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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.'"
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.
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
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).
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.
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.
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.
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make install -not war
Of course, comparing Pattern Recognition to something like Neuromancer is really the key to what Gibson is arguing about science fiction. Being speculative about technology far ahead of the present is naturally a recipe for failure. I didn't start reading books like Neuromancer and Snow Crash until about 2000 or so, and while I enjoyed them immensely, most of their predictions had long since become laughable. The authors of cyberpunk novels in the 1980s and early 1990s correctly sensed that the relationship between humans and computers was on the cusp of major change, but virtually all of them put their money down on sophisticated AIs and immersive virtual realities which haven't come to pass. As Gibson notes in his interview, "If I were a smart 12-year-old picking up Neuromancer for the first time today I'd get about 20 pages in and I'd think 'Ahhaa I've got it - what happened to all the cell phones? This is a high-tech future in which cellular telephony has been banned'."
Now, some of this, I think, just happened to be bad timing- no one writing in 1987 could be expected to accurately forecast 2007. However, rather being outstripped by a vertical asymptote of progess as the technological singularity idea suggests,the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the creation of the Web in particular represent "jump discontinuities" in the timeline. Earlier today, I was reading about Arthur C. Clarke's Space Odyssey series on Wikipedia. The political and technological changes which occurred in between the releases of novels in 1968, 1982, 1987, and 1997 were so great as to cause Clarke to state that each work in the series is on a seperate timeline (2061 still has the USSR around in its title year, while in 3001 it fell back in 1991).
I think that even if we don't have a Singularity, we will still have events of such significance every few years which alter the course of history in ways that will only be obvious in hindsight and which will make speculation further than a couple years ahead very difficult indeed. And I suppose if we truly are on the run up to a Singularity, it won't be too long before predicting further than a couple days into the future becomes a fool's errand So, Mr. Gibson has a point. However, I'd suggest that's just part of the fun of science fiction- books from the 60s suggesting we'd be living in space in the year 2000 but using computers the size of houses, books from the early 1990s about computer hackers of the early 21st century as virtual reality ninjas. In these best examples of these, the story is entertaining enough that it didn't matter that the visions of the future (now the present) didn't pan out.
"FDA staff reviewers expressed concern about the number of patients who were left out of the study because they died."
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!
Assuming we cannot exit the universe, or alter its physical laws.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
If you have magical hacking tools that let you visualize hacking as manipulating a physical object, then you're wasting time with an interface that spends time interpreting data in a human-recognizable way that could've been spent just handling the intrusion. It's a waste of cycles that could be used to do something useful.
In the early 1990s, that's what they said about object-oriented programming -- that it was a cute idea, but any real world problem would be better solved using efficient C (not C++) programming. And even that was an advance from the 1980s, when even C was seen as a waste and programs were often written in assembly language. The point is, as computers get more powerful, it's okay to waste some cycles on the human.
Not to hackers; not to technologists; not to users. It's an abstract, and an expensive one (look how crappy the Windows UI is trying to be everything to everyone; look how crippled linux is by being unwilling to create a standard GUI; look how crippled OSX was by pretending mice only needed one button. Complexity and abstraction aren't bad things and can be done very well.
Nonsense. The more dimensions you can manipulate at once, the more complex a user input you can provide. Up to the limits of your ability to handle complex motions. As a musician and a programmer for over four decades, I didn't perceive Gibson's ideas as unlikely or overwhelming or impossible at all. Raising the level of art required? Plausible. The next generation would simply rise to meet the challenge. Watch them learn video games if you don't know what I mean.
For instance, the Mac gives you one mouse button. You can, while doing graphics, move the mouse XY and press the button, -a, +a. A better mouse gives you two buttons. Now you can move the mouse and provide four different modifiers: -a-b, -a+b, +a-b, +a+b. Take a tablet with a couple buttons. now we have motion, -a-b, -a+b, +a-b, +a+b, and pressure. Now take an interface that gives you visual objects to manipulate in the air a'la Gibson's speculation: You can move your left hand XYZ, going from a square space to a cubic one, you can move your right hand XYZ, doubling your cubed space, and because you now have Z, the number of "buttons" you can create with stabbing motions, not to mention the sweeps and other motions you can make, have multiplied hugely. Create graphics metaphors for things to manipulate that use models of geometrics or anything else you like, and you are way into interface excellence. You can't seem to see this; but that doesn't degrade the idea at all.
And what military or government or corporation would not want serious deterrents to entry when the world is virtual? The only reason my own home's entries are not actual man-traps is the law that says I can't protect my own property with deadly force. Otherwise, as a programmer and an engineer, I'd have something quite clever — and quite deadly. After having had a couple of vehicles stolen, I'm all for deadly force there, too. Scientifically, it's all good. Socially - yes, mommies rule. For now.
Yeah, but if something requires YOU to suspend, but not ME to suspend, then it's just you with the problem. :-)
Right, right. :-)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
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
What? You think targets provide the interface to hack them? That's not how it works, not even today. Programs are compact bundles of executable code and data. Sometimes encrypted, usually not. Programs are the ultimate models of terseness, because each machine instruction represents an action by the processor. There is no "interface" to the code provided in the program or data itself. Interfaces for hacking, for instance a debugger / disassembler, are separate things, created by people who understand completely that the goal is to get into the code, and therefore they provide the graphic and other UI elements you need to do that in the most efficacious manner the authors of the debugger / disassembler can come up with - it has nothing to do with what the authors of the program being attacked had in mind, planned for, or provided except in that whatever anti-hacking they might have put in, the hacking software needs to have a counter for. If that interface took on a 3D metaphor, that's just a detail, though an interesting one and an efficiency issue for the hacker. You're completely confused about the demarcations between the roles of who is providing what interface, what code, what data, what functionality - that's why you can't understand what is being described. If the target was a corporation's site, the hacking interface wouldn't be provided by them, it'd be provided by your deck, even if the corporation defined the "normal" interface for end users. So a hacking deck, or a deck running hacking software could easily have any interface imaginable, whatever seemed to work. This is why your objections are pointless.
Wrong. Hacking works any way that it works, from the utmost simplistic approach (futzing with a URL or entering data and/or command strings not specified as valid) to actually hacking the binary of the software with complete control over what machine instructions are changing, and how, and taking into account any self-validation / checksum type protection as you work. UI, again, is a matter of approach, not a matter of results. Any tool that increases the speed of visualization of the task at hand and your ability to get in there and make changes is feasible, presuming you have the computer power to pull it off. What do you think a progress bar is? It's an abstraction of a lot of things going on, letting you know things are running, how much has been done, and giving you a quick visual estimate of how much there is yet to go. This is an extreme abstraction of, for instance, how far through a dictionary attack one may have progressed. Other abstractions that could work rather than a bar might be size, shape, color, words, animations of other processes that go from start to finish (eating a sandwich, filling a bucket, hammering a nail) and so on. A 16-sided ball could be a tool for hex digit input. A 20 sided ball might be useful in due-decimal work. Etc.
If the full solution to a problem is known to be available in canned form, the smart thing is to use it. You may have been the "canner", or you may not. That doesn't make you a script kiddie; that makes you competent. If the lock needs picking, then you pick. If picking doesn't work, you may want to get out the C4 or simply abscond with the entire dataset in unbroken form so as to approach it at your leisure. Every time you presume that things work "just this way" you miss the entire point of hacking. I write a program, I create X to attempt to make it secure; the hacker approaches, and comes up with Y to defeat my X. Hac
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.