Great...
by
benjamindees
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· Score: 1, Interesting
Science Fiction is realized and the future is...
The Minority Report?
Yay... Big Brother here we come.
-- "I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Stuff from SF we should have.
by
Animats
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· Score: 5, Interesting
There's a whole list of technologies that are routine in SF, but we don't have a clue how to make work.
Better energy sources. There hasn't been a new primary energy source in fifty years. All we have is better oil drilling technology.
Spacecraft that are actually useful. What we have now is minor improvements on 1960s technology, with the same miserable fuel to payload ratios and insanely high operating costs.
Robots and AI. We do not have a clue how to do this.
We're not making much progress on any of this, either. 25 years ago, all those goals were thought to be closer than they are now.
Worse, those aren't fields that good young people go into any more. Who goes into fusion research, or booster design, or even AI?
Get your SciFi right
by
Planesdragon
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Big Brother was from 1984--a distopia illuminating a potential future where communism has conquered the world as communism's penchant for rewriting history on political whim is having a negative effect.
Minority Report (no "the") is a semi-distopia wherein predictive science has become exact and law enforcement is able to convict people before they commit their crimes. It's more a tale of the overzealousnes of technology than a horror report about the advance of technology--hell, even 1984 was about 'tech.
The "total awareness" of Minority Report wasn't even that bad--I mean, the main character was able to move about fairly easy given that an APB was out for him, and he even managed to foil the entire system, too.
Don't worry about Big Brother or Future Crime, though--they'd both be government programs, which, at least in America, are both amazingly conservative in design and embarissingly inefficient in implementation. (Note that, even though we have a brand-new national alert level, there are no laws or funding programs for local response to the increased level.)
Re:Get your SciFi right
by
dazed-n-confused
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· Score: 2, Interesting
If 1984 was talking about any government, it was talking about Socialism, as the name of the government was IngSoc.
If you can read 1984 (inc. the Newspeak appendix) and come away with the impression that the names of things tell you what they are, you have a problem. Maybe the Ministry of Love can help you sort it out...
To quote Immanuel Goldstein's Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism:
Socialism, a theory which appeared in the early nineteenth century and was the last link in a chain of thought stretching back to the slave rebellions of antiquity, was still deeply infected by the Utopianism of past ages. But in each variant of Socialism that appeared from about 1900 onwards the aim of establishing liberty and equality was more and more openly abandoned. The new movements which appeared in the middle years of the century, Ingsoc in Oceania, Neo-Bolshevism in Eurasia, Death-Worship, as it is commonly called, in Eastasia, had the conscious aim of perpetuating unfreedom and inequality. These new movements, of course, grew out of the old ones and tended to keep their names and pay lip-service to their ideology. But the purpose of all of them was to arrest progress and freeze history at a chosen moment. The familiar pendulum swing was to happen once more, and then stop.
So the 'Ingsoc' movement grew out of English Socialism, kept its name, paid lip service to its ideology; BUT...
What about OSS?
by
mpthompson
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Has the impact of open source software been anticipated in science fiction literature or movies? It seems to me that 10 to 20 years from now the impact of OSS on the technology industry and our culture can potentially be 10 times or more greater than it is today. Particularly as the grip of the media companies is tightened on an unsuspecting public with draconian DRM laws that leak into all facets of our lives through media controlled technology. The chaos of OSS may ultimately become the last refuge of innovation in a tech sector that is otherwise corralled and beaten into submission.
A rant on smart guns.
by
rjh
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Ask cops sometime what they think of smart gun technologies. Of all the cops I've asked, they all hate the idea. Admittedly, my sample isn't representative; the cops I know are all ones I see at the local shooting range.
Their opinion comes down to basically guns need to be kept as simple as possible. That's been the major direction firearms technology has been taking for the last 50+ years; not making more complex weapons but simpler and cheaper weapons. A modern Glock handgun is cheaper, more reliable, and (most astonishingly!) has fewer moving parts than a revolver of 50 years ago. A modern SIG-Sauer is cheaper, more reliable, and has fewer moving parts than a 1908 Luger.
This trend--towards weapons which have fewer moving parts, fewer breakable parts, and are thus cheaper to manufacture and more reliable--has been overwhelmingly welcomed by shooters. It's been so welcomed that I don't know a single shooter who doesn't welcome it, and I've been shooting for 20 years. In fact, the only people I've ever seen advocate adding complexity to weapons are people who neither shoot for sport nor carry a weapon as part of their daily job.
