William Gibson Gives Up on the Future 352
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.'"
Well, crap! (Score:5, Funny)
there goes my investments in learning Chinese, buying slums in Tokyo and building a crappy AI called Wintermute.
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Re:Well, crap! (Score:4, Insightful)
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I.J. Good & The Suspension of Disbelief (Score:5, Interesting)
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!
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Re:I.J. Good & The Suspension of Disbelief (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I.J. Good & The Suspension of Disbelief (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:I.J. Good & The Suspension of Disbelief (Score:5, Interesting)
Science fiction is no more impossible by these standards than it ever was. If you read sci-fi from the 50's and 60's they got some of it right and huge amounts of it completely wrong. I would venture to guess that science fiction today will have about the same ratio of accuracy some 50 or 60 years hence.
Also, despite his fame and fortune, William Gibson is one of the last person to be talking about predicting the future. Anyone really familiar with science fiction and Gibson's novels can tell you that other than a few buzzwords and the general tone of his one and only original novel, nothing Gibson has written about has actually come true. The metaphorical "cyberspace" (there's the buzz-word [smirk]), in his first novel if not really anything like what actually became cyberspace except in very general, symbolic outlines. And all of his further novels are just regurgitations of the same stuff.
"Real" science fiction, (the original science fiction), is about science and the future in a concrete sense and it's based in social and historical themes. The idea is to base a story in a "real" or possible future society. The "other" kind of sci-fi, the stuff that has been popular since about 1980 or so and has become mainstream in our culture, has nothing to do with the future or with science. Despite the trappings of ray-guns and spaceships for instance, Star Wars is essentially a medieval drama about empire and heroic rebellion. Same goes for the vast majority of TV sci-fi.
These are not science fiction stories, they are War stories (now called "action" movies), romantic dramas, and sitcoms that just happen to take place in some cheesy spaceship. Gibson actually wrote some real science fiction with that first book, but it's been severely overplayed and overexposed.
He has been trading on it's success ever since IMO.
Re:I.J. Good & The Suspension of Disbelief (Score:5, Interesting)
The premise here is wrong. Hard SF is not limited to technology that *will* come, it is about technology that *could* come because the science, at the time is is written (and that is a very important issue) is plausible as far as is known. It has nothing to do with the ideas "coming true", though that's not to say they could not.
Suspension of disbelief is easier in stories written this way; and contrary to the above assertion, in good hard SF, the technology doesn't serve the role of the main story, carrying the characters as an incidental; the technology can almost fade away, leaving the story to be the main theme because the technology isn't so crazy.
Can there be good, accurate ideas in hard SF? Sure. We have seen them over and over. Frederick Pohl predicted today's convergence of cell phone, PDA, browser and so on with a great deal of accuracy in "The Age of the Pussyfoot." Niven and Pournelle did a great "asteroid hits earth" novel; Gibson himself did some very intriguing speculation along the lines of interfaces, scientifically plausible but requiring considerably more horsepower than was available at the time of his writing (but not now.) Gregory Benford, James P Hogan, Asimov, Blish, Clarke, and a host of others have all dipped their hand into the "hard" SF bowl and pulled out shining fruits no one had ever thought of before, all while writing great, engaging stories about a huge variety of things.
I read both types with equal, but different, pleasure. I enjoy the flight of fancy that comes with the idea of FTL drive; I also enjoy the tweak I get from a lesser technology that I actually might live to see if things go that way. But if the story doesn't bring interesting plot lines, significant character development, thought-provoking social comment, reasons for the major technological developments being posited... odds are I'll put it down and never pick it up again.
The idea that an SF story would be devalued if the predicted technology didn't materialize or if later science narrows the hard SF window such that it could not materialize is ludicrous; on the contrary, an honest window into what people really thought was possible at any point in time has its own magnificent charm.
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Well, you make an interesting point. I think what has changed most is the rate of social acceptance and civilization-wide implementation of new technologies, and the attendant acceleration of social, legal, political, and psychological changes. From the Watt Steam Engine (first engine concept robust enough to pull significant loads) to Blenkinsop's Steam Rail car was forty years, and significant commercial implementation was another twenty-five. Even with that amount of lead time, the impacts on society a
Re:I.J. Good & The Suspension of Disbelief (Score:5, Insightful)
What Gibson writes isn't hard sf by any stretch of the imagination. Neuromancer, as I'm sure most of the /. audience is aware, was written by Gibson when he had very little, if any, knowledge of how computers work. Bundles of fiber-optic lines as thick as a horse's tail, for instance. Second, technology isn't the point in most of his stories. In Neuromancer, we have one superhuman entity attempting to merge with another one. Do we have intricate passages in which the technology of this is discussed? Nope. The AIs in Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive, I'd argue, are closer to traditional definitions of gods than pieces of technology. Look at what we know about the Aleph in MLO: it's a mother-huge slab of nanotech, infinite storage space, and can somehow connect Earth with Alpha Centauri. We're definitely lacking some technical details here. I'm a bit fuzzier on the Bridge technology, but certainly Pattern Recognition isn't sf at all, given that it took place in the recent past at the time of its publication.
