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A Case For the Necessity of Science Fiction
unc0nn3ct3d writes "This article makes an interesting point about the necessity of science fiction — or, more specifically, speculative fiction as a tool to aid in the long-term survival of the human species. 'We live in a world that is incredibly frightening for a growing portion of the population because of the exponential rate of change we are experiencing. Our world is changing so fast now that we often don't have time to contemplate the full ramifications that come with the increasingly rapid adoption of new technologies and social changes. Most often this is simply because these changes are being introduced almost one after another after another, without any time to breathe. Speculative fiction, however, if widely adopted, makes it almost instinctive that we think about these situations and possible outcomes before they even arise.'"
You mostly get that from people who don't read enough SF.
Engineers and scientists will invent things anyway regardless of whether there has been bad fiction written about the concept beforehand.
Most people are STUPID!
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
I don't think there is much in the current world to surprise you, if you've read John Brunners The Shockwave Rider. The biggest surprise is when you look at the time it was published: 1975. It has always astounded me, how clearly Johns eyes have seen....
There are so many good quotes in that book, that you could make nearly a second book out of them. My favorite: There are two kinds of fools: One says, "This is old therefore it is good." The other one says, "This is new therefore it is better."
I think the thesis "Speculative fiction, however, if widely adopted, makes it almost instinctive that we think about these situations and possible outcomes before they even arise" is correct. At least i can say it worked for me.
CU, Martin
Who says humans will take it sitting down as robots shoot up past us? Humans will be riding the wave of progress and will improve themselves alongside their machines. Robots won't be rising up against us, they'll be integrating with us.
Really, there have always been people who are unable or unwilling to deal with change. It's nothing new and it certainly isn't getting worse with time. 100 years ago some individuals were having a tough time dealing with the idea of mass population moving to the new fangled "factories" (or as they were originally called: manufactories) and leaving the farming life behind. 50 years ago some people were having a hard time coming to terms with the social changes hitting society - lack of respect, sexual freedom and all this rock-n-roll.
So no, I don't buy the basic premise and I certainly disagree with the idea that the people who are insecure about change will want to read books about even more change.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Summarized the article just says, "SF is good because it helps us think about stuff -- but not that icky lowbrow SF like Star Trek; that's practically porn."
That's not a fair distinction. The author dismisses Trek, which in the 60s had some ham-fisted attempts at an Important Message (mainly re: race), and puts "Avatar" in that category even though it has a (stupid, hypocritical) moral message too. So it's not having A Message that makes for the kind of SF the author likes. The article's more like a guide to making movies that will get whipped in profits by the latest Star Trek. For good or ill, I hear some people were deeply affected by "Avatar", so that sort of movie is capable of being deep and meaningful in some people's eyes.
I wrote an SF novel recently. There was supposed to be a Message in it. I'd read enough SF to know that making the Important Message blatant and heavy-handed is a way to ruin an otherwise decent story; famous example "Atlas Shrugged". What I found to be a good solution is to focus on being entertaining first, with plot and character being much more important than the Deep Philosophical Implications. The same group of characters could've been used to tell a story with a different message, if the character development had gone a different way ("This cause isn't worth killing over!"), and that's a good thing.
So, if anyone wants to apply the article's advice, they should interpret it as, "Write stories with meaningful takes on the possible future -- but they should be stories first."
(One bit of snootiness: I've got a theory that a way to describe character growth is a two-axis method. One axis is, "Can the hero find the strength to do what he's trying to do?" and the other, harder-to-write one is, "Is the hero questioning what he should do?" Simpler stories tend not to bother much with the second one, but overusing it gets angsty and annoying quickly.)
Revive the Constitution.
