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Ask Slashdot: What Essays and Short Stories Should Be In a Course On Futurism?
Ellen Spertus writes "I'll be teaching an interdisciplinary college course on how technology is changing the world and how students can influence that change. In addition to teaching the students how to create apps, I'd like for us to read and discuss short stories and essays about how the future (next 40 years) might play out. For example, we'll read excerpts from David Brin's Transparent Society and Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near. I'm also considering excerpts of Cory Doctorow's Homeland and Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age. What other suggestions do Slashdotters have?"
All too easy.
Make Room! Make Room! Harry Harrison. A dystopian near-future where overpopulation leads to a struggle for resources. Overcrowding, energy blackouts, food riots and soylent green. Especially look for any passages where the old man, in the main protagonists shared flat, talks about how the world used to be.
The Father Thing - Philip K Dick
It's Such a Beautiful Day - James Blish
Read biographies of people who actually changed the world, and discuss how they did it.
Stop confusing science fiction or science fiction-styled essays with futurism.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
First, try to use the right terms for what you are trying to describe. Futurims isn't about "how technology is changing the world", it's not even "about the future" (well, not ours anyway). What you are refering to is Futurology.
Here, take this : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurism
and thos : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurology
Stanislaw Lem's The Futurological Congress
yor students shud wrte thR essay bout d evoluation of language, UzN a modern txtN lngwij, lol!
Oh, U ask bout reading, not writiN. ZOMG!
Bladerunner - Philip K Dick
The Foundation series is a great set of material where he deals with the difference between an individual's actions swaying the course of history, and the behaviours and trends of large groups over time (psychohistory).
It links in neatly with the 3 laws, and if it's far too long then try some of his short stories.
You should dig around the website 365 tomorrows, which publishes daily science fiction short stories, "flash fiction".
It's frequently quite thought provoking and is exactly about exploring how future can change our lives in form of short peeks into it.
"Superiority" by Arthur C. Clarke
"The Power of Progression" by Isaac Asimov
"Time For The Stars" by Robert A. Heinlein, with particular attention to the "Long Range Foundation"
A Few Notes on the Culture.
Powershift - Alvin Toffler
Published in 1990, might be interesting to see how his predictions fared.
The Third Wave - Alvin Toffler
Published in 1980, the second book of the trilogy.
Future Shock - Alvin Toffler
Published in 1970, my introduction to the fact that there were books other than SF worth reading.
I see he has written another, Revolutionary Wealth, which I must now go acquire.
I have plenty of common sense, I just choose to ignore it. -- Calvin
I commented about that anonymousely a minute ago and I think Shalsdot ate my comment, so I'll go ahead and repeat myself:
The thing you are describing isn't Futurism. Futurims isn't about "how technology is changing the world" and specifically not about " how [it] might play out". It's about the glorification of early 20th century technology and the way it affected the people at that time.
What you are talking about is Futurology, NOT Futursim. Try not to confuse these, especially if you are teaching people who already know about that stuff. Trying to make the disambiguation early on can be intresting too, since most people tend to abusively use the word Futrism.
Here, take this : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurism
and this : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurology
Though it's about social rather than technological developments.
by Murray Leinster, March 1946. If you're going to talk about how our literature predicts the future, it's worth taking a look at how past literature predicted us. "A Logic Named Joe" did a pretty good job of nailing the internet, nomenclature aside, and it did it almost 70 years ago.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
" Before The Golden Age " vols. 1-4. A series of science fiction anthologies written before 1939 (the beginning of the "Golden Age" of science fiction). A look at how our great/grandparents saw today (their far future).
Chaos maximizes locally around me.
Well if you're going to teach about Futurism you should definitely include some critical consideration of the effect of industrialisation on European and North American countries, consider how art was affected by the experiences of artists in the First World War, and how it influenced the later art movements such as Art Deco, Surrealism, and Dada.
Elizabeth Kolbert's The Sixth Extinction An Unnatural History
I for one was always fascinated by Ray Bradbury's "A Distant Sound of Thunder" when it came to thinking about the future... I always liked the fact that that the future is built on the past, and this short little story put it as clear and obvious as can be. It was good when I first read it in 6th grade, and it's still excellent on many levels.
While not really "Futurism" (My definition has always been the ideal of casting off the past for the future), I do think it presents enough of a look at the cause and effect, plus it's small size even for a short story, that it should bear consideration.
