science fiction

My parents read science fiction, so I was introduced to it at a young age. I remember my father reading Piers Anthony's Blue Adept to me when I was seven - and even though that is as much fantasy as SF, it gives you the idea.

Science fiction inspires and is inspired by real science and technology. Many inventions predicted by SF writers have emerged or are emerging into the real world - everything from lasers to online avatars. Trouble is, a lot of those predictions were made in the late 19th and early to mid 20th Centuries. Lately.. there doesn't seem to be a lot of it happening.

PC Pro (UK) has an article which basically asks if science fiction as a genre has run out of steam. Although there is still good SF being written, much of it is either space opera or otherwise very much social SF, dealing with ideas such as first contact.

I don't know if it's true; there are other factors at play here. It is increasingly difficult for new authors to get published, due to the lack of small publishing houses which are willing to take a risk on a first novel in what is still viewed as a niche or non-literary genre. There are fewer magazines which will publish SF short stories. But if it is true, if there are fewer innovative ideas coming out of science fiction writing, think about what that means.

Either our culture and technology are entering a period of decadence and and decline - or it's just getting harder to make useful predictions that won't be out of date by the time the novel is finished and goes to print a year later.

In other words things are just changing so fast that writers don't have time to keep up and imagine fourteen steps ahead.

Memory

We can talk about human enhancements and memory/cognition upgrades as if they're decades away, but it just isn't true. They're happening now. They're called the internet.

Faustus, over at ErosBlog, writes:

it’s the glorious age of the Internet, which means that with a certain amount of head-scratching and Google searching and perhaps a small outlay of cash, you can sharpen up strange old memories. And so I did. The clip indeed exists.

I read that, and I thought - well, yes. The truism that Google knows everything, or more accurately that the interweb knows everything, is actually not far off. I remember something, vaguely.. so I look it up online. Example: A music video to a song which was popular for all of a week sometime while I was in high school, and all I can remember is a few images from the video (no artist, no lyrics, not even the melody). Yep. The interweb knows what it's called, what year it came out, who it's by, and can even supply a copy of the clip.

I often joke about the internet + my computer being extra parts of my brain, but you know.. it isn't really a joke.

infinite games

The thing that people miss, I think, is that the idea of singularity is not merely a technological idea. It is also a cultural idea; a human idea. The singularity is about people, about change, about learning to deal with a newly complex environment.

It is, in many ways, the next big adaptational motivator.

So I find it interesting to read about the human side of all this. How we are coping, how we are adapting as a species and a culture to the things we've set in motion. One of the most significant ideas I've seen coming out of the maelstom is that we can cope better with the technological and contextual change through play.

We are, after all, a game-playing, story-telling species. It makes sense that games are a good method of making sense of and interacting with a rapidly changing world. Not the finite games of winner vs loser that we use to channel our biological aggression and social dominance imperatives - the infinite games that we played as children for the sheer joy of play. The ones which nurtured that invaluable plasticity of mind which will - with any luck - get us through to whatever comes next.

Did you know?

• It took radio 38 years to reach an audience of 50 million people. TV took 13 years. The internet took 4 years.

• There are, now, approximately 5 times as many words in the English language as there were during the life of Shakespeare.

• It is estimated that the amount of unique information generated this year alone will be greater than that generated over the last 5000 years of human history.

We live in interesting times - and they're likely to get more interesting over the next century.