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

[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.