What happens as soon as you add a fingerprint-recognition system to a firearm?
Well, first, you've got some kind of optical reader... how well does the optical reader work if you drop your gun in a mud puddle? I've dropped an M1911A1 in a bucket of mud before, pulled it out, given it two shakes to dislodge mud from the barrel, and gone through 21 rounds (three magazines) without a failure. I was spattered with mud and the gun was literally steaming by the end of it, but it fired perfectly--zero failures. Could I repeat that kind of reliability experiment with a fingerprint-reading gun? No? Okay, great. Your new smartgun is now less reliable in the face of hostile environments (like mud, water, etc.) than a pistol first designed in the early 1900s.
The next thing you need is some kind integrated circuit controller and wires between it and the optical reader. Do you know why there's been such a push towards simpler and simpler firearms designs? Because when you fire a semiautomatic pistol, parts of it are subjected to internal stresses of hundreds of G-forces and tens of thousands of pounds per square inch. It's not uncommon to have bullets loaded to generate 50,000 pounds per square inch. Take hundreds of G-forces and repeated exposure to huge overpressures and you get an environment which is very, very hostile to everything; the fewer moving parts you have, the fewer parts which can break. Can wires and integrated circuits be built which handle these things? Sure. An example would be the Army's Copperhead artillery system, which uses artillery shells with built-in integrated circuits. The question isn't "can we do it", though: the question is "do we want to be totally dependent on the circuit". If a load of Copperheads doesn't work, the artillery crew can just fall back on conventional high-explosive warheads--they're back in action almost immediately. If your smart gun doesn't work, you're best off throwing the gun at the bad guy. Big difference.
Third thing you need is a battery, because ICs don't run on nothing. Great. So now do you not only have to make sure that your gun is loaded, that a round is chambered, that all safeties are disengaged, you now also have to make sure that your battery hasn't run out? Most cops--the majority of them--shoot very rarely. They don't inspect their guns very often. They go to the range once a year (or however often their department requires that they qualify) and then they forget about the gun the other 364 days. You ever had a power outage and then discovered the batteries in your flashlight are out? Do you really want the same thing happening to your firearm when the bad guy is shooting at you, your life is on the line, and all you want to do is get home safely to your wife and kids?
... Also, take a look at how many cops are shot by criminals with their
Minority Report Accuracy?
by
KrispyKringle
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· Score: 2, Interesting
"[Minority Report] is highly regarded for its accuracy in projecting what life will be like in 2054 as all objects and gadgets featured in the film have very real foundations in existing technologies."
Yeah. Existing technologies. Especially the part about the coked-out siblings who see the future through disturbances created by murders in the metaphysical plane. I bet Spielberg really researched that one, too.
Fact is definitely better
by
Anil+Kandangath
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· Score: 1, Interesting
The world wide web is much much better than anything predicted in science fiction. We take the web so much for granted that it is difficult for us to imagine a time when there was no web/internet for us to communicate (and that was not so long ago). Could anyone have predicted that within a span of 10 years, almost every community on earth would be connected by computers without the whole setup being owned by any company or government (an amazing idea in itself) with so much content provided by people for free(amazing too). I am of the strong view that the world of the future will be shaped in ways that no science fiction author has thought of and someone will be saying these very same words in another discussion forum (wonder what they will be like in the future) at that time.
Especially as movies are 30 years behind...
by
geekotourist
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· Score: 5, Interesting
the literature, at least. And the author appears to be entirely unaware of this, because the people she interviewed- the movie experts- also don't know this. Saying that technology is catching up with "the benchmarks set by sci-fi writers and filmmakers" is like saying that a new computer is catching up with "the benchmarks set by PDP-11's and Cray X1's."One is mightily easier to catch up with than the other.
Comparing authors and the literature with directors and the SF movies...
Authors
Know about the history of SF literature, including what has become stale or cliched.
Must be aware of scientific developments of the past 40 years, especially if the author specializes in "Hard SF"
Get help or critiques from other writers / scientists: many of the best SF writers are both (i.e. Benford, Vinge)
Go to SF conventions where topics include recent discoveries in science, technology and medicine; bleeding edge new writers and concepts; and which new novels or short stories should get recognized via awards like the Hugo.
Directors and others involved in SF movies...
Get away with plots and backstory that were already old 30 years ago in the SF literature
Don't seem to want to admit their relationship with / dependancy on the SF literature, so don't read or seek criticism from SF writers. (Anecdotal evidence- they rarely participate in regular SF conventions (instead going to Media Cons) and even more rarely hang out in the audience, listening and learning.)
