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William Gibson Gives Up on the Future
Tinkle writes "Sci-fi novelist William Gibson has given up trying to predict the future — because he says it's become far too difficult. In an interview with silicon.com, Gibson explains why his latest book is set in the recent past.
'We hit a point somewhere in the mid-18th century where we started doing what we think of technology today and it started changing things for us, changing society. Since World War II it's going literally exponential and what we are experiencing now is the real vertigo of that — we have no idea at all now where we are going."
"Will global warming catch up with us? Is that irreparable? Will technological civilization collapse? There seems to be some possibility of that over the next 30 or 40 years or will we do some Verner Vinge singularity trick and suddenly become capable of everything and everything will be cool and the geek rapture will arrive? That's a possibility too.'"
there goes my investments in learning Chinese, buying slums in Tokyo and building a crappy AI called Wintermute.
Second, I would like to point out that every non-fiction book or movie I have read requires some degree of suspension of disbelief. Whether I'm watching Remains of the Day or Demolition Man, I need to look past illogical or non-scientific aspects of the movies. Does this detract from the story? Some would say yes, I would say only a little bit. I am very forgiving in literature. I have read many old Stanislaw Lem novels and the complex emotions the robots display is impossible--the physics of the robots are even more impossible. But Lem's stories are still great, given I can get past a robot with no energy input survives millions of years in space.
So although I have not read William Gibson's works, I ask him not to give up on writing. You will have another good idea and you will write another book about it. Just wait for it to come.
As for this idea of technology actually achieving this event horizon described by Good or Gibson or Vinge, I don't think that it's achievable. I can't prove it won't happen just like you can't prove it will happen. All I will say is that I don't even know where to begin. I would start with digesting the world wide web & developing a logic and reasoning engine to decide which statements are true and which are fact and which are neither. When it would be done, it may be 'more intelligent' than I but not 'more intelligent' than the sum of all human knowledge.
I think there will always be a "???" in the game plan to make an artificially intelligent robot that functions intelligently on a human level or higher. I just don't see a way around it. That doesn't mean we should ever stop writing about it though.
Sci-fi is fun, not something that is completely scientifically accurate--it just is a lot more fun when you explore the gray areas we don't understand or theorize about. Enjoy it while you can!
My work here is dung.
So what its hard, and you might get it wrong? That doesnt mean it cant be entertaining reading and thought provoking.
History class is for the lazy writer since there is little to 'invent'. Sure, history is really interesting and educational, but not in the same way as scifi is entertaining and thought provoking.
And if his 'history works' turn out anything like the "difference engine" was ( it was set in the past remember ), then his career is over as a writer im afraid.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
wow. didn't see that one coming, He predicted that the future will be unpredictable.
The shortest route to the truth. Which is more likely, sudden Godlike sentience, or failure and degeneration into a has-been? It may be that life was never meant to get smarter than apes are, and humans were an anomaly...
technical writing / development
Gibson has been going backward and forward in time as he sees fit. Doesn't seem like this is some new direction if you ask me. Perhaps continuing to go sideways might be more accurate.
It's become too difficult? I think it's always been difficult and he's just now beginning to realize how far off the mark his books have been. Don't get me wrong, I love his stuff and will continue to read his books, but saying it's become too difficult is just silly. As for his new book being set in the past, why does that seem to ring a bell? Anyone know of any other cyberpunk novelists that have gone that route?
This guy's the limit!
Slashdot: News for nerds, behold the geek rapture.
30% off web hosting. Coupon code "SLASHDOT".
It's pretty easy to predict the future. The hard part is the timing.
Anyhow, here goes:
- most of the world gets online and fully integrated into the digital revolution
- wireless networks everywhere
- more and more services get online
- large-screen video conferencing in every living room
- digital glasses that overlay the real world with maps, wikipedia pages, everything
- facial recognition for *everyone* you meet, pops up their wikipedia page
- no more queues at the post office - every interaction with the state will go online
- movies will, eventually die, and be replaced with something like scripted video games
- virtual worlds will become a major front-end to the internet
- rising energy costs will define how we use transport
- poorer nations will be strongest adopters of ecological technologies
- we'll see 'fabricators', able to make any product out of a digital design
- the *AA will crack down on design sharers
- cities will reject the automobile and become a lot nicer places to live in
- pharmaceutics will go digital and we'll be exchanging digital drug designs
- some bright kid will hack a drug fab to produce artificial life
- the church and the *AA will crack down on DNA design sharers
- the country as a notion will die and be replaced with the online community
- big, big changes in political structures
Etc.
My blog
Isn't it Vernor Vinge ?
He should rewrite the book "Left Behind" but with a 'geek rapture'. I'd read it!
I dont seem to see anything particularly novel or interesting about his remarks. Technologically speaking, I dont see any evidence in the recent (or distant) past that we've EVER had an idea about where we're headed. According to 1950's sci-fi, we should have multiple extra-solar colonies by now, hand-held laser based weaponry, AI, working jetpacks and the list goes on...
Just as many issues with the future in the 80s, no?
Cold war erupts, MAD destroys humankind. Bad fashion causes global intellectual meltdown.
He writes what he wants, but the reason Neuromancer & Co. was amazing was because he took certain aspects of the current time and extrapolated them into an interesting future. Just like all great science fiction, and I'm sure there will be other authors writing great works about the future in the future (heh). If global warming, singularities or a collapse of civilization doesn't make great writing, write about something else.
I lost my sig.
You know a lot of people in the world live as though airplanes, cars, televisions, and the light bulb were not even invented yet. So even if someday someone invents cool stuff, there will always be a segment of the world to which those things may as well have never been invented. The computer I am typing this to you on is science fiction to them.