Rather than hard sf, let's call Gibson's early writings what they are: cyberpunk, stories about high technology, low lifes, and their interactions in a social millieu. The emphasis isn't technology at all, but social change. I mean, look at the importance of megacorporations and zaibatsus in Gibson's writings, something that's not characteristic of Vinge or Kim Stanley Robinson (who'd I argue is more of a hard sf writer than Charles Stross). Look at Case's first reaction when he is able to punch deck again: there's no technical details for what's been repaired in his brain, but the description of an ecstatic (in the strictest definition of the word) experience. Even the development of the relationship between humanity and AIs over the course of the first trilogy overshadows the technology that drives AIs. There aren't any scientific details and there's no attempt to reconcile science with plot in Gibson's writings. This isn't a bad thing.
To quickly wrap it up, I've always believed that cyberpunk, with its emphasis on heroes, higher [technological] beings, and grand conflicts that change the course of society are new myths for a technological society. Look at Greg Bear's "Petra," Stephenson's _Snow Crash_, Cadigan's _Mindplayers_... the emphasis on the religious/spiritual/pseudo-religious/spiritual is seemingly more important than the technology that drives each of these works. I'm very sad that Gibson is moving away from this, but given Pattern Recognition, he's moving towards an exploration of mass media and society, which is also very fascinating. (And what's this about space operas not being considered sf? Who would say this?)
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I've read pretty much everything written by both authors, and love them both, but this is not a comparison I would have made. I would be sincerely interested if you would elaborate.
My dad was a big sci-fi fan, and I read his back copies of "Analog" and "Astounding" pulps in the early 60's. My mom worked as a librarian, and so we got advanced access to all the new, good SF as it
Re:Excessive SF purity. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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In the early 1990s, that's what they said about object-oriented programming -- that it was a cute idea, but any real world problem would be better solved using efficient C (not C++) progr
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Not to hackers; not to technologists; not to users. It's an abstract, and an expensive one (look how crappy the Windows UI is trying to be everything to everyone; look how crippled linux is by being unwilling to create a standard GUI; look how crippled OSX was by pretending mice only needed one button. Complexity and abstraction aren't bad things and can be done very well.
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What? You think targets provide the interface to hack them? That's not how it works, not even today. Programs are compact bundles of executable code and data. Sometimes encrypted, usually not. Programs are the ultimate models of terseness, because each machine instruction represents an action by the processor. There is no "inter
True, but not unique to SF though. (Score:3, Insightful)
Fixed that for you. Suspension of disbelief is just as much a requirement for other fiction subgenres as it is for SF, in greater or lesser amounts. In some ways I think 'hard' SF requires less than other types of fiction, because it gives you plausible arguments for setting aside your disbelief.
But were it not for people's willingness to set aside their disbelief in order to be entertained, we wouldn't ha
Eh. (Score:2)
That being said, I read Pattern Recognition (his last novel) and it was an excellent book, even though it wasn't very futuristic at all. I think he's selling himself
always be a "???" (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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A human brain has ~100 billion neurons.
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It sure does not seem that far off.
Re:always be a "???" (Score:5, Insightful)
Moore's "law" as you understand it is already plateauing.
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Of course, if Moore's law holds...
a factor of 10 billion takes about (lemme see, 10^10 =~ 2^33, implies 33 * 1.5 years) 50 years. Yeah, that's a while, but not outside our lifetime, to get a household computer with the processing power of the human brain.
The references I've seen state that the power for the human
Re:always be a "???" (Score:5, Interesting)
http://neuron.duke.edu/ [duke.edu]
And attempting to model everything we know about the chemical processes. That said, there are 2 dimensions of performance issues:
1) Neuron is not as fast as it could be, because a lot of the work being done is at an interpretive level.
2) It's likely we don't know all we need to about the chemistry.
I assume those 2 issues are roughly a draw, and that in order to eventually simulate a human brain, there will be improvements in the simulator software eventually, but those will trade off against the necessity of more detailed simulations.