Don't know the state of the art in scientifically consistent (even if not plausible) technobabble. Apparently not aware of the evil overlord's rules and other long-known lists of cliches to avoid.
Don't have any idea about recent SF writers. Nor do their critics, so as in this case the movie/TV show will always be compared to one of "Wells, Verne, Bradbury, Star Trek, Star Wars, Bladerunner (or rarely PKDick) and The Matrix," all nice but they could use some higher standards. Leads to critics calling movies like Harris's Fatherland ("ohhhh, what if Hitler *won* WWII?") original, because they don't know that the SF subfield of alternate history is decades old.
If the technologists have caught up to the literature, let's all go off to play a game of quantum soccer with the other 10^16 posthumans in the multiverse (to give a nice 4 years old example from a state of the art author. I'd also recommend Dozois' "Year's Best Science Fiction" collections, Stross, McLeod, Vinge and most anything found in the best of the SF magazines.)
They didn't mention quantum teleportation...been done on large groups of photons. (Star Trek, And Larry Niven, possibly others)
didn't mention Moller and his flying car thingie...been test flown. (Heinlien, and others)
didn't mention those needleless injection thingies...sold by a variety of companies (Star Trek)
didn't mention clones...rumors of human tests (a running gag in sci-fi)
didn't mention PDA's...sold by retailers all over (Mentioned as pocket computers...Larry Niven/Jerry Pournelle 'The Mote in God's Eye' first published in 1974) Mote also made a couple of other subtle predictions besides everybody walking around with pocket computers, they also predicted that they would be wirelessly connected to nearby large databases...see wi-fi and a primitive internet/web-services kinda thing.
I can't think of anymore, I'm sure someone will
-- If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
Re:The Wonderful Future
by
fferreres
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Nice point. I've been thinking about this issues for some time. But there's a twist to it, what would companies sell? If there is a lot of unemployed (read: goverment paid or financed jobs), and salaries as low, so will be the sales. And if goverment need to charge a lot of charges so to feed people with purchasing power so that they can survive, they do it buy taking money away from these same companies.
No, your line will not work. Yes, it can work when the unemployed to employed ratio is low.
What will HAVE to happen is companies will just give up trying to make their fortunes selling stuff to the masses. They will have to focus on making the rich happy.
Rich people, at some point, will have to either start spending their money (become real consumers), or losing it. For example, there is NO point is speding much money in investment projects right now. You have extra capacity. What you need is consumers. So you need the rich to start spending their money, and thus employing the uhg, unemployed.
You could think an extreme case: let's say Bill Whatever discovers a machine that can materilize whatever, anywhere, with zero cost, and that how the machine works it's a trade secret. What happens? Nobody can compete. So at first, every consumer buys from Bill Whatever.
If Bill Whatever doesn't spend his income, you have a problem. Suppose he puts it at a bank, and offers loans to consumers. Great! The weel keeps moving for a while. After some time, what??
No, Bill Whatever MUST spend his money in some way, he has to demand something back from everyone else in this world. But he can't stop the world. In this case the goverment can start printing paper and giving it to people for free, at which point Bill Whatever starts to feel the pressure to hire people.
The economy is trade, if few people have a lot, and they do not want to trade good for goods (read: demand services for their own consumption), only goods for money, the wheel stops, and you'll have the goverment expanding credit as a short term solution, then raising taxes, then..going into panic more, and after that, making a case to move to put rich people in line with reality (that is, making war, fear of losing everything for everyone inside their country).
That's what a recesion is. Tax increases do not solve the issue. Only wealth taxes would, or enforced consumption of the ones that have purchasing power (or you could just print money if there was a single world currency).
But the world having countries doesn't help, money moves very fast from country to country. So...
The real question really is, if we ever reach a point where we don't need everyone to work so that there is anough food and houses, why the heck would you need capitalism? I don't mean comunism, but why capitalism? If things are NOT scarce, economic rules do not aplly, and you only have "laws" of who owns what, and will shape the world we'll live in. The economy years are counted. This century is about the law...we are already seing this with stupid patents and laws like DMCA, Patrio-t Act, etc.
-- unfinished: (adj.)
