The World in 2100

[Gareth3]

Economic growth by itself doesn't give much detail to the setting, but once I combine it with the warfare cycles and population it should help me sketch out the history.
The next topic Barnes covers is technology. He makes an important distinction for forecasting, between devices that you can understand from known physical principles, and devices based on new principles. The best example I've seen is from Arthur C. Clarke: Archimedes would more-or-less understand how a car engine works. Volatile oil exploding and driving a piston to turn a wheel. But a radio would be incomprehensible - based on electromagnetic radiation that he has no concept of. So the question is, by 2100 is there any technology that we wouldn't understand?
About the only way to estimate that is to look backwards to 1936, and see what 2018 technology depends on basic principles discovered since then. If you look at physics, 1936 is quite advanced. All our information technology depends on band-gap conduction in semiconductors, which was developed in 1931. That's based on quantum mechanics, the basics of which were developed in 1927. The theory of lasers goes back to 1917, and general relativity to keep GPS accurate was published in 1915. The literal rocket science to launch the satellites was first published in 1813. The only major exception I can find is nuclear fission, which was discovered in 1938 and explained in 1939. Still only a few years after our cutoff.
It's less clear if you look outside physics to biology and medicine. It took until the 1960s to fully determine the genetic code, for example. Still, our hypothetical time-traveller from 1936 wouldn't find any of our technology truly incomprehensible. So we can predict that all 2100 technology will be based on principles that we understand today.

[mèþru]

I think there is a fallacy somewhere there but I can't think of the name

[Gareth3]

"Past performance is not indicative of future results", maybe. Sure, but there's nothing else to base the setting on.

[Salmoneus]

Economic growth by itself doesn't give much detail to the setting, but once I combine it with the warfare cycles and population it should help me sketch out the history.
The next topic Barnes covers is technology. He makes an important distinction for forecasting, between devices that you can understand from known physical principles, and devices based on new principles. The best example I've seen is from Arthur C. Clarke: Archimedes would more-or-less understand how a car engine works. Volatile oil exploding and driving a piston to turn a wheel. But a radio would be incomprehensible - based on electromagnetic radiation that he has no concept of. So the question is, by 2100 is there any technology that we wouldn't understand?
About the only way to estimate that is to look backwards to 1936, and see what 2018 technology depends on basic principles discovered since then. If you look at physics, 1936 is quite advanced. All our information technology depends on band-gap conduction in semiconductors, which was developed in 1931. That's based on quantum mechanics, the basics of which were developed in 1927. The theory of lasers goes back to 1917, and general relativity to keep GPS accurate was published in 1915. The literal rocket science to launch the satellites was first published in 1813. The only major exception I can find is nuclear fission, which was discovered in 1938 and explained in 1939. Still only a few years after our cutoff.
It's less clear if you look outside physics to biology and medicine. It took until the 1960s to fully determine the genetic code, for example. Still, our hypothetical time-traveller from 1936 wouldn't find any of our technology truly incomprehensible. So we can predict that all 2100 technology will be based on principles that we understand today.

No offence, but that's appalling thinking.

First, on a technical point: Archimedes would not find a radio incomprehensible, though I'd sure he'd find it surprising. Archimedes would have been familiar with Stoicism, which teaches that an invisible, fine form of matter, 'pneuma', forms the bonds that hold atoms of visible matter together into solid bodies, while at the same time being able to pass through visible matter undetected. He'd have been familiar with Epicureanism, which holds that vision is the reception of radiated fine particles scattered by the visible object, and also that there are even finer particles that are able to pass through visible matter, only interacted with particles of similar nature - Epicureans also claimed that the fine radiative particles were of the same kind as those that, in the human nervous system, produced sense and thought. He'd have been familiar with Aristotle, who theorised that magnetic attraction was due to attraction between the same sort of invisible 'soul' matter that animated humans and animals, and with countless Greeks who had theorised (if not just assumed) that magnetism and static electricity were underlyingly the same phenomenon, as well as with those who had demonstrated that static electricity generated sparks analogous to lightning. Given all this, the idea of electromagnetic radiation and reception by an appropriate device would of course have required a bit of explaining, but would probably not have involved any serious explanatory obstacles or disbelief. [of course, many of the technical details, like the whole "wave" thing, might come as a bit of a shock].

Second, and much more importantly: the assumption that the 21st century will be a repetition of the 20th is, again, not a neutral assumption, but a specific and rather tendentious theory.
Compare, for example, the technology of 1950 with the theories of 1870. The gulf is far wider! Sure, you could argue that nothing in 1950 would be entirely alien to the writer of 1870... but hardly any of it would be entirely alien to the writer of 870 or 70 either.

