Politics of the Science-Fictive Future: Or, what a "Futurist" Wants from the Republicans

This election year, many have been quick to note that Romney and the Republicans lost at least in part because they are no longer speaking  to a demographic (white males) capable of winning them the election. I think these pundits may be on to something, but I don't think the same will be true four years down the road, when that party will be presented with a far more equal shot at the White House. The pundits reason that the conservative values held by white males aren't views shared by the growing majority of america that is not white or not male or both, but I think these commentators don't get that it's not the whiteness or the maleness of the demographic that gives it its conservative bent.

The white male gets his generic conservative attitude from working in a system that supports him. He doesn't want it to change because for him, it works. Instead of innovating the government's policies, he would take the more cautious approach of working within the lines as they already exist, because they seem well-drawn to a cohort that has benefitted from their delineation (such as him). That, not fiscal responsibility or religiosity, is the core of the conservative ideal. There is actually much to like in such an ideal, even for people whom the system has not thus far made ascendant: stability, assurance in the knowledge that it has worked for others and could be made to work for you, the advantages of familiarity, the perpetuation of rightly-honored traditions, etc. These aspects will also appeal to the section of the majority that also sees itself as on top, as working within the system they were given to rise to the point they are at. It would be foolish to think that just because of race or gender they will somehow find the conservative ideal unattractive. 

They will not vote conservative, however, unless the party redefines itself by reimagining their take on this core value and abandoning some of the traditional trappings of that stance.

In the arena of social policy, they will need to eschew publicly-religious-based moral decision-making. This is not because basing moral choices on religious beliefs is wrong. In fact it is probably the only truly legitimate way to do it. The reason they need to avoid this, though, is that in a non-white male majority, they can't count on establishing a unifying religious vision; the new majority is going to be made up of a patchwork of nominal Catholics, a whole bunch of vying protestant sects, and ever-increasing number of the irreligious who are trying to base their morality on some kind of scientific ground or another. Thus, candidates wishing to appeal to this majority of minorities will need to appeal to the one thing most of them will have in common - the belief in a separation of church and state. It will be fine to mention that a candidate is religious, and to in actuality make decisions based on that candidate's own religious integrity, but the party and candidate must have a wholly secular justification thought up as well. It can be done; you can convincingly argue that abortion is wrong not just from a religious standpoint, but also from a scientific/philosophical standpoint, for example. The other basis for social policy in a new conservative party should be economic - a language of dollar bills that every American intuitively understands. Take a cue from the growing libertarian sentiment in this country - if weed and other drugs could be legalized and taxed to turn a profit, then they should be. Let the individual decide what is right for them if it only hurts them - a true conservative sentiment if there ever was one. This coming change is as inevitable as Prohibition's repeal was in the 30's - don't let the Democrats get the jump on this message. Couch it in terms of reacting to the situation as history dictates you should, thus enshrining the move as a move from the heart of your conservative ideal - the idea that we should act based on what we know already works. This will steal the show from the Democrats for the young electorate and truly move the debate about the war on drugs, our border, and the national debt forward into new and fruitful territory - all in a way that preserves your conservative ethos. 

In the arena of business and fiscal policy, the Republican party desperately needs to cease its big business protectionist tendencies and become the friend of the entrepreneur, the nascent Green Economy, and the Internet. Teddy Roosevelt was once a member of your ranks; this man is a ghost from your past whose policies are writ large in your political future. Nobody in America likes that we have businesses that are actually "too big to fail." Deregulate - stand for a more open economy so long as trusts and monopolies are not in play. Keep arguing for a smaller government - the nightmare of Greece's downfall is strong in our memories, or could be made strong - but be willing to compromise here (look to cut defense spending, foreign aid, and the postal service instead of healthcare policies, for example). The Green Economy will need some incentive to get started, but not as much or of the type that many Democrats think it will need if a conservative agenda of deregulating the economy and busting up the big  players is successfully pursued. Focus emphasis on the improvement of American industrial infrastructure via our Internet - bust up the cable companies, make sure Google and the rest are keeping the net neutral, and ensure it remains the wellspring of entrepreneurship that has made it so huge thus far. Divorce the party from SOPA and the RIAA as much as possible given recent history and use the idea that an economy driven by information technology will boom on a glut of FREE information. Stand against regulation of this most important of business sectors, and be ready to disagree with Democrats on the degree to which governments should have oversight into network traffic and censorship. Some of this does constitute an about-face for the party, but characterize the party and the candidates as disparate instead of united; show that the party candidates who uphold these and other policies are united in ideology but are willing to try to realize it in different ways. This will give the party's image some vitality and dynamism. Liberals will be forced to pay attention to each candidate instead of dismissing them as "Republican." Conservative voters will find the party more inclusive.

