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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.