Your mission, should you choose to accept it

[james_davis_nicoll]

In an article referenced in an article reference here, Ken MacLeod said:

It's just rare to see stories written about a future that the writer believes in and the reader can get excited about - let alone one they'd like to live in. What we need is a new intellectual engagement with the real possibilities, coupled with a new confidence in humanity's capacity to deal with them.

Outline such a future [of your own creation]. Extra points for not tucking "embrace poverty" into it in one form or another, not creating a backswing setting [1], not praising the virtues of oligarchy or dictatorship and on and so forth. In other words, outline my Nightmarish Future or something equally attractive.

I have a report to do on something that is the exact opposide of MNF so my entry will have to wait until tomorrow.

1: Settings where the author slaughters ninety nine of a hundred people to give his characters more room for their sword's backswing. I think Andrew Wheeler invented the term. He certainly has expressed distaste for settings that as a side-effect wipe out his kids.

Comments

[autopope.livejournal.com]

There's currently a lot of gassing in political salons in the UK about how 21st century politics is going to be polarized between bureaucratic authoritarianism and social liberalism, fighting a tug-o-war over privacy in the backwash from the ubiquitous rollout of technologies of omniscient surveillance. A world in which Gordon Brown and New Labour have staked out the extreme wing of authoritarian politics the way Hitler did it in the last century is ... well, it's not ideal, but it could be worse.

The big project of the first three decades has got to be the uplift of China and India from the third world to the developed world -- if they get it right, it's going to be a change of epochal proportions. At the end of the 20th century, just 15-20% of the world's population had first world lifestyles; if by the middle of the 21st century that figure has increased to 50%, and we haven't suffered a massive environmental collapse as a consequence, I'd call that a huge win.

Power ... renewables are shit for base load grid power, but if you couple them to electrolysis cells and some sort of Fischer-Tropsch synthesis back-end feeding off H2 and atmospheric CO2 (which you can reduce to CO, given H2 and catalysts and an energy input) we could see renewables taking up the back end of our carbon fuel cycle and replacing fossil carbon (bad) with synthetic fuels (carbon-neutral). Add nukes for base load, and that's beginning to look like a viable future, energetically.

Warfare is becoming increasingly capital-intensive over time, at least for war-fighting in the conventional mode. I don't think we're going to be free of nasty civil insurrections and guerilla campaigns for a long time, but Panzer armies charging back and forth across the smoking wreckage of nations are hopefully going to become a thing of the past, and the ICBMs will continue to molder in their silos.

We tend to forget just how grim life was for ordinary folks in a developed nation just eighty years ago. I'd like to envisage a world where in 2090 folks look back at our lifestyle the way we look at the English working classes as depicted in "The Road to Wigan Pier".

[daveon.livejournal.com]

I have a feeling we're going to all end up living with the bastard child of bureaucratic authoritarnism and social liberalism where we end up with a block of "don't scare the horses" exceptions to things that people worry about now, but don't blink at having every single aspect of our lives recorded, measured and monitored.

We're already seeing this with the degree to which people don't seem to care about people knowing who they are and where they are to a degree that makes me twitchy.

Having said that, I'm far more relaxed about online life now I have a Green Card - before I got that I was having the heeby geebies about people doing a search on me as part of the FBI checks, even if I had nothing to hide.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

The authoritarians are particularly keen on "if you have done nothing wrong you have nothing to be afraid of".

They tend to forget or ignore the possibilities that (a) social norms change over time (that which was legal becomes illegal, and vice versa) but data retention is forever and permits retroactive trawls for past behaviour that wasn't considered bad at the time, and (b) their searches may throw up false positives, which it hurts to be on the receiving end of.

I bring this up not to preach but to point out some possible friction sources in mid to late 21st century politics.

[daveon.livejournal.com]

I think you'll find a lot of the "younger" generation also have a degree of that attitude too. At least based on reactions when this gets discussed with people in their 20s of my aquaintance.

I can see a shift to things being less admisable in courts simply because statutes of limitations will run out faster and there will be tightened rules on what you need to bring things to a legal setting. Otherwise the system would probably fall apart all by itself.

One scenario for punishment: you get dumped off the grid for a period of time. People are assigned personal IPs and the authorities get extremely tweeky about people trying to get private IP access. If access is wireless you could dump people offline remotely quite easily and that could be quite catastrophic if a lot of technology is based around implants and personal verification.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Shades of the episode of the Simpsons where Bart sells his soul....

