artifical modifications biological or otherwise, the Exuberants, who accept biological modifications and some mechanical but stay essential true to the brain evolution gave us, and the Uploaded, who decide, screw it, what really matters is my consciousness, the pattern of stimuli and response that makes up me and my me-ness and who, for whatever reason, move into completely computational realms.

Either that, or somewhere the combined computational capacity of the Earth goes asymptotic. There's a lot of unused computational capacity, and much of what is being used is used poorly, or repetitiously, while the overall number of petaflops of processing power available on the surface of the Earth doubles every two years-- without, mind you, a corresponding increase in power consumption. Despite the heat and power problems of modern machines, comparatively they're incredibly efficient compared to their predecessors fifteen years ago. When that happens, it'll happen so fast that we'll have no idea how to handle it-- what happens the day next will be different from anything happening now that we, here and now, will be as capable of comprehending it as a mouse is capable of understanding us.

Very few people want to hear these things: because those are the only valid possible futures we see right now. Well, there's one other: that we halt everything right now, stop all forward-looking development, jump with jackboots on anything that could lead to those possible futures, and wallow in our "sacred humanity" until the sun goes out.

Which is why the reporter probably missed those stories. Unless he want to the Singularity panel, he missed them. Instead, he gets things about how mainstream S/F reflects our current fears, or our understanding of feminism, or whatever other blather he ran into. He gets the history of the future-- and it's a good history; it gave us computers and waldos and space ships and yes, even communicators. But for most people, the really forward-looking science-fiction isn't fun, it's frightening. It's about giving up all cherished assumptions, about our inevitable extinction, it's about an open-ended future with no ending.

Comments

Words Fail Me

[nbarnes.livejournal.com]

I'd like to emphasize here that there is a [i]lot[/i] of very fine speculative fiction being written these days. Egan's 'Diaspora' or Bear's 'Slant' (I know you've read those, Elf, this for the benefit of the lurkers ;) ) are only the most popular/accessable/common examples. I'd also say that that sort of SF has been going in and out of style for ten years or more now. Frankly, I can't imagine a journalist with real perspective on what's being written and talked about in SF saying that the genre as bad as this one claims.

Moreover, I'd like to know exactly what we're supposed to be comparing the stuff to. Mainstream fiction, which seems to come in three flavours; Crichton, King, Rowling, and Clancy (the former, if not an 'SF author' in fact, is taxonomically damn close, and if the latter can be defended as writing anything other than hack near-future technophile SF (and doing it less well than Niven and Pournelle ever dreamed of) I'll eat my hat)?

Re: Words Fail Me

[nbarnes.livejournal.com]

Stupid markup failues. I wish they'd settle on <> or [] so I could just remember one. How about {}? I'm real good at typing {}. [] is just annoying, especially since I never used arrays since discovering the joys of the STL.

[(Anonymous)]

well i guess im a hopless romantic ;)
i honestly see a future for man kind sort of like the neuromancer novels and or maybe more torward "do androids dream of electric sheep" now both of these books were writen when i was either realy young or b4 i was born lol im only 22 but i feel that artist such as you elf and gibson and niven are on idealized tracts of the future either on the darker side or the light hmm

take the neuromancer trillogy a mega industrialized world were corperations rule and countries have all but cesed to exist
yet the net exist for those who enjoy the challenge were super intellegent AIs exist free floating among the ether poseing as new gods once the break free from the machines they once inhabited

bah oh well thats my stupid rant for the day hehe;)

--
warstoke

[zaiah.livejournal.com]

And then there is the "future" by which technological advances only serves to cue the natural biological/spiritual advances of the individual and then of the species such that reliance on any technology should no longer be necessary. Gotta love the growing up in a household with metaphysicians. ;)

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Never happen. We are a "technology." Meat has been Nature's quick and dirty way of getting to consciousness, but it is silicon that is destiny.

Singularities

[sarabande7.livejournal.com]

This by Bruce Sterling, from September 2000, in response to Jaron Lanier's "One Half Of A Manifesto:"

1. There is no one Singularity. Any area of scientific inquiry, pushed far enough, could provide its own native version of a cataclysm: biological, cognitive, mechanical, cybernetic, you could name it. If man is the measure of all things, then there probably is no measure by which we can't be made more than human.

2. A Singularity ends the human condition (because that is its definition), but it resolves nothing else. It would almost certainly be followed by a rapid, massive explosion of following Singularities. These ultra — cataclysmic events would disrupt the first Singularity even more than the first Singularity disrupted the human condition.

3. The posthuman condition is banal. It is crypto — theological, and astounding, and apocalyptic, and eschatological, and ontological, but only by human standards. Oh sure, we become as gods (or something does), but the thrill fades fast, because that thrill is merely human and parochial. By the new, post Singularity standards, posthumans are just as bored and frustrated as humans ever were. They are not magic, they are still quotidian entities in a gritty, rules — based physical universe. They will find themselves swiftly and bruisingly brought up against the limits of their own conditions, whatever those limits and conditions may be.

This comment is in direct response to "the stark cosmic horror of 'belief #6'" of Lanier's 'manifesto', which attributes to 'Cybernetic Totalism' the idea that: "biology and physics will merge with computer science (becoming biotechnology and nanotechnology), resulting in life and the physical universe becoming mercurial; achieving the supposed nature of computer software. Furthermore, all of this will happen very soon! Since computers are improving so quickly, they will overwhelm all the other cybernetic processes, like people, and will fundamentally change the nature of what's going on in the familiar neighborhood of Earth at some moment when a new "criticality" is achieved- maybe in about the year 2020. To be a human after that moment will be either impossible or something very different than we now can know."

Sterling's complete comment can be found here (http://www.edge.org/discourse/jaron_manifesto.html#sterling). Also, a link to the manifesto (http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/lanier/lanier_index.html).

Re: Singularities

[elfs.livejournal.com]

The problem with Sterling's point #3 has been well-covered by Egan and Vinge: "the thrill" is a purely human phenomenon that we do not need as an excuse to keep doing whatever it is we want to keep doing. It's a purely "human" (as in current human) phenomenon, shared equally well by the discoverer of the Nobel Prize and the serial killer on his tenth victim.

It's a frailty, not a virtue. We should beware of keeping it.