Slashdot Mirror
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?"
My boss has definitely been influenced by the world of literature. Most of the things he promises people are straight from science fiction although the schedules are more of a pure fantasy.
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.
cat /dev/urandom | /usr/games/morse > /dev/hda
Try it, it really works. You must be root of course.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
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]!