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I feel that the author bases the hypothesis on what journalists say sci-fi predicts (flying cars) not what they actually predict. Most sci-fi deals with pretty

by SRasch 11y ago

I feel that the author bases the hypothesis on what journalists say sci-fi predicts (flying cars) not what they actually predict. Most sci-fi deals with pretty radical views of culture in the future. Look no further than Banks' Culture-series, which deals a lot with the power-structures, norms and rules of a post-scarcity society. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_series In one aspect futurism often looks like an extreme expression of contemporary culture when seen in retrospect is in futuristic architecture and design. E.g. http://vintageindustrialstyle.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/60s.jpg http://vintageindustrialstyle.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08...

RodericDay 11y ago
I really enjoy Iain Banks but I don't think he's particularly popular with Reddit-style futurists. Passages like this one usually make em balk: Intelligence, which is capable of looking farther ahead than the next aggressive mutation, can set up long-term aims and work towards them; the same amount of raw invention that bursts in all directions from the market can be - to some degree - channelled and directed, so that while the market merely shines (and the feudal gutters), the planned lases, reaching out coherently and efficiently towards agreed-on goals. What is vital for such a scheme, however, and what was always missing in the planned economies of our world's experience, is the continual, intimate and decisive participation of the mass of the citizenry in determining these goals, and designing as well as implementing the plans which should lead towards them. http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm
- eli_gottlieb 11y ago
  Well then "reddit-style futurists" can take a running jump. There's not much point thinking about past and future history if you're going to consider only the toys (technology) and not the games (social systems).
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
notahacker 11y ago
Flying cars have been part of science fiction since road-going cars and flight were a relative novelties, and the sentence in the original article is obviously referring to flying cars "we predicted we would" quite some time ago. I don't think pointing out that fantastical views of the far future written in the nineties didn't place quite so much emphasis on them really contradicts his point. On the contrary, I'm sure he'd argue that all the emphasis in more modern space operas like Banks' on the extent to which liberal civilisations with few other worries should impose their cultural norms on very different aliens is probably a reflection of contemporary preoccupations[1], much like the softer side of late nineteenth century proto-futurism was preoccupied with eugenics and utopian socialism, and by the early twentieth century it had become preoccupied with war and dystopian socialism. It's not the most tightly-written article, but it's full of social as well as technological innovations missed by the last generation of futurists. We're a long way from the world of the Culture so it's not really the job of the author to identify exactly what that's missing, but I think it's fair to say that if we ever enter a spacefaring age, we might find even the most thought-provoking late twentieth century space opera to be more a reflection of contemporary liberal foreign policy concerns than a reflection of the biggest changes that have happened and challenges they face.
- eli_gottlieb 11y ago
  Liberal foreign-policy concerns? Why does everyone always forget that the Culture are anarcho-communists?
  - Kalium 11y ago
    Probably because the books are mainly concerned with how the Culture meddles with others to amuse themselves. And I'd say that they're only anarcho-communists in name. Really, they're ant farms, kept by the Minds.
    - psb217 11y ago
      The minds are the Culture and the minds are anarcho-communists (at least as far as I can tell).
cstross 11y ago
Planet Earth calling: science fiction is not a predictive medium. It's a literary form -- a subcategory of fiction. Yes, some works of SF are set in a plausibly-imagined future. Yes, some of these works may make projections/extrapolations about technologies around us. But the authors are writing in the social context of the present, and what they write about reflects the present day's concerns and perspectives, unless they are really hardcore about their futurism. Upshot: the vast bulk of SF isn't predictive, and isn't intended to be. As a field we sometimes get something right -- but there's an element of the thousand monkeys eventually emitting a Shakespearean sonnet to this: we also get a whole lot more wrong. Source: I do this for a living.
- ideonexus 11y ago
  Ah! I recognize you! I consider "Accelerando" futurist/transhumanist cannon. Thank you for such a wonderful book!
  - patal 11y ago
    Do you maybe mean "canon" as in: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/canon https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/canon ?
- koberstein 11y ago
  What is the difference between predicting and influencing?
  - cstross 11y ago
    Hard call: I'd have to say it all depends on the author's intent. Let's see ... at the time he wrote "Neuromancer" William Gibson had never used a computer -- he wrote it on a manual typewriter (and used the royalties to buy an Apple IIc). His creative vision was more one of social atomization and a particular aesthetic in a multi-national dominated future than it was informed by actual technology. Despite which, his creative vision of "cyberspace" got taken seriously enough as a visual metaphor that I remember sitting in on a debate at the W3C conference in 1996 between folks proposing that VRML should follow a Gibsonian model, and those who thought "Snow Crash" was the way forward. (Neal Stephenson's followers won the day. See also "Second Life", I guess ...) That's an example of "influencing". "Neuromancer" was very influential, but hardly predictive. Actual predictive SF is much, much rarer, but if we ever get a space elevator you can probably blame Arthur C. Clarke ("The Fountains of Paradise"), which is an old-school didactic hey-why-don't-we-do-this-the-numbers-check-out work of prediction in fiction drag. Or maybe Andy Weir's "The Martian". Written SF has traditionally been utter rubbish at predicting developments in the IT/computing sector, with notable exceptions -- for example the novella "True Names" by Vernor Vinge. (I've attempted this too but I'm not going to bang my own drum here.)
jerf 11y ago
I'd also point out that the "flying cars" of science fiction generally either explicitly or implicitly involve some sort of anti-gravity. In the 1960s, the idea that some sort of anti-gravity would be possible in the future wasn't so silly. It just seems to be the case that we're not going to get it. (Even if physics turns something up that can be used for it, the crazier the physics necessary to invoke it, the less likely it is to be practical.) I'll be honest, when I see "Where are my flying cars?" used seriously, not just as a "ha ha" sort of thing, I dock a lot of points. It's fashionable pseudo-intellectual claptrap. Real science fiction has discussed all sorts of things, and yes, that actually does include women in a wide variety of roles, including giants of the field like Heinlein and even TV such as the original series Star Trek, and I could keep going for a very boring amount of time.
- moe 11y ago
  In the 1960s, the idea that some sort of anti-gravity would be possible in the future wasn't so silly. I don't think anti-gravity is a silly idea. We're only starting to learn about the quantum world, and who knows what we will discover beyond that?

