zompist wrote: ↑Fri Aug 24, 2018 1:21 pm
Ah, a chance to trot out some of my pet peeves. These can be divided into "futures that move too fast" and "futures that move too slowly."
An example of the first: pretty much any sf involving AI. To sf writers, it seems that fully sentient AI is only a decade away, and always has been. Few seem to want to deal with the idea that intelligence is a
really hard problem, far harder than quantum mechanics or shooting a space probe around several planets to get gravity boosts. (Note: AI ≠ automation.)
I very broadly agree. But I'd add three caveats. One you add yourself: you can have AI smart enough to do almost everything before you have "fully sentient AI". Second: we don't know how to make a fully sentient AI, which means it won't happen tomorrow; but since we don't know how to do it, we also don't actually know how hard or easy it might be. Specifically, if sapience 'emerges' through self-refining AI we don't know how far we have to push the technology before, as it were, the motor gets going. So while I don't think we'll have sapient AI in the near future, I also don't think it can be ruled out. And third: we should remember that we're never really talking about when a fully sentient AI emerges; we're talking about when a computer programme emerges that is sufficiently adroit in language-games to be indistinguishable in conversation from a sapient being. Whether 'full sentience' is a) impossible, b) achieved by definition as soon as we have a persuasively talkative computer, or c) somewhere in between is a problem that's mostly philosophical, certainly unknowable, and possibly nonsensical.
Similarly: any future where interstellar colonization is far advanced within, say, two centuries. (Mass Effect is set in 2183; Star Trek TOS took place around 2265.) Colonization takes a long time.
On this one, you're wrong. Colonization speed depends on the economics of travel (and reproduction), which is a variable, not a fixed value. It can therefore happen as quickly or as slowly as you want.
Basically, there are two problems with interstellar colonization: a) it's physically tantamount to impossible; and b) it's pointless.
This is, paradoxically, good news for interstellar colonization in fiction. The default assumption must be that the sum total of interstellar colonization in the next couple of thousand years will be, if we're really determined, maybe a computer orbiting proxima centauri. That means, however, that if a setting DOES include interstellar colonization AT ALL, both those core problems must somehow have been fixed. Since this will require unknown and currently imaginary physics, and tendentious if not outright implausible economics (and/or a massive mcguffin), the author is left free to set whatever rules they like, since any hypothesis is about as implausible as any other.
If, therefore, birth rates continue to be at replacement at best, and interstellar travel operates through fast but sub-light ships with stasis fields or the like, and all travellers travel as adults, then colonization will indeed take thousands of years and be extremely limited in scope. If, on the other hand, colonization involves limitless-range FTL teleporters and extensive use of in vitro gestation and robotic childcare, then you can have billions of people on thousands of planets within decades.
There are so many variables here that a wide range of scenarios can be produced. For instance, an interesting one that I don't think I've seen explored in depth is if you couple fast sub-light ships with cargo holds filled with eggs and semen. The slow travel means no colonization happens for a long time - but intensive in vitro fertilization can then produce a planetary population in very little additional time. [this has been seriously proposed. It requires no new physics, and avoids many of the problems of slow colonization, like in-breeding (you could reproduce almost the complete genetic diversity of earth if you wanted to).]
Once you take the technology out of the way (and the economic purposes for doing it in the first place), human breeding rates are so astronomical that things rapidly take care of themselves. If you put just one cruise ship of humans onto a planet with sufficient resources and have their population double every 30 years, there'll be over 10 billion people on that planet in under 300 years. And if 'doubling every 30 years' sounds extreme: well, a doubling rate of under 40 years was achieved in the middle of the 20th century, and that was with governments around the world trying actively to reduce fertility. How humans would respond to a world of ample resources and some sort of economic system than encouraged (rather than, as now, discouraged) childbirth, is hard to imagine. [historically, it was often common for the average woman to have 15-20 children; now imagine that happening with medicine capable of keeping all those children alive!]. And of course, you could say: oh, but we won't really have that sort of growth rate again. No, probably not. But with modern growth rates there'll never be colonization, so if you want it at all, you need to change the rules.
Hence, the only two viable predictions for colonization are: a) virtually none ever (under current conditions); and b) anything goes (because it depends on unknown new conditions and we can't know what those will be).
There's a lot to be said for "things will be very much the same." After all, there has been huge change since 1918, and yet we have:
* exactly the same political institutions in the US and UK
* almost the same political parties
"Not quite" on the first one. The two big developments have been the changing executives (massive centralisation in both countries, and the end of even vestigial royal power in the UK).