So, can we use our existing technology to provide decent preventative health, transportation, and clean water for everyone? It requires no inventing. No new technology. Their governments just need to allow entrepreneurs build a bunch of solar or nuclear power plants to desalinate the water and power heavy construction equipment (currently most third world governments don't allow entrepreneurs to compete against eh state owned corrupt utility companies).
Had you ever watched one of those ancient b/w sci-fi shows or movies on TV? They predict scientific and technological advances to a certain extent - on some they fall short (DNA anyone?), and on some they expected too much (dude, where's my flying car?). But most of them are way off track on something: Society. The way it changes, advances or goes back is unpredictable.
Think about it. 10 years ago, sites like youtube or facebook were simply out of the radar. (Heck, 15 years ago Google didn't exist!) What to say of Survivor or Big Brother? World of Warcraft? Identity theft? Guys catching thieves with webcams on their laptops? Internet cults like Heaven's Gate? Corporations patenting certain kinds of corn? The RIAA's war on priv^H^H^H^Hpiracy?
Truth is stranger than fiction, indeed.
Predicting the future is actually very easy.
The future will be very much like today. In 10 years, we'll have the same modes of transportation, the same fuels, the same foreign policy issues, the same bad TV, the same bad politicians, etc.
If you look back 10 years, what are the big changes?
If he's going to cite this month's CNN headlines as possibilities of our unraveling in 30 years, he's really demonstrating how weak his mind is getting as he's getting older.
I'll turn to Fox News if I want to hear about the end of the world or live in fantasy land.
I think for Gibson-as-sci-fi-writer the ability to concretely visualize emergent trends is critical for him to be able to write about them...If he's sitting down in front of the keyboard and thinking, "Welll crap, from where we're standing, we could go anywhere" that's not really going to allow him to really develop details and a distinct feel.
That being said, I read Pattern Recognition (his last novel) and it was an excellent book, even though it wasn't very futuristic at all. I think he's selling himself short; there is more to sci-fi than futurism.
If anyone hasn't read William Gibson, I recommend him...He's a seminal sci-fi author...Pretty much created the cyberpunk subgenre.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
The rate of technology advancement indeed has been quite impressive in recent years, with the advancement of computers for instance where yesterdays million dollar computer can be outperformed by todays $200 computer. Computers were once mainly text oriented devices, and now even the cheapest ones can play video and render complex 3D graphics. This information age which has come to pass, is one of the best things that could have happened, especially if it is controlled and utilised by the masses rather than for the few, in a climate of completely free and unbridled free speech and expression. We must hang on to that, and i believe such diversity is critical to our continued development intellectually, its when we have only a few viewpoints and persons which are able to express themselves that we risk stagnation. The internet has opened up anyone to be able to pubish information and anyone to be able to access it easily, so this has allowed for a lot of talent to be developed where it otherwise wouldnt have.
However, if we are going to continue this, we need to look for a renewable source of energy to power our machines and computers, and the only one I can think of is some sort of over unity system. Solar and wind it appears now are too low in power density to make more of a drop in the bucket of difference. Fusion might be too expensive and costly to provide energy on a large scale to provide cheap energy to all of the worlds population. Solar and wind energy do not even produce enough energy density to manufacture these very sorts of devices and fossil fuels are still necessary to manufacture them. Free energy would lift humanity out of the enslavement of poverty, and allow for poverty to be eliminated and first world standards of living to be brought to all areas of the world, all without burning one drop of fossil fuels burning any earth material or any fuels. Completely free, clean, cheap electricity which can be access anywhere without the need for quickly depleated, environmentally destructive and difficult to access and rare forms of energy such as fossil fuels. To not want this would be insane, it would be to want to see the continued suffering and impoverishment of millions of souls.
The over unity energy technology may be quite possible. If so, it is only our arrogance and ignorance, and our self assuredness that the laws of nature as we know know them apply in every single instance, which has not been proven at all. Perhaps there is some yet undiscovered force or effect that only manifests in one configuration of magnets out of millions. Unless you have been actively and carefully looking at all possibilities and testing all possibilites for such varations they would have been completely missed. Since every possible configuration of magnets, mechanical or electrical systems has not been tested that their is not some sort of force that may manifest in some special condition is based on faith. Withj this It is much harder to prove a negative than it is to prove a positive, because there are so many different cases where such a thing may be possible which have not been tested at all.
Electric power is everywhere present in unlimited quantities and can drive the world's machinery without the need of coal, oil, gas, or any other of the common fuels." [Nikola Tesla].
Ere many generations pass, our machinery will be driven by a power obtainable at any point in the universe. This idea is not novel... We find it in the delightful myth of Antheus, who derives power from the earth; we find it among the subtle speculations of one of your splendid mathematicians...Throughout space there is energy. Is this energy static or kinetic? If static our hopes are in vain; if kinetic \ufffd and this we know it is, for certain then it is a mere question of time when men will succeed in attaching their machinery to the very wheelwork of nature." [Nikola Tesla, in a speech in New York to the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, 1891. Quoted from his biography, Margaret Cheney, Tesla: Man Out of Time]
Dates with girls.
I can hardly wait.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
1. Use a combination of surgical examination, dissection of dead tissue, and MRI and other dynamic techniques to produce a model of the physics of a human brain
2. Wait until Moore's law puts a computer within your price range that is capable of running that model at faster than 1 model second per real second
3. Implement it
You now have a machine that is slightly more intelligent than a human. Add in the fact that you can fully oxygenate all tissues, remove waste products, control neurochemicals, and dissipate (virtual) heat with no regard for physical laws, and I'd say it's quite a bit beyond human intelligence.
...Or is it? Eh...I always thought Sci-Fi was more about bringing the present to light then predicting anything about the future but who am I... :p
Alternately, climate change destroys much of human life on the planet.
It won't be Mad Max, Waterworld or Soylent Green but certain foods are going to become a luxary. Certain fish already are.
Somehow the future is surprising, yet not surprising. I revel in watching the world change, the same mistakes being made, but still with crazy plot twists.
