2) "Instagram began life as a Yelp-style app called Burbn, with photos an afterthought (photos on your phone, is that a thing?)."
Is this somehow implying that Instagram invented phones on your camera, or indeed anything at all? This seems a common sort of confusion, along the same category as believing Apple invented smart phones, Google invented search engines or Facebook invented social networking, rather than popularizing a particular form of a preexisting technology.
I'd read it as that the makers of Instagram initially didn't believe in people actually using cameras in their phones, so the opposite of your interpretation.
How many people did have camera feature-phones/early smartphones and did really use the camera? Granted, I was still in high-school, but tons of my peers had phones with cameras, but they were only used very seldomly and not in any phone-specific way (take picture with phone if you didn't have a digital camera with you, send to computer, treat as if it came of a crappy digital camera)
The innovation that allowed this was really faster wireless networks with internet. My first cell (2005) was a feature phone, had a camera, I used it, but transferring it over the network was slow and painful, so sharing of any kind was impossible. Once it was, it of course required no great leap of imagination to start moving things to the cloud.
If you haven't already read it, G.K. Chesterton's response[1] to the original Futurist manifesto is an absolute joy. I completely lose it every time I get to his Futurist drinking song.
Or not necessarily about the present time. For example a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away they had very advanced AIs but no computers or mobile communication (in any practical form) :)
Another example, the universe of Dune had pretty impressive engineering for a universe without computation. Yeah yeah I read the series, don't correct me about the pre Butlerian Jihad era, etc. Dune was mostly a fantasy not sci fi anyway.
Note there's hard sci fi and soft sci fi, and a soap opera / action flick which happens to be "in the future" like B5 is not really predictive. I'm just saying that very soft sci fi is indistinguishable from copy and paste style fantasy or historical fiction. Hard sci fi like KSRs Mars Trilogy ages much better than "80s soap opera, on a space ship".
There was mobile communication. Skywalker and C-3PO used a 'comlink' to communicate when Skywalker, etc. were in the garbage mashers. And the Storm Troopers use a comlink, which has a transmitter that breaks down often enough that the Command Office wasn't suspicious when TX-four-one-two couldn't respond.
On Hoth, Skywalker on his Tauntaun uses a comlink to talk with Solo. And Solo uses a pocket comlink to talk with Transport to say that he and Leia have been blocked by a collapse of the ice corridor and will be using the Falcon to leave Hoth.
There are other examples of comlinks used as practical mobile communication about equivalent to a compact walkie-talkie.
Honestly, I don't get what the article is about. Was probably expecting something deeper, e.g. why our vision of the future is always so wrong and dull and not only in terms of cultural changes. Take any prediction from the 1960s for example and there will be a lot of food for ridicule. A self driving car in the year 2000 (well, ok so far), going at 500mph and the passenger reading a newspaper in the meantime. Can it get any more wrong than this?
"Radio has no future." -- Lord Kelvin, physicist, the father of thermodynamics.
Our inability to predict the distant future only says one thing: things that we can imagine are already happening. The gap between an idea and its implementation is narrower compared to hundreds of years ago. With very few exceptions maybe: AI, "eternal" battery cells, easy space travel and a few others. So in terms of predictions, I think we will be getting only worse over time.
>A self driving car in the year 2000 (well, ok so far), going at 500mph and the passenger reading a newspaper in the meantime. Can it get any more wrong than this?
I think those are trivial errors (got the car right, missed the tablet or internet).
What can be more wrong is not predicting cultural and lifestyle changes affected by technology etc in the future.
Also the temporary nature of some cultural/lifestyle issues.
Just to make fun of the headline from the article, "We predicted cell phones, but not women in the workplace.", the failure was thinking giant buildings full of men tightening bolts on a non-automated assembly line was normal, progressive, and eternal. Men and women working side by side has been normal or at least not noteworthy for a couple hundred thousand years... a couple decades of men only manual labor factory buildings was the weird oddity. What I'm getting at is the innovation isn't "allowing" women to stop eating bonbons on the couch and go to work, the "innovation" is all male manual labor assembly line factories died out and blew away, so things are now back to more or less normal with men and women more or less working together more or less most of the time plus or minus geography and climate and individual worksite and individual instantaneous work task. Aside from fixations on imaginary pasts that never or rarely existed in the first place but fit a modern political axe to grind. Men and women not spending time together is really pretty weird on a long enough time scale.