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

Charlie, far be it for me to nitpick, but you're framing things in terms of problems: the new Panoptikon, economic development, the energy crisis, major interstate war. Given the nature of many SF readers, this frame allows ample hooks for them to fret over How Things Could Be Worse, or to congratulate themselves that Their Idea Worked In A Fictional Situation.

How do things look after these issues are so resolved they aren't even mentioned?

[autopope.livejournal.com]

You want me to spin some scenarios?

(I'm thinking along these lines for the novel after next -- it's going to be set circa 2023 in a world that is, I hope, nicer to live in than the present day for many people, despite all its problems.)

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

It was more of a rhetorical question, but sure.

Since I'm wearing my optimist hat this morning, let me throw one at you: the Panoptikon precipitates a small-l libertarian society, due to public reaction, with the Panoptikon fully in place, due to government inertia. No one cares that they're on camera [1], it's mostly inadmissible in court, and the government can't even turn a profit selling the footage to data miners, whose needs have become much more specific. By 20xx, it's mainly used as a source of clip art for reality entertainment: e.g. they set up public booths where you can watch fifteen random minutes of yourself at the Fringe Festival.

[1] The obligatory Simpsons quote would be "That could be anyone's ass."

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

By 20xx, it's mainly used as a source of clip art for reality entertainment: e.g. they set up public booths where you can watch fifteen random minutes of yourself at the Fringe Festival.

All plausible positive futures aspire to the condition of Triton ?

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

Just some of them.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

You know, it's a shame SRD and Hal Clement never collaborated on a quasi-utopian novel.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

I like.

(See also: the copyright rentier class tacitly admits defeat and settles for a blanket all-you-can-eat license regime, whereby just about any device with a public communications feed pays a small fee into a copyright remuneration pot. The current copyright fiasco with its ridiculous draconian penalties for copying stays in existence, but gathers dust beneath a transparent blanket license-to-download sitting on top of it which renders the whole issue moot. There's no reason to repeal the body of restrictive copyright law, but it can be safely ignored by anyone who isn't planning the equivalent of tax evasion.)

Another thing I'm hoping for ...

Over the past 40-odd years we've seen a hollowing out of the state and the selling off of assets that were hitherto considered public services -- I'm not talking about things like aircraft and car factories, but things like municipal water supplies, the post office, and the air traffic control system.

We're also (I hope I'm not degenerating into Friedmanspeak) seeing a long-term shift in resource distribution, mediated by communications technologies, from hierarchical structures to networks.

I'm expecting the energy and environmental crises we're approaching to stress the hollowed-out structures we've been left by the asset-strippers of the 1980s and 1990s, but I'm hoping that we'll be able to survive the crises by reconstructing some sort of new model of public custody of the commons. Logistics and communications are the key issues here. Just as large swathes of rural Englandshire are losing their post offices and hardware stores, they're gaining local Tescos; I'm looking to a future in which those supermarkets have been turned into public distribution hubs, in which as much food as possible is grown locally in vertical farms backing onto those hubs, and in which those hubs have expanded to take on the role of the (long-since closed) public services like the village post office. This doesn't mean social ownership in the pre-1979 sense, but something functionally equivalent (from the end-user's point of view).

I'm expecting fuel to stay expensive, if not even more expensive (and I'm paying US $11 per US gallon of gas right now whenever I fill up my car's tank), but for new public infrastructure to develop that can function effectively under such conditions. Oh, and better airliners, running on biofuel from algae, so the masses can thumb their collective nose at the hair-shirt ecopuritans and go on holiday overseas without contributing to atmospheric CO2 pollution.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

but I'm hoping that we'll be able to survive the crises

You how the future isn't evenly distributed? Neither are calamitous results of stupid public policy. One could hope that the examples of watching Montreal's overpasses collapse en masse during a minor tremblor or some American city being depopulated due to an avoidable infrastructure catastrophe will not be lost on other regions.

Alternatively and more desirably [1], people's reactions to the small but growing inconveniences caused by slowly declining public infrastructure might inspire them to apply pressure to their governments to address these issues.

1: Because I don't care for "After the Armenian/Paraguayan nuclear exchange of 2031 depopulated both nations, the rest of us decided that there may well be a downside to mutual extermination" style scenarios, where some expendible regions get to be a lesson for everyone else.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

I'm thinking on the small, local scale here -- the UK's big enough that trying to wrap my head around the global picture is asking for an aneurysm.

But yes, I agree. (Although the fallout from New Orleans/Katrina is not encouraging; it's more like some expendable regions get to be a lesson for everyone else ... who then go right ahead and get themselves an 'F' grade.)