Re:I'm still waiting.
by
phthisic
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· Score: 2, Interesting
My favorite scene in Minority Report is the one where Cruise is flipping through the images using his hands. Here he is using this totally cool, futuristic, literally hands-on GUI. Then he needs to transfer some data to another console a few feet away -- so he puts it on a disk and walks it over there. Ah, the sneakernet. I've always wondered if this was a stupid oversight -- or was it an ingenious commentary on how humans interact with technology. Excuse me now, I have to go print out some emails for my boss.
it's not like this is really news...
by
Malor
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· Score: 5, Interesting
SF authors have been doing this *forever*. This article did catch a few good recent ones, but there are some towering accomplishments in early SF, including:
The waterbed (Heinlein, I believe)
The microwave oven (Heinlein) (has a one-paragraph joke about how hard cooking and cleanup are.... something along the line of "I pushed the button, you toss the dishes in the disposer." For 1950s-era writing, this was a powerful insight just tossed away as a cute joke.)
Waldoes (Heinlein: the short story "Waldo", about a brilliant but incredibly weak man who lives in orbit and uses remote manipulators for everything) Even the modern *name* of these manipulators comes from the story.
Geostationary satellites (Clarke) -- This was an amazing insight for the time -- it's one of those things that's retroactively obvious, but exceedingly difficult to invent.
Virtual Reality -- I think possibly Clifford Simak had the first written version of something like a Holodeck. The book was "Way Station", published in 1963. Aliens had set up a waypost on Earth, and had hired an Earthling to run it. He got to play with some amazing technology. The virtual reality thing was a room-sized hunting simulator where he fired real shells at projected images on a wall, and they reacted appropriately. It was described as being extremely real and very frightening.
This story was also my first exposure to the concept of a frictionless surface, which obviously remains fantasy at this point. I imagine frictionless surfaces were done before this, but this is the earliest example I can remember for something holo-deckish.
Cell phones -- Dick Tracy, in the 1930s, had a pretty fair approximation. People wanted those wrist radios in the worst way. As it turns out, that form factor isn't too popular, but the fundamental idea has become indispensable for most first-world citizens, and the basic idea came from comics.
Submarines -- This is a little more of a stretch, but 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea showed just what submarines might someday be. It was published in 1870, which is a little after the first submersible warships were designed, so the concept wasn't quite as groundbreaking as some of these others, but the story is worth a nod when you consider they're STILL doing remakes of it -- 130 years later!
And, of course, there's the Time Machine, by H.G. Wells, another one that's a perennial favorite for remakes. This is one of my favorites, not because of the time machine (still unproven and most likely impossible), but because of the social commentary. We've had numerous Morlocks versus Eloi threads here on Slashdot, so it's not just me that finds the parallels a bit creepy. It was published in 1898 and is still quite relevant.
Most modern SF doesn't look very far ahead. It's rare for authors to invent things that are *really* amazing and inventive. Greg Bear's "Blood Music" was probably in this caliber, and Gene Wolfe wrote a disturbing book about a society where people encouraged themselves to become schizophrenic as a method of tapping into more of their brainpower. (I think it may have been called "The Book of the New Sun", but that might be another novel by the same author.) Both were fascinating books... but did they really change anything?
Perhaps I'm being unfair, too -- I'm picking out the very best of the old stuff and comparing it to the run-of-the-mill schlock today. But, even so, it seems that SF authors back in the 50s and 60s truly changed the world, and the ones nowadays don't do that. They entertain, they challenge, they make us think about things.... but they don't come up with things that change how we live anymore.
I'd love to be proven wrong on this -- counterexamples welcome.:-)
Unfortunatly there are not going to be anymore Next Generation movies. We'll be lucky to get anymore ST movies at all.
There Is No Singularity
by
Catiline
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Will all do respect to Verner Vinge, I think this article is proof that there is no "technological Singularity" (a point where the pace of change is so rapid it is overwhelming).
Neanderthals could not envision a written word, although the Egyptians could. But the Egyptians could not envision movable type; eventually Gutenburg did. For Gutenburg, a "computer" refered to a person doing math, and was not a machine. In the '70s as computers began marching into many businesses, people cosidered cloning, quantum computing, nanotechnology, and many other things "sci fi" -- and yet they are developing now, for potential release within our lifetimes.