In practice, however, that general grasp of principles would have been of no use in forming predictions. Few writers in 1870 could have predicted the nuclear reactor, the computer, the television, the strategic bomber, and countless other things.

Likewise, frankly, the idea that time-traveller wouldn't find snapchat and 4chan incomprehensible because, hey, she'd know about the theory of semiconductors, is kind of ludicrous!

[Gareth3]

It's not really prediction I'm talking about, you can always have unexpected applications of known principles. I wouldn't really expect Archimedes to predict the internal combustion engine, much less monster truck rallies or exurbs. It's more about understanding the principles behind it.

[Gareth3]

Just "principles we understand today" doesn't specify much about the technology of 2100. So I'll introduce a couple of other limits. These are not based on any kind of extrapolation, but are arbitrary choices to keep the setting recognizable from our perspective. Call one the Human Brain Limit: no technology can duplicate all the abilities of an average human brain. True AI hasn't been invented, hardware progress stalled decades ago, and most effort is going into closer and more productive connections between brains and computers. Automation is everywhere, but there's always a human somewhere in the loop, even if he's supervising a hundred automated factories or a thousand drones at once.
Almost everyone is in constant contact with their own powerful and connected computer and has been for decades. They can all instantly "recall" any moment of their lives or any publicly available fact, or perform any calculation. Whether this is done through direct brain to computer links, or just a very easy and fast interface, I'll decide later. The closest this setting gets to true AI is interplanetary probes, where human intervention is limited by lightspeed and the machines have to be as autonomous as possible.
The other limit is the Replication Limit: no machine can replicate itself from naturally occurring materials. No von Neumann probes, and no grey goo either. Neither of these limits are fundamental; this isn't Vinge's Slow Zone where whole kinds of technology are permanently ruled out. It's just that 2100 technology can't do true AI or self-replication yet, and everyone recognizes how difficult it will be to achieve them.

[Axiem]

our hypothetical time-traveller from 1936 wouldn't find any of our technology truly incomprehensible

I find this utterly risible on its face. We have living adults now who find the Internet—and all the many, many things it's fomented (e.g. 4chan)—utterly incomprehensible. Some of those adults were even alive back in 1936! (That's also a weird year to pick; 82 years ago? What's the logic there?)

Also, I think it's problematic to say "academics knew about principle XYZ in year ABC, therefore laypeople would comprehend technology that depends on that principle today!" For one, just because something is known does not mean that it is general knowledge; for a good example of this, look at how long it took for things to go from "dinosaurs had feathers" to "everyone knows dinosaurs had feathers" (or any other piece of knowledge about the world. I mean, the Internet was invented in the 1970's but took a good two decades to hit the mainstream). For two, understanding the principle of a technology does not mean you comprehend the technology (or vice-versa); I have a general understanding of how internal combustion engines work, but my car is still a complete and utter mystery to me.

Frankly, I think even someone from the 1980s would struggle to comprehend current technology absent coaching. Consider looking into how people who have been imprisoned for many decades feel when they have to suddenly jump literally decades ahead of the technology they were familiar with. That's a small sample of what you'd get with an 80-year leap without having the context from point A to point B.

[mèþru]

That's also a weird year to pick; 82 years ago? What's the logic there?

2100-2018=82

[Axiem]

look backwards to 1936, and see what 2018 technology depends on basic principles discovered since then

Claude Shannon's paper on Information Theory was published in 1948. This underpins basically the entire field of computer science in one way or another. Heck, the Turing Machine wasn't discovered (/published about) until 1937! Hedy Lamarr didn't publish anything on radio frequency hopping until what, 1941? Lithium-ion batteries weren't figured out until something like the 1970's.

Computers and wireless communications (among other things) ultimately rely on these discoveries.

What 2018 technologies rely on computers, wireless communication, or lithium-ion batteries?

[Axiem]

That's also a weird year to pick; 82 years ago? What's the logic there?

2100-2018=82

Ah. That makes sense.

[Moose-tache]

You know all that mid-century SF where advanced technology exists alongside social stagnation? You know, the ones where men in stetson hats lecture their house-bound wives about nanocomputers while smoking a cigar in a hospital. My favorite is the Foundation series, or maybe the part in I, Robot where the post-automation utopia still has labor unions.

Anyway, what is the current version of that? What would a sincere prediction of the future that falls flat on its face in social issues look like if written today? Would people of 2100 laugh out loud that we thought sugary beverages would be illegal but spanking your child would be legal?