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

A meta-trend you might want to consider: faster feedback loops in the public sphere. What would it be like to live in a world with fast grassroots action? The traditional SFnal response has been to consider this at best a two-edged sword, because SF has traditionally distrusted the public.

What would an SFnal future look like where fast effective public feedback was at worst a two-edged sword?

Maneki Neko

[(Anonymous)]

Short story by, of course, Bruce Sterling.


Doug M.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Even the relatively minor (on the scale you're discussing) collapse of one side of the Interstate 35W bridge over the Mississippi here in Minineapolis (deaths in the low teens) seems to have resulted in renewed attention to the state of bridges around the country (or, possibly, just to increased reporting of activities that were going on anyway). This seems to support the reasonableness of your hope.

[traviswells.livejournal.com]

I think the I35W bridge collapse points out a problem in how people respond to disasters.
The bridge collapse may have only killed a dozen or so people, but nearly everyone travels over bridges regularly (IT COULD HAPPEN TO YOU!), and there's always the old tree-dwelling-ape fear of heights to make us vaguely distrust these dangerously-far-from-safe-ground structures. So many bridges are getting checked and worked on because everyone can see this happening to them, even if the number of bridge collapses in recent history is not exactly high. They're pretty safe, you know.

But Katrina flooding New Orleans doesn't seem to have generated that same response. Most people I guess are thinking "Eh, I don't live in a city that's below sea level. Sucks to be in New Orleans, but I'm safe". There are clearly lessons we could be learning about disaster response and preparedness, since the Katrina problem didn't start or end with a lousy levy. Those are more universal problems, not just applicable to seaside towns with questionable foundations.

[daveon.livejournal.com]

some American city being depopulated due to an avoidable infrastructure catastrophe

We're drinking buddies with a couple of civil engineers around here (Seattle) and they're not all that fun to talk to. One of them refuses to drive on the viaduct along the waterfront (the other one will drive on it but does say that some of the cracks are a little disturbing from a structural point yet probably won't bring the whole thing down, so on balance it's _safe_).

Their key gripe is that most road and bridge engineering is based on lasting 50 years. Most of the road infrastructure in the US is heading North of that now and around Seattle, most of the key infrastructure - the floating bridges and the Aurora Bridge are all older and in dire need of replacement.

Of course, nobody around here wants to vote for the local tax increases to fund that... [1]

[1] My excuse is that until recently I couldn't actually vote on local matters. I think I can now... wanders off to check paperwork...

[florbigoo.livejournal.com]

Why won't SF write about meals, vacations, occupations, associations, and ekistics?

Culinary Randism! Agronomic Vertigo! Satanism and Site Planning! Fourth-person Fertilizations, Fatherhood and Fraternity in Family Law!

It's a gold mine of story ore. Who might aspire to 21st century Robert Mosesdom in energy infrastructure, and what might be a power generation analog to the construction of the East Tremont section of the Cross-Bronx Expressway?

[autopope.livejournal.com]

That does't sound like terribly good fodder for commercial drama ... (which is the business we professional SF writers are in)

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

It's a legitimate mode. A guy running an interstellar bar. Two teenagers parked by the spaceport watching the ships come in. A quiet dinner on Mercury. A liner cruise to Mars. Colonists waiting for the mail. Working your way through college on top of the space elevator.

Heinlein made his bones with stories like this. [ding!] Down and Out in Luna City. I'd read that.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Conversely, how reliable will the Panopticon be if digital video can be perfectly faked?

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

That was one of the rare things about the Internet that Leinster's "A Logic Named Joe" missed: that the information available on it would be unreliable.

"A Logic Named Joe" can be read as an early example of looming-Singularity fiction, and I think this basic problem is an obstacle to other Singularity scenarios as well.

[happyinmotion.livejournal.com]

Which renewables we talking about there? Coz down in NZ, we've already got hydro and geothermal for 75% of electricity, and it's pretty sweet.

Throw in tidal, wave, hot dry rock geothermal, demand-side management and solar hot water and you're looking at a nicely diversified generation portfolio, for a large number of nations.

It's not just a case of reliable base + fast peaking plants, with wind upsetting the apple cart. Future generation, hell, current generation is a bunch of different technologies, all with different response times, predictability and reliability, matched against a load that's reasonably predictable but variable across a wide range of timescales. It works pretty well already.

Now, the interesting question is who can squeeze someone else into holding reserve generation that isn't going to be running the vast majority of the time, and will thus never be profitable. That's a political question, not a technological one.

(Do they still have Economy 7 in the UK? Night storage heaters are demand side management for inflexible generation, namely base gen like nuke plants that can't change power levels quickly. From that point of view, you could argue that the UK already has too much base gen.)