If there is one piece you must include, it is this. Asimov imagined 2014 in 1964, and he wasn't far off with some of his ideas.
I am Audience.
by Bill Joy (then Chief Scientist at Sun Microsystems) from the April 2000 issue of Wired magazine:
http://www.wired.com/wired/arc...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
How about a collection of primary source material concerning the...neat...capabilities of technology being actively exploited, on a global scale, right now.
Seems to me that lesson #1 for (my best guess about what your course is about) is the fact that 'the future' isn't a tame model organism that you neatly confine to the future tense and clinically examine. It's more like a chestburster embedded in the present tense, your present tense, the stuff you would think is too banal to possibly do a course about, and it's starting to squirm.
In fairness to some of the great visionary essayists and hard sci-fi types, it is quite impressive how far ahead of time they managed to predict, sometimes in fair detail, 'the future', and they deserve all credit for such an accomplishment; but to overemphasize 'future-as-text' is to create the fundamentally misleading impression that 'the future' is like some sort of celestial phenomenon, sitting at a distance while we tell past-tense stories about which authors were the best at manning the telescopes.
It's much, much, more immediate than that. 'The future' is what your students probably don't even notice 90% or more of(not that I claim to, or claim that anybody does: banality and familiarity are the ultimate camouflage) happening right now, and on a screaming ahead on a trajectory of its own.
From what I recall, the humans simply don't care about going out because they're living in little rooms hooked up to the internet teleconferencing with whoever they want to and ordering their food online. It's more of a caution against internet addiction, written in 1909.
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Maneki Neko by Bruce Sterling ...which you can read for free right here:
http://www.lightspeedmagazine....
If you really want to talk about how technology is changing the world and how the next 40 years might look like, you'll have to mention peak oil and climate change.
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O...
You may want to have a look at New Scientist magazine's digital futurology spin-off "ARC". They aim to publish 4 a year (2.1 was just released, 2013 saw 4 releases) and it's all about trying to look forward into the future. Short stories, SF restrospectives and non-fictional introspectives, all in a neat little bundle.
http://www.arcfinity.org/
If This Goes On/Revolt in 2100 by Robert Anson Heinlein. (The backstory to that story is more concerning the question, where the First Prophet was Nehemiah Scudder, a backwoods preacher turned President (elected in 2012), then dictator (no elections were held in 2016 or later)
You can read Heinlein as adventure stories, you can read his stories as idea experiments and you can also read his stories as reflection on humanity.
Even though the world isn't what Heinlein depicted I still have a feeling that the real life Nehemiah Scudder is waiting around the corner.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
JG Ballard's Billennium is an excellent story about the psychological ramifications of population growth.
That's the book 1984 is based off of. Project Itoh's "Genocidal Organ" is also an interesting read. Essays by Sven Birkerts, who tends to be skeptical about how we use technology to cultivate ideas as opposed to traditional means like the pen and paper. Interestingly, I am taking courses on interface design and my instructors continuously tell us to sketch ideas on paper FIRST before running to the software. Some in class have no idea what a pen and paper is. Stallman's 'Free Software Free Society' essays are very important, as is some of his cautionary sci-fi stories. Orwell wrote some essays about possible futures (not 1984), suggesting that humans in the future might be little more than brains in bottles. Stanislav's Lem, 'His Masters Voice' is a masterpiece, says a lot about humanity. I'd start there abouts...
"SO we bide our time, waiting for a purer kick to bloom and the future is still bleak, uncertain and beautiful" -GSYBE
Another suggestion: read "Manna" by Marshall Brain, a (free) short story that brings up Marx' old question about the ownership of the means to production, in a society that is pretty much completely robotized. Even if you disagree with his view on how such a future will play out, it'll make for some interesting discussion.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
I'd show them Back To The Future II - especially appropriate since the future they are visiting is 2015. As our world resembles 1985+smartphones more than the 2015 depicted in the film, it could help temper expectations and demonstrate that no matter what predictions one makes, (and let's face it, nothing in BTTF2 aside from flying cars was really that crazy to believe we would have in 25 years), the only thing certain is uncertainty. Obviously it's a fictional film and was not serious futurist prediction, but it would make the point and give something a little lighter to engage the students.
Forward looking, non-fiction. Will be wrong, obviously it will be wrong, but if any of these wrong future speculations are worth reading then Freeman Dyson's certainly is among them.