The future has always been quite similar to the past, that's probably the most striking thing about it. Culturally things have hardly changed in centuries. People fight over religion, travel wherever they can to get away from each other, experiment with anything they get their hands on, grow up, get married, raise children, and die. The tools we use change, but our actual lives as homo sapiens...not so much.
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
1) Gravity is finally figured out as a force.
:-)
We engineer devices to nullify it and usher in a new age of transportation, at ANY speed.
Instantaneous speed now has an entirely NEW meaning.
2) Dark Energy is found to be something you can actually tap into.
New forms of electrical generation result in unlimited amounts of energy as we tap into the local universe and use as much as we want.
3) New materials are manufactured from Dark Matter. Buildings 10 miles high, space elevators ala Space 3001.
It could happen.
-hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
I find it impossible. I guess that's why I can't get a job:
Interviewer: "Where do you see yourself in 5 years?"
Me: "If I knew what was happening in 5 years, I'd be a billionaire and NOT interviewing for some dipshit wage slave job! And maybe, if I actually knew, I'd be committing suicide for my dismal future of: commuting at least an hour in traffic one way each day, having to put up asinine reviews that are geared to make me fail, watching CEOs who get fired leave with tens of millions of dollars in severance while, the rest of us watch our jobs go overseas,and ... oh fuck it!"
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
"Everything that can be invented has been invented." --Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899.
"If something's expensive to develop, and somebody's not going to get paid, it won't get developed. So you decide: Do you want software to be written, or not?" -- Bill Gates, 1984
I rest my case.
she called it "the worst kind of pseudo-intellectual garbage,"
The "worst", as opposed to the "best" kind?
The book is speculative fiction: Is it garbage because its predictions haven't been met? Is it "pseudo-intellectual" because it is a work of fiction, and, to some extent, was intended to entertain? Or is it that she judged the story or the characters or the setting to her disliking insteading judging the writing itself?
Granted, it's not an earth-shattering revelation on the insights of society and technology, but then I don't believe either the book itself or Gibson presented it that way.
Neuromancer was damned fun to read, even if large parts of it seem completely unrealistic now or in the future.
For that matter, "Journy to the center of the earth" (Jules Verne) was actually an interesting book, even if we're all pretty confident now that it's completely impossible.
So I can understand giving up on actually trying to predict the future. But go ahead and speculate. Have fun!
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
...but his stance reminds me a lot of the people in the 50s, 60s and 70s who gave us artist's impressions of the following decades where we were all wearing odd-looking outfits to work and driving flying cars. Yet the only truely "big" visible change was in computing.
Aside from any incredible breakthroughs (time travel, faster-than-light drives, etc) I just see our future as being the same as those of previous decades: steady incremental advancements in mostly low profile technolgy and bioscience.
And please, nobody start blathering about "nano" anythings. You remind me of an Australian science show ('Beyond 2000') in which every episode we were told about how "virgil re-elleedee" was going to transform our lives completely and forever, Real Soon Now.
This is one author, continuing to write, but changing his focus. Interesting article about William's change of focus and his ideas, but the "William Gibson gives up on the future" is obviously inflamatory and meant to draw in the eyeballs, when it's far more interesting to present an even keeled title. I would have felt compelled to remark more about sci-fi writing and the near future if it weren't for this obviously crappy title.
Did the firehose suddenly run out of water when this article was being modded?
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
In an essay published some time ago, Si Fi author Ursula LeGuin came down hard against the idea that one should even expect her art to be a prediction of the future. She went down a list that included prophets, touts, and futurists, and didn't find herself anywhere among them. So she gave up decades ago.
People will find more ways to kill time.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
...that this post will be read. In the future.
I don't know why. I think it's because the millions paid to make Kangaroo Jack could feed an entire African nation for quite some time. And that writing a book usually costs a person just enough to live and get by while it's in the process. I see books as more of a pure form of free speech also and I never want to see a book censored or banned regardless of its content. Purist, idealist view I know but if I had a religion it would be centered around that.
Maybe it's because the world wanted James Joyce to stop writing. Maybe it's because the world wanted Anthony Burgess to stop writing. If they had succeeded, we wouldn't have Ulysses or A Clockwork Orange. Two monumental masterpieces in my mind.
Don't ask him to stop writing, I'm sure someone somewhere still enjoys the works, you don't have to keep reading them. I no longer read Crichton or Stephen King even though I read everything by them in eighth grade. Is it because I've grown up or they've changed? I cannot say but I still hope they author novels until their dying day so that others may enjoy them.
What does a bad book by an author you once loved hurt you? Let them publish, read the reviews and pick carefully. I think that deep down inside you'd still read them and get some enjoyment even if it's just discussing them with your friends.
My work here is dung.
Come now, Frank Herbert of the Dune series completely eliminated the future predicting as a problem altogether. First, he went WAY into the future, at least 10 - 20 thousand years, and second he eliminated the difficult to predict computers and robots via cultural phenomena.
Just like that he eliminated all barriers to the future and was free to write whatever the heck he wanted. Wonderful Dune goodness was the result.
Canticle For Leibowitz is another good book that just decided that eventually we would blow ourselves up, and then went from there to build a different future the way the author imagined it might go.
You don't even have to get super creative with this stuff. If it's too hard, just come up with something that will elimate the barrier for you and go with it from there. Perhaps we hit a plateau in 20 years and the "future" goes away from technology and into a different direction, who knows? His job is to be creative and it sounds like he's whining about it.
Me, I am happy that Gibson finally admits he has no freakin' clue what the future will bring.
Maybe he will stop writing about the dark ages as if they were coming to us instead of long past.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Set your stories far enough in the future that you'll be long dead. That way, if you get it wrong, what are they going to do about it?
Allow me to translate...
