Manchester Geoff
From Fs_wiki
The wholesale abandonment of the future by Science Fiction is expressed by Cory Doctorow's statement at the beginning of some speeches:
- "So Science Fiction writers and to a lesser extent Futurists, when they write about the future, they’re really talking about the present..."
He then produces a proof of the technological singularity without reference to real world in the way of a theological argument.
It's important to challenge authoritative excuses. It's not always been like this; the future used to be a fascinating place, but writers have given it up due to decadence, its incompatibility with their beliefs, total lack of confidence, and fear. However, like many inconvenient things, not talking about it doesn't make it go away. The fact that it is systematically unexplored in fiction (by the device of postulating non-existent technologies which make its avoidance possible) is the reason to look at it rather than shy away. It also makes sense to get into an area at the time it is unpopular so you are in position when the stock goes up -- which it must do so.
Because it's so important, many institutions (eg oil companies) produce future reports within their own domains of interest. The United Nations sponsors an annual State of the Future Report (must order a copy). The IPCC also produces very detailed reports about what's going to happen and could be done about it. This was what it was invented for. Are people frightened to read it?
On global warming, which is one threat among many, Margaret Thatcher, who was a scientist, gave speeches in 1988 and 1990 that are entirely not out of date. Meanwhile, though it is out of the news, the doomsday clock has been continually advancing since 1991. The scientists are trying to tell us something.
Stuff to avoid
- space travel/tourism
- robots that are like humans
- nanotech limited by uninformed imagination
- plagues/terrorism
- cloning/longevity
- extraordinary physics
- mind-computer interfaces with good UIs
Short message:
- Avoid making things up as this leads to regurgitation of stuff already known. Prefer finding something real proposed by a scientist and sticking to it. Stories should adapt to the reality at hand, not the other way round.
Contents |
Military robotics
Military applications are the best funded and least restricted field of technology in the world today, and their purpose is clear. The limitation of the technology (primarily in the field of computer vision) is demonstrated by the fact that weapons systems are still being designed in which humans are carried (eg a tank or a fighter jet) when all that needs to be delivered are bombs. (Note: arms companies are more than happy to promote their future products, and there are many government reports available.)
The ethics of the military robots are considered to rest on whether it requires a human to authorize a kill or if it can make that decision itself. If substantially autonomous robots were invented, this issue may become obsolete. Nobody has been concerned about the authority of an ICBM to explode, though it may take an hour to reach its target.
Because flying is easy due to the lack of terrain, there are hundreds of aerial robots, some of which carry missiles. Many are remote control planes. Modern fighter jets are so computerized they nearly are unmanned vehicles. There is a continuum between such fighter jets and targeted missiles.
Ground based military robots are less common, yet come in many bizarre shapes. There are enough to choose from that you don't need to invent one. There is a continuum from land-mines to autonomous military robots. There are lots of accounts of what it is like to live in an area that is blighted by land-mines.
Sentry guns have been around for years, but there are things other than guns. When domestic robots become available, the difference between them and a military robot is the software. They are already in the right place. This is probably where the threat is going to be from. Security of software (which we are awesomely bad at -- eg voting machines) is going to matter more than a few viruses on our Windows machine.
A long technical report commissioned by the military about the ethics of autonomous military robots is available for reading.
SF has lost its fascination with robots just at the time when something unexpected might emerge from the technology now present; in the way that the World Wide Web appeared on technology (the TCP/IP protocol) that had been around for decades -- we just use it differently.
Surveillance
Surveillance is similar to robotics in the way that development has not been what was anticipated. Accurate human identification and tracking should easy, but it isn't (see the history of biometric ID cards), and interactions with the government in the form of paperwork appears little different to what it was 50 years ago. Although money is mostly electronic, it's not tracked effectively. Electronic banking is no better than doing it over the telephone, and it still takes 3 days to clear a transaction.
A decade ago there was a push for electronic money. This failed, and instead we have mobile phone payments. We still file our taxes the same way; the government doesn't just download our bank statement. This is technical and not due to civil liberties implications -- some people would find it more convenient.
Who'd have thought that mobile phones could have saturated society so thoroughly and yet made so little tangible difference?
Also a decade ago, there was a big issue over the clipper chip which was a cryptographic system the government would let you use because they would keep a backup key. Turns out that nobody uses cryptography for their messages anyway.
CCTV has blanketed the UK more comprehensively than it ever did in the Eastern Block. It's good for capturing police violence as well as any public violence ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Charles_de_Menezes#Missing_CCTV_footage refer to missing Stockwell tube footage). Why is our system not a threat to the public as it was in East Germany? Could something small change it to make it a threat? The UK leads the world with CCTV deployment that if anything happens, it will happen in our cities first.
Everyone is leaving a trail of electronic records. These appear uniquely to be as accessible to the citizens as they are the state. Here is an interesting story about how easy it was to uncover a mole who tried to infiltrate a protest group -- it's very difficult to fake an identity these days; and our security may come from being known, rather than being private. Only your secrets can harm you.