I would consider Accelerando by Charlie Stross, whcih is, I think, a good complement to The diamond age. And maybe have a look at the video's of Robin Hanson for the more "over the top" futurism, very suitable for a critical review and to get to know the more crazy side of futurism (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvjCJE-N34k).
1984, Brave New World and Little Brother could be too close to comfort for the authorities, probably Foundation too. And I'd say that a lot of Philip K. Dick tales where the official vision of reality is put in doubt won't make it neither.
Asimov's The Feeling of Power, Charles Stross Accelerando, Vernon Vinge's Rainbow's End and parts of Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy could give different hints on how the future could develop without too much controversy.
Can't recommend Stephenson's Diamond Age because for me is somewhat the past. It was written before wikipedia and internet, before than even poor children in 3rd world countries had an access to all of it. And those children prefer to access youtube videos and play candy crush over accessing wikipedia.
Not really science fiction but definitely a great novel about a dystopian future.
Another great dystopian future novel, with some science fiction.
Warning: contains graphic sex scenes, violence
and violent sex scenes.
Flatland, by Edwin Abbot, is a short and amusing book that describes the lives and trials of two-dimensional beings. It's a social satire, but it also gives one the feeling that our personal realities, and indeed, our present day societies may not be (and should not be) the limit of what we can imagine and/or what we can achieve. For me it seems like the perfect stepping off point for an exploration of the future.
Vaya con huevos, my darling.
As soon as everybody has understood that this is not something they are doing because it has any worth except as entertainment, you are alls set. Then use anything that is fun and interesting, but never forget that reading tea-leaves is about as scientific as futurism is.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
James Burke's "Connections" and perhaps "The Day The Universe Changed". How small incidents can create massive changes - Napoleon's near defeat at Marengo starts the path to refrigeration, how a botched souvenir production run and an grousing cleric leads to a revolution in printing and religion. Etc. Also "The Second Self" by Sherry Turkle - to see how an emerging thread in technology can have implications elsewhere. Yes, many sc-ifi books have done this predictively, but again it's valuable to see how this plays out as it plays out with a historical record.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Aren't you supposed to tell us? You're teaching the course, innit? Or is this some kind of reverse open course, where the pupils are in a class room and the teachers are anyone and his dog on the internet?
I would definitely include: The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era by Vernor Vinge
https://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/fac...
Excellent choice, although your memory of the plot and basic themes differs greatly from mine.
It's absolutely eerie to read this story and realize it was written over a century ago.
Or the short-story version, Fast Times at Fairmont High, which appeared in one of the IEEE journals, won a Hugo in 2002, and has since appeared in The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge. It touches on many of the same themes as Rainbows End, but it's a quicker read.
A number of Larry Niven's short stories would be excellent examples of futurism:
The Jigsaw Man really stands out as a commentary on how power would be abused when organ transfers became nearly 100% successful (yet very expensive).
The Last Days of the Permanent Floating Riot Club talks about flash crowds.
Cloak of Anarchy deals with, strangely enough, anarchy.
The Right to Read by Richard Stallman
There are several cases of technology and knowledge development that I think are worthy of consideration. The most important is the development of writing. Often, this rather mundane technology had all sorts of mysticism attached to it, such as the Egyptians' use of it to help the dead transition to their afterlives. Or to turn defeat into victory.
Another example would be the development of modern medicine particularly in the early days when it required numerous cadavers to learn the principles of the medical knowledge of that day. In England and elsewhere, medicine was associated with a nasty black market in human corpses.
Then there's the reactions to modern urbanization and its problems (such as conservatism, environmentalism, and city planning) which often have historical antecedents.
Finally, the technologies of the past shape how we view it. For example, the biggest distinction is between history and prehistory. Make a guess what technology development divides those two periods.
Make them all buy My Book!
History has shown that the strong governments get, the more corrupt they become (power corrupts). Yet, they can hit a point where the people can no longer hold their government accountable (e.g., Stalin). So, how, with technology advancing, and the government having access to it all while the people have limited access, can you prevent corruption in the future?
The first half of 'Mana.' Or was it Manna? Not sure.
One of the best novels about a realistic and mostly dysfunctional future set in 2010. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
Skip these fakes you mention and go straight to the real futurologists: Nostradamus and Mother Shipton.