The pace of change over the past 100 years makes me unwilling to forecast what would come 50 or 100 years from now. Indeed, to the Neanderthal, Egyptian or even Gutenburg, the pace of our change would be beyond their tech horizon: their world was far more static and unchanging. Yet the changes over the past year -- or over the past 50 years -- have not overwhelming. The so-called "technological singularity" is not an event horizon, a point-of-no-return beyond which all natural law changes, but a traditional horizon, a permanently receeding point beyond which our future predictions become rapidly more hazy. This article helps show that we will always be able to see some distance ahead, be it only a few decades, and the change will not become instantly overwhelming. Indeed, the pace of change is limited by the ability of society to teach new thinkers what is currently the state-of-art level, and whatever technologies we invent to increase the pace of learning will also assist in increasing the pace of acclimation.
My letter to the publishing paper.
by
PeterPiper
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Oh Good Grief!
In your July 5th article titled; Science Faction, by Fiona Williams, it was described how science fiction has influenced current day technology. First of all, "Really!? Wow, nobody would have ever realized that!" Duh... What really gets my goat however is that the author (and by association your publication) seems to be completely clueless as to what science fiction IS. The author spent the entire article taking about the effect of 'movies', as if that was what the field of science fiction was. Virtually no mention was made to science fiction as a literary genre whatsoever.
The fact is that there is not a single 'science fiction' movie ever made that has had an original science fiction idea in it. Indeed the vast preponderance of science fiction movies are not science fiction at all. They are cowboy movies in space, nonsensical fantasy with the directors knowing nothing about actual science and scientific speculation and frankly, caring even less. To refer to movies as 'being' the field of science fiction is as insulting to the genre of science fiction (which is a 'literary' genre) as it is revealing of the total ignorance of the author.
Slashdot Mirror
Science Fiction is realized and the future is...
The Minority Report?
Yay... Big Brother here we come.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
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Better energy sources. There hasn't been a new primary energy source in fifty years. All we have is better oil drilling technology.
-
Spacecraft that are actually useful. What we have now is minor improvements on 1960s technology, with the same miserable fuel to payload ratios and insanely high operating costs.
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Robots and AI. We do not have a clue how to do this.
We're not making much progress on any of this, either. 25 years ago, all those goals were thought to be closer than they are now.Worse, those aren't fields that good young people go into any more. Who goes into fusion research, or booster design, or even AI?
Big Brother was from 1984--a distopia illuminating a potential future where communism has conquered the world as communism's penchant for rewriting history on political whim is having a negative effect.
Minority Report (no "the") is a semi-distopia wherein predictive science has become exact and law enforcement is able to convict people before they commit their crimes. It's more a tale of the overzealousnes of technology than a horror report about the advance of technology--hell, even 1984 was about 'tech.
The "total awareness" of Minority Report wasn't even that bad--I mean, the main character was able to move about fairly easy given that an APB was out for him, and he even managed to foil the entire system, too.
Don't worry about Big Brother or Future Crime, though--they'd both be government programs, which, at least in America, are both amazingly conservative in design and embarissingly inefficient in implementation. (Note that, even though we have a brand-new national alert level, there are no laws or funding programs for local response to the increased level.)
Has the impact of open source software been anticipated in science fiction literature or movies? It seems to me that 10 to 20 years from now the impact of OSS on the technology industry and our culture can potentially be 10 times or more greater than it is today. Particularly as the grip of the media companies is tightened on an unsuspecting public with draconian DRM laws that leak into all facets of our lives through media controlled technology. The chaos of OSS may ultimately become the last refuge of innovation in a tech sector that is otherwise corralled and beaten into submission.
Ask cops sometime what they think of smart gun technologies. Of all the cops I've asked, they all hate the idea. Admittedly, my sample isn't representative; the cops I know are all ones I see at the local shooting range.
Their opinion comes down to basically guns need to be kept as simple as possible. That's been the major direction firearms technology has been taking for the last 50+ years; not making more complex weapons but simpler and cheaper weapons. A modern Glock handgun is cheaper, more reliable, and (most astonishingly!) has fewer moving parts than a revolver of 50 years ago. A modern SIG-Sauer is cheaper, more reliable, and has fewer moving parts than a 1908 Luger.
This trend--towards weapons which have fewer moving parts, fewer breakable parts, and are thus cheaper to manufacture and more reliable--has been overwhelmingly welcomed by shooters. It's been so welcomed that I don't know a single shooter who doesn't welcome it, and I've been shooting for 20 years. In fact, the only people I've ever seen advocate adding complexity to weapons are people who neither shoot for sport nor carry a weapon as part of their daily job.
What happens as soon as you add a fingerprint-recognition system to a firearm?