And "only technically" on the second one, particularly in the US. Two-party systems strongly encourage the perpetuation of the existing parties unless one party complete screws up (the US Whigs and the UK Liberals). But the flip side of that is that the parties are only, as it were, tickets to the race, and who holds those tickets can change dramatically. Chances are, there'll still be Republicans and Democrats in 2120... but who knows what their policies or demographics will be.
* the world economy is still dominated by Europe and the US (though less so)
* capitalism is the dominant economic system, but troubled by increasing inequality
Although it's worth noting how dramatically capitalism changed from the capitalism of the gilded age [if you look at the concrete demands made by Marx, most of them were achieved through reform of capitalism.] Of course, now we're heading back there again...
* there haven't been any major religious revolutions
I don't think that's true at all! In 1900 in the UK, almost everyone was Christian; now, almost everyone is non-Christian. [they call themselves christian, but they don't believe in statements like "Jesus was divine", "the Christian faith is how we should live", or even "there is a God".] It's less obvious, because the big religious change this century hasn't been the development of new religions (though we've had plenty of them too along the way). But the sweeping advance of secular belief structures is just as significant! [not just in Europe - see also the decline of religion in China]. I'd also point to the dramatic gains made by conservative fundamentalist forms of both Christianity and Islam - the latter in particular looks very different in a lot of the world now from how it did a century ago.
* an awful lot of everyday life is quite similar (what you eat, what a hammer looks like, how a kindergarten works, what a wedding looks like, what a major symphony orchestra plays)
Well, that last one is a no true scotsman! "Major symphony orchestras" are defined by continuing to play what used to be played - lots of orchestras don't play anything like Beethoven, they're just not called 'orchestras' anymore. They're called "big bands" or... whatever it is you call concert ensembles in pop music. [also,
no, major symphony orchestras now play completely different repertoires from before. Partly this is due to rediscoveries (nobody in 1900 had ever heard Vivaldi, for example!), but mostly it's because the 20th century was a tumultuous time for classical music. If you go along to the Proms, you'll find, I'd guess, somewhere between 40% and 60% of the music is post-1900, much of it in a style that would have shocked listeners in 1900. Tonight at the Proms, OK, it's Mozart and Bruckner. But last night it was Mahler and Bartok, and tomorrow it's Bernstein's "On the Town". Monday, it's Bernstein and Shostakovich.
] I'm not sure what your point is with kindergartens... "kindergarten" refers to many different things in different places. We don't have kindergartens in the UK. Even in the US they didn't begin to be set up until the 1870s, and by 1900 they weren't yet that widespread. And education theory as regards young children has changed radically and repeatedly in the intervening years.
* men's business attire is almost identical (compare 1818!)
Yes, broadly, if you focus specifically on men working in formal offices, which were simply very conservative in the late 20th century.
I do agree with your general point, however.
On the other hand, the major boner in a lot of sf is assuming that work will stay about the same. E.g. Brave New World assumes that a huge classs of "morons" will be needed for menial work, in agriculture or industry. Heinlein assumes that his futuristic transport system would be manned by people who talk and act like 1930s factory workers. Most 1950s sf viewed the future as pretty much like middle-class 1950s America.
So if you want a likely future, or just an interesting future, think hard about what people do. What are some typical jobs? Has present-day inequality accelerated or been reversed? Has something replaced the corporation? What are the worst jobs? Based on the jobs they have, where do people live and how much can they afford? How much education do they need? What jobs can't automation take over?
. Indeed; although it's worth pointing out that there are actually two different questions here. One is: what do people do all day? the other is: how are resources distributed? The questions are linked for us, because the answer to both is "the working class perform tasks for the capitalist class in exchange for resources". But if resources become too plentiful (or too sparse), or the capitalist class have fewer tasks for workers to perform, that system breaks down and the two questions de-link.
Obviously you have to decide what to do about climate change. Basically, you're either writing some terrible apocalypse, or about the early decades of a near escape.
I would see this as, in the next few centuries, a much less important question. climate change changes some of the where and the who - some areas see emigration, others see immigration, with accompanying frictions - whereas the other questions much more fundamentally and permanently change the nature of social life.
Oil is a big problem, but replacement by renewable resources looks far more doable than it once did. But other resource crunches are coming, especially water, fish, and forest products.
I agree that of the three current contradictions I mentioned, energy scarcity seems most likely to be resolved without traumatic change - but we're still a long way from that point and there's a ticking clock.