In any case, 50 years for the computer power to simulate a human brain is a decent bet.
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There is no science that indicates that this is even slightly likely. We have every reason to think that the brain obeys the physics that everything else has turned out to obey, and no reason to think otherwise at this point in time.
I'll consider your brain-as-uber-thang ideas when you get so
Re:I.J. Good & The Suspension of Disbelief (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
I'd like to suggest that if you HAD read his books, you'd ask him to please put down the pen and do something else.
He had one great idea, and when he was younger, his writing style was beautiful and articulate, like some crazy poetry. But as time has worn on, he has moved further from brilliant concepts and fantastic conceptualizations, and closer to being "just another sci-fi author."
Neuromancer was an excellent read. The stories in Burning Chrome, genius. I'd even give im points on Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive.
After that, he went to crap. I still give him credit for being a brilliant man, a good writer, whom a lot of people enjoy. But I don't think that anyone, even his current fans, would argue that after his first set of books, "something changed."
I Can't Ask an Author to Stop Doing What He Loves (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Fake, plastic, and surreal. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Drugs? (Score:3, Interesting)
Having heard Gibson talk about his past, I get the feeling that the reason his writing style changed so much since Neuromancer is because his life got better. It's harder to write about how completely shitty the world is when you can't truly believe it.
While I miss reading the old Gibson, I wouldn't want him to go back to that place.
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He probably stopped taking drugs. No, I'm not joking...
LS
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Gibson's books are all about the grey areas. You should check out the short story the New Rose Hotel, even a pretty decent movie adaptation.
His earlier works focused on AI, and hum
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God, I hope it's better than what they did to Johnny Mnemonic
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A machine might be able to consider more information than humans in making a decision.
We need to understand genius's before we could make a smart machine tho.
And real genius's are random in nature and typically unique.
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The requirement for the singularity is simply that we reach a point where we can achieve, in some manner, an intelligence of 1.01 times the human norm, and that that intelligence can repeat the trick. Certainly, machine intelligences should allow this, but it is also possible we will devise ways to improve our own mental functioning, or a way to aggregate normal human intell
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Fantasy is not Science Fiction (Score:3, Insightful)
About the singularity, my opinion is: who knows? It seems more or less like life afte
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Sounds like a cop out to me (Score:3, Insightful)
History class is for the lazy writer since there is little to 'invent'. Sure, history is really interesting and educational, but not in the same way as scifi is entertaining and thought provoking.
And if his 'history works' turn out anything like the "difference engine" was ( it was set in the past remember ), then his career is over as a writer im afraid.
Especially given what he's written (Score:2)
For that matter, "Journy to the center of the earth" (Jules Verne) was actually an interesting book, even if we're all pretty confident now that it's completely impossible.
So I can understand giving up on actually trying to predict the future. But go ahead and speculate. Have fun!
Re:Sounds like a cop out to me (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Use Occam's Razor (Score:2)
become? (Score:3, Insightful)
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And Stephenson's Baroque Cycle is a monument to how much fun that can be. I mean, how many novels get to have a thorough explanation of the origin and evolution of international banking, swashbuckling scenes involving Barbary pirates, a wide range of um... occasionally unorthodox intimate antics, and a chase scene involving Our Hero barely escaping through t
maybe he's just getting older (Score:3, Insightful)
I mean, the same transition happened to me. In my 20s and early 30s I read gobs of sf and other kinds of speculative stuff. Now (early 40s) I tend to be a much more interested in history and social psychology. Not sure
New Title Tag (Score:3, Funny)
He's wrong, you know. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Haven't read Gibson this century, however.
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I completely agree. When I was in school I thought that he was a great writer and that his books were excellent. They were great books, but having read them again recently the prose and syntatic structure doesn't seem as great as it did when I first read it. None the less, I still think he has a great way with words. The opening line from Neuromancer will always be in my mind
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Gibson's "impressionistic" style was a great big part of it, a style that sadly waned after the Sprawl trilogy was done. Going back and re-reading it, I'll admit it's a bit trite, but I still prefer it to the godawful style of Asimov's Foundation and Robot wherein he would congratulate himself m
Re:[s]He's wrong, you know. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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No offense, but the fact that your wife has a Master's in English doesn't mean squat. I have a degree in Creative Writing and that doesn't make my opinion more valid than anyone else's. I know people with CS degrees who can't operate a toaster. There is no more or less informed opinion when talking about appreciation of art: it's all entirely subjective.
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What's "wrong" about it? It hasn't come to pass yet. Mice aside, we still interact with computers in roughly the same way as we did thirty years ago - prettier colors, some video, but still largely a keyboard, a monitor and text.