Well, first, you've got some kind of optical reader... how well does the optical reader work if you drop your gun in a mud puddle? I've dropped an M1911A1 in a bucket of mud before, pulled it out, given it two shakes to dislodge mud from the barrel, and gone through 21 rounds (three magazines) without a failure. I was spattered with mud and the gun was literally steaming by the end of it, but it fired perfectly--zero failures. Could I repeat that kind of reliability experiment with a fingerprint-reading gun? No? Okay, great. Your new smartgun is now less reliable in the face of hostile environments (like mud, water, etc.) than a pistol first designed in the early 1900s.
The next thing you need is some kind integrated circuit controller and wires between it and the optical reader. Do you know why there's been such a push towards simpler and simpler firearms designs? Because when you fire a semiautomatic pistol, parts of it are subjected to internal stresses of hundreds of G-forces and tens of thousands of pounds per square inch. It's not uncommon to have bullets loaded to generate 50,000 pounds per square inch. Take hundreds of G-forces and repeated exposure to huge overpressures and you get an environment which is very, very hostile to everything; the fewer moving parts you have, the fewer parts which can break. Can wires and integrated circuits be built which handle these things? Sure. An example would be the Army's Copperhead artillery system, which uses artillery shells with built-in integrated circuits. The question isn't "can we do it", though: the question is "do we want to be totally dependent on the circuit". If a load of Copperheads doesn't work, the artillery crew can just fall back on conventional high-explosive warheads--they're back in action almost immediately. If your smart gun doesn't work, you're best off throwing the gun at the bad guy. Big difference.
Third thing you need is a battery, because ICs don't run on nothing. Great. So now do you not only have to make sure that your gun is loaded, that a round is chambered, that all safeties are disengaged, you now also have to make sure that your battery hasn't run out? Most cops--the majority of them--shoot very rarely. They don't inspect their guns very often. They go to the range once a year (or however often their department requires that they qualify) and then they forget about the gun the other 364 days. You ever had a power outage and then discovered the batteries in your flashlight are out? Do you really want the same thing happening to your firearm when the bad guy is shooting at you, your life is on the line, and all you want to do is get home safely to your wife and kids?
... Also, take a look at how many cops are shot by criminals with their
Yeah. Existing technologies. Especially the part about the coked-out siblings who see the future through disturbances created by murders in the metaphysical plane. I bet Spielberg really researched that one, too.
The world wide web is much much better than anything predicted in science fiction. We take the web so much for granted that it is difficult for us to imagine a time when there was no web/internet for us to communicate (and that was not so long ago). Could anyone have predicted that within a span of 10 years, almost every community on earth would be connected by computers without the whole setup being owned by any company or government (an amazing idea in itself) with so much content provided by people for free(amazing too). I am of the strong view that the world of the future will be shaped in ways that no science fiction author has thought of and someone will be saying these very same words in another discussion forum (wonder what they will be like in the future) at that time.
Comparing authors and the literature with directors and the SF movies...
Authors
- Know about the history of SF literature, including what has become stale or cliched.
- Must be aware of scientific developments of the past 40 years, especially if the author specializes in "Hard SF"
- Get help or critiques from other writers / scientists: many of the best SF writers are both (i.e. Benford, Vinge)
- Go to SF conventions where topics include recent discoveries in science, technology and medicine; bleeding edge new writers and concepts; and which new novels or short stories should get recognized via awards like the Hugo.
Directors and others involved in SF movies...- Get away with plots and backstory that were already old 30 years ago in the SF literature
- Don't seem to want to admit their relationship with / dependancy on the SF literature, so don't read or seek criticism from SF writers. (Anecdotal evidence- they rarely participate in regular SF conventions (instead going to Media Cons) and even more rarely hang out in the audience, listening and learning.)
- Don't know the state of the art in scientifically consistent (even if not plausible) technobabble. Apparently not aware of the evil overlord's rules and other long-known lists of cliches to avoid.
- Don't have any idea about recent SF writers. Nor do their critics, so as in this case the movie/TV show will always be compared to one of "Wells, Verne, Bradbury, Star Trek, Star Wars, Bladerunner (or rarely PKDick) and The Matrix," all nice but they could use some higher standards. Leads to critics calling movies like Harris's Fatherland ("ohhhh, what if Hitler *won* WWII?") original, because they don't know that the SF subfield of alternate history is decades old.