[mèþru]

I think they would be more advanced with gender equality and accepting transgender people. Also, sexual harassment will be (relatively?) uncommon in the work place.

[zompist]

Anyway, what is the current version of that? What would a sincere prediction of the future that falls flat on its face in social issues look like if written today? Would people of 2100 laugh out loud that we thought sugary beverages would be illegal but spanking your child would be legal?

This sort of thing really depends on the overall shape of society— i.e., your answers to the major questions of what we do with climate change, inequality, automation, resource depletion, etc.

E.g., In a repressive dystopia, the people of 2100 will look back on our times as licentious, anarchic, and rebelling against the natural order.

In my sf future, people looking back at our sf would shake their heads at the "great man" ideology: every corporation and spaceship is run by a charismatic, mercurial old man.

A prediction which I think will fail in any future society: robots/AIs are dispassionate and don't understand human emotion.

[Gareth3]

What would a sincere prediction of the future that falls flat on its face in social issues look like if written today?

Anything we write now is inherently doomed to fall flat on its face - social issues are much harder to predict than economics or technology. You can identify trends, higher birthrates in conservative religious cultures for example. But do the children keep the same culture, or assimilate to the mainstream? At some point you just have to guess. My favourite prediction error in social issues is that Heinlein story where someone's cellphone rings, he apologises to his friends, and turns it off without answering.

[Moose-tache]

What would a sincere prediction of the future that falls flat on its face in social issues look like if written today?

Anything we write now is inherently doomed to fall flat on its face - social issues are much harder to predict than economics or technology. You can identify trends, higher birthrates in conservative religious cultures for example. But do the children keep the same culture, or assimilate to the mainstream? At some point you just have to guess. My favourite prediction error in social issues is that Heinlein story where someone's cellphone rings, he apologises to his friends, and turns it off without answering.

I would argue that what we identify as "failing to predict social trends" is just the lay person's way of saying "failure to predict economic trends." Asimov's silent women and vocal labor unions mean he didn't understand how the labor market would work, with women playing a larger role and organized labor a smaller one, in the future. It's not like some cultural shift happened without economic basis. Those kinds of trends, the shape of phone receivers maybe or the most common color of car paint, are exactly the details you can get wrong without anyone caring.

[Salmoneus]

It's worth pointing out that Asimov DID predict the increasing role of women in the economy.

Here's a quote from Asimov's speech on The Future of Humanity:

If we do have a very low birth rate, then what are we going to do with women?

Throughout history, the purpose and function of womankind has been to have lots of children. Now, no sane woman, if she came upon this whole thing cold, would want a lot of children; they're a lot of trouble, and they're dangerous to the health...

[group laughs moderately]

Seriously! When the germ theory finally came in and people learned how to arrange it so that women could have babies in reasonable safety, the world discovered to their surprise that women had a longer life expectancy than men. This had never been understood before, because throughout history women had, on the average, lived years and years less than men had. With all the dangers men faced, the hard work in the fields, the hunting accidents, the killings in war, everything else, women died faster for one reason and one reason only: childbirth. Every woman had one baby after another until one of them killed her. Usually, it didn't take long.

Well then, why do women do this? Because they are carefully told that being a wife and mother is the most glorious thing in the world, the one thing they're fit for, the most noble activity they can possibly have, and...and this is told to them until they believe it. And if they don't believe it, there's a lot of trouble made for them.

Well, I won't go into the whole thing. I suspect that you women know all about this already, and you men would rather not listen.

[group laughs mildly]

But notice the difference: once you want women not to have children, you're going to have to give them something else to do! It is absolutely impossible to tell a woman that she can't have children, and at the same time that she can't do anything else either except maybe wash an occasional dish.

[mild laugh from a few of the women in the group]

Because if you tell a woman that, she'll figure out some way to have a baby.

[swelling mild laughter from group]

I think I know the way, too!

[mild laughter from the group]

Well then, in the world of the 21st century in order to keep the birth rate down, we're going to have to give women interesting things to do that'll make them glad to stay out of the nursery. And the interesting things that I can think of that we give women to do are essentially the same as the interesting things that we give men to do. I mean we're going to have women help in running the government, and science, and industry...whatever there is to run in the 21st century. And what it amounts to is we're going to have to pretend...when I say "we", I mean men...we're going to have to pretend that women are people.

[group laughs]

And you know, pretending is a good thing because if you pretend long enough, you'll forget you're pretending and you'll begin to believe it.