When someone comes with a truly different way to interact with information, then we can call Gibson "wrong".
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Not so hard, really (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Climate change (Score:3, Insightful)
It won't be Mad Max, Waterworld or Soylent Green but certain foods are going to become a luxary. Certain fish already are.
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With any luck, we won't actually be so stupid as to try and "repair" something we do not fully understand.
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or Nuclear Fission will start to replace natural gas and coal fired power plants followed shortly buy Fusion in about 20 years.
Coal reformulation will replace oil as the primary source of liquid hydrocarbons.
- poorer nations will be strongest adopters of ecological technologies
Poorer nations will continue to exploit the cheapest and dirtiest fuel sources such as coal.
- cities will reject the automobile and become a lot nicer places to live in
Would be nic
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Don't know where you were, If you look at the census data [census.gov] you will see that almost 20% of Manhattan's population is under the age of 18. All I know is that I can't walk down the sidewalk without dodging mom's and dad's and their damn strollers.
And, don't worry: the end of the petroleum economy will radically change the American landscape. It's already happening in some areas. Atlanta, for instance, has seen big increase in
Sounds like Gibson is getting old. (Score:2)
Cold war erupts, MAD destroys humankind. Bad fashion causes global intellectual meltdown.
He writes what he wants, but the reason Neuromancer & Co. was amazing was because he took certain aspects of the current time and extrapolated them into an interesting future. Just like all great science fiction, and I'm sure there will be other authors writing great works about the future in the future (heh). If global warming, singularities or a collapse of civili
Re:Sounds like Gibson is getting old. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Computer not yet invented. (Score:3, Interesting)
So, can we use our existing technology to provide decent preventative health, transportation, and clean water for everyone? It requires no inventing. No new technology. Their governments just need to allow entrepreneurs build a bunch of solar or nuclear power plants to desalinate the water and power heavy construction equipment (currently most third world governments don't allow entrepreneurs to compete against eh state owned corrupt utility companies).
Perfectly understandable. (Score:2)
Think about it. 10 years ago, sites like youtube or facebook were simply out of the radar. (Heck, 15 years ago Google didn't exist!) What to
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Indeed, Gibson really ought to reconsider hanging up his prognosticator cap.
Unless we see a really massive enabling of peoples in other parts of the world, the only prediction I see is Orwell's: "a boot stomping on a human face. Forever."
It's actually very easy (Score:2)
The future will be very much like today. In 10 years, we'll have the same modes of transportation, the same fuels, the same foreign policy issues, the same bad TV, the same bad politicians, etc.
If you look back 10 years, what are the big changes?
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Only chance for sustainability renewable energy (Score:2)
Re:Only chance for sustainability renewable energy (Score:2)
And the sun may not rise tomorrow either! There's some *remote* possibility that the Earth may stop turning suddenly or the sun may go out because of some "law of nature" which is not obeyed "in every single instance".
I would bet my life on the sun rising tomorrow. Furthermore, consider this: if some earthly living thing in billions of years of evolution had come across "forever inexhaustible non-waste producing energy", we would ALL be running on it--the selective advantage
Re:Only chance for sustainability renewable energy (Score:3, Insightful)
Sure, if you repeal the laws of physics
Tesla was a genius, but he turned into a complete wackjob in his old age.
Geek rapture (Score:2, Funny)
I can hardly wait.
It's a Brave New World... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
The problem is that when you hold the "mirror" of science-fiction up to REALITY, it doesn't look all that much different. I imagine that is what Gibson's problem is.
We've reached a point with technology where we know A LOT about what is possible and what isn't possible. In many ways, the "dreams" of sci-fi are shattered. No FTL travel, no artificial intelligence, no unlimited energy source. That pretty much covers it, doesn't it?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
FTL travel I'll give you; it would take a major rewrite of physics to make that a reality. It's not happening.
AI, though? I'm unaware of any fundamental reason AI can't be realized. Quite the opposite: the fact that what we term intelligence has already arisen naturally rather strongly implies that it can be done. It may not be right around the corner, but - unlike FTL travel - we know intelligence to exist; all we have to do is replicate it.
And unlimited energy? If you're defining it
oblig simpsons. (Score:3, Insightful)
The future has always been quite similar to the past, that's probably the most striking thing about it. Culturally things have hardly changed in centuries. People fight over religion, travel wherever they can to get away from each other, experiment with anything they get their hands on, grow up, get married, raise children, and die. The tools we use change, but our actual lives as homo sapiens...not so much.