"When pictures seem alive with movements free,
when boats like fishes swim beneath the sea.
When men like birds shall scour the sky.
Then half the world, deep drenched in blood shall die."
-- Mother Shipton, predicting the World Wars
You should include the Manifesto of Futurism. It's quite moving.
1. We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness.
2. Courage, audacity, and revolt will be essential elements of our poetry.
3. Up to now literature has exalted a pensive immobility, ecstasy, and sleep. We intend to exalt aggresive action, a feverish insomnia, the racer’s stride, the mortal leap, the punch and the slap.
4. We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath—a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.
5. We want to hymn the man at the wheel, who hurls the lance of his spirit across the Earth, along the circle of its orbit.
6. The poet must spend himself with ardor, splendor, and generosity, to swell the enthusiastic fervor of the primordial elements.
7. Except in struggle, there is no more beauty. No work without an aggressive character can be a masterpiece. Poetry must be conceived as a violent attack on unknown forces, to reduce and prostrate them before man.
8. We stand on the last promontory of the centuries!... Why should we look back, when what we want is to break down the mysterious doors of the Impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed.
9. We will glorify war—the world’s only hygiene—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman.
10. We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind, will fight moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice.
11. We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot; we will sing of the multicolored, polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern capitals; we will sing of the vibrant nightly fervor of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons; greedy railway stations that devour smoke-plumed serpents; factories hung on clouds by the crooked lines of their smoke; bridges that stride the rivers like giant gymnasts, flashing in the sun with a glitter of knives; adventurous steamers that sniff the horizon; deep-chested locomotives whose wheels paw the tracks like the hooves of enormous steel horses bridled by tubing; and the sleek flight of planes whose propellers chatter in the wind like banners and seem to cheer like an enthusiastic crowd.
F.T. Marinetti, Le Figaro (Paris), 20 February 1909
We had stayed up all night, my friends and I, under hanging mosque lamps with domes of filigreed brass, domes starred like our spirits, shining like them with the prisoned radiance of electric hearts. For hours we had trampled our atavistic ennui into rich oriental rugs, arguing up to the last confines of logic and blackening many reams of paper with our frenzied scribbling.
An immense pride was buoying us up, because we felt ourselves alone at that hour, alone, awake, and on our feet, like proud beacons or forward sentries against an army of hostile stars glaring down at us from their celestial encampments. Alone with stokers feeding the hellish fires of great ships, alone with the black spectres who grope in the red-hot bellies of locomotives launched on their crazy courses, alone with drunkards reeling like wounded birds along the city walls.
Suddenly we jumped, hearing the mighty noise of the huge double-decker trams that rumbled by outside, ablaze with colored lights, like villages on holiday suddenly struck and uprooted by the flooding Po and dragged over falls and through gourges to the sea.
Then the silence deepened. But, as we listened to the old canal muttering its feeble prayers and the creaking bones of sickly palaces above their damp green beards, under the windows we suddenly heard the famished roar of automobiles.
Shouldn't you also be looking at much earlier authors and comparing what they wrote to the state of events 50 odd years later? Would think there is a vast selection from 'golden age' sci-fi including Asimov,Heinlein, Pohl, etc. You can also find many old PopMechanics and similar magazines from the 40s, 50s, 60s with 'future' editions. How does what they wrote compare to what is being predicted by writers today?
In such a course the first thing I would point out is how dismal we have always been at predicting what the future will be like. From my own view point I would suggest that we have at least a 50,50 chance of descending into a dismal and barbaric spiral into oblivion. It is one whopping assumption that the future will be better than life is now. We have a population that just assumes that "they" will find a way to solve our problems. Yet not a single politician will touch the population explosion issue and few will admit that growth is an environmental horror story and that the world economy is based upon growth, Getting drunk, getting high on dope, riding very fast motorcycles, and skipping education entirely might be the best plan of all for modern youth. A fast ending but exciting, short life might be a good goal.
Maybe this is not relevant, but I was amazed out how accurately this hundred year old book described modern society.
No one produces anything but they use screens to share ideas. They share with others who may be near or far but never face to face. The screens give a vague approximation of the person on the other end. Everyone is happy until the machine stops working. When it does, they complain about it on their screens.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops
calling all destroyers
Why The Future Doesn't Need Us.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
It's a poem rather than a short story or essay. It's by Richard Brautigan who was the poet in residence at Caltech. It was first published in a volume of the same name, not all of which may be suitable for your audience.