Where foreign policy is concerned, Republicans should foster a revolutionary approach with roots deep in American history. Americans are psychologically ready for an era of political (but not economic) isolationism. We should be the country with open borders for immigrants of all colors, with little cause to be involved in foreign conflicts or peacekeeping operations unless called to do so by NATO or the United Nations. The War on Terror can be fought via cunning realpolitik diplomacy with other nations, especially China and India, and by an expansion of the CIA, as we did during the Cold War. Propose to lead the free world by example and not by fiat. Make it clear the USA is looking for profitable business opportunities regarding our planet's climate change and the dawn of Peak Oil.

That last point brings us to the Republican party's relationship with science. The future of the world is one in which science and technology will make an ever-increasing impact, which makes intelligent and coherent use of these tools an imperative for any political party. The reality of Climate Change and humanity's role in it must be acknowledged, as must the possibility that peak oil is upon us. These two events constitute an enormous problem for our developing worldwide civilization, and the Republican party's relevance must consist in engaging with these realities instead of denying them. There are valid conservative approaches to this: focusing on conservation and renewal of natural resources as opposed to major terraforming initiatives, for instance, or championing nuclear power as a tried-and-true green technology with downsides that can be mitigated at a later date by human ingenuity. Actually coming around to the fact that we will need to cut back and be sustainable instead of a forever-expanding industrial revolution. Democrats are lacking in this area because they aren't putting enough emphasis on conservation and sustainable growth, and they tend to wrongly link their strategies to unhappy social policies, such as various forms of population control. They are surprisingly unable to mobilize social responses that Republicans could happily adopt; for instance, the victory gardens and DIY projects which characterized America's incredible response to the stresses of the Second World War could be used to greatly improve sustainable living in America, as would initiatives to move the middle class out of sprawling suburbs and into more densely-packed urban areas that made use of the extra space to create "green belts" in which the ongoing green revolution could develop in close proximity to the people. An emphasis on at-home production instead of reliance on imports would help us avoid the inevitable rise of costs in shipping that will attend the oil crisis in the years to come. American agriculture, manufacturing, and information technology should be bolstered with improved educational outreach to the millions of new immigrants more open borders would provide - these people should be turned into the newly-revitalized blue-collar class of the twenty-first century, ready to actually implement what we have the know-how to do. It is one thing to promote science and technology in our schools, but businesses today know that America's true lack in human resourcing is in the blue collar area. Science and technology are changing what blue collar looks like, but our preconceived notions of its inferiority are unfortunately not. Republicans should make life easy for high-tech blue collar workers, and help resurrect that kind of practical middle class.

America could benefit greatly from a Republican party that stands for the entrepreneur, the individualist, and the sustainable lifestyle. Some party members already have inklings of putting their feet through this door; Romney was really a moderate defeated because of being backed by a rabidly right-wing party that in all probability was the driving cause behind him saying some very unsavory things that voters (like me) just couldn't stomach. I suspect the same was true of McCain, the last time I voted for Obama. Obama is a great president, but it would be great to see a new kind of Republican the next election competing with whoever is tapped to succeed Obama. A Republican prepared to be competitive and radical - only in the sense that they are rethinking what always has made the conservative approach appealing. That Republican could stir up the new majority and do major good for the country and its world. In a future that looks to change our lives so much, so rapidly, we could all benefit from a powerful voice for conservative nation-building philosophy.  

The Constant: Story

This is not a poem;
Think of it more
As a poetic telegram from your future.

This is not the future
With rocket cars
Or FTL Martian Colonization

This is YOUR future
And the future of your children
And your nation.

The plausibility is high
Because it is already begun,
And what is begun we will complete

Whether because we know to
Or because, too late
We are forced.

So these words are telling you
Warning you
Notifying:

The suburbs will die 
Along with the gasoline car;
Your children will inhabit cities.

Agribusiness will grow your things
Industry will manufacture ideas
And your neighborhood will feed you.

Everyone will be a designer;
(Did you ever play with Legos?)
Everyone will be a consuming producer.