by SRasch 11y ago

RodericDay 11y ago

I really enjoy Iain Banks but I don't think he's particularly popular with Reddit-style futurists. Passages like this one usually make em balk: Intelligence, which is capable of looking farther ahead than the next aggressive mutation, can set up long-term aims and work towards them; the same amount of raw invention that bursts in all directions from the market can be - to some degree - channelled and directed, so that while the market merely shines (and the feudal gutters), the planned lases, reaching out coherently and efficiently towards agreed-on goals. What is vital for such a scheme, however, and what was always missing in the planned economies of our world's experience, is the continual, intimate and decisive participation of the mass of the citizenry in determining these goals, and designing as well as implementing the plans which should lead towards them. http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm

eli_gottlieb 11y ago
Well then "reddit-style futurists" can take a running jump. There's not much point thinking about past and future history if you're going to consider only the toys (technology) and not the games (social systems).

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

notahacker 11y ago

Flying cars have been part of science fiction since road-going cars and flight were a relative novelties, and the sentence in the original article is obviously referring to flying cars "we predicted we would" quite some time ago. I don't think pointing out that fantastical views of the far future written in the nineties didn't place quite so much emphasis on them really contradicts his point. On the contrary, I'm sure he'd argue that all the emphasis in more modern space operas like Banks' on the extent to which liberal civilisations with few other worries should impose their cultural norms on very different aliens is probably a reflection of contemporary preoccupations[1], much like the softer side of late nineteenth century proto-futurism was preoccupied with eugenics and utopian socialism, and by the early twentieth century it had become preoccupied with war and dystopian socialism. It's not the most tightly-written article, but it's full of social as well as technological innovations missed by the last generation of futurists. We're a long way from the world of the Culture so it's not really the job of the author to identify exactly what that's missing, but I think it's fair to say that if we ever enter a spacefaring age, we might find even the most thought-provoking late twentieth century space opera to be more a reflection of contemporary liberal foreign policy concerns than a reflection of the biggest changes that have happened and challenges they face.

