Slashdot Mirror
Experts Fear Future Will be Like Sci-Fi Movies
segphault writes "In the year 2020, Luddite terrorists attack technology infrastructure and artificial intelligences dominate earth! Or at least that's what 700 experts predict in the latest poll conducted by the Pew Internet and American Life Project (pdf). Is the future really going to be like a science fiction movie? Ars Technica provides a humorous overview of the survey results. From the article: 'Are these scenarios really indicative of future trends? Given the prevalence of many of these concepts in science fiction content, it is obvious that the ideas themselves are at least relevant enough to warrant consideration. That said, the nature of the survey and the way that the scenarios are presented makes the entire thing seem less plausible. In looking at classic science fiction films of the past, from Blade Runner to Soylent Green, one realizes that few of them really predict with any accuracy the world we live in today. Culture and technology can change in radically unpredictable ways, and today's experts may lack the foresight to perceive the future with the clarity of Hari Seldon.'"
I more fear that it will be like 1984. Cameras everywhere, mass surveillance, no criticism of the rulers allowed.
Get your own free personal location tracker
V for Vendetta, Planet of the Apes, 2001, and Matrix Revolutions I think.
I predict that the poor and stupid will continue to breed at over twice the rate of the wealthy and educated such that eventually we will reach a high-water mark in technological development. After that point some continued advances will be made but I believe we will see a gradual decline as there simply aren't enough people to sustain the extreme level of specialization we see in society today.
And, oh yeah, I predict lots of attendant unpleasantness - first-world cities emptied as birth-rates decline, then re-filled with unassimilated, superstitious immigrants (or, in the case of societies largely closed to immigration like Japan, just plain emptied). Noone to care for the elderly in once-wealthy societies. And lots, lots more fanatical religion and superstition. A new dark ages.
Bradbury's future was marked by huge video screens in the living room, little speakers in the ears, people pursuing dangerous hobbies because their lives had become empty (street racing, in the novel), and a disinclination towards knowledge (books) in favour of a false sense of reality being fed to citizens through the media.
Golly gee, I hope that's not our future.
Assuming the questions were posed in a "Y/N" fashion, what this study tells anyone with a statistical background is that there is no fucking consensus whatsoever. These guys have no idea - pick any question about 2020 and pose it to one of these guys. They're almost exactly as likely to say "yes" as "no".
It's interesting that this study was done, and it makes an interesting read, but it produced almost exactly no significant results.
Meta will eat itself
According to expert futurologists, we face a nightmarish future -- a future without expert predictions of the future!
"People will get sick of it," said a spokesman for the Institute for Predictions. "They just won't want any more baseless predictions -- so people will stop making any."
Professor Isaac Sagan of the University of Pontification agrees. "In the future, people will almost certainly have gotten sick of hearing me talk about what will happen in the future. Very likely, I'll have to find another job -- such as fry cook, or hat salesman."
Although vapid, uninteresting predictions of the future are currently at a record high, even those who attempt to make actualy useful predictions foresee a downward trend.
"At some point, real problems are going to become impossible to ignore," pointed out Dr. Bob Gore of the Smartville College, Oxford. "With climate change already depopulating some areas, and the deepening split between the American, Muslim, and Chinese spheres of influence, it's only a matter of time until people just don't have the time to talk about whether, in future, they will have the time to make predictions about... hang on, I can't remember how I started this sentence."
Whoever you listen to, one theme is clear -- futurologists and the kind of 'experts' who appear in newspaper articles as 'experts predict' will one day die out, and that day may be sooner than we think. Which gives us all a ray of hope for the future.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
But we don't have telescreens in every room that can listen and watch us. Yes, they listen to our phone calls without a warrant, but no, you don't have to guard your facial expression for fear of being tortured in Room 101. Saying that our situation is that bad trivializes the suffering and deaths of those whose situation is that bad.
I detest the rantings of O'Reilly and Coulter as much as the next thinking biped, but they do not consitute the Thought Police. Morons may impugn your patriotism for being skeptical of the President's policies, true, but no one, even Coulter, is saying you should be tortured for doing it.
There is no boot in the face, forever and ever. We are being pwned by bible-thumping do-gooders who are not burdened by the humility and self-doubt that plague those of us who can't think of ourselves as instruments of divine providence. They don't think of themselves as power-hungry. That is why our world is so alien to Orwell's fictional one. I'm about halfway done with Orwell's essays, and basically he thinks that people are good, except for those who are bad. But the world really isn't that way. The bad things are done not by inherently bad people, but by people who think they are doing good, but lack the capacity to doubt themselves, their convictions, and their methods. Mix in political conviction with religious faith, bind them together, and you get borderline megalomania, which I think characterizes Ashcroft, Perle, Cheney, and Bush pretty well. They aren't evil (well, maybe Cheney--he's scary), only immune from self-doubt, because they think that the ultimate arbiter of good, meaning God, is firmly on their side. If you are on God's side, then there is only one other side, really.