Thus stardom will fall to earth,
Swamped in the morass of human experience,
Billions of us coming online.

Information technology
Will destroy commerce in mass;
It is creating commerce in ideas.

So ships and trucks and airplanes
Will ply fewer expanses,
Copyrights will combat human rights,

And human rights will conflict
With human needs and the future generation's
Very existence.

Religion will die a slow, mistaken death
As "Science" learns to oppress.
The gentle will weep.

The classroom is the neighborhood
The workplace is your livingroom
Yet your reach is global.

Women will make children
For state money;
Men will sex robots.

The natural world will recover territories
The landscape dotted with panels
And windmills and cellulosic fuel bases.

The population will contract and empty
And grow old, demand will slacken
The economy slow.

Life will also slow,
The new spaces will be enjoyed
With knowledge gleaned from free books.

Libraries will deliver hyperlinked books to your house
For a fee, and your sunglasses
Will be imbued with 3D movie classics.

The word of rap will run
Over the dubstep ground,
Through an ethnic forest, to your ears.

You will grow poorer,
Happier, educated, 
and forgetful, even of violence.

Medicine will oppress all of us
If we let it define our standards of life,
And computers will take our jobs

If we think of jobs
As they are thought of now.
Your children will thus actually want schooling,

Though education will not save them
From the press of their peers
Around the world.

All the specialized minds 
Will let their cars drive them
Safely to only a few jobs.

The rest of us must learn to be generalists,
Rennaissance "agriculturalists,"
Cultivating in a strange, satisfying rennaissance. 

Satisfying,
Because it will at last
Seem strange, even to the young.

Review of John Carter: The Movie

This is the movie Avatar should have been (yes, Avatar was bad). Here you have a whole world properly imagined, without any of the noble savage baggage or Fern Gully hippy BS that weighted down Avatar. Yet it still has a message, and it still delivers entertainment just like its pulpy forbears did.

When a director previously known for WALL-E makes a movie like this, you don't just sit through the whole thing without thinking about the message, no matter how entertaining (or not) you find it. John Carter does have a message that builds on WALL-E's - human civilization is on a crash course for destroying the environment of its planet. Andrew Stanton smartly expands on this simple message, fleshing it out by using a very old science fiction universe to move the drama of such a conflict over to Barsoom, another planet (very like Mars back in the days when we thought ancient alien canals ran over its surfaces due to defects in our telescopes), where another race of men are experiencing the end results of rampant expansion and civilization at the expense of the environment, resulting in the barren desert landscape that Mars is known for.

This is a brilliant move for Stanton to take because it builds on a theme that was actually already present in the original novels of Barsoom, generates a cultural cachet with the older generation, and uses it to comment on a very modern problem - our global climate change crisis. Whereas WALL-E was for children (wonderfully), and it left the reasons for Earth's destruction simply as gluttony and waste, here the reasons get a little bit more sophisticated - Barsoom and Earth are both seen as doomed by the demigod-like Therns, who seek to manage what they believe is the inevitable downfall of any civilization so that it does not disrupt their control of events even as the planetary ecosystem crumbles to dust around them. A more damning sketch of climate change deniers could not be painted. Stanton makes the humans (the ones responsible for the destruction of the ecosystem) almost unwitting players in this planetary-scale tragedy, blind to advances in science that could save them because of old beliefs in fatalism and internecine conflicts they cannot forget. Nobody is bad, as Avatar would have us facilely  believe - instead they are only human (or Thark, as the case may be). John Carter (played by a barely capable Taylor Kitsch) has the job of  trying to convince the viewer through his superhuman actions that we can transcend these inherent weaknesses if we can leap no matter how insurmountable the odds.

This message is subtly established over the course of a plot full of properly  swashbuckling heroics, including naval combat, pitched battles, gladiatorial forays, journeys into forbidden realms, super-intelligent damsels in distress, geopolitics, strange cultures, and of course, the Western-sky beauty of that dying planet Barsoom herself. That most viewers didn't grasp the message consciously can be forgiven, since they had this to preoccupy themselves with. This is to say nothing of the good visual jokes and sometimes even funny dialogue, although at times the script does fall over itself, especially with a few bad lines - but these only serve to enhance the pulp atmosphere if you're of the right mindset.

