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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 ----
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!
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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).
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)
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.
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.
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.
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."
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?
> The over unity energy technology may be quite possible.
Sure, if you repeal the laws of physics
Tesla was a genius, but he turned into a complete wackjob in his old age.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
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.
People will find more ways to kill time.
and each other
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
I think this is the problem. Look at where we are right now. Extrapolating elements of our present into an interesting future is something many authors have struggled with. Because, quite frankly, the era we're living in is pretty dystopian. For an example: Today Congress passed the "Protect America Act" which grants sweeping surveillance powers to the executive branch with no judicial or legislative oversight. George Orwell didn't know the half of it. How do you work with that? Who is most likely to be able to other throw the totalitarian regime recent US governments have turned the USA into? The Chinese? The other great totalitarian surveillance state?
I really disagree that there were as many issues pressing down on us in the '80's. Barring a Strangelove-esque Doomsday device, MAD was never going to really end it all. The worst issues facing the '80's were the ones that we were blissfully unaware of, or ignoring. Global Warming, Energy crisis in the next 50 years, etc. Worst case (realistic) scenario with the Cold War was the utter destruction of the major world power bases, which doesn't sound all that bad in hindsight.
In my opinion, the best long term extrapolation from our current situation is "Earth Abides" by George R. Stewart, and its probably too optimistic.
Unlimited energy and control of the graviton? I'm guessing that the result would be... global warfare on an unprecedented scale, resulting in either A) an endless dictatorship or B) the end of humans. Probably B, when somebody's automatic war machine turns out to be an uncontrolled chain reaction.
Not to be too much of a cynic or anything, but I'm glad the mysteries of the universe aren't unlocked easily, and that they don't usually live up to the hype. Change is good, but sudden change is destabilizing.
[javac] 100 errors
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.
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!
In the future authors will have 5 or 6 different good ideas and they will recycle them endlessly into an entire genre.
And in turn, I would point out that you appear to know very little science, as your entire assertion here is wrong. GUI abstraction is the basis for GUI's in general. Further abstraction is not unreasonable; I have had demos on my desktop that did quite a few things, including 3D abstractions of various types. Impractical? Possibly. Unscientific? Not even a little bit.
Death by security program? Today on slashdot there's a story about a LED device that makes you puke. We know that electricity can kill you. Stuttering flashes can put humans into an epileptic seizure. Disjoint feeds to your eyes can disturb your orientation. Would you *really* care to say there's no way to shut you down via an interface that is connected to not just your eyes, but your ears, senses of touch, heat, and so forth, electrically, pressure-wise, heat-wise, visually, aurally? What if it can induce visions right into your nervous system, bypassing your eyes? What if it can dispense drugs? Unscientific? Hardly. Socially unlikely? Perhaps, but that doesn't make it bad scientific speculation. That just means there is an onus upon the author to create a story where we can believe such things would have come about so the work will be readable and engaging.
These ideas are far more plausible in hard SF terms than (for instance) Trek's warp drive at this moment in science. That makes Trek lean a lot harder towards fantasy than Gibson's Neuromancer, which is what I presume you're kvetching about here. Even the AIs that Gibson postulates are still viable hard SF elements. At this point in time, we have no reason to believe, scientifically speaking, that computer AI will prove intractable in any of the forms he postulated. And it has been some years since he wrote the novel.
Methinks you would enjoy SF more (hard or not) if your imagination was a little more informed around the edges.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
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.
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.