All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace (poem)
All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (collection)
That you should look at stuff from 40 years ago and show them how wrong it was.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I'm supposed to teach others, but I'm too lazy to do my own research. Can you help me?
Why certainly. What you do is write a paragraph explaining what you need, and then post it to Ask Slashdot.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Yeah, I know there's no book. But the target demographic is those who wait for the movie.
Have gnu, will travel.
Hugh Howey's Silo Series, starting with Wool. Granted, it is a dystopian story, but it shows a strongly human side to the collapse of civilization. A lot of dystopian stories tend to focus on the inhumanity and shock value of distorted societies. Howey's collection of novellas makes it much more personal to the reader. I believe it is the uniquely intimate approach to such a story that caused Howey's stories to catch on.
Whew! This water sure is cold!
Pretty much anything written by William Gibson.
The guy is a visionary. He seems to be able to unerringly look 10-15 years ahead and predict the future culture and what tech will be most relevant.
So much of what he writes about seems unlikely at the time, but yet comes true just a few years later.
Most people already know that In his 1984 book "Neuromancer" he basically predicted the future importance and uses of the internet and the existence of portable devices to access it (It was he that coined the term Cyberspace). he also emphasised virtual reality, which back then was somewhat of a niche fad but even now is about to become more mainstream with the imminent release of Occulus Rift, off the back of which there is already a series of similar devices being leaked/advertised.
In 2003 his book Pattern Recognition correctly predicted the forthcoming cultural shift in advertising and new emphasis on marketing and product placement.
More recently in his 2007 book "Spook Country" he not only correctly predicted/emphasised the forthcoming importance of personal GPS/geolocation to the culture, but also what kinds of associated services would arise. he also described devices startlingly like Google Glass, 7 years ahead of their actual invention.
This.
In fact, GO HERE. Now. Manna is telling you that you have 1 minute to open the link and perform a scan of the instructions at hand. Don't think. Just click the link. Manna will do all the thinking for you.
Go to http://www.reddit.com/r/Futuro...
I tried to post the list here but /. helpfully said "Your comment has too few characters per line (currently 33.9)."
My Hello World is 512 bytes. But it's also a valid Fat12 boot sector, Fat12 file reader, and Pmode routine.
Ah thanks, I remember better now.
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E.M. Forster's short story, "The Machine Stops," was written in 1909 and seems more prescient by the minute. It would certainly provide a nice contrast to Kurzweil.
Any number of novels by John Brunner, but Stand on Zanzibar if you have to choose one.
Fred Pohl's short-short "Day Million," about a cyborg spaceman and a transgendered otter-woman meeting, falling in love, exchanging virtual reality sex profiles and never meetin again.
Freeman Dyson's essay "The Greening of the Galaxy."
Daniel Boorstin, Librarian of Congress (1975 - 1987) wrote The Discoverers. It's a book about the people and events surrounding some very early, essential discoveries. Some of the discoveries include
Time (remember, prior to clocks each day had hours of differing duration. The 12 daylight hours were longer in the summer, and shorter in the winter.)
Maps and map coordinates (such as the idea that they should be drawn to scale, or that coordinates were not evil)
the Compass
Money
It's history, not the future view you're discussing, but it does give lots of great insights into the discovery of things that fundamentally changed the world.
Might be a bullet point to discuss how technology (fertilizers, vaccines, medicine) may, or has resulted in, a possible overshoot/overpopulation scenario.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...!
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
It's longer than you want, put perhaps you could present excerpts from the excellent dystopian novel Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart.
First, thank you, everyone, for the feedback. There are some wonderful stories that I recognize and others that I look forward to reading.
Second, because the solicited essays and fiction will only be a small part of the course, I will have to rely on short stories (including novellas) instead of entire novels. That is part of what makes it hard to research. It's much easier to find out about novels, which have more readers and are better publicized than short stories, especially recent ones that have not yet been widely reprinted.
Third, to those of you who think I am being too lazy to do my research myself, gathering information is part of the research process, and I'd be remiss in not making use of the hive mind if it has useful information that I might not. I would much rather be called a negligent teacher than to be one. Academics study one another's reading lists and syllabi all the time. Believe me, plenty of work remains in deciding what material to include, how present it, etc.