Second viewings for the sake of watching a "bad movie" will surprise viewers with the revelation of a deeper purpose to all the sound and fury on-screen, but of course most will sadly write this film off and never give it a second chance.

-----

One last final note about the Tharks - they are the most even-handed, complex, and believable alien races I've ever seen on-screen. SF movie-makers take note: THIS is how you create a tribal alien race without blatantly ripping off a stereotype of a random culture on Earth. They are barely anthropoid, have bizarre, sometimes superstitious rituals that would seem morally repugnant to a human, and have many faults (including a hopefully cultural propensity to violence). But they are also fair, honorable, strong, brave, funny, and open to change. Even better, all of this is subtly laid out over the course of developing the greater plot, without ever wasting any time on dreary and unlikely explanations, as Avatar did.

Instead of explaining itself, John Carter asks you to accept what you do not understand, to imagine it as you will while it concerns itself with the more important task of telling you a thrilling story that can inform your beliefs, if you let it.

The Tyranny of the Imagination

An important error of the modern age is that with so many people dreaming up so many things so often, we are apt to place our prejudice on the side of the human imagination.

7,000,000,000  minds work alongside our own. I forgive anyone who might catch themselves feeling that, freed from the shackles of reality and yet focused by the immediacy of the human condition, this increasingly-interconnected system of cogitation should be capable of exploring every possible avenue of thought, solving any problem, and predicting all that might be found in this single, predetermined (mostly) reality. Witness the generally-accepted Rule 34 as a contemporary and humorous example of our confidence in this regard. Indeed, I even find myself believing this once in a while.

We all know, when given half a second to think about it, that this just isn't true. The combined work of all the scientists in the world daily reveal details about our universe that we as a species have not comprehended before - indeed, some things are discovered which simply defy the powers of comprehension for most of us. Some might argue that there are people who may have conceived those things before, yet their thoughts are unknown to us because of the tyrannies of distance, time, language, attention, etc. A glance at the corpus of human fancy in the form of our species' literary traditions, up to and including all forms of story-telling - spoken, written, hypertextual, film, game, musical, theatrical, or otherwise - will reveal this supposition to be similarly false. Certainly a corpus this expansive should constitute a representative slice of human thought, yet from this very "wellspring," cliché and genre sprang; it has never created anything that did not have a human experience to back it up. Who imagined a world even as mundane as the inner realms of Jupiter before they were discovered?

Throw this much money, time, technology, and human creativity at a project, and you still end up in a mostly earth-like rainforest with humanoid inhabitants. Not only are we incapable, but oftentimes we are willfully cliché.

(exciting conclusion after the jump)

Deus Ex: Human Revolution & Rule 34 - Progress, Law, Science Fiction

Over the past few weeks I have had the pleasure of completing both the new Deus Ex: Human Revolution, by Square Enix/Eidos: Montreal, and Rule 34, by Charles Stross. I can say unequivocally that both of these new releases were very good storytelling laid over very old plots, and as such they add to Science Fiction incrementally, but they do not open any new doors. They do, however, prompt us to look at the implications of a relationship between SF and an equally venerable subgenre of Mystery - the Police Procedural. What comes next involves spoilers. (TL;DR at the bottom as well)

The Most Worthy Achievement for Humanity in the 21st Century

"The most worthy achievement for humanity in the 21st century that doesn't just fix problems we already have, but advances us further in civilization, will be what?"

I've heard this question before, and talked with several people recently about this idea, and it seems like a good one for lifting spirits, which is what we could all use every once in a while. These are things to look forward to in the years to come - if not in our lifetime, then within the lifetimes of our children.

I have created a poll on the side of my blog - I don't expect people to actually answer it because my blog has so little traffic, but it should serve as a useful reminder of this topic, because I think it is important to consider the good as well as the bad, ala the Shine Anthology, only less stringently utopian.

Take a look and let me know what you think, if you happen to venture here.

Green Future: Belated Review of Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl

The Windup Girl came out in 2009 and won both the Hugo and the Nebula.

It is compared to William Gibson's work by critics in that it is grimy, noir-ish, and set in a near-future focused on a single type of technology - in this case, on "green" technology in a world that has passed through the nightmare side of global warming and the resultant economic collapse.

On the far side of this disaster (not so far away), Bacigalupi posits a world in which green technology is dominant - the combustion engine is replaced by wound-spring drives, genetic crop and animal engineering has made food companies the rulers of the nascent reemerging global economy, and anything that produces greenhouse gases is carefully circumscribed by law - including, apparently, anything remotely resembling the internet.