"Screw this. I'm going to write about a farm. With a horse. And he will act like horses do and eat hay. He will not be genetically engineered super-horse that's plugged into the online universe, hacking the orbital death ray lasers.
His name will be Fred.
Fred will whinny and snort while trotting about the pasture. The only thing fantastic about Fred will be the sheer amount of manure he produces."
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
Were it not for willing suspension of disbelief, the entire genre of fiction would not even be viable.
Fixed that for you. Suspension of disbelief is just as much a requirement for other fiction subgenres as it is for SF, in greater or lesser amounts. In some ways I think 'hard' SF requires less than other types of fiction, because it gives you plausible arguments for setting aside your disbelief.
But were it not for people's willingness to set aside their disbelief in order to be entertained, we wouldn't have a whole lot of art. (Certainly there would be very little theater; how do you cope with some of the tortured plotlines common in classical theater, or for that matter, why people are standing in front of you and paying no attention to the fact that they're on stage?)
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Which is what confuses me about this. Many of Heinlein's books were set in the actual present. The same with Pohl. The same with Robinson. Even those set in the past are not necessarily time travel books. An appropriate example is the difference engine, by gibson and sterling. In that book they assume that manufacturing difficulties had been overcome and the age of computers began early.
What I hope Gibson is doing is not being so negative about the future, and focusing on the realistic implications of technology, or the best guess reality based on who we have behaved in the past. As wonderful as Neuromancer and the like are, they added more to the popular culture than the genre of science fiction.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
We have Shatner.
o res-world-of-trek-tech.htm
"It's a step-by-step process. You climb on the backs of giants. Only rarely are there leaps. Scientific advances mostly are incremental. If enough time goes by, a decade goes by, suddenly, that increment, you take year one to year 10, looks like a giant leap. So here we are 30, 40 years after `Star Trek,' and it looks like it was extraordinary, the advances we've made."
http://www.happynews.com/news/392006/shatner-expl
Enjoy,
It's just the normal noises in here.
Does this mean Scotty will finally beam me up?
I may not be a smart man, but I know what an inode is.
About the singularity, my opinion is: who knows? It seems more or less like life after death, we have no sure way of knowing from where we stand today, we should just wait and see. It's a funny thing, when you start examining past predictions of SF. In one of the books in the original Asimov "Foundation" trilogy, written about 1940, there was a description of a calculator: "Seldon removed a calculator from the pouch at his belt
Another funny prediction is that something very much like a search engine was predicted both in Arthur Clarke's 1975 book "Imperial Earth" and in the film "Rollerball", from the same age. But neither of these predicted the internet, both of them had a search engine running in a supercomputer that had assembled in it the whole of human knowledge.
The point is that it's possible to predict functionality, because that's something we need and someone will invent it sooner or later. But we cannot predict when or how that functionality will be achieved. Arthur Clarke's Google was 300 years in the future, Rollerball's was in 2018. And there's more: when the scientist in "Rollerball" wants some data he types a command and the computer starts reading punched cards.
In conclusion, I'm ready to bet we will reach that "singularity", but I don't know whether it will be in the next 30 or 300 years. And I have absolutely no idea how we will do it or what will come after.
In some way we can say that we already have reached a point where machines are more intelligent than us. The first mathematical theorem that was proved by a machine and that humans couldn't prove was the "four color map" theorem, proved about 30 years ago, taking about a thousand hours of calculations from the supercomputers of the day.
There was an age that ended about 150 years ago when an intelligent person would be able to learn everything worth learning in science. Today, the more we learn the more we become specialized, and the more we need machines to handle our knowledge. But I see nothing wrong with that, if a man can control a crane that lifts a thousand tons, why couldn't a man control a computer that handles knowledge far beyond the capacity of a single human being?
Of course, Marx was different in this way: He did make one prediction about the future whose means of production were unknown to him: he thought there would be a people's revolution in which people would take control of the technology developed in the capitalist era, because of the inevitable resort to artificial scarcity that the capitalist system will increasingly have to turn to. Scarcity will need to be artificial because technology will be able to meet all the basic and many of the advanced needs of everyone in the world. Capitalism doesn't work in situations of plentitude, so there is no market for breathable air (yet). So the artificial scarcity that Capitalists will need to create will eventually get so ridiculous that people will just depose them. As far as futurism goes, I think this outline is aging rather well.
And by the way, this is much closer to what Marx actually said than what most "Communists" claim he said. The Marx I read never advocated a revolution, resource distibution, or any of that other socialist stuff. He was a dialectician who thought that history has an inner logic and moves forward inevitably. Pleading with people doesn't move history; technology moves history. He argued pretty forcefully that Capitalism isn't the final system, but not because he was trying to stir up a revolution. It was just to convince people that it can't last, that, like every earlier technological/ideological era, it will be undone by the tools it eventually creates. So if Capitalism creates automatic strawberry harvesters because Mexicans get too expensive, and intelligent robots and fusion powerplants and workerless factories, it will eventually make the gear of it's own demise. Marx repeatedly extolled Capitalism for being so damn good at producing new technology in the most efficient way possible. It was Lenin, not Marx, who thought that a society can leap past all the stages of industrial and post-industrial capitalism and start a revolution with just an ideological vanguard. Obviously, that didn't work out. Marx was clear that technology drives ideology and not the other way around.
Jebus shall descend and take unto his hands one USB flash drive and turn them into thousands. He shall start an Internet Business and his IPO shall be good.
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
I dunno, maybe it's just something that happens to you when you get older. You stop being quite so fascinated with gizmos and widgetry and start becoming interested in the "technology" of social interactions and human nature -- and that leads you straight to history and historical fiction.
I mean, the same transition happened to me. In my 20s and early 30s I read gobs of sf and other kinds of speculative stuff. Now (early 40s) I tend to be a much more interested in history and social psychology. Not sure why.
