Science and Technology

The Possibilities of Science Fiction

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 3 Comments

One commenter on yesterday’s post noted that science fiction “can also be used as a formidable stock of thought experiments, with profound philosophical implication.”  I have hardly read any science fiction (I am currently working on Lewis’ Space Trilogy) yet I have no doubt this is the case.  Another commenter made note of Ray Bradbury.  Kurt Vonnegut and Aldous Huxley also come to mind as well as Jules Vernes and H. G. Wells as early practitioners.  It seems to me that Mary Shelley deserves recognition at least as a forerunner.  I’m sure those familiar with the field can fill out the list quite a bit.

Hannah Arendt, writing in the mid-twentieth century, appears to be one of the few intellectuals of the time to have recognized the value of science fiction.  Writing in The Human Condition she notes that the “respectable newspapers” were only just then catching up on implications of science which,

up to then had been buried in the highly non-respectable literature of science fiction (to which, unfortunately, nobody yet has paid the attention it deserves as a vehicle of mass sentiments and mass desires).

Perhaps someone can correct me on this, but it seems the most profound science fiction also tends to be of the dystopian variety.

Where are the Flying Cars?

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 56 Comments

Well, right here actually.  Unfortunately, in case you hadn’t noticed, they’re not zipping through some highway in the sky.  This despite the hopes fanned by science fiction, cartoons, and science magazines from an earlier generation.  The flying car has become the emblem of a future that never was, one that actually seems quite silly now.

As a kid the future fascinated me,  I just had no idea it was an already dated image of the future that took me in.  My favorite ride at Disney World was The Carousel of Progress (say that with a straight face) and later its sequel at Epcot, Horizons.  Both gave us a sense of steady, inexorable movement towards … underwater cities and farms in the desert, and sitting around watching … television.

It wasn’t just Disney either.  I am just old enough to have had libraries rather than media centers in school as I was growing up.  In these libraries with actual books and magazines, I would pull out back issues of Popular Science and Popular Mechanics scouring them for even more images of a future that would never quite materialize.  Of course, its not just a matter of not having the know-how, looking back one wonders why some of this stuff was attractive to begin with.   Again, underwater cities?

All of this to say that it is hard work imagining the future (although Star Trek had better luck than Disney). William Halal should know,

Forecasting anything is an enormous challenge, much less “predicting” the state of the world decades from now. My TechCast project is in the business of forecasting, but we make a point of avoiding the word “prediction” for that very reason.

According to Halal,

For more than a decade, TechCast has scanned the literature and surveyed 100 experts worldwide to forecast technology breakthroughs and their social impact. We identify trends driving a forecast and obstacles opposing it, summarize other forecasts made by other sources, and have our experts review all this background data to reach their best estimates. Although I think this approach provides the best possible answers to tough questions, we miss the mark by about plus or minus three years for forecasts a decade out, and sometimes a lot more.  For anything beyond two decades out, the sources of error mount dramatically, especially because the world is changing so quickly that present assumptions will soon prove invalid.

So what is Halal betting on these days,

Our forecasts suggest that most of the big breakthroughs now anticipated—green technologies, alternative energy, artificial intelligence, biogenetic medical care—are likely to arrive well before 2050. In fact, exploding information technology and knowledge are likely to unify the globe into some type of coherent world system between 2020 and 2030 out of sheer necessity. The mounting threats of climate change, energy shortages, environmental collapse, WMDs, terrorism, and other elements of the “Global Megacrisis” are forcing this historic transition, and global gross domestic product will double about 2020, making the present global order unsustainable and demanding a form of “global consciousness.” Our surveys of the megacrisis show that the next decade or two will either see a crucial turning point to a “mature” global society or we are likely to witness the collapse of civilization in major parts of the world.

So basically we are heading toward a “mature” global society (exciting!) or the end of the world as we know it.

Funny, I feel fine.

Multitasking Monks?

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 2 Comments

In her essay, “Medieval Multitasking:  Did We Ever Focus?”, Elizabeth Drescher addresses the Nicolas Carr/Clay Shirky debate on the relative merits of the Internet.  Drescher’s piece distinguishes itself by taking, as her title suggests, a long view of the issue and by its breezy, phenomenological style.  I think she is right to look for historical antecedents that shed light on our use of new media, however, I have reservations about where she ends up.  I tend to see more discontinuity than she does, particularly in the kind of relationship with the text encouraged by certain features of new media. You can read some of my thoughts in the Letters section below Drescher’s essay or here.  Quick excerpt:

Modularity, or what Manovich also calls the “fractal structure of new media,” allows for individual elements of a hypertext (text, image, video, chart, audio, etc.) to retain their integrity and be easily abstracted and recombined in another setting. Now to get a sense of the significance of this development, imagine a medieval monk attempting to easily abstract the graphic elements of an illuminated manuscript for use in another setting.

I single out modularity because it gets at an important distinction the gets lost if we lay all the emphasis on continuity. Modularity has contributed to a massive reconfiguration of the relationship between the media artifact and the user. The conditions of new media have allowed us to approach texts (and I use that term in the widest possible sense) on the Internet as potential creators, as well, users . . .