This means that manual and animal labor is back in style while green power generation catches up, which gives the whole book the cant of a story set in the industrial revolution, with very strong themes concerning class, racism, and wealth that are supplanted in the end by a transhumanist message: that humanity itself is probably broken, but that the windups - the genetically engineered versions of our own species rabidly hated in the book - are a possible means of salvation. This really means that the reader's exploration of this new industrial world is all for the sake of a tired conclusion with flaws already mentioned better elsewhere. But before I reach that conclusion -

Overall, I thought the book contained a welcome cynical look at the sustainability movement. Anyone who thinks that sustainability will not mean a certain level of sacrifice should read this book for a great vision of a world where this was not realized until too late. It also does a great job of imagining the geopolitics, people, and places of its world, although it gets a poorer grade for the technology. The tech is great for the most part, but it is difficult to imagine that the world would ever completely lose the internet, especially in an era bent on energy efficiency - so much of that is to be gained through networked communication and computing. Also noticeably absent from the plot is any mention of improving your basic human through medicinal, surgical, or any other means. I find it hard to believe that in a future where improved humans can be genetically engineered, science does not also understand how to improve the average human as well.

To get back to what I was coming to conclude before, it shows that The Windup Girl is a book bent on its transhumanist message - to the point where the worldbuilding and the storytelling ultimately suffers, if only a little. It was a fantastic read plot-wise (I won't reveal even one jot more of it than I have already given away here, which is precious little, actually), and I highly recommend it for anyone looking to see where the good SF might go in the next few years. The future is mostly plausible, nearby, and finely tuned between dystopia and utopia. Just don't expect its ultimate conclusion to provide anything new.

It is the getting there that counts, in this case.

Dragon Age II and the future of storytelling, character building, and chainmail bikinis

An apology on behalf of the upper corner of my brain, where I presume my personified ability to write hides for long periods and feasts on Cheetos: yeah, sorry. Now, get back out here, you ungrateful tit! The meat, then:

Recently, I finished up with Dragon Age II, and I find myself increasingly amazed at the ability of some games to surpass their predecessors despite massive pressures to do the very opposite. I’ll get more into the specifics, but I have some general things that I keep coming back to. These all apply in varying ways to Science Fiction, which is why it matters here.

In many ways, of course, Dragon Age II (and its predecessor) grab from the standard bag of fantasy tropes, dragons being the least of them, Dwarves (dwarfs, depending on how much one reveres Tolkein) and elves, too, and their respective stereotypes. Now, this isn’t much of a problem when it comes down to it, because it can allow subtlety, relying on certain archetypes to take care of the atlas-like support while finer details are spun out, which I believes explains a lot of the recent explosion in fantasy – they all build on each other complementarily, much in the same way of ALL the MOVIES about PEOPLE IN LOVE, I mean, HOW MANY PEOPLE AND STORIES CAN THERE BE? Oh, well, I realize that the depth is hardly comparable, but you get the point; this is a maturing field, one that has built itself from the ground up and is just now starting to get going into real production.

There’s other parts of this grab bag that aren’t often used so well, though. (I would argue that DA II avoids these pitfalls, fortunately, but that’s for later) The Breast Plate and No Ugly People phenomena are alive and well still, for one. Fantasy literature covers tend to revel in this, with various ratios of smeared dirt to magic use to signal high/low fantasy, but some of the worst offenders are computer games. I stopped playing RIFT for this very reason, not out of any dislike for proper female proportions, but because a world of Victoria’s Secret models dressed as such causes major immersion issues. World of Warcraft used to be a major offender in this—every possible variation was to be seen, right down to an armor model that was basically two metal bowls and nothing much else—but as of late they’ve given female characters significantly more modesty (although the character models themselves are still, um, idealized.

I’ve told you all of that to tell you this: not breaking ground in realistic depictions of women within Dragon Age would not have been a problem. I’m jaded about that (although RIFT was a bridge too far for me) but then DA II shocked me out of my complacence twice before the first hour was up, and both times bucked the trend. First, the character I was able to make was…moderately realistic. Actually, I was able to make a face that I felt would not have been out of place in Peru, classical ‘moon-faced’ Native American, someone who I doubt would make the cover of Sports Illustrated no matter how svelte. Second, the first NPC to join your party is a lantern-jawed female who, nevertheless, isn’t really ‘butch’ in any way. Oh, and the armor covers them, you know, protecting and all that. Now, keep in mind that there’s still a fair amount of abstraction at work here, but these nods to realism worked on me, at least, and sucked me in as much as anything else.