Maybe it's because the attraction of sf is mostly the fun of "working out the consequences" of a few mildly plausible assumptions. As in: what would happen if teleportation booths were invented? What would society be like, what would it be like to live in such a world, what other inventions would be enabled, et cetera?
But perhaps as you get older the chains of reasoning that you use to work that stuff out start to seem flimsier and less believable, since you've seen in your personal life how often predictions of the future turn out to be self-delusional garbage. You live through the 1970s "Energy Crisis" and realize how even very short-range forecasts (of e.g. a world out of oil by 2000) can be bogus, and you start to see how easy it is to delude yourself about what the future will bring, and (which is perhaps more personally discouraging), how this doesn't deter people one whit from continuing to make and consume delusional predictions of the future.
Plenty of sf writers at least unconsciously want to warn or enlighten readers about the probable consequences of present trends. It's discouraging in one sense to realize how wrong you were, but discouraging in probably an even greater sense to realize that no one even cares, that people lap up hard-headed "scientific" predictions of the future with about as much enthusiastic credulity and failure to critically re-evaluate when they prove wrong as they do astrological horoscopes. You might start to think: what's the point? Why think long and hard about what the future will bring if (1) I'm probably going to be wrong, and (2) no one even cares much about whether I'm right or wrong. Maybe you start to feel like a circus clown, making funny faces to make the rubes laugh. You feel like you could drop four major scientific goofs into your next book, and as long as there were plenty of crackling laser beams and mind-blowing nanowidgetry no one would care. Like you're George Lucas and you can sell a totally lame screenplay with pathetic acting, just so long as the computerized special effects are cool enough.
If that happens, then perhaps you start to be drawn to the past, to chains of reasoning that are more solidly-based, because they terminate in the present with consequences you can directly observe. The intellectual attraction is still "working out the consequences" of assumptions about what in the past was important and led to the present we know, but you've more assurance that your chains of reasoning aren't completely cracked, because they're anchored, so to speak, at various points by historical facts.
There is probably also some attraction in the idea that if you can understand the past in some way more consistent and believable than anything yet achieved, then you will open a unique door into predicting the future, too.
- facial recognition for *everyone* you meet, pops up their wikipedia page
Until some asshole declares them "not notable". At which point, it auto-redirects to their MySpace, and you have a seizure.
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
What happens to all that salt left over from desalinization?
.. we don't need to build a containment facility in the sahara desert for salt.
It get's dissolved back with the used water (post wastewater treatment during which hazardous molecules are broken up back into minerals) and let back into the ocean. How do you increase an ocean's salinity with it's own salt if you're putting the water back?
You do realize that most of the water comes back to the sea eventually right? -- either through the sewer system or rain.
So no
Does anyone else think if anything, we have slowed down? I mean, we still get technology, but it's more refinement then anything else. Maybe that is me, but it seems like the big society changes are stable for now, and maybe the next 20 years.
...writer gets writer's block, blames in on (looks up excuse of the day) lack of imagination
Go not unto/. for advice, for you will be told both yea and nay (but have nothing to do with the question)
I would like to point out that cyberpunk's vision of cyberspace with its entirely abstract-GUI hacking and its death by security program is just as magically unscientific as warp drives and funny-foreheaded aliens. Anyone that kvetches about Star Trek not being science fiction shouldn't be all that much more sympathetic about Gibson's work either.
Heck, anyone willing to cut off nearly all TV SF is probably missing out on a lot of really awesome authors like Ellison and Bester due to their desire for hard science purity. Even David Brin's written some pretty wildly out there stuff like "Kiln People" (which I HIGHLY recommend).
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
... just before the next big thing comes along.
What's the next big thing? I have no idea. I'm just like everybody else, noticing that not much has changed lately...
...Everyone will have methods of transportation like in The Jetsons. Also, we will be fishing for mermaids on the moon.
Gibson rewrote SF future with his revolutionary _Neuromancer_. But each subsequent book shone a little less intensely, and all in the reflected brightness of Neuromancer. _Mona Lisa Overdrive_ is really recommendable only to fans of _Neuromancer_, and _Virtual Light_ is often best left unrecommended, so as not to spoil the "trilogy". Even _Idoru_, which was good, was just an overlong novella, like part of a "Director's Cut" of _Neuromancer_.
I've enjoyed Gibson's books since they were first published. And I've enjoyed asking him questions when he's given readings. But I haven't considered Gibson an expert on "the future", even his own that he writes about, in almost 20 years. That's a lot of past to make up for a futurist.
Now Neal Stephenson, Gibson's literary heir: he's still got a plausible future machine running upstairs.
--
make install -not war
Neuromancer was very well written, but utterly short-sighted (as all futurism is. Like Cory Doctorow said, futurists only create the present, just more of it). The world he created felt fake, plastic, and surreal.
Neuromancer is absolutely brilliant for what it is -- a dystopian critique of everything that was frightening about the 80's for those who had been adults in the 70's: Corporate mega-mergers; the captivating, numbing, spellbinding nature of television, the "Me generation," the dissolving bond of loyalty between company and employee, the increasing disregard of companies for the lives of citizens, drug use going from drugs for relaxation and communion to those for stimulation and frenzy, weakening government at the same time corporate power began to transcend borders, Japanese dominance of the markets, the transition away from natural folk music to synthetic and hard music, edgier and more aggressive fashion, body modification, alienation and the increasing fraying of social bonds, market booms and busts, the obsolescence of the average worker, etc., etc.
You're right that "futurists only create the present, just more of it," but if you think that the world of Neuromancer was "fake, plastic, and surreal," then that's there's nothing wrong with that. That's what it was supposed to be!
Early cyberpunk is nothing but the nightmare shadow the 1980s, and "fake, plastic, and surreal" was the dominant feeling of that era for a lot of people.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Having heard Gibson talk about his past, I get the feeling that the reason his writing style changed so much since Neuromancer is because his life got better. It's harder to write about how completely shitty the world is when you can't truly believe it.
