Archive for December 29th, 2008

Apologies for missing my regular Saturday post.  I’ve got a lot going on during Christmas vacation with my wife, and tomorrow we leave town for our delayed honeymoon.  I’ll try to post again this Saturday, but we’ll see.  Maybe we’ll get snowed in up in the Smokey Mountains!

*Apologies if this lands in your feed reader twice… Wordpress got all wonky when I hit “publish.”

Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today — but the core of science fiction, its essence, the concept around which it revolves, has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all. — Isaac Asimov

Amazing Stories!

Asimov might be accused of a certain amount of bias in this matter, but that doesn’t mean he’s incorrect.  Our “salvation,” in the cultural sense, does depend on the kind of speculation and imagination that our science fiction authors have made their life’s work.

Western society has spent the last century completely reinventing itself every five or ten years… “five” more frequently than “ten” in the last five decades, especially.  Most of our cultural metamorphoses have been centered around the preservation and distribution of data.  Once the nineteenth century had brought color photography and the radio, the stage was set for people to tinker, fiddle, jury-rig, and otherwise improvise all kinds of new and exciting novelties.

For a quick summary of the last 70 years of information technology, I recommend the list “Technological Milestones of the Computer Era” by Dennis F. Herrick.  I was originally going to post such a list here… but it was a long list in an already long post.

As we enter the new millennium, many of us are cancelling our home phone services, scrapping our MP3 players, leaving our digital cameras on the shelf, and tossing our pocket notepads in the recycling bins.  Why bother with all of that junk, when our cell phones have taken over these functions (and so much more) anyway?

The obvious question is, “where do we go from here?”  The obvious question, however, may not be the most important.  The question we might need to worry about is, “how can we prepare ourselves for the next century better than our ancestors were prepared for the last?”

Think about these examples:

• Identity theft apparently took our society by surprise… our responses to this threat have mostly been reflexive reacting rather than preemptive planning. 
• Identity theft of another sort was the topic of a recent post here on Shreds of Truth… send me your name and resume, and I will work you up a fradulent MySpace profile guaranteed to get you fired from your job, or your money back. 
• The concept of email security seems to have been ignored in our recent presidential campaign, and email has been around since the 1970s! 
• Even worse, we spent decades warring against the production and distribution of child pornography; now we buy our children camera phones so that they can produce and distribute it themselves.

I am no Luddite.  I love technology.  I especially love the responsible, thoughtful, and well-informed use of technology.  Unfortunately, technology sometimes develops so rapidly that our cultural understanding of it lags behind.

The dilemma:  how do we solve or prevent problems arising from the use of technology that hasn’t been invented?

The answer:  by conceiving of the technology and the problems it poses before the technology appears on store shelves.

 So, wait, that means we need to predict the future, right?  How can we know how a particular piece of technology will be (ab)used before it has become available?

Through science fiction, that’s how.

In the 1970s, Orson Scott Card had already envisioned a remarkably accurate version of the Internet — a global, computerized medium for sharing communications, news, and information.  In his novel Ender’s Game, he also correctly predicted some of the risks inherent in a global computer network:  trolling, anonymous abuse of communications systems, deliberately deceptive online profiles, malicious hacking, invasions of privacy, and so forth.

Ender’s Game was published nearly twenty years before the news flash arrived in most Americans’ homes that their twelve-year-old sons and daughters were chatting online with (and giving personal information to) dangerous pedophiles masquerading as middle-schoolers.

The reaction, more often than not, was “OH MY GOSH do you mean to tell me that some people on the Internet are LYING ABOUT THEIR IDENTITY?”  The shock was nearly tangible.  The outrage was nearly palpable.  And every forward-thinking teen who had read Ender’s Game had seen this (or something similar) coming for a long time.

Now… if you’re interested to see what’s coming within the next twenty years… and to think about how to protect your children from it… go read Charles Stross’s Accelerando.  To get your attention hooked, I’ll share with you the first few sentences of the novel, copied and pasted from the free (!) online version linked above.

Manfred’s on the road again, making strangers rich.

It’s a hot summer Tuesday, and he’s standing in the plaza in front of the Centraal Station with his eyeballs powered up and the sunlight jangling off the canal, motor scooters and kamikaze cyclists whizzing past and tourists chattering on every side. The square smells of water and dirt and hot metal and the fart-laden exhaust fumes of cold catalytic converters; the bells of trams ding in the background, and birds flock overhead. He glances up and grabs a pigeon, crops the shot, and squirts it at his weblog to show he’s arrived. The bandwidth is good here, he realizes; and it’s not just the bandwidth, it’s the whole scene. Amsterdam is making him feel wanted already, even though he’s fresh off the train from Schiphol: He’s infected with the dynamic optimism of another time zone, another city. If the mood holds, someone out there is going to become very rich indeed.

He wonders who it’s going to be.

(Accelerando e-book licensed under CC-by-nc-nd Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license by Charles Stross.)