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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.
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
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.
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.
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.
I can't speak for everyone, but as I age, there's certainly more of a tendency to focus on history over the future. I still like sci-fi, but there is a growing trend to focus on character stories in sci-fi, which is, I think, indicative of the fact that much of the technological what-ifs have all been thoroughly hashed out and repeated ad nauseum.
I think a few things happen as people get older (and I'm about 30 now, so take that for what it's worth): They've learned that the promise of a golden future is an empty promise, especially for people who grew up in the 70s and 80s. They realize that their parents were actual people who had babies, as opposed to mythical, ever-present beings. And, if they've had even the smallest taste of history, they realize that we're doing the same stupid things over and over, and the best chance of finding our way out is to learn from the mistakes of our predecessors, and figure out what we can do differently. In the US at least, history is typically taught as little more than a collection of meaningless dates; anything but interesting. When you start to dig down into who these people really were, what their lives were like, and what they accomplished, it becomes much more entertaining, interesting, and informative. For all of those reasons, history can be very appealing.
Aside from that, much of science fiction borrows heavily from history, intentionally or otherwise. Clearly Firefly is the Wild West. Star Wars is the American Revolution with Taoist philosophy. The Matrix revisits the question of Plato's Cave. Contact also explores The Cave (what is real?) and Nietzsche's philosophy. BSG is not unlike the Biblical story of the Israelites, except with Cylons instead of Egyptians, and Roman Mythology instead of Judaism. And SG-1 is trite crap. (Sorry, just had to throw that in). Many of these works are valid and entertaining in their own right, but with the proper context they can be even more enjoyable.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
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").
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.