While I miss reading the old Gibson, I wouldn't want him to go back to that place.
Spell cheek you've failed me four the last thyme!
Come on, guys. There is not THAT much change. I mean, we still have the aging process to deal with. Once we get SENS (www.sens.org) or some equivalent biomedical technology, then we can start talking about real change.
It never felt dystopian or nightmare like to me. The world described in this book feels good - despite the corporate power in the background. Nearly all the people in the book live a rather free life in the shadows in which the corporations are not much interested.
Also regarding his interview: I never would care that he missed mobile phones. I heard him telling that he missed that even before and I don't get it. I can't see how much it would have changed the book. Everything I cared about in this book would also have worked if he had thought of mobiles. What I think that he really missed was that the religions would get so loud once more.
....this guy needs a DeLorean.
www.purevolume.com/martyd
lol
In the future authors will have 5 or 6 different good ideas and they will recycle them endlessly into an entire genre.
Well written sci-fi is timeless regardless of whether its predictions come true. If accuracy was the prerequsite no one would read Jules Verne or H.G. Wells in school anymore. Still im looking forward to the Geek Rapture thats when Charles Babbage comes back to life to lead us all to Zion.
I've never thought those types of books were about predicting the future. Take a book like 1984. It hasn't come true, at least not yet. But even if it isn't a correct interpretation of the future, it still serves as a warning. In fact, perhaps a small part of the reason 1984 never happened is because it was written.
Gibson has great themes but he has a hard time to write in a manner that won't become obsolete. In Neuromancer, the hero is to make a little fortune by selling a few stolen RAM dimms. Why did Gibson think that is was a good idea to specify that they totaled 5 Mb?
I'm reading Rendez-vous with Rama at the moment and even though the action if way further into the future, I don't think that it will become obsolete anytime soon. Clarke puts the focus on character interactions, not on endless descriptions techno-gadgets. Gibson is, in a sense, the Tolkien of science fiction.
I'm glad that he did put forward the cyber-punk genre but I don't enjoy it through him. If, like me, you like the Gibson's universe but not his prose, watch Ghost in the Shell, you'll be delighted.
Just wanted to point out that the science in Brin's novels is pretty consistently awful.
For example, in "Sundiver" there is a space-elevator kind of thing. Instead of a wire though, it is a sealed cylinder that blimps float up into outer space. Total fundamental misunderstanding of how air pressure works. Basic basic stuff.
He definitely doesn't consider himself a hard sci-fi writer. He describes hard sci-fi authors as an elitist group that has ghettoized itself.
Alternately, climate change destroys much of human life on the planet.
600 million years of temperature and CO2 levels
The climate is pegged between fixed limits, as the paleoclimate record shows. It's not sensitive to CO2 levels --- nature tried that experiment already, injecting vastly more CO2 than we can even imagine generating (up to 7000 ppm, versus our few hundred ppm).
There's no reason to believe that mankind's survival is in any danger at all, wherever we end up on that graph which spans a 10-degree C variation of possible average global temperatures.
Frankly I am sick and tired of hearing these references to global warming. Of course those who like to use these references like spices typically know next to nothing about the subject.
/.'ers are going to be caught up in it.
/.'ers should be worrying about?
/.'ers are young enough that they will be fighting an oil war - which is a resource grab. Who wants this?
It is my opinion that if one wants to know how CO2 might affect the planet then one should probably look first at the geological record to see what effect CO2 might have had in the past. I think anyone who disagrees with this premise should show why CO2 levels during such and such a geological period should be expected to not behave as CO2 levels are expected to behave now.
On this basis...
Over the last 570 million years the planet has been about 10 degrees ON AVERAGE warmer than now for at least 80% of the time period. There have been three (3) major cooling events and we are at the bottom of one now. 5 million years ago it was much warmer than now. 2 million years ago there were trees growing north of the arctic circle. Actually I have a friend who is a hard rock geologist and they were drilling Kimberlites in Canada's tundra and struck wood - 2 million year old wood - at a depth of about 150 meters. Yes. There were trees in Canada's tundra back then. The earth was much warmer then.
But what of CO2 driven global warming?
During the Ordovician, the planet plunged from a very warm climate to a very cold climate. The CO2 levels back then were about 13x to 17x greater than now... Even with CO2 levels about 5,000 ppm this gas was not able to prevent the earth from slipping into an ice age. Note that at present, CO2 is about 370 ppm and this is up from about 280 ppm in the 1800's. Yes, CO2 has increased. But geologically it is still at a geological historical low.
Then, during the Carboniferous, there was a cooling. CO2 was much much higher than now.
The paleoclimatology community says that CO2 levels are not linked to temperature in the geological record.
IMHO - global warming is just an excuse for people to worry over something. Mass media wants people to worry. People tend to worry about things they don't understand. People tend to worry about things they do understand also. Pollies like to use this to justify unpopular laws and taxation.
Personally I think there are many things worth worrying about. The Fckd USA health care system is something worth worrying about because a sizable percentage of
The oil wars are worth worrying about. The conflict in the middle east scares me. There is much more going on than we are told. I side with those who say we are at peak oil production. North America passed peak gas production in Jan 2001. We have NOTHING on the back burner now that will provide the energy we need.
When I read and hear about the new security measures I worry. Like why? The system we had before wasn't all that bad. Why the emphasis on security? Then I think about war. If our governments are planning to start WWIII then it all makes sense. Is this something I and other
Many
There are alternatives. Many stories address this. One alternative is nuclear.
Maybe instead of worrying about ghosts that probably do not exist we should be all looking at the real problems we do have to face.
Global Warming is not one of them.
The principal green house gas is Water Vapour and at 40 degrees C which is common in the tropics the absolute humidity is about 5% which is 50,000 ppm. We do not know historically if this is higher or lower. CO2 levels are 370 ppm and they are up about 90 ppm over the last say 100++ years.