But this sort of megalomania is seductive even to non-religious people. I'd bet Pol Pot and most other Communist leaders just thought they were doing what was right, they lacked the capacity for self-doubt, and they were surrounded by those who told them what they wanted to hear. There aren't that many authentically bad people in the world. I think Orwell actually gave human beings too much credit, because being rational himself, he assumed that, a few stupid people aside, most people were rational. So even his "bad guys" are rational--they want power, and will use "the boot in the face" to get and keep it. But in reality we have clean-cut, Christian soldiers torturing people to death because they think they're fighting for freedom and democracy. People will do horrible things for noble words, and still sleep like babies at night. Evil is more complex and insidious than Orwell made it out to be.
Anyway, rambling aside, our world is not like the one Orwell created in his books. There are similarities, yes, but ours differs from his in nature and degree. If you use up all your superlatives now, if you shout "tyranny" now, what words will you use when it gets worse?
It is fascinating that you would make that connection, despite my original intention and written word. The relevant implications of it are interesting because we are discussing dystopian future scenarios.
Making common language unintelligible (self-contradictory statements that are taken as wholy true, for example) is essential for the world described Orwell to be possible. If people lose the skill or tools to effectively express reason (see also Fahrenheit 451 ), they will eventually become unable to do anything other than what they are told to do. As I am at work, I will leave it to the reader to make the connections and mental leaps between this concept and a society controlled by artificial intelligence. (A concept, incidentally, beliefly alluded to in a popular anime with a very dark vision of the future.)
Join Tor today!
The secret service investigates all threats, even ones that seem relatively stupid. It's so nobody will go "why didn't we see all these obvious clues?" after the fact. And yes, they've been doing it for decades.
Who will own the Artificial Intelligence? If it's some corporate head like Rupert Murdoch or some Government head like George Bush then count me with the luddite terrorists.
I think the original post misses the mark a bit - the best predictions are made on paper, not on film. The best predictions are also general ideas and not specific things. I mean, Steven Spielberg can predict that we'll have animated newspapers and cereal boxes and he's probably right, but that wasn't all that difficult to call. Philip K. Dick, on the other hand, took the effort to ask the question "what happens when we substantiate present action with the information of future events."
IMHO, the greatest "predictions" of SF to date is the rise of the logos (the living information, not the nike swoosh) and the death of affect. See: Philip K Dick's Valis, William S. Burroughs' Nova Express, J.G. Ballard's Crash. More readable: Snow Crash. Evidence: The internet, the media, reality television.
m0nstr42.blogspot.com
Hari Seldon would have failed today anyway, no matter how much history he had access to. His equations had the technology factor a more-or-less constant. Unexpected events such as specific technological breakthroughs can only be made a part of the equations once they happen. Not to mention he only dealt with human behavior en mass. A single ultra-intelligent non-human entity (an AI for example) would be completely unpredictable to him.
Which is a good point, because the use of the term "selection" carries with it the implication that the trait is a result of one's genotype. For the most part, this is inappropriate when discussing the desire to reproduce. Using the term selection in this way is like suggesting that there is selection against hunger because hungry people die more often.
I don't think it's appropriate to apply natural selection or evolutionary theory to human populations, for the very simple reason that human behavior and reproductive success is, more often than not, unrelated to one's genotype. A more useful prism to view this issue through is sociology. Different cultures and sub-cultures, by definition, exhibit different behaviors, which of course applies to reproduction.
I don't think this is true at all--particularly when many immigrants actively seek (and are allowed to) to segregate themselves from their host populations. Look at the recent riots in France. Most of the rioters were second generation muslim immigrants.
The real question is: should ethnic tension and violence be surprising when the politically correct doctrine of multi-culturalism has cast assimilation as a profane practice?
-Grym
s/soma/[one or more of the following]/g
Alcohol, marijuana, caffine, sugar, nicotine, TV, MySpace, video games, soccer, golf, blackberries, pornography, religion, sudoku, gossip or pokemon.
We all have our vices.
May the Maths Be with you!
The Luddites were a group of people who destroyed machines in factories. They did this because the machines had put them out of work. Most weaving was done as a cottage industry, each craftsman having his own loom in his own house. The invention of the powered looms and subsequent rise of factories to house those looms meant that the cottage industry could not compete in terms of price and efficiency. So unless you were prepared to work for low wages in a factory (the powered looms were operated by largely unskilled operators) you had to find another trade or starve to death !
Considering that there were thousands of home based looms but the factory machines didn't need as many operators, your choices were mostly restricted to the last two options - nice eh ?
That's why they destroyed the machines, not some idealogical fight against "da man", just positive action against the things that were replacing their means of making a living. This bears no resemblance to resisting DRM or Trusted computing. Unless you want to start breaking into houses and smashing pcs that is...