Anyone who’s played Bioware RPGs within the last 15 years knows that one can expect a basic level of story competence that’s miles above most others, although this gap has been wider at some times than others. This game is no different, with the expected richness of character from damn near everyone, mature themes handled with care, and the standard assortment of emotions, but one thing stood out to me in particular. To be honest, it stood out to others first, but not in the same way…the Gamespot review puts it this way:

There's an odd lack of direction here. There is no overall sense of purpose, no main villain […] [T]he stakes are never clear because there's no central plot to pull you through. As a result, the story is scattered--a series of missions and events without a center. The most heartfelt moments come from peripheral tangents and side quests focused on individual party members, where you explore loss, love, and betrayal. Nevertheless, there's a discouraging lack of epic-ness and focus, and no final prize to set your eyes on.

This sounds damning, actually. It’s not a bug, though, but a feature. There’s no massive story because you’re the tale. It’s even a told tale, framed in the conceit of an interrogation of one of the characters after the fact, and the effect is that the entire game is basically side quests, which, when you take Gamespot’s words at their face, starts to sound like a pretty compelling game. That’s the real tale, and it’s a mark of how far games—and fantasy!—have come.

Once completed, I noticed something else about the game, or rather about myself. Once complete, I was done. Well, that sounds dumb, so let me rephrase: when I completed the game, I felt that I was satisfied that I hadn’t missed anything that would have significantly changed how I felt about the game. The game completed itself on its own time, but let me feel as if I had completed it on my own terms; this is no mean feat. To a degree, actually, I am loathe to replay it too soon, because so many of the characters and their relationships with you changed so significantly that it’s hard to see them in their early states. I returned to a savegame and betrayed one of the characters (a Sephiroth expy of sorts, brooding and maundering about fate) with the intent of exploring another path, but couldn’t, because it felt like I had just forcibly mangled the story that had already been told.

There’s much that’s new in this game, much that’s not, and much that tells of a grander future for the medium. It set many things into relief for me, and that’s something hard enough to do as of late. Dragon Age II is a glimpse of the future of computer fiction, you could say, and you’d be right, even it is just a game…the right blend of realism and abstraction, of embracing and rejecting canon, of guiding the player though a story that is nominally linear but doesn’t seem to be, well, more please.

Various Thoughts Brought on By Recent Reading and Writing

I recently read William Gibson's Zero History. This book is fantastically-written and full of great ideas, much more SF book than Pattern Recognition, which while a fantastic book in its own right was more "literary," if you will (along the lines of Lord of the Flies). It is easily a match for the starter to its trilogy, and certainly much much better than Spook Country, which has thus far been the only mediocre novel I've ever seen William Gibson write.

The big ideas in this book are that you can destroy the world economy by knowing the order queue for everything on the market a little bit in advance, and that secret advertising is the best way to catch people's attention through a sort of reverse psychology of advertising that works only in a world flooded in advertising, where a lack of said substance causes the calloused eye of the consumer to pause and take interest. In examining this phenomenon, Gibson lays bare the reason that viral marketing works so well (when it works).

The big idea, though is the first that I mentioned, and while it is undeniably the better of the two ideas he has come up with, he spends precious little time on it in Zero History, and in general makes the book a stylistic and plot-driven success that nonetheless leaves behind a shadow of philosophical disappointment. The book dodges some of the hardest questions it raises, and it really seems to me like Gibson is willfully ignoring the singularitarian implications of his own imaginations. I mean, you write a book with a name like Zero History, stick a world-altering idea in it, and then avoid doing anything with it that might smack of singularity-esque prognostication? It seems like turning a blind eye to me, if there was ever a literary example of said feat. I can't help but think Gibson is opposed to this kind of thinking by some deeply-inborn atheism, but I wish he could look at the possibility from the detached perspective of a scientific observer of the phenomenon he foresees. There is at least the chance that what he speaks of in this book is going to be one of, if not the, drivers behind a material singularity. To go into it further here would ruin the book for those who have yet to read it, but the book does a pretty clear job of intimating where it might have gone had Gibson been more willing, so I'll leave any curious readers of mine to read the book for answers.