You can keep up on the latest trends in who Marsha might be attracted to besides Curtis! And is the Jennifer's baby actually Devon's? And will Steve ever come out of that coma, and if he does, what will happen to June and Chris?
i kinda recall a statement similar to "every golden age had a free lunch".
that is, greeks and romans had slaves. Later on it was oil. The next may well be humanoid robots, filling much the same role as slaves did in roman times.
and yes, i do wonder about the same thing. And i could have sworn i bumped into a story somewhere on the net where a guy had wrestled with the topic, via burger flippers that was guided by wireless headsets and sound prompts from a computer, via robots and the poorhouse for displaced workers, to a kind of utopia set up in australia, where people had free food and housing, and could use a daily allotment of "resource points" either on themselves or pool them to "fund" greater projects someone was working on.
thing is that if we ever get to the point where machines can be fed a CAD plan and build the complete device without human intervention, we hit a point where only "intellectual property" and access to the raw material matters. The latter is a age old problem, while the former is playing out in prototype form by way of copyright, patent, DMCA and ACTA as we speak.
btw, doctorows latest, makers, pokes into this. Funny enough, his inspiration was the aftermath of .com, while the release timed perfectly with the most recent economic downtime.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
I have first hand experience with this. I used to employ two skilled carpenters to cut wood all day long. For the cost of one year's salary for those guys, I bought an automated CNC machine that does everything they did, and more, and has been running virtually non-stop for a solid three years.
Sounds awful when I stop there. So then what happened...
My product's quality, consistency and reliability shot up dramatically, Tolerances went from 1/4" to 0.005". My customers noticed, and then my sales shot up too. So my employee count went up to handle the new order volume. I have employees doing jobs that didn't exist when I started this business ten years ago. And now my employees get to work in an air conditioned office and don't have to worry about cutting their fingers off with a table saw either.
So, because technology killed two jobs, I'm better off, my customers are better off, and I was able to hire more employees who are also better off.
When a textile worker was complaining about his job going to China (in the news last year), an astute interviewer asked him "Do you want your kids to grow up to work in this same sweaty factory, breathing this lint filled air?" Of course, the answer was "No.", so then, why not let the job go to China, and teach your kids to embrace the innovation and change that will be so inevitable in his lifetime? That's the value of Science Fiction in my opinion. Once a kid gets his head around it, he understands intrinsically that that "different" is natural, and change is normal. He has to change his world-view to get into the story, for most of the stories he reads. That's good practice for living in any future, especially your own.
I grew up on a steady diet of science fiction. I'm 50 years old now, and I've changed careers in every one of my adult decades. It has always been a good thing for me too. Follow-up studies consistently show that 95% of workers who are laid off get better jobs at higher pay within two years of being laid off.
By the way, here's how the economy really works -- It's not "supply and demand" as the old school used to teach, it's really all about production and consumption, which is subtly different, but in a very important way. A healthy economy is driven by production. Production is driven by consumption. Consumption is driven by innovation (think iPhone, Blu-Ray, etc.), and innovation is driven by education and imagination. If you want a healthy economy, invest in education and support the arts. Give a kid a Kindle stuffed with a thousand books (there are literally thousands of free and nearly-free books for the kindle on Amazon, including the HG Wells collection for $0.99, etc...)
You missed the revolutions in network connectedness (and global consciousness),
http://www.global-mindshift.org/memes/wombat.swf
robotics, materials, genetics, and design tools. Examples of the state of the art in robots:
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005926.html
Here is an index into stuff I wrote on why doomsters are wrong about material issues (but may be right about social issues):
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-August/thread.html#4123
We are not running out of stuff or energy by any means. The human imagination is the ultimate resource (as Julian Simon suggests). Are you suggesting optical fiber uses more energy that copper?
On earth, we can recycle and use renewables (or other energy sources even -- whether nuclear or coal), and there are enough resources in the solar system to support quadrillions of humans at a higher than current US standard of living, building thousands of Earth's worth of area in space habitats. How can we be running out of, say, metals when we just need to mine the landfills to get them back? The US auto industry has also become a *net* producer of metal as people downsize cars. And if we switched to electric cars, we would use less electricity (since it takes more electricity to make a gallon of gas than it takes to make an electric car go the same distance as a gasoline car).
"Why luxury safer electric cars should be free-to-the-user"
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/09eb7f4c973349f2?hl=en
Try James P. Hogan or Iain Banks or Ursula K. Le Guin for something different in sci-fi.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.