Ironically, if you work in IT, especially if you write code, you are exactly the opposite of a Luddite, seeing as the whole point of a computer is to automate repetitive tasks.SciFi is never right. Never. In the whole, that is. Bits come out right, and if we ignore all the wrongness, that makes them look clever, but it's just a point or two taken out of context for most works. The same sort of cherry picking, in a more extreme form, makes bible prophesy look reliable.
SciFi folks may do a better job of predicting than the average schmoe, but they don't do fantastically well. This is because technology changes and we're all living in bonazaland. (Marshall McLuhan's term for the fact that we're all living in the world of our youth, mentally, and the fact that it is impossible for us to see the world the way the kids do.) We don't see what's already happening.
Also, when we do make a look into the future, we cannot see far enough. When computers first appeared, the world expected them to be huge and brilliant. SciFi had them running planets. Meaning one big computer, running a planet. Who guessed that they'd still be stupid, 50 years later, but so small and so cheap that they run coke machines?
Further, when technology changes, it has a ripple effect. Things change all around it. That coke machine now has a computer in it. It knows what was bought at what time. Who thinks about the little things like that in toto? One or two may occur to a writer, or even fifty. But thousands of such small effects? And together, they change society.
But SciFi is right now and then, and we take those points out of context and those POINTS appear brilliant. HG Wells described the use of the atomic bomb. Never mind that he thought that, because of nuclear decay, it would keep exploding for years.
For SciFi that gets things right, the key is to look for SciFi without Sci. Orwell, for instance: 1984 is amazingly prescient. Look in various totalitarian countries (like or own, more and more) for bits and pieces which appear. Nothing on the whole, but lots of bits.
At the other end of the spectrum, John Varley looks horribly dated, these days, because he wrote about tech and sex. Well, sex hasn't changed, so he still describes a future, there (though it seems more like a wet dream than a possible future) but the tech in his books looks impossible or silly, now. This is a man who eschewed word processors while writing SciFi -- Talk about Bonazaland.
Philip K. Dick still seems current, since Phil didn't even know how light bulbs work. All his work is about society and ethics and the nature of reality. It ain't coming true, but it still grabs ya!
We're talking about the sci-fi future... I think i'd rather start buying stock in spice. I hear that stuff is both addictive and keeps your customers alive longer.
As much as I love science fiction [realistic and fantastic styles], the fact remains that predicting the future is a damn hard thing to do. Consider how people thought that cars would be made obsolete and replaced with flying cars or 'air buses' over half a century ago, yet today cars are getting more and more specialized in composition and function. Then the predictions that robots would be commonly used in every facet of society, yet the fact remains the power constraints for even the least electric motorized platform limits their economical viability. And so on.
Now, lets look at the current things none of the futurists predicted; wireless communication being common [even in the least developed nations], advancements in cancer research [The stem-cell theory of cancer is becoming the prominent paradigm in diagnosis and treatment of cancers.], and even the slow [but steady] advancements [mostly indirect, but a few direct] in life extension [quality and quantity]. Just these three areas weren't even considered possible or predicted by many if any so-called future studies expert. But other discoveries, such as the advancement of negative refraction meta-materials, weren't even on the 'radar' of these experts at all. So, as much as I love guessing what's over the next hill in the future, I don't take it seriously, nor will I take it without a giant lump of salt.
-- Attis
So movies with car crashes upset me. They can take it.
Blar.
(s)
There are things that Bladerunner absolutely predicted that have come to pass, or are occurring in the present.
Manufactured animals. In the movie there are man made animals like snakes that are created in the bio tech industry. This is really no different than someone cloning a dead pet or Dolly the sheep. Anybody with the money can have it done.
Further more it is also common for parents to be able to pick the sex of their child.
The political and economic climate of the movie had large multinational corporations as the central power structure of society. This is exactly what is happening today. When corporations have such vast amounts of wealth to spend on lobbyists, they are the true power behind our government. Who feeds and houses our military; the government, or Haliburton?
The spread of Asian influence into every day society was also predicted in the movie.
This is something that is on going. We already have this influence in the mfg industry. All of our tech dollars eventually flow into Asia. And the Chinese economy is set to explode. At this rate, something like almost 1/4 of the population of the planet will be speaking Mandarin.
And perhaps, most profound is the disconnection of people from each other, leading to increased isolationism, and a lack of understanding and empathy of those around us. Look at the character of Sebastian. Holed up in his apartment, surrounded by friends he built himself. More comfortable around machines than people.
Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld have all claimed that various criticism of the current policies of the executive branch are anti-American. They may not use the term directly, but they phrases like "helping the terrorists", "unacceptable to think...", etc. Of course, sane people ignore them, but that's where the parent poster is coming from.