71–80 of 90 posts
I really liked this article because it was a concise demonstration of the 'known' solution problem. A while ago[1] there was a discussion of what folks from the 19th century thought the world would be like in the 20th century. The common theme is that the futurists could never anticipate a change to a technology they didn't have any experience with. The rise of communications as a means of linking people together was…
I really liked this article because it was a concise demonstration of the 'known' solution problem. A while ago[1] there was a discussion of what folks from the 19th century thought the world would be like in the 20th century. The common theme is that the futurists could never anticipate a change to a technology they didn't have any experience with. The rise of communications as a means of linking people together was…
Instead, we should try to predict how the fundamental paradigms will change, and then deduce visible, commonplace details from that.
I did just started reading "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" by Kuhn, which is all about paradigms (of a specific sort). It's good stuff.
[0]: http://www.thenewatlantis.com/doclib/20120203_aftervirtuecha...
> MacIntyre argues that "there are four sources of systematic unpredictability in human affairs" which preclude social science from being like natural science (93). The first is radical conceptual innovation, which can be explained in retrospect, but inherently can only be predicted when the innovation has already occurred. MacIntyre notes that this also means that the future of scientific innovation cannot be predicted, invoking the Church-Turing thesis as further proof. The second source is the fact that "the unpredictability of certain of his own future actions by each agent individually" implies the unpredictability of that agent by any other agent, and hence an aggregate unpredictability to the social world (95). The third source "arises from the game-theoretic character of social life" (97). Social life in fact embodies multiple games, players, and transactions and thus cannot be studied as a single instance, reducing the predictive power of game theory. The fourth source is "pure contingency", the way in which "trivial contingencies can powerfully influence the outcome of great events", such as the length of Cleopatra's nose, or Napoleon's cold at Waterloo (99-0).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the best one of those I encountered was an SF story where the navigation for FTL was done with slide rules. But demanding that fiction predict the future is unreasonable and will cause upset for you and the authors. Almost all speculative fiction is based on "what if" : imagine if there was something different about the world or or our technological capabilities, what stories could we tell about them? (That's…
> I think the best one of those I encountered was an SF story where the navigation for FTL was done with slide rules. As in, you're impressed that someone writing in the 1950s predicted information warfare?
I will relate to my observation in Harry Potter books. Harry Potter universe has time machine which we know scientifically are impossible while in the same HP universe, Hermoine has to physically go to the forbidden library to read books. JK Rowling couldn't think of wikipedia or internet which both exist in real world but not time travel.
Strong encryption is another thing that sci-fi authors seem to miss. For example 1998's Moonwar has people sneaking communications on laser beams instead of radio waves because spies won't be able to eavesdrop on the straight-line laser without physically going to its location. That, despite the internet already using encryption for financial transactions in real life.
Applied AI will be the next "nobody knew how fundamentally things would change." I don't believe in the singularity (at least as currently envisioned) but I do believe we need to figure out what a society must look like when most human beings are, almost literally, not useful for commercial employment. Like, the whole tenets of a market economy and capitalist ownership will smash into the tenets of human worth and th…
Two problems in the article analysis One is the classic hard vs soft sci fi. A classic example in book form is Stranger in a Strange Land reads like a story about 60s boomer hippies from India who meditate and get high and die in an allegory of Jesus, because it is. There's a very thin wrap of search and replace science fiction over that hippie story most famously a giant plot hole where the author wrote in video tel…
Very much so. In those days if you wanted to know about the future of telecoms you asked telephone engineers. Those guys thought in terms of voice circuits, circuit switching, and paying for fixed bandwidth (e.g. 64kBit/sec) by the second whether you were using it or not. Even when packet switching came along they were still trying to shoehorn it into their existing technical and business model. There were people thinking about packet switched services, but they weren't "experts".
Take a look at Vannavar Bush's paper "As We May Think". It anticipates concepts of hypertext, but the whole thing is shot through with solutioneering about microfilm.
Interesting aside: One of the RAND's predictions (No. 24) is for " International agreements which guarantee certain economic minima to the world's population as a result of high production from automation ", which sounds pretty much like Basic Income, along with some of the same arguments we've heard recently about why it will be increasingly needed. (Not saying I agree nor disagree)
The RAND study is from 1964. There have been several experiments with basic income systems in the US and Canada in the 1960s and 1970s, and I may assume that the general idea is even older.
Any reason to expect women will be more likely to be rocket pilots in the future than truck drivers today?
I have no idea whether that had scientific grounding.