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Designers - Are You Influenced By What You Read?
Silent_E asks: "A student of mine is writing a paper on how Stephenson's _The Diamond Age_ offers a good educational model for distance learning. She has been asked by publishers to justify looking at fiction as a way of talking about 'the real world.' That dialogue made me wonder whether Slashdot folks currently or recently coding or doing hardware design are, or have been, directly inspired by what they've read in Science Fiction?"
I took a course that was mostly online and I found that participation and in depth discussion can be even better on IRC through text than in the classroom. That may be just my experience since I can express myself better in writing, but I think it's a great tool for education.
because you can follow several independent threads at once. More than one person can "have the floor" at once, and no one feels jipped because they weren't able to voice their opinion or were interrupted by someone else's opinion.
The internet is great at stripping the physical characteristics of our world and leaving thought. Well, thought and conspiracy theories aboout evil cell phones, overbearing corporations, bribes of congress, and the like.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
A better question would be "who can deny having been (directly) influenced..." since literature is part of the makeup of who we are there is no way to deny it.
Of those to whom much is given, much is required.
For sure. I think that's one of the reasons that authors (and other creators of fiction) do what they do - to put something out that rattles the brain.
if you take something away from a work of fiction (or film, or recording, or game) then you will be all the better for it.To add to that, why else would you delve into a work of fiction? So that you can look "cool" or brag about it? If you're not taking something from a work of art, then you've wasted your time.
Imagination is what drives fiction...
Imagination is also what drives invention...
I do virtual reality research with head-mounted displays. I mean real-world applications stuff. I can't tell you how many times I've heard people say, "You're wasting your time - the real way to do it is with direct neural connections to the optic nerve" (a la Gibson, et al) or even worse, "Just wait until they have holodecks!" These people aren't in touch with reality and IMO, their vocal view do more harm than good. Neural implants into something as enormously complex as the human visual system are way off (and imagine the problems we'll have in getting there - something goes wrong and you go blind)! The reality is that we first have to master the visual "interface" we have right now: the eye and the light entering it.
...and as for holodecks... They look great on TV, but the real-world implications of that Star Trek pipe dream are almost laughable. Pure fantasy that's even farther off (if not infinitely far off).
is an idea that goes back to John Brunner and 1970's Vernor Vinge.
Science fiction and engineering live in a cycle of mutual inspiration. Heinlein read about Goddard. The Apollo engineers grew up reading Heinlein. Then Heinlein got to reap the benefits -- he testified to Congress about looking around at the medical technology that saved his life after the stroke and recognizing all the space program spinoffs in it.
Miguel Alcubierre's paper about faster-than-light travel in general relativity was inspired by warp drives.
When I was in second year of university (and getting into programming in C), I read Robert J. Sawyer's "The Terminal Experiment". There's a section of the novel where he discusses a simple evolutionary algorithm that allows the computer to find a string starting with a random sequence of characters. I remember putting the book down and thinking, "I could write that!" So I did. It was really fun, and it opened me up to a new way of coding and thinking about algorithms.
If I book inspires you to write code you would have never written otherwise, go with it!
~ "When I'm of that age I'm just going to live up a tree."
I was once paid to basically build "sci-fi" technology in order to demonstrate new research technologies.
My experience has been that sci-fi inspired technology rarely 'works' as dramatized on TV. What I mean by 'works' is that even with a perfect system [as simulated by Wizard of Oz experiements], humans will not be impressed by, nor even tolerate, those technolgies.
Here is an example of sci-fi meets reality.
One system we built was similar to the house in "Minority Report". You could talk to the lights and query the room about various information, that sort of thing. In the end, the idea was hopelessly misguided.
The reasons this particular demo sucks is because of cognitive load, cognitive dissonance, and limited human bandwidth. Cognitive load means your brain has to think more to get a task done; cognitive dissonance means your brain is uncomfortable doing the task, and bandwidth means mainly that human speech is slow.
For example, a "lights on" command requires concious thought in order to get lights, and some linguistic processing. The alternative light switch technology is less so, even automatic [you might notice this when the power goes out you still hit switches]. Also, humans are pre-programmed to talk to humans, talking to the wall is an unpleasant experience for most people. Finally, speech is really quite slow. Flicking a light switch is much faster than saying the words.
The point is that the dramatization of this technology is done in the imagination with all factors tuned optimally for dramatic effect; but the reality falls short of the fantasy. Real world factors not taken into account by the imagination destroys the appeal of the technology.
So what is a better model for driving innovation than the fantasy scenarios of fiction? Quite simply, it is the time tested process of real-world problem solving. Find a problem, look for a solution [as contrasted to find a technology look for a use]!
Not to assume or suggest that all fiction should have a point or a message/moral to it, but all fiction has the power to inspire us or make us question reality/society/etc.
if you take something away from a work of fiction (or film, or recording, or game) then you will be all the better for it.
