11 ms·
Let's put the future behind us
- spacefight 12y agoWhen I read the intro, I thought he's going to write about modern luxury cruise ships.... not too far off.
- lisper 12y agoThis. If you've never been on the Oasis of the Seas (or her sister ship, the Allure) it's worth checking out. Not nearly as dystopian as the article imagines.
- angersock 12y agoOh, from an environmental standpoint, they're still quite there.
- jpatokal 12y agoNot nearly? David Foster Wallace famously (and hilariously) argues that they're even worse: http://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/HarpersMagazine-1996-01-0007859.pdf http://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/HarpersMagazin...
- waterlesscloud 12y agoMaybe it's just the stuff people end up linking, but Stross's blog always seems so negative. It's a bit of a drag.
- mcguire 12y agoI'm a little unclear on the point of this article. Is it that the future is here, but it's way different from you thought it would be, or that universal surveillance is universal?
- jschwartzi 12y agoI think it's the sudden realization that utopia and dystopia are ideals, and that reality is always some combination of the two.
- herendin 12y agoYes. The content is sometimes interesting, but he so enjoys having a good erudite rant, that I fear accuracy takes second place. It's his own personal blog, and a fan echo chamber. So that's fair enough. But it's tiresome.
- digi_owl 12y agoNot limited to his blog. There is a video of a recent con panel on the topic of Cyberpunk where he goes on a rant of some kind.
- BugBrother 12y agoReality checks are valuable. It is better to get the depressing stuff from a good writer. But sure, there is some spin. You might note about e.g. the Netscape browser example that Microsoft got into legal boiling hot water. And the shuttle abomination, which gave NASA a motivation to use its heavy influence to stop cheap space launch, delayed real space projects by decades; if it end up with humanity extinct because we lack ways to stop a new dinosaur killer, we deserve it. And so on.
- digi_owl 12y agoEither it is the Scottish weather, or it is his way of dealing with a serious case of tech burnout, from being in the thick of the 90s Internet boom in UK.
- cstross 12y agoAlso: older and more cynical this decade. (Although I have a soft spot for Elon Musk's projects: both Tesla and SpaceX seem poised to go the distance, and they're both potentially huge game-changers in their respective fields.)
- digi_owl 12y agoHeh, the net sure is a small world. (and yep, egg on my face for not looking at the link poster)
- jacquesm 12y agoIt's a hard trap to avoid. I suffer from the same and I notice many other people that are still active and getting older have this too. (For instance, Richard Dawkins). I attribute this to a very simple thing: We had these youthful dreams and we realize that we are probably not going to be around to see them realized.
- javert 12y agoSpeaking as an American, he seems to have that stereotypical European pessimism about human nature, which is a big turn off to me. (I realize these stereotypes are just stereotypes... I mention them here because they seem to fit well.)
- jacquesm 12y agoWow. You've managed to generalize across 300 million people in one go. Congratulations, that has to be a record. If you're aware that your stereotypes are just stereotypes could you try a little harder next time? Nothing worse than being aware of the failings of your arguments but using them anyway.
- arethuza 12y agoOut of interest - where did you get 300 million from? I believe its about 742 million for Europe as a whole and about 507 million for the EU. Or was there some Eurostat poll I missed and we really do have 300 million cynical people here.... :-)
- Roboprog 12y agoThere's about 300 million in the US. And of course, we're all super optimistic :-) Of course, what we call Reaganism in the US, they would call Thatcherism in the UK/Scotland. So much for progress, hail stupidity and greed forever!
- javert 12y agoI did NOT generalize across 300 million people. That is precisely what I did NOT do. I am not sure if you misread, or you just don't understand what I said. Your comment is not only wrong, it's rude. I'm disappointed and a bit alarmed. I'm getting tired of this hateful bashing here on HN. I'm really sorry to see it from the old guard. You've been here a long time, so have I.
- justincormack 12y agoDystopia has always been a glorious part of our culture, in the UK and in Europe more generally. From Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, through HG Wells, Joseph Conrad (the Machine Stops), Orwell, JG Ballard, not to mention Pink Floyd, Chris Morris and When the Wind Blows. We love it, the discordance between what might have been and the plastic shittiness of what is, and we hate that Hollywood happy ending bollocks where everyone is going to live for even and ever and everything will be quite super.
- cpeterso 12y agoAn antidote to dystopian futures, Kevin Kelly's "A Desirable-Future Haiku: The coming hundred years, in one hundred words". On the chance that desirable futures ARE possible, we need to imagine them. https://medium.com/message/a-desirable-future-haiku-ff01d63c93c6 https://medium.com/message/a-desirable-future-haiku-ff01d63c...