Fourth, thank you for letting me know the history of the word "futurism". The sense I used it ("concern with events and trends of the future or which anticipate the future") is the first one in some dictionaries and is widely used at kurzweilai.net, The Foresight Institute, and other sites I have used, but I will certainly let my students know that some people prefer the word "futurology". For those who are interested, here's a Google n-gram view of "futurism", "futurist", and "futurology".
Fifth, some commenters suggested using primary sources and biography. Agreed. I was already planning to include Turing's Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Vannevar Bush's As We May Think, and the stories of Khan Academy, Iqbal Quadir, Sugata Mitra, and others.
Sixth, it was also suggested that I look at past predictions of the future. Also agreed. I assembled such a reading list for a previous course. It hadn't occurred to me to include in my question what I didn't need, because I'd already assembled it, but I see now that it would be helpful.
Thank you again for the suggestions and even for the criticisms. Soliciting opinions from Slashdot is always a story in itself.
If you want to include some "lighter" fare, or comedy relief, I highly recommend "Machine of Death" (http://www.amazon.com/Machine-Death-Collection-Stories-People/dp/0982167121).
While it's not technology we have, it's a collection that looks at the wide-reaching implications of a single invention that warps basically everything.
Much of it is "funny," but some of the stories are also very serious and thought-provoking. Nearly all of them are object lessons in "unintended consequences," which is a valuable thing to consider when looking at advances in tech.
There's also a sequel called "This is How You Die"
Thanks! I'd read and liked Rainbows End but do need the quicker reads. I'll check it out.
Your assignment for today is to find out where this statement originated. Extra credit will be awarded if you can manage to tie in Helena Blavatsky's Theosophy and Cyril Burt's twin studies.
Unless you want to turn the class into a bunch of Luddites who become the next Theodore Kaczynski, don't expose them to Kurzweil and Doctorow's crap. Think of the children.
Why does slashdot have an article about a WWII-era Italian art movement?
Or was this in reference to the Chicago theater?
If this was an article about "singulitarians," then we need to be more specific.
You should take excerpts from 'The Prefect' by Alistair Reynolds. It does a lot to explore augmented reality, people being interconnected to computer networks, instant voting, etc. as a cultural norm. It takes place in a distant future, but we are already encountering some of these things today.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
Great story of the not-so-distant-future. While it's a lot lighter than most of the listings above, it's a glimpse of a possible future ruled by megacorporations and greed. Wait - isn't that now?
http://www.technocracy.org/stu...
Written mostly during the 1930s by M. King Hubbert of peak oil infamy. Describes a sustainable society directed by science instead of wishful thinking.
Melding technology into our bodies is not going to evolve us as a species.
And why is that consideration important? For example, we might be able to create intelligence that will live much longer than life on Earth has lived to this point. We may have already created various systems that will outlive the Sun. Evolution is not the only way.
Or any of his "Future History."
I recommend this one in particular because this short essay discusses how to write futuristic stories or make futuristic predictions. One of his basic premises is that any predictions that view technology at advancing at a slowing rate, or even maintaining the "current" rate, will be bound to be too timid. Only predictions that are based upon an exponential rate will have a chance of coming true.
Why is it needed? Wouldn't it be more useful to study Medicine, Maths, Physics, Chemistry, Economics etc.. or even a foreign language?
How many jobs are out there where the qualifications includes this course?
Examines government use of a truth drug.
Bonus: Wikipedia links to a full digital English translation
I think other authors have done a better job with postulating advances in technology. A few examples:
Charles Stross - Accelerando - One of the more believable and compelling projections of computer tech that I've read in a long time.
Linda Nagata - Vast - Similar projections for computer tech as above, plus genetic engineering. This was a recent random find in a used book store for me, and apparently the fourth book in a series called The Nanotech Succession. I will definitely be looking for more of her stuff.
Paolo Bacigalupi - The Windup Girl - Definitely the best I've seen for projection in biotech, and it hit me in a similar way as the first time I read Neuromancer a few decades ago. Definitely not for children, though. Pump Six And Other Stories is a collection of short stories set in the same world, but I don't know how well they would hold up on their own without the deeper context that TWG provides.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
Check out my documentary http://www.thesingularityfilm.... It's been described by the IEET as the "best film about the singularity to date." Just played in Cambridge last week, at Yale Friday night, Santa Fe this past weekend and ASU tomorrow. It's deep but accessible.