If the technologists have caught up to the literature, let's all go off to play a game of quantum soccer with the other 10^16 posthumans in the multiverse (to give a nice 4 years old example from a state of the art author. I'd also recommend Dozois' "Year's Best Science Fiction" collections, Stross, McLeod, Vinge and most anything found in the best of the SF magazines.)They didn't mention quantum teleportation...been done on large groups of photons. (Star Trek, And Larry Niven, possibly others)
didn't mention Moller and his flying car thingie...been test flown. (Heinlien, and others)
didn't mention those needleless injection thingies...sold by a variety of companies (Star Trek)
didn't mention clones...rumors of human tests (a running gag in sci-fi)
didn't mention PDA's...sold by retailers all over (Mentioned as pocket computers...Larry Niven/Jerry Pournelle 'The Mote in God's Eye' first published in 1974) Mote also made a couple of other subtle predictions besides everybody walking around with pocket computers, they also predicted that they would be wirelessly connected to nearby large databases...see wi-fi and a primitive internet/web-services kinda thing.
I can't think of anymore, I'm sure someone will
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
Nice point. I've been thinking about this issues for some time. But there's a twist to it, what would companies sell? If there is a lot of unemployed (read: goverment paid or financed jobs), and salaries as low, so will be the sales. And if goverment need to charge a lot of charges so to feed people with purchasing power so that they can survive, they do it buy taking money away from these same companies.
No, your line will not work. Yes, it can work when the unemployed to employed ratio is low.
What will HAVE to happen is companies will just give up trying to make their fortunes selling stuff to the masses. They will have to focus on making the rich happy.
Rich people, at some point, will have to either start spending their money (become real consumers), or losing it. For example, there is NO point is speding much money in investment projects right now. You have extra capacity. What you need is consumers. So you need the rich to start spending their money, and thus employing the uhg, unemployed.
You could think an extreme case: let's say Bill Whatever discovers a machine that can materilize whatever, anywhere, with zero cost, and that how the machine works it's a trade secret. What happens? Nobody can compete. So at first, every consumer buys from Bill Whatever.
If Bill Whatever doesn't spend his income, you have a problem. Suppose he puts it at a bank, and offers loans to consumers. Great! The weel keeps moving for a while. After some time, what??
No, Bill Whatever MUST spend his money in some way, he has to demand something back from everyone else in this world. But he can't stop the world. In this case the goverment can start printing paper and giving it to people for free, at which point Bill Whatever starts to feel the pressure to hire people.
The economy is trade, if few people have a lot, and they do not want to trade good for goods (read: demand services for their own consumption), only goods for money, the wheel stops, and you'll have the goverment expanding credit as a short term solution, then raising taxes, then..going into panic more, and after that, making a case to move to put rich people in line with reality (that is, making war, fear of losing everything for everyone inside their country).
That's what a recesion is. Tax increases do not solve the issue. Only wealth taxes would, or enforced consumption of the ones that have purchasing power (or you could just print money if there was a single world currency).
But the world having countries doesn't help, money moves very fast from country to country.
So...
The real question really is, if we ever reach a point where we don't need everyone to work so that there is anough food and houses, why the heck would you need capitalism? I don't mean comunism, but why capitalism? If things are NOT scarce, economic rules do not aplly, and you only have "laws" of who owns what, and will shape the world we'll live in. The economy years are counted. This century is about the law...we are already seing this with stupid patents and laws like DMCA, Patrio-t Act, etc.
unfinished: (adj.)
My favorite scene in Minority Report is the one where Cruise is flipping through the images using his hands. Here he is using this totally cool, futuristic, literally hands-on GUI. Then he needs to transfer some data to another console a few feet away -- so he puts it on a disk and walks it over there. Ah, the sneakernet. I've always wondered if this was a stupid oversight -- or was it an ingenious commentary on how humans interact with technology. Excuse me now, I have to go print out some emails for my boss.
The waterbed (Heinlein, I believe)
The microwave oven (Heinlein) (has a one-paragraph joke about how hard cooking and cleanup are.... something along the line of "I pushed the button, you toss the dishes in the disposer." For 1950s-era writing, this was a powerful insight just tossed away as a cute joke.)
Waldoes (Heinlein: the short story "Waldo", about a brilliant but incredibly weak man who lives in orbit and uses remote manipulators for everything) Even the modern *name* of these manipulators comes from the story.
Geostationary satellites (Clarke) -- This was an amazing insight for the time -- it's one of those things that's retroactively obvious, but exceedingly difficult to invent.
