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Neal Stephenson Takes Blame For Innovation Failure
itwbennett writes "Neal Stephenson is shouldering some of the blame for discouraging budding scientists and engineers, saying in a interview that perhaps the dark turn science fiction has taken is 'discouraging budding scientists and engineers.' For his part, Stephenson has vowed to be more optimistic. From the article: 'Speaking before a packed lecture theater at MIT yesterday, Neal Stephenson worried that the gloomy outlook prevalent in modern science fiction may be undermining the genre's ability to inspire engineers and scientists. Describing himself as a "pessimist trying to turn himself into an optimist," and acknowledging that some of his own work has contributed to the dystopian trend, he added "if every depiction of the future is grim...then it doesn't create much of an incentive to building the future."'"
Between the cold war and the religious mania of the early 80s, "If Jesus doesn't get you, Oppenheimer will" was the phrase of the day.
I find that a grim outlook actually makes me dig my heels in much more so. Five years ago, I wasn't too engrossed with privacy, politics or anything like that. These days, I seem to be going out of my way to make noise and generate resolve amoung the population. I think there is an element of Ying/Yang to it, the harder certain people will push to empower themselves or the folks that pay them, the more people will stand their ground.
"Let me say at the risk of seeming ridiculous that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love." - Che.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
...given programming legend Michael Abrash (now currently at Valve Software) just announced that he's currently researching wearable computing more or less as a direct result of Neal Stephenson's book Snow Crash!
His post on the Valve blog is really interesting and worth reading.
I am an avid scifi freak
Have been reading scifi since 1960's, and still can't stop reading the stuff (including manga since late 1980's and animation nowadays)
But my love of Science didn't emerge from my scifi reading habit
My love of Science stems from my curiosity of what happens all around me
The scifi genre is just like any other, there are good ones and there are real lousy ones, but no matter how good or bad the scifi is, it will never encourage or discourage me from exploring
Nope, I just ain't gonna be influenced by a book
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
To me the real tipping point seems to be as the "corporate dystopia" of which William Gibson and Cyberpunk was part.
I recently ran into someone I hadn't seen for years, who used to be heavily into cyberpunk back in those days. I asked him how that was going, and he doesn't read or cosplay any of that any more. I asked why, and he said, "It's not fun any more, it's coming true."
While I certainly wouldn't say one person bears a large load of responsibility, don't knock the idea in general. Star Trek had some very real influence on geeks. They saw a Utopia in it that they'd like to see happened, and some worked towards it.
I'm a research scientist and I was heavily influenced by Star Trek as a kid. That utopian world in which technology is a positive force for humanity and where rational thought and curiosity replace ignorance-based fear and militarism was a island of serenity in a small town full of bible-thumping, anti-intellectual fundamentalists. I consumed a lot of science fiction and fantasy, but Star Trek made a particular impression on me. When I was finally exposed to real-world science, I fell in love with Chemistry in my first year of college with cheerful optimism that I might help move the real world slightly closer to that fictional world. I even lobbied hard to name my son Jean Luc.
I do, however, disagree with TFA; when I was in college we didn't have the Internet to tell us about every cute Nature or Science article, so we were left with our imagination and what we could photocopy in the science library. If anything, I think the danger for potential scientists now is that their opinions about what science is are being shaped too much by under-qualified "science journalists" writing pseudo-fiction about real research. It replaces the unbridled imagination and curiosity of young minds--which fiction reinforces--with an erroneous understanding of what modern science actually is. Worse, it emphasizes the unsubstantiated claims about potential future applications that have become a necessary part of the scientific literature (i.e., the chest thumping that under-funding research necessitates) which leads to disappointment when young people are exposed to actual research. This phenomenon culminates in a perception that science fiction--dystopian or otherwise--is even more realistic and fact-based than ever. I think what science fiction needs is more imagination.
Actually, I wrote my thesis on life experience.