[mild laugh from group]

In short, the 21st century, if we survive, will be a kind of women's lib world. And as a matter of fact, it will be a kind of people's lib world because, you know, sexism works bad both ways. If the women have some role which they must constantly fulfill whether they like it or not, men have some role which they would have to constantly fulfill whether they like it or not. And if you fix it so that women can do what suits them best, you can fix it so that men can do what suits them best too. And we'll have a world of people. And only incidentally will they be of opposite sexes instead of in every aspect of their life.

Why do Asimov's stories not reflect his own predictions? Well, it may be in part because they came a long time before this speech, but I don't think that's it. I've just read a collection of his, and back in Hostess in the very early '50s he was writing about career women and the social problems they might face.

But the thing is: he was writing fiction, and for a particular audience. That audience were readers of popular pulp magazine stories in the 1940s and 1950s, and if he wrote some bizarro world in which women were people, the popular audience of his day would have rejected his stories as unbelievable, and/or communist. [he did write more prominent roles for women when he returned to fiction in the 80s, when the market would put up with it]
There was also an issue of what the audience demanded, as well as what it would reject. He said himself at one point that he rarely had prominent female characters in his stories, because he wasn't interested in writing romances - and back then, if you wrote a "women's story" (i.e. a story with women in it), you were writing mostly for a female audience, and that audience demanded romance and nothing but.

[I'm reminded of Doc Smith, when he wrote his first SF novel. His plot required there to be women, which meant there had to be a romance, but he wasn't interested in romance stories, so he had to find a female friend of his who would write the romance bits for him. A lot of the romance material was edited out in later editions, but you can still see its influence: Smith's SF plot required that his women be intelligent, strong-willed and independent; but the romance demanded that they get married, which meant a man had to propose to them, which could only be excused if it was obviously necessary for the woman's health... so every now and then a switch flips and the women become 'romantically' helpless and childlike and keep swooning, until eventually a man has to propose to them to calm them down... and then the switch flips again and they become strong-willed and independent again for a bit, and so on. It's interesting because in this case we can be confident it wasn't just Smith being misogynistic - he actually wrote them as more capable, and his female co-writer infantilised them because that's what the genre audience demanded...]



More generally, Asimov's approach to SF was generally, as it were, an experimenter's approach: change a variable, see what happens. He didn't set out to make full-rounded totally alien worlds every time he wrote a story - instead, his stories were mostly "1950s with a key variable changed", to see what effect that variable had. So, for example, in Hostess, the story is just as much about Rose as an intelligent, ambitious woman caught between her career and her marriage as it is about the hay-eating alien medical researcher and the missing persons bureau, because in this story, gender roles are part of what the story is about. But in other stories, it wasn't, so he left things as they were, so that his audience understood his story more easily. In the same way, in one story about computers he might have a computer capable of doing all sorts of things, but in another story, about something else, he'd have the same things dealt with with slide-rules and the like - not because he didn't understand that computers could do these things, but because he understood as an author - rather than as a futurist - that presenting his readers with a world in which EVERYTHING was different, all at once, would alienate them and obscure his actual point...

[zompist]

I don't disagree with any of that. I'd point out though that what was progressive in the 1950s would be exclusionary today. E.g., the classic sf stories would have one smart woman and half a dozen men. (Like Star Trek TOS, in fact.) I suppose the idea of half the jobs being held by women would have seemed bizarre to them.

Kudos to Asimov for making his premier robotician female— Susan Calvin.

(Some writers did better than others— e.g., The Stars My Destination has several interesting female characters.)

FWIW, other genres of the same epoch allowed far more women— mysteries, in particular. A curious outlier is Gaudy Night, whose cast is almost entirely female.

[Gareth3]

I've heard there's a quote by Gene Roddenberry that "real" 23rd-century people would be disturbingly alien to present-day audiences, so he deliberately made Star Trek as present-day characters in space. Does anyone know where he said this?

[Zaarin]

E.g., the classic sf stories would have one smart woman and half a dozen men. (Like Star Trek TOS, in fact.)

Which was still better than TNG, which had zero smart women. I'm sorry, that was mean. I love Marina Sirtis. I think she's the only actor on TNG who was an equal to Patrick Stewart, even more so than Brent Spiner. But Troi and Crusher were both boring, useless characters.

[Bessunire]

I think the one constant thing here is that cultures change. The issues that everyone holds to be the most important at any one time are likely to be forgotten or laughed at by the people of any other age. I suspect that the world of the future will not be "21st century America but more liberal," but rather something much stranger and more unpredictable, whose issues are things we wouldn't even think about, and whose people don't think about our issues, or think it's ridiculous that people ever cared about such things.