eli_gottlieb 11y ago
Liberal foreign-policy concerns? Why does everyone always forget that the Culture are anarcho-communists?
- Kalium 11y ago
  Probably because the books are mainly concerned with how the Culture meddles with others to amuse themselves. And I'd say that they're only anarcho-communists in name. Really, they're ant farms, kept by the Minds.
  - psb217 11y ago
    The minds are the Culture and the minds are anarcho-communists (at least as far as I can tell).

cstross 11y ago

Planet Earth calling: science fiction is not a predictive medium. It's a literary form -- a subcategory of fiction. Yes, some works of SF are set in a plausibly-imagined future. Yes, some of these works may make projections/extrapolations about technologies around us. But the authors are writing in the social context of the present, and what they write about reflects the present day's concerns and perspectives, unless they are really hardcore about their futurism. Upshot: the vast bulk of SF isn't predictive, and isn't intended to be. As a field we sometimes get something right -- but there's an element of the thousand monkeys eventually emitting a Shakespearean sonnet to this: we also get a whole lot more wrong. Source: I do this for a living.

ideonexus 11y ago
Ah! I recognize you! I consider "Accelerando" futurist/transhumanist cannon. Thank you for such a wonderful book!
- patal 11y ago
  Do you maybe mean "canon" as in: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/canon https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/canon ?
koberstein 11y ago
What is the difference between predicting and influencing?
- cstross 11y ago
  Hard call: I'd have to say it all depends on the author's intent. Let's see ... at the time he wrote "Neuromancer" William Gibson had never used a computer -- he wrote it on a manual typewriter (and used the royalties to buy an Apple IIc). His creative vision was more one of social atomization and a particular aesthetic in a multi-national dominated future than it was informed by actual technology. Despite which, his creative vision of "cyberspace" got taken seriously enough as a visual metaphor that I remember sitting in on a debate at the W3C conference in 1996 between folks proposing that VRML should follow a Gibsonian model, and those who thought "Snow Crash" was the way forward. (Neal Stephenson's followers won the day. See also "Second Life", I guess ...) That's an example of "influencing". "Neuromancer" was very influential, but hardly predictive. Actual predictive SF is much, much rarer, but if we ever get a space elevator you can probably blame Arthur C. Clarke ("The Fountains of Paradise"), which is an old-school didactic hey-why-don't-we-do-this-the-numbers-check-out work of prediction in fiction drag. Or maybe Andy Weir's "The Martian". Written SF has traditionally been utter rubbish at predicting developments in the IT/computing sector, with notable exceptions -- for example the novella "True Names" by Vernor Vinge. (I've attempted this too but I'm not going to bang my own drum here.)

jerf 11y ago

I'd also point out that the "flying cars" of science fiction generally either explicitly or implicitly involve some sort of anti-gravity. In the 1960s, the idea that some sort of anti-gravity would be possible in the future wasn't so silly. It just seems to be the case that we're not going to get it. (Even if physics turns something up that can be used for it, the crazier the physics necessary to invoke it, the less likely it is to be practical.) I'll be honest, when I see "Where are my flying cars?" used seriously, not just as a "ha ha" sort of thing, I dock a lot of points. It's fashionable pseudo-intellectual claptrap. Real science fiction has discussed all sorts of things, and yes, that actually does include women in a wide variety of roles, including giants of the field like Heinlein and even TV such as the original series Star Trek, and I could keep going for a very boring amount of time.

moe 11y ago
In the 1960s, the idea that some sort of anti-gravity would be possible in the future wasn't so silly. I don't think anti-gravity is a silly idea. We're only starting to learn about the quantum world, and who knows what we will discover beyond that?