Not necessarily. It depends a lot on what you take away from it.
If you take, for instance, the idea that Jews are subhuman and need to be exterminated, or blacks ditto and properly should be slaves, are you "the better for it"? The NAZIs would have thought so for the first case, the KKK for the second, wouldn't they?
Mainstream fiction is an art form directed at the masses by their masters (i.e. the art school establishment). The central message is that, no matter how bad things are, if you try to improve them (especially if you break the rules doing so), you will make them worse. So be a good little domestic animals. Obey your masters, don't break down the fence, and go quitely to the shearing and the slaughter.
(Classic) SF, on the other hand, is (mostly) by and for the people who design the tech and make it run. SF offers a rich toolset for speculating about both current situations and potential future changes - and for disconnecting them from the immediate problem so the reader can think about the core issues without biases from the current political situation or technical paradigm. The central message is that, by the application of intelligence and effort, you can make things better both for yourself and humanity at large. (It also includes the cautionary tale: If you break it THIS way you CAN'T fix it afterward, so apply your intelligence and effort up front, while it can still do some good.) It teaches the mindset that builds technologies and civilizations.
And of course that's why both SF in particular, and fiction in general, are held in contempt by the arts school types - which include historians, sociaologists, political scientists, and the like. Of COURSE you "can't" have a "valid" thought about the future based on fiction - THEIR fiction - because it's defeatist propaganda rather than valid speculation. (And SF doesn't obey their rules - when it's true to its own, so it is suppressed as "escapist trash" which must not be validated as a "serious" art form and thus must not be viewed by anyone "sophisticated".)
Notice that, even in the "golden age", there were a few authors and stories that obeyed the mainstream fiction rather than the SF rules. (_The Machine Stops_ springs to mind, as does virtually everything by Bradbury.) And (surprise!) only these stories and others like them are considered "valid" by arts types. (Of course they were pushed on the inmates of classrooms as examples of what SF is about, making the experience massively unpleasant and giving most of them an aversion to the whole art form.)
(I won't attempt to do modern SF justice, beyond mentioning that it includes both classic SF ruleset stories and stories from a number of other artforms, all lumped under one category. But thank GHOD the "new wave" has broken on the shore and sunk back into the depths. B-) )
But SF, in the classic sense, is EXACTLY the art form where the authors bring up real-world issues and speculate about possible outcomes, alternatives and their effects, and how to improve the human condition. They engage their readers in the sort of thinking that both inspries them and trains them to problem-solve and strive to bring about constructive change.
So of COURSE at least THIS kind of fiction is a vaild way to "talk about the real world". That's what it's FOR!
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I'd consider William Gibson the most important living SF writer. I would not consider his intent to have anything to do with inspiring intelligence, the direction of technology, civilization, etc.
/. readers? I'd even call it "mainstream".
When SF is good (and it is often bad: the geek equivalent of a romance novel), it illustrates the present. Stranger in a Strange Land, for example, gives totally unique insight into human nature. That is its (way over-generalized) goal. Every Gibson novel is a perfect snap shot of the time it was written.
Also, there is no need whatsoever to malign "arts school types." First of all, you are focusing on a contrast that isn't there. Tell me what genres Pattern Recognition and Vineland belong to. Second, over the course of my college career, four different professors either referred to or recommended Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. Two were in comp sci, one was in Middle Eastern studies, and one was in photography. If you think non-geeks naturally have some sort of antipathy towards SF, you're wrong.
Grandparent post didn't say that we should look away from SF, just that we should look everywhere. He's right. Note, when he says "all fiction" he does not say "mainstream fiction". Is The Hobbit SF? Does it inspire
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
I suspect fiction is very good at supplying vocabulary for naming technology once it is instantiated, but on the whole the ideas come from almost entirely different directions to the fictional ideas (and thus it is unrealistic to claim the fictional idea as a precedent.)
A couple of 'near misses' I can think of are mobile phones and 3D virtual environments.
Mobile phones have similar functions to Star Trek communicators, but I seriously doubt Star Trek had much to do with the development of mobile phones. Instead technology made it possible to take baby steps that ended up with a teeny , robust, voice communication system. (Which still is nothing like a communicator if you look at it critically.)
The various fictional virutal environments (such as Neuromancer or Snow Crash) have yet to eventuate, and when they do are much more likely to come out of Ultima than some serious business drive. (Why? In part because they are actually really dumb interfaces, bringing across all the disadvantages of the physical world to the virual world. Yay!)
On the other hand when real developments eventually come along that have similar properties to fictional ideas it is really handy to steal terminology. Mostly because the words actually mean something as opposed to the newly invented word 'frozbidget' which is not obviously to do with- say- a virtual representation of yourself in an immersive 3-dimensional enviroment.
