Monday: The Future Is Its Own Worst Enemy
Sep. 8th, 2003 08:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsStill 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.
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.
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Words Fail Me
Date: 2003-09-09 12:02 pm (UTC)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
Date: 2003-09-09 12:04 pm (UTC)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.