Thinks I would like to happen! (Score:2)
We engineer devices to nullify it and usher in a new age of transportation, at ANY speed.
Instantaneous speed now has an entirely NEW meaning.
2) Dark Energy is found to be something you can actually tap into.
New forms of electrical generation result in unlimited amounts of energy as we tap into the local universe and use as much as we want.
3) New materials are manufactured from Dark Matter. Buildings 10 miles high, space elevators ala Space 3001.
It could happen.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Not to be too much of a cynic or anything, but I'm glad the mysteries of the universe aren't unlocked easily, and that they don't usually live up to the hype. Change is good, but sudden change is destabilizing.
Huh? (Score:5, Funny)
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!"
Future predictions have always been easy (Score:2)
"If something's expensive to develop, and somebody's not going to get paid, it won't get developed. So you decide: Do you want software to be written, or not?" -- Bill Gates, 1984
I rest my case.
One author (Score:2)
Did the firehose suddenly run out of water when this article was being modde
Here's my prediction (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
and each other
Gibson Gives up on the future? (Score:2)
Me, I am happy that Gibson finally admits he has no freakin' clue what the future will bring.
Maybe he will stop writing about the dark ages as if they were coming to us instead of long past.
ah (Score:2)
"Screw this. I'm going to write about a farm. With a horse. And he will act like horses do and eat hay. He will not be genetically engineered super-horse that's plugged into the online universe, hacking the orbital death ray lasers.
His name will be Fred.
Fred will whinny and snort while trotting about the pasture. The only thing fantastic about Fred will be the sheer amount of manure he produces."
What is science fiction (Score:2)
Who needs Gibson, (Score:2)
"It's a step-by-step process. You climb on the backs of giants. Only rarely are there leaps. Scientific advances mostly are incremental. If enough time goes by, a decade goes by, suddenly, that increment, you take year one to year 10, looks like a giant leap. So here we are 30, 40 years after `Star Trek,' and it looks like it was extraordinary, the advances we've made."
http://www.happynews.com/news/392006/shatner-explo res-world-of-trek-tech.htm [happynews.com]
Enjoy,
Welcome to Marxism 101 (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course, Marx was different in this way: He did make one prediction about the future whose means of production were unknown to him: he thought there would be a people's revolution in which people would take control of the technology developed in the capitalist era, because of the inevitable resort to artificial scarcity that the capitalist system will increasingly have to turn to. Scarcity will need to be artificial because technology will be able to meet all the basic and many of the advanced needs of everyone in the world. Capitalism doesn't work in situations of plentitude, so there is no market for breathable air (yet). So the artificial scarcity that Capitalists will need to create will eventually get so ridiculous that people will just depose them. As far as futurism goes, I think this outline is aging rather well.
And by the way, this is much closer to what Marx actually said than what most "Communists" claim he said. The Marx I read never advocated a revolution, resource distibution, or any of that other socialist stuff. He was a dialectician who thought that history has an inner logic and moves forward inevitably. Pleading with people doesn't move history; technology moves history. He argued pretty forcefully that Capitalism isn't the final system, but not because he was trying to stir up a revolution. It was just to convince people that it can't last, that, like every earlier technological/ideological era, it will be undone by the tools it eventually creates. So if Capitalism creates automatic strawberry harvesters because Mexicans get too expensive, and intelligent robots and fusion powerplants and workerless factories, it will eventually make the gear of it's own demise. Marx repeatedly extolled Capitalism for being so damn good at producing new technology in the most efficient way possible. It was Lenin, not Marx, who thought that a society can leap past all the stages of industrial and post-industrial capitalism and start a revolution with just an ideological vanguard. Obviously, that didn't work out. Marx was clear that technology drives ideology and not the other way around.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Really? And which Marx did you read? Groucho?
It's true that a key difference between Marx and Lenin was Lenin's insistence that a revolutionary vanguard could guide a country into socialism without a well developed capitalism - in fact Marx wrote in The German Ideology that an economy well developed enough that redistribution would not cause need as a prerequisite for socialism or "the same shit w
Gibson's Future Ain't What It Used to Be (Score:3, Interesting)
I've enjoyed Gibson's books since they were first published. And I've enjoyed asking him questions when he's given readings. But I haven't considered Gibson an expert on "the future", even his own that he writes about, in almost 20 years. That's a lot of past to make up for a futurist.
Now Neal Stephenson, Gibson's literary heir: he's still got a plausible future machine running upstairs.
He was right about one thing (Score:3, Funny)
Is that what he has been trying to do? (Score:3, Insightful)