We cannot even measure water vapour over the planet accurately enough to determine of water vapour levels are up 90 ppm or down 90 ppm or even if they are up 1000 ppm or down 1000 ppm. When the most important variable in the model is ignored then
This is, of course, assuming that your model of the "physics of the brain" will somehow behave intelligently. But why should it?
One can show that a hand full of nodes in a neuronal network (if properly watch and arranged) can learn and show intelligent behavior. The problem is that until now, it doesn't work with bigger sets of nodes. The problem here is not (or not only) processing power. The problem is that we don't know _enough_ about learning and intelligence to put the finger on it and produce a better model that would show the same behavior as a Real Brain.
Trying to mimic more of the "physics of the human brain" is just a desperate move in finding the missing parts of the current models of how the brain might work. Maybe we learn some more about how the brain works, but my guess is that we are still far far away of building a model which exposes the same capabilities a Real Brain.
I have read every single book William Gibson wrote, until I got to Pattern Recognition, which was so bland that I simply gave up on William Gibson. His newest Book I will not read for the same reason. And it's not just that book, but his books have become steadily less edgy, and steadily more yuppy pseudo intellectual ever since the Idoru series, which started off well, but really got terribly bad towards the last book, All Tomorrow's Parties.
There was none of that low life, poor man, minute graphic detail, bundled with a climatic story which made Neuromancer, Burning Chrome and Count Zero so good.
I wondered why that was for a long time, and then, while reading William Gibson's blog, some years ago, after Pattern Recognition came out, where William Gibson was describing his iBook, and there was a photo of him in an expensive coat, looking very much the North Eastern intellectual, I realised that that which had made William Gibson's early works so good was his own financial desperation, social dislocation and the trauma of his childhood. In effect, he was writing his dreams into his works.
Now, a lot of writers do this, and he probably still does, but he made a fantastic amount of money with Neuromancer, Count Zero and Johnny Mnemonic and is now a settled writer with a comfortable home, a family of his own (both of his parents died when he was young and he ran off to Canada to avcid Vietnam) and no longer has any burning issues or needs. And it colours his work. Now he no longer has a poor man's escapist dreams.
It has very little to do with predicting the future.
I think the biggest problem in SF is how to describe a recognisable and meaningful future. If you read Charles Stross' 'Accelerando', he handles it very well - starting off in the very near future (super-computer built into glasses, robo-pets) and by the end of the book is nonchalantly chucking around concepts that would have been almost meaningless at the start of the story but make sense when built on everything you've read thus far.
On the other hand, I've tried to read some of Iain M Banks' SF and can't make head nor tail of it - the future's too far in the future, the people in the stories don't have motivations I recognise or can empathise with, the technology is so radically different that I recognise nothing, and therefore am not interested in what's going on, or what the people and AI's might be trying to do. I also tried reading some gigantic space-opera by Peter Hamilton, and got 250 pages into it before realising I still had no idea what the story was about, who any of the main characters were, and the fact that none of them had done anything interesting by that point. You can describe all the whizzy tech you like, but if the people in the story ('people' encompassing anything from AI to alien to sentient slime-mould) aren't doing anything to make you care what happens to them, then it's a crap story whether it's set in the Stone Age or the Diamond Age.
I always thought Gibson didn't write SF so much as bog-standard thrillers - break a guy out of captivity, rob a bank, but hey! it's happening in the future, so it's suddenly SF. I can no longer find one of my favourite ever SF stories - I think it was in an issue of IASFM. It's a short story about a day in the life of a future criminal, but far from being the Stainless Steel Rat, he's doing things that simply aren't illegal in our day - hunting through garbage for recyclables, and arranging fake birth permits for a childless couple are the two I recall. There's no future tech in the story at all, but the world is beautifully delineated by what are considered future crimes.
There are a number of true future predictions you can make. For instance "The future will be dissimilar to some significant number of predictions we make." It's simply a matter of having a prediction whose verbiage is inclusive enough.
But that aside, they are doing amazing things with longevity these days; I think that betting your money on not dying is about as wise as deciding that the Atlantic Ocean would never be crossed would have been in the days of Columbus. Physically speaking there is little known reason for people to die. Why can't they replace their body forever? It looks more and more like we are biologically built to die - because evolution 'designed' us, and evolution is notoriously defective. Until we can scientifically show there is good cause to believe people have to eventually die, from a biophysical aspect, I think that the prediction of "we'll all die" holds as much water as "we'll never fly".
[Ego]out
"There seems to be some possibility of that over the next 30 or 40 years or will we do some Verner Vinge singularity trick and suddenly become capable of everything and everything will be cool and the geek rapture will arrive? That's a possibility too.'"
:D
"and the meek shall inherit the earth". meek was just a spelling mistake, they ment geek!
It is William Gibson, in particular, who is running into a predicition problem. I haven't seen anyone else mention this, so I'm going to. It's a simple problem and it makes it very hard for him to presidct future, much more so than any other random science fiction author. You see, William Gibson's problem is he doesn't like or understand computers. In fact, last time I heard, he was still writing his novels on a typewriter. He didn't own a computer and I doubt he owns one now, or that even if he did own one, that he'd use it.
It's may be hard to believe but it's what he said himself in a number of interviews. We're reaching the point where any future technology is going to be driven by computers, and if you only have a vague idea of how computers work, then you're going to have a very hard time predicting the future.