There was one other thing about the novel that got me thinking. It was, at its base, a Quest plot in many ways, but one that felt almost like all the physical moving about was secondary to the quest that was done online in the book. The whole idea of a Quest plotline becomes increasingly quaint in a global world such as ours, and even potentially dangerous. It's no far stretch to say that our cultural mindset in the West is deeply ingrained in a Quest sort of attitude - it permeates our greatest literature from Gilgamesh to Homer to Melville to L'Engle to McCarthy. It is in movies and books and computer games, so to say that the West thinks in terms of the Quest is like saying that dogs think it terms of food. Even as a generalization it is an understatement. Going a step further, it is not too far a step to say that all of human culture is heavily invested in the mindset of the Quest narrative.

The problem with the Quest narrative is that it is all about expansion; going elsewhere to solve your own problems, either within yourself or back at home. That's not sustainable thinking. There are other plots, some more sustainable than others, but it might be worth it to think about how strongly narratives structure the way we think about our lives and our future as a society. We can't afford to fantasize just about space travel, or travel to extreme areas of the Earth, or travel outside of society when disaster strikes, as potential solutions. They form a good part of what we want to imagine for ourselves, but it seems we could use a healthy dose of imagining about what solutions might exist if through bitter fate, we are forced to make do with what we have right here for the foreseeable future.

Hardware, Interface

I am an enemy of the The Singularity.

Let me rephrase that slightly - I am an enemy of The Singularity as it is currently in vogue to imagine. I don't think that the singularity will be as dramatic, as life-changing, as flashy, or, most importantly, as soon as some people imagine. Kurzweil and those who look to him as a prophet of the future are looking too hard in the wrong place.

Computing is indeed expanding in power and decreasing in cost at a tremendous rate, along with the information that it has been made to handle. Problem is, these things expand at different rates: information is the elephant in the corner, and hardware the precocious child that everyone knows will succeed but no one quite knows how or when. Between the two of them lies the invisible aspect - the interface. In my view, this is where the singularity breaks down.

I believe that The Singularity occurs when hardware is indistinguishable from interface.

Computing power is needed to access information and to manipulate it; right now, the manipulation is being done by Google and Pixar and any number of high-powered computing/analysis firms). What Kurzweil's singularity does is move this computing power into our hands (actually, heads), along with both the tools to utilize it and be changed by it. Pretty heady stuff, actually, but I feel that it misses a critical juncture - how does it go smoothly from 'access Google from the refrigerator' to 'hey new drivers for my eye'? We've had keyboards for ages, mice for a long time, speech recognition is not quite there yet, and let's not even bother with video...and then look at the other aspect, delivery - just one path there, really, and that's screens. Small, large, flexible, they're still the same thing. This is not technology that is ready to be implanted into our bodies in 50 years.

Why, though, do we feel so close to the information? A keyboard is a keyboard, but we work around its limitations with fantastic ease, and screens are developing in ways and directions astounding and myriad. The thing that gets glossed over in talk of the imminent and inevitable Singularity is that our interfaces must change substantially for all of the things predicted to become true, and this is not going to happen any time soon. I think that it may end up happening later on, but only for certain values of X exceeding 100 years.

Notice, though, that I said 'things predicted.' I think that we need to look at the common car as an examplar - well, actually, not the car so much as our relationship with it. When driving, one more or less internalizes the car as part of the body. 'He hit me!' instead of 'He hit my car!', avoiding the feeling of barely controlling a massive chunk of metal, and jetting in and out of crazy traffic with many other peo - there I go again, internalizing. It is also completely physical, not at all any kind of wetware interface. Keyboards, multitouch interfaces, mice, all are physical in a similar way.

The extension of our selves that we feel when using these, when driving, that is what The Singularity ignores - we can almost achieve an end result of The Singularity already, sans wetware, sans ultra-powerful external computing. Until a paradigm shift - until something quantitatively massively different and better comes along, completely replacing what already exists, this key point will prevent The Singularity from occurring as some envision. It might not prevent another Singularity, one that is perhaps more subtle and less intrusive, but it probably won't lead to the Kurzweil Singularity or another kind of man/machine interface.

While I do believe all of this, here's the best part: there is always a chance of something from left field. Something may happen, or a development may occur, and suddenly we're sitting in the modified future in 50 years, reading this and laughing at my ignorance.