- EdwardCoffin 12y agoRegarding The Machine Stops, I think you mean E. M. Forster: http://archive.ncsa.illinois.edu/prajlich/forster.html http://archive.ncsa.illinois.edu/prajlich/forster.html
- justincormack 12y agoYes, of course.
- jacquesm 12y agoThis comment too, is negative and a bit of a drag. It's a very hard trap to avoid. Try harder! (cue meta meta comment...). I have to really force myself to see the positive side of how all this technology that we have is being used. The tools we have built to exchange information are being used to track us both by industry and governments, the software development environments are getting more and more complex and frankly ridiculous (compatibility testing for well over 25 browsers in order to make sure your documents can be read by others in the way you intended?), coffeemakers and printers with DRM and so on. But then I remind myself to look at: - wikipedia - the Khan Academy (though they've started spamming!) - Google search (you can keep the rest) - Open Access journals - Linux And a whole raft of good stuff and I feel better again.
- DanielBMarkham 12y agoI think the trick here is _cautious optimism_. Yes, bunch of things suck really badly, and there is serious danger lurking on the horizon. But we're also increasing the power of the individual to rise above all sorts of problems with pervasive learning and commerce opportunities. You help a billion people live ten years longer and receive a decent education? You've done probably more good than allowing some western countries to become police states. It's all relative. As an artist, I find it much more important to keep finding flaws in my work and improving, but I can't do that to the extent of missing out on smelling the roses. Or -- yeah bud, but things still suck! :)
- DennisP 12y agoI'm sure he's right, while there's only one O'Neill colony. But I can't help thinking that after a couple centuries of exponential growth, when there are millions of them, that it will be a boon for human freedom. I'm not convinced that such extensive surveillance will be necessary for safety purposes. Detectors for explosives, and security around critical points like airlocks, is likely to be sufficient. Ultimately, when we can build them out of carbon nanotubes instead of steel, we'll be able to make them much larger: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McKendree_cylinder http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McKendree_cylinder
- arethuza 12y agoKeep up that rate of progress for 15,000 years or so and we'll have proper space habitats: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_%28The_Culture%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_%28The_Culture%29
- noir_lord 12y agoIf the singularity folks are right it will take a lot less than 15,000 years, exponential growth is terrifying in that context.
- joshmarlow 12y agoI would worry about relying only on specific countermeasures like explosive detection. You can only build detectors like that for attack's that you can imagine; it's always possible someone is a bit more clever and comes up with a unique/lateral attack. With extensive surveillance and AI good enough to interpret body-language with a high-degree of accuracy, you could have a very general detector; as long as the person knows they are being malicious, I bet it'll generally show up in his/her body-language. Which of course opens up the possibility of having patsy's who don't know they are carrying a bomb or what-not and so have normal body language, so specific and general detection mechanisms are probably going to be needed...
- cstross 12y agoThe worst threats aren't deliberate attacks: when you get thousands of people living somewhere, there will be screw-ups, misunderstandings, and just plain reckless behaviour. We're used to living in a (relatively) fault-tolerant environment, where if I damage my home's plumbing it will, at worst, damage my neighbours apartments -- it won't kill them instantly by letting all the air out!
- mazork 12y agoThe article was interesting, but am I alone thinking that those tenebrous, click-baity titles are bad ?
- raldi 12y agoAgreed. How about, "A visit to Germany's indoor tropical resort"?
- grey-area 12y agoHe's not really just talking about an indoor tropical resort.
- raldi 12y agoOh, then I must've given up before I found the part where he reveals his point. What is it?
- icegreentea 12y agoHe's using it as a tool to think about the implications of space colonies - with the major point being that he believes that space colonies must implement some level of high fidelity individual tracking and monitoring for security purposes / that people would likely accept that loss of privacy for various reasons.
- gdubs 12y agoAny West Wing fan will recognize the futurist's "whine" as attributed to Leo McGarry, the president's chief of staff: Leo McGarry: My generation never got the future it was promised... Thirty-five years later, cars, air travel is exactly the same. We don't even have the Concorde anymore. Technology stopped. Josh Lyman: The personal computer...? Leo McGarry: A more efficient delivery system for gossip and pornography? Where's my jet pack, my colonies on the Moon?
- justincormack 12y agoOr is that from They Might Be Giants, the World Before Later On (also 2004)? Or is there an earlier source? I'm trapped in a world before later on I'm trapped in a world before later on Where's my hovercraft? Where's my jet pack? Where's the font of acquired wisdom that eludes me now? We're trapped in a world before later on We're trapped in a world before later on Where's our telray? Where's our space face? Where are all the complications we won't see around?