I used to like William Gibson's writing, then I saw and interview with him where he was bragging about an X-files episode he wrote, it was one of the worst episodes of X-files I had even seen. Since that time my view of his writing has changed a little it looks a lot more like Neuromancer was the product of a fair amount of luck. The genre tropes that William Gibson somehow crystallized in Neuromancer all predate him. They were even all collected in a similar manner in a couple of books before Neuromancer, it's just that Neuromancer was the first one to sell really, really well. So, I've come to conclusion that William Gibson is a better writer than a predictor in science fiction. He's got a flair for capturing atmosphere with his argot, but he doesn't really understand the science in his science fiction and sometimes that really shows.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
so I don't have long to wait! ;)
"The Future is not only stranger than we imagine; it's stranger than we can imagine."
Mod Karma -1: I sed bad wurds. If I cep my mouf shut, I wud be at riyses.
I see every damn day, I am definitely more worried about something NOT being intelligent enough to carry out its job than I am worried about it being too intelligent to do mine.
While Moore's law is fine for the sheer number of components on a chip, its totally crap when it comes to predicting anything about what those components do.
I wish it were otherwise but I don't see anything on the horizon that's going to improve the situation.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
..is the ultimate vaporware.
Never was a fan of WG. His vision of the future was always blurry. Ask me, I can tell you the future. Any true geek can.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Nice strawmanning there.
I like Neuromancer, but really, it's fairly cheap entertainment and I can easily see how somebody could with very good reason call it pseudo-intellectual garbage. Because it is, and it just happens that some of us are entertained by that kind of thing. If you aren't, it's not going to have much to offer you.
This is the worst sort of denial of the responsibility to consider the consequences of our collective actions that I've seen in a long time from someone who has made their entire reputation on speculation about the future. All of this sort of hand-wringing is based quite clearly on the myopic assumption that simply because we, as a species, have managed to advance the state of our technology over the past few millenia and have witnessed a corellated exponential increase in population, we will continue to do so at an ever-accelerating rate. The number one question we face right now is the question of whether or not our available resources, in terms of both raw materials and energy, are sufficient to sustain our way of life, and the more we discover about science and technology, the more we realize that it is practically certain that we do not, in fact, have resources of unlimited abundance.
> anyone who analyses the literature will hate neuromancer and most other cyberpunk as well.
>> Incorrect. My wife has a masters in English and she informs me that Neal Stephenson's 'Snow Crash' is part of what they call 'the literary canon'.
>>> No offense, but the fact that your wife has a Master's in English doesn't mean squat.
In this case it does matter. Your post's GP made an assertion as to what a group of people ("anyone who analyses the literature") thinks of Neuromancer ("will hate [it}"). The parent said that his wife belongs to a group of people who profesionally analyse the literature, and that she reports that group does not hate Neuromancer, but rather considers it a classic (that is what "part of what they call 'the literary canon'" means).
How is that irrelevant?
> There is no more or less informed opinion when talking about appreciation of art: it's all entirely subjective.
But there is a clear informed opinion when talking about current consensus on a given work. The Mona Lisa is universally considered a masterpiece in academic circles, primary school textbooks and the popular media, regardless of what your (or mine, for that matter) entirely subjective impression of it may be.
And Neuromancer is now rutinely included in reading lists by English Departments the world over, whether you know someone with a CS degree who can't operate a toaster or not.
http://barrapunto.com/ - News for nerds, en español
Ben Hocking
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My point was they don't have to be like NYC. Of course, most American cities aren't like Phoenix, either. I live in Charlottesville, VA, (population approximately 40,000), and we have a pretty decent public transit system. I walk to work almost every day.
This wasn't my point but the problem boils down to a few factors: (1) the willingness of the city/suburb to embrace public transportation (many suburbs of Atlanta, like Phoenix, are lousy in this regard), (2) sane zoning regulations that make it easier to work near where you live, and (3) the willingness of the people to seek out working/living arrangements so they work near where they live. Too many people think they have "no choice".
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Hogwash. They're perfectly able to if they just had the political will to do so. There are lots of different styles of public transit, and I'm certain there are ones that would work in Phoenix. Again, it works in Charlottesville with a population of 40,000. Don't tell me it can't work in a suburb where people are traveling more than 15 miles each way to go to work. Short drive to a park & ride, hop on a subway/bus line, get close to high density job locations. That would meet most of the transportation needs of those with significant commutes in the Phoenix metropolitan area.
Then you should look around. Several decent sized cities in Washington are doing this, and, as I've previously mentioned, Charlottesville has this. Most big cities don't, mind you, but they could if they chose to. Atlanta has actually improved in this regard. (For example, they've opened up a lot of nice housing near a large computer/seminconductor producing area, including IBM, in NW Atlanta. By near, I mean literally within walking distance.)
A lot of people assume this, which is exactly why I mentioned it. What profession are you and your wife in that you somehow can't manage this? For the record, the last time I had a job like working in the mall or flipping burgers (I was a movie theater manager) was when I was in my early 20's, putting myself through college. Currently, I do computational neuroscience (towards a Ph.D.) and my wife works at a school for children with autism. Both of our jobs are less than a 1.5 miles from where we live. Granted, it gets more complicated if you also want to live very close to your siblings, parents, or cousins.
Finally, you'll notice that you don't need all three of these. Any one by itself would go a long way.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
I think we might be using different definitions of "high density", though. You don't make a subway line that travels in a 2-dimensional grid. I don't know if Phoenix already has a subway system or not, but I can tell you that several other big cities do, and they work fairly well without being set in a grid. Buses, of course, can travel in a 2-dimensional grid quite fine. I know that in most public transit systems (including Atlanta's) the amount of time it takes to travel is excessive compared to the amount of time it would take to travel by car. If buses were more frequent and had more routes, this would be far less of an issue. However, they can't do that because not enough people use public transit. Of course, more people would use public transit if buses were more frequent and had more routes — although possibly not enough. Governments spend lots of money on supporting roads, etc., but as soon as they talk about spending money on public transit a lot of people suddenly get up in arms (I'm not saying you're one of these people). A city with 4 million people ought to be able to solve this problem even more efficiently than a city with a puny 40,000.
Ben Hocking
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