Virtual Reality -- I think possibly Clifford Simak had the first written version of something like a Holodeck. The book was "Way Station", published in 1963. Aliens had set up a waypost on Earth, and had hired an Earthling to run it. He got to play with some amazing technology. The virtual reality thing was a room-sized hunting simulator where he fired real shells at projected images on a wall, and they reacted appropriately. It was described as being extremely real and very frightening. This story was also my first exposure to the concept of a frictionless surface, which obviously remains fantasy at this point. I imagine frictionless surfaces were done before this, but this is the earliest example I can remember for something holo-deckish.
Cell phones -- Dick Tracy, in the 1930s, had a pretty fair approximation. People wanted those wrist radios in the worst way. As it turns out, that form factor isn't too popular, but the fundamental idea has become indispensable for most first-world citizens, and the basic idea came from comics.
Submarines -- This is a little more of a stretch, but 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea showed just what submarines might someday be. It was published in 1870, which is a little after the first submersible warships were designed, so the concept wasn't quite as groundbreaking as some of these others, but the story is worth a nod when you consider they're STILL doing remakes of it -- 130 years later!
And, of course, there's the Time Machine, by H.G. Wells, another one that's a perennial favorite for remakes. This is one of my favorites, not because of the time machine (still unproven and most likely impossible), but because of the social commentary. We've had numerous Morlocks versus Eloi threads here on Slashdot, so it's not just me that finds the parallels a bit creepy. It was published in 1898 and is still quite relevant.
Most modern SF doesn't look very far ahead. It's rare for authors to invent things that are *really* amazing and inventive. Greg Bear's "Blood Music" was probably in this caliber, and Gene Wolfe wrote a disturbing book about a society where people encouraged themselves to become schizophrenic as a method of tapping into more of their brainpower. (I think it may have been called "The Book of the New Sun", but that might be another novel by the same author.) Both were fascinating books... but did they really change anything?
Perhaps I'm being unfair, too -- I'm picking out the very best of the old stuff and comparing it to the run-of-the-mill schlock today. But, even so, it seems that SF authors back in the 50s and 60s truly changed the world, and the ones nowadays don't do that. They entertain, they challenge, they make us think about things.... but they don't come up with things that change how we live anymore.
I'd love to be proven wrong on this -- counterexamples welcome. :-)
Unfortunatly there are not going to be anymore Next Generation movies. We'll be lucky to get anymore ST movies at all.
Neanderthals could not envision a written word, although the Egyptians could. But the Egyptians could not envision movable type; eventually Gutenburg did. For Gutenburg, a "computer" refered to a person doing math, and was not a machine. In the '70s as computers began marching into many businesses, people cosidered cloning, quantum computing, nanotechnology, and many other things "sci fi" -- and yet they are developing now, for potential release within our lifetimes.
The pace of change over the past 100 years makes me unwilling to forecast what would come 50 or 100 years from now. Indeed, to the Neanderthal, Egyptian or even Gutenburg, the pace of our change would be beyond their tech horizon: their world was far more static and unchanging. Yet the changes over the past year -- or over the past 50 years -- have not overwhelming. The so-called "technological singularity" is not an event horizon, a point-of-no-return beyond which all natural law changes, but a traditional horizon, a permanently receeding point beyond which our future predictions become rapidly more hazy. This article helps show that we will always be able to see some distance ahead, be it only a few decades, and the change will not become instantly overwhelming. Indeed, the pace of change is limited by the ability of society to teach new thinkers what is currently the state-of-art level, and whatever technologies we invent to increase the pace of learning will also assist in increasing the pace of acclimation.
Do you like Japanese imports?
Oh Good Grief!
In your July 5th article titled; Science Faction, by Fiona Williams, it was described how science fiction has influenced current day technology. First of all, "Really!? Wow, nobody would have ever realized that!" Duh... What really gets my goat however is that the author (and by association your publication) seems to be completely clueless as to what science fiction IS. The author spent the entire article taking about the effect of 'movies', as if that was what the field of science fiction was. Virtually no mention was made to science fiction as a literary genre whatsoever.
The fact is that there is not a single 'science fiction' movie ever made that has had an original science fiction idea in it. Indeed the vast preponderance of science fiction movies are not science fiction at all. They are cowboy movies in space, nonsensical fantasy with the directors knowing nothing about actual science and scientific speculation and frankly, caring even less. To refer to movies as 'being' the field of science fiction is as insulting to the genre of science fiction (which is a 'literary' genre) as it is revealing of the total ignorance of the author.
This was tawdry reporting.
Peter