Climate change
Major advances in archeology, from dendrochronology to the sheer weight of challenging information that has been gathered. A famous survey is Guns, Germs, and Steel. Museums are interesting to watch the way they have to keep up (along with needing to remount T Rex from positions that were chosen wrongly for cultural reasons).
There have been many more and stronger civilizations in the past than we knew about; and the conventional timeline of progress that we are brought up with is very lacking. This is due to the anthropic principle -- by the fact that our culture exists, we will see an unbroken history of triumph with minor setbacks which trace back to the dawn of civilization; in the same way that all our ancestors survived childhood against the odds. The civilizations that fell are not represented in our history, and are only present in the ground. Most collapsed due to climate change.
The threat of climate change is well studied, although not often believed. In spite of our enormous capabilities of science and prediction (satellites, computers, etc), there is no evidence that our political system is able to handle this challenge any more wisely than a primitive tribe whose best response is to conduct a rain dance. Are we just as superstitious and stuck in our rituals as humans have always been in history, though we can't see it from the inside.
There has been significant sea level rise during the history of humanity (for example, the whole of the north sea used to be a plain with mammoths). The writer of BLDGBLOG has a fear of liberation hydrology, although very little is actually written. Probably because the idea of sea level rise is unimaginable. Although completely predicted, construction routinely continues in places where there is no future.
Regarding technical fixes, scientists have been working out possibilities. As one scientist says during the show:
- We are not happy campers, right? We are not saying: Wow! This is a great idea! Let’s go do it right, that’s the... the feeling is.. you know, this may be a way that we hope will never be wanted, but which we have to think about in case the dire situation comes out.
Resource depletion
The theory of peak oil is well-known, but also not actually believed for real in a way that anyone has made preparations for a future shortage.
There are numerous plans for replacing the energy, such as A Solar Grand Plan - Scientific American and many writings by Amory Lovins at his Rocky Mountain Institute.
The question is why are none of these plans put into action. They are considered to be lesser than the Moon race of the 1960s, but with greater consequence (landing on the Moon actually achieved nothing), with a projected timeline that suggests work needs to start yesterday.
The energy will be in a different form than gasoline, so cars and planes won't be the same. The way they will be is predictable and possibly less convenient.
Must watch Kim Stanley Robinson at google.
At some point recycling and scavenging (scrape collectors like from Victorian times) will start to make sense again.
There is an End of Suburbia movie which is worth watching. The effects of this will be seen on every single street in the country.
Medical developments
The theory of antibiotic resistance is about diseases that we have gotten used to not being a problem, returning to the world again. There's a frightening growth in diabetes. Global obesity problems. There's a lot of money to be made selling these people new knee joints etc.
There's also many interesting cancer treatments being invented.
Expensive drugs. Depression pills. Anxiety pills sold to Americans on TV. Many children medicated for ADHD.
A lot is happening. It's difficult to make a compelling story in this area, though people are able to go on about it for hours and hours. Avoid cloning, fertility treatments, or organ transplants. The science is outside what most people are already familiar with.
Politics
There is an exceptional availability of political information from Parliaments and other political bodies. There are also numerous sources of alternative and more reliable and interesting news than the mainstream media whose political conflicts of interest are well known.
Things would be very different if citizens took as much interest in politics as they used to do historically (even 30 years ago), because the information and tools are available.
Julian knows about and is involved in many e-democracy projects, and has made undemocracy.com where you can now easily find what goes on in the United Nations, where they spend a lot of time worrying about and planning for the future. You might not think they are competent at this (and why would you, given the appalling misreporting of its activities from the media), but nobody else is doing it.
Best to start with some of these articles. A lot goes on that no one has heard about.
Rylands library is a UN depository library.
Nuclear politics
The UK is planning to build a new nuclear weapons system which would be a factor in war over the next 50 years. Nuclear war was once a central topic in SF, though now no longer. There are numerous policy statements, countless parliamentary reports, and even studies about whether this country has the manufacturing and skills base -- which gives hints about what's possible beyond the nukes. The debate in Parliament provides the final say.
The official justification is that the nukes are needed because we face an uncertain future. Yet there seems nowhere an obvious fleshing out of possible scenarios -- which is something that would be essential for any designs to take place. If these nuclear submarines are built to target the Russian threat circa 1965, then the abandonment of any speculation about the future has gone real deep into places it shouldn't be. These are not versatile pieces of kit; they can't be adapted as the nature of the threat changes.
The task of the researcher is to go through all the documentation and find all unique instances of a future story being detailed -- if any. That in itself is a deep story. In fact a story that made the weapons system proposed actually useful for something and not a complete liability would be a fantastic challenge. This illustrates the dire deficit of mundane-sf -- if governments are unable to create stories in it when they desperately need it, then something is really wrong.