- lisper 12y agoYou got your tricorder and your communicator -- both in one box no less! (And smaller and wizzier than they were originally imagined!) You can even get a phaser if you really want one: http://www.wickedlasers.com http://www.wickedlasers.com And we're making pretty good progress on the holodeck. Sure, we're still waiting for warp drive and the transporter, but still we're batting over 500. That's not too shabby.
- digi_owl 12y agoCommunicator, yes. Tricorder, dunno. Not enough sensors really. Then again, there is the sensordrone that may help with that.
- coroxout 12y agoI remember a definite pre-millennial spike in such jokes so I went looking. Never heard it before (it's on youtube so I have now), but track 2 of this album from 1984 might win the prize: http://www.discogs.com/Daniel-Amos-Vox-Humana-The-Alarma-Chronicles-Vol-III/master/431379 http://www.discogs.com/Daniel-Amos-Vox-Humana-The-Alarma-Chr... (Daniel Amos - "(It's The 80s So Where's Our) Rocket Packs")
- _random_ 12y agoWould rather have aging cured. Would make sense to manage things long-term for everyone.
- Animats 12y agoThe future has less power than expected. From the beginnings of the industrial revolution up to the first oil crisis, new energy sources were discovered, exploited, and scaled up. Space travel requires insanely high power levels, and it was assumed back in the 1950s that those were coming. They weren't. In the last 50 years, there have been no new power sources. We're still mostly on oil, coal, natural gas, and hydropower. Even solar cells and atomic power are now more than 50 years old. The existing technologies have improved, but there are no new ones. That's why we don't have heated streets for snow melting, as seen in Disney's "The Magic Highway" (1958). We don't have much space travel because chemical rockets hit the power limits of chemistry around 45 years ago. If controlled fusion is ever cracked, and it's not too expensive, we may see some of the older futuristic ideas back.
- jacquesm 12y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwA7c_rNbJE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwA7c_rNbJE Incredible little movie, well worth watching. Quite neat to see how many of these features we already have today and which ones we definitely do not and probably never will.
- r00fus 12y agoSo from just your comment, my take is different - essentially, nuclear power was demonized, mismanaged and ignored. We have the technology to have an abundance of terrestrial power to do most things if we'd only embrace nuclear power. Look at Philae - because it didn't contain a fission source, it's stuck without the capability to replenish it's power source. What would have happened if we weren't scared to death of nuclear power? https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/the-bittersweet-taste-of-philaes-limited-success-199c49a3a46 https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/the-bittersweet-taste-...
- jacquesm 12y agoNuclear power being demonized is one problem, another problem is that it is simply very hard to do in a distributed manner without getting into a proliferation nightmare. So embracing nuclear power is a bit harder than it may seem from a technological point of view. Also, since we can currently only use fission, shielding will always lead to nuclear power being almost exclusively used for heavy stationary projects or at best something that floats such as a very large nuclear powered boat. In those cases the weight isn't a huge factor.
- pavel_lishin 12y agoThe Roton looks like a пепелац from Kin Dza Dza.
- api 12y agoIt's fascinating to me the power of the spirit of an age. Lord of the Rings was in all its explicit elements a novel pining for agrarian feudalism. Yet in spite of this it could not help but be progressive. Were it written in the climate of today's never ending 70s tape loop, the moral would be that Frodo should never have left The Shire to begin with.
- DanielBMarkham 12y ago"They've actually made wearing a tracking tag a rewarding experience. Of course it's entirely voluntary, keeping count of entrants and exits can be justified as a safety measure, and it saves you from having to carry cash around in your swimsuit ... but, but, tagging...After you stop spluttering with indignation, you realize that it's an inevitable part of this package..." I am still waiting for this experience, where I realize that humans must be tagged and tracked like animals. So far it hasn't come. We've taken combat-trained soliders -- many times with live weapons -- and put them on airplanes and flown them around the world. Nobody needed tagging. We've had random groups of strangers thrown into lifeboats after various maritime disasters. Nobody needed tagging. We have all kinds of examples where one bad individual might cause great harm to others, yet taqgging was not an answer. The only reason we're talking about tagging now is because the tech is here. It's convenient -- and much easier than trying to figure out how to have a civil society. Screw getting governments more responsive: just treat all of the citizens as potential criminals. The Panopticon is not the answer, for ludicrously simple reasons that any half-educated person should be able to ascertain. </rant>
- jacquesm 12y agoIn NL they replaced a perfectly good system for train tickets based on paper with an electronic one that is failure prone but allows the operators to track the movements of half the population.