The other reason I don't think fiction is a strong guide is that Ideas are Cheap and Doing Stuff is Hard. In University we come to value Ideas, but once you hit the real world it turns out that there are lots more ideas than there is capability to do them. And most ideas are not really goers. In fact ideas in isolation don't really work- they need a supporting caste of thousands (of ideas) before they can even be called a technology.
And while a fiction author can easily gloss over the intermediate steps of how the idea became succesful, we can't in the real world. In practice the means often define the ends.
Finally there is an error of observation that often makes it seem like fiction has influenced technology. In reality there are just so many damn ideas in fiction that anything that pops up in reality probably has some kind of precedent in fiction- even if it actualy had no influence on the real devleopment of the technology.
I neither write nor type that fast, and it's difficult to write, listen, and digest at once. With chat you would just read and save the thread if useful.
I've never taken a class over the internet, but it would be nice to have a record of a class and digest the information during class.
http://yetanotherpoliticalrant.blogspot.com
I've seen far too many non-essential inventions to believe that necessity is the mother of (all) invention...unless you count "necessity" for something to do, for fun, for impressing someone...etc.
Imagination inspires fiction, fiction inspires imagination...a circle of life.
Actually, I think that the holodeck was intended for recreation and exercise (self-defence, sports) as well as entertainment.
God is dead -- Nietsche
Nietsche is dead! - God
So basically, you want the Matrix.
Having actively participated in humanoid robotics research for 6 years, and I can say that while many of us are aware of Asimov's ideas and principles (including the infamous "rules": i.e. a robot must never harm a human being) they are of (sadly!) little relevance at the moment.
:)
Simply put, we are still hard pressed to have modern robots navigate as effectively or robustly as ants; and quite a far cry from having them act as servants. Additionally, and perhaps more tellingly, we have made surprisingly miniscule progress in learning for robots. Mimicking even a simple rat's (read: politician's) learning or sensorymotor abilities is still beyond us. This, naturally, has left us with little time, need, or incentive to contemplate how our robots could potentially be programmed to:
a) Not kill us.
b) Obey us.
c) Be emotionally satisfied with their existence as slaves.
Asimov is a visionary, no doubt, but his writing has not yet played a significant role in the _technical_ evolution of robotics, in my opinion.
All science fiction is about social commentary, if it is intended seriously at all.
And yes, we used to watch Science Fiction movies for product ideas, at IBM. Pick a movie, go in the conference room for the Thursday night brainstorming session, and then write down everything you see that you think you can implement, and everything that comes to mind as a result of that. Then everyone reads their list, making no comments, and people write down what they think of as a result of hearing the lists read.
Quite effective, actually.
-- Terry
I like your points, but don't think this argument invalidates the Chinese Room example.
Yes, an initial level of understanding is necessary to create the Chinese room. Searle argues that the *Chinese room* does not necessarily have this understanding (while the creator does).
That is, the Chinese room can act intelligently, but does not necessarily have intelligence. Likewise, an adder in hardware does not understand addition, although it adds. An odometer does not understand counting, although it counts.
I like that you explicitly state the unwritten assumption of the Chinese room: a being with understanding created it. But I don't see how this invalidates the example.
More formally the problem can be stated as follows. Let X be a set of all words of length at most N, with letters from the alphabet A. Then X contains A^(N+1) - 1 elements(I will assume that a book is nonempty, or equivalently that a word has non-zero length). Now, the index, call it I, must contain A^(N+1) - 1 entries as well, and map them bijectively onto X. If we assume the same alphabet is used for the index as for X, then every element of I of length at most N will also be an element of X.
Thus, the only way to construct an index which is, in fact, not identical to the contents of the library, would be to have index entries(at least one) which were longer than the books that they are indexing. This would be a rather poor form of indexing, and hence the optimal index is indeed the library itself.
Have you ever read a book that's not pulp sci-fi?
She has been asked by publishers to justify looking at fiction as a way of talking about 'the real world.'
This is one of the silliest demands I think I've ever heard. Any decent fiction should have direct application on the "real world". Fiction is, by nature, an argument, relevant to real problems--a discourse on reality. As soon as publishers become disabused of the notion that fiction is pure entertainment, they'll be in much better shape.
Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes. -- Walt Whitman
I think it's wiser to look at the greats of SF the way one would look at the greats of any other literary mode. SF or not, I think the moral rallying power is universal across quality literature.
The lessons are, in many ways, universal. Indeed, there are strong motif types running through SF that can connect to early human myths and non-SF literature. Consider a bog-standard SF story about thinking machines that go amok. This well connects back to Frankenstein, which, depending on one's perspective, may or may not be SF, and also connects back to early myths about golems.
What it may be is that SF is really the new wrapper for old tale types. We live in an age of technology rather than gods and magic, and so the tales are now told with technology. In the end, the thematic messages are the same.
As for some sort of "art school" establishment telling people to fall in line, I'd be curious to see you make all of classic literature fall under this heading. Literature is far too varied to be painted with a brush that broad.