We now seem less apt at receiving a text and, at least to begin with, submitting ourselves to it. This is a particularly important development in religious contexts. We are now more likely to jump into the creation of our own meaning and our own texts without first allowing the texts to read us as it were. We are less likely to listen to the text before wanting to speak back to it or speak it anew. We are first disposed to shape the text rather than being open to how the text may shape us.

Along the way Drescher links to the op-ed piece by Steven Pinker that we noted here earlier, but she also links to an op-ed by David Brooks, “The Medium is the Medium”, which I had missed.  In his piece Brooks makes some interesting distinctions and observations, yet my initial response is mixed.  Perhaps more on that later.

Marilynne Robinson on The Daily Show, Mark Twain on Interviews

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 3 Comments

Marilynne Robinson is one of those authors whose name I keep running into and each time I do I make one of those mental notes that never quite materializes to read one of her books.  Mostly I’m interested in reading her Pulitzer Prize winning novel, Gilead: A Novel, and her most recent work, Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self.  The latter collects Robinson’s Dwight H. Terry Lectures at Yale University on the topic of religion, science, and consciousness.  No lack of ambition there.

Robinson recently appeared on Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show.  Typical Stewart, a little bit serious, a little bit funny.  You can watch the five minute clip here.

Update:  Let me take an opportunity to embellish this post a little bit with another item I just came across.  Let’s begin by recognizing that this is not the most enthralling interview.  Robinson was not exactly inspiring and Stewart’s fan base, which seems for the most part to be a bit hostile to religion, is apoplectic (see the comments below the video clip).  There are probably a number of reasons why this interview doesn’t quite soar when on paper it probably looked like a good idea, but would anyone consider that the format itself is to blame?  In other words, are interviews inherently flawed?

The Mark Twain Foundation has just released for the first time in print a 10-page hand written essay on the subject of interviews written by Twain in 1889 or 1890.  You can see the whole essay at the Newhour’s web site including scans of the handwritten pages.  Here is an excerpt (sections of which brilliantly match form to content) that expresses Twain’s dissatisfaction with the interview:

The Interview was not a happy invention. It is perhaps the poorest of all ways of getting at what is in a man. In the first place, the interviewer is the reverse of an inspiration, because you are afraid of him. You know by experience that there is no choice between these disasters. No matter which he puts in, you will see at a glance that it would have been better if he had put in the other: not that the other would have been better than this, but merely that it wouldn’t have been this; and any change must be, and would be, an improvement, though in reality you know very well it wouldn’t. I may not make myself clear: if that is so, then I have made myself clear–a thing which could not be done except by not making myself clear, since what I am trying to show is what you feel at such a time, not what you think–for you don’t think; it is not an intellectual operation; it is only a going around in a confused circle with your head off. You only wish in a dumb way that you hadn’t done it, though really you don’t know which it is you wish you hadn’t done, and moreover you don’t care: that is not the point; you simply wish you hadn’t done it, whichever it is; done what, is a matter of minor importance and hasn’t anything to do with the case. You get at what I mean? You have felt that way? Well, that is the way one feels over his interview in print.

Yes, you are afraid of the interviewer, and that is not an inspiration. You close your shell; you put yourself on your guard; you try to be colorless; you try to be crafty, and talk all around a matter without saying anything: and when you see it in print, it makes you sick to see how well you succeeded. All the time, at every new change of question, you are alert to detect what it is the interviewer is driving at now, and circumvent him. Especially if you catch him trying to trick you into saying humorous things. And in truth that is what he is always trying to do. He shows it so plainly, works for it so openly and shamelessly, that his very first effort closes up that reservoir, and his next one caulks it tight. I do not suppose that a really humorous thing was ever said to an interviewer since the invention of his uncanny trade. Yet he must have something “characteristic;” so he invents the humorisms himself, and interlards them when he writes up his interview. They are always extravagant, often too wordy, and generally framed in “dialect”–a non-existent and impossible dialect at that. This treatment has destroyed many a humorist. But that is no merit in the interviewer, because he didn’t intend to do it.

There are plenty of reasons why the Interview is a mistake. One is, that the interviewer never seems to reflect that the wise thing to do, after he has turned on this and that and the other tap, by a multitude of questions, till he has found one that flows freely and with interest, would be to confine himself to that one, and make the best of it, and throw away the emptyings he had secured before. He doesn’t think of that. He is sure to shut off that stream with a question about some other matter; and straightway his one poor little chance of getting something worth the trouble of carrying home is gone, and gone for good. It would have been better to stick to the thing his man was interested in talking about, but you would never be able to make him understand that. He doesn’t know when you are delivering metal from when you are shoveling out slag, he can’t tell dirt from ducats; it’s all one to him, he puts in everything you say; then he sees, himself, that it is but green stuff and wasn’t worth saying, so he tries to mend it by putting in something of his own which he thinks is ripe, but in fact is rotten. True, he means well, but so does the cyclone.