This also shows up in the car predictions. Burning basically all our fossil energy resources in a century or so is really weird behavior, so the results are going to be very weird and very temporary and very dependent at any instant on the trajectory of that very rapid burn rate and very rapid economically viable depletion rate. There's a classic graph that shows fossil fuel use over the history of our species as a flat line around zero with a crazy vertical line blip right about now. You can't make long term trend predictions about a random sized and located momentary blip.
Finally an aspect of naming games. We have reasonably cheap extremely safe 500 mph self driving machines that we sit in while reading legacy newspapers just like we always claimed we'd have, we just call them jet airplanes instead of calling them cars. That doesn't mean the prediction the machines would exist was wrong, or that we don't sit in them and read newspapers today, it just means we insist on marketing them under a different name, not exactly a major miss for the prediction. So predictions of everyone having electric cars will basically be correct in that average peasants like us will use electricity in the daily grind of life, even if some marketing guy insists on calling it the electric minivan or the e-Bus or the Apple iStationWagon, OK whatever its still basically "everyone uses electric cars" in practice.
It sounds like you and the person you responded to are saying that there were self-driving cars in the year 2000? There really aren't even self-driving cars now, in 2015. Sure, there are prototypes (which are really cool), but there's a big leap between a prototype and the average person owning/hailing a self-driving car.
I think the shift to self-driving cars will be more of a social/cultural/political challenge than a technical one. I might even go so far as to predict it will never happen (at least, not for average people getting around town).
>It sounds like you and the person you responded to are saying that there were self-driving cars in the year 2000? There really aren't even self-driving cars now, in 2015.
No, I just dismissed it as close enough (the 15 year gap doesn't matter much if you predict in the 50's-60's -- it's just 20-30% off in the date, and they still got the technology right).
Today, besides multiple projects (Google, Apple, Tesla, GM, for self driving cars being demonstrated etc) we have mass market self-parking cars.
>I think the shift to self-driving cars will be more of a social/cultural/political challenge than a technical one. I might even go so far as to predict it will never happen
If it's slowly introduced as a feature to new models, then as soon as people see how convenient it is, they'll enabled it. Some people will resist because they want to "have control" and are afraid, but most will use it. They might start using it 20% of the time or so, when in a traffic jam, when talking on the phone, when tired, etc. Soon they'll just leave it on most of the time. 15 years after they become mass market, small kids will have known them all their life, so even easier for them to adopt.
The article is about how people into "futurism", like people over at /r/futurism or a large part of HN's userbase, keeps wishing people would stop "concerning" themselves with society and politics to bring technological future faster, have a big blind spot about what really matters and changes our lives.
G.K. Chesterton points out, in reply to the original manifesto:
Suffice it to say that Futurism has a gratifying dislike both of Liberal politics and Christian morals; I say gratifying because, however unfortunately the cross and the cap of liberty have quarrelled, they are always united in the feeble hatred of such silly megalomaniacs as these. They will "glorify war--the only true hygiene of the world--militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of Anarchism, the beautiful ideas which kill, and the scorn of woman." They will "destroy museums, libraries, and fight against moralism, feminism, and all utilitarian cowardice."
The essay fleshes this out in a less combative way, making less assumptions about what Futurists are for, and merely critiquing their blind spots.
> The article is about how people into "futurism", like people over at /r/futurism or a large part of HN's userbase, keeps wishing people would stop "concerning" themselves with society and politics to bring technological future faster, have a big blind spot about what really matters and changes our lives.
The article, and you, fail to make the case that this is anything more than a strawman.
> The founder of Futurism and its most influential personality was the Italian writer Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Marinetti launched the movement in his Futurist Manifesto, which he published for the first time on 5 February 1909 in La gazzetta dell'Emilia, an article then reproduced in the French daily newspaper Le Figaro on 20 February 1909. He was soon joined by the painters Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Giacomo Balla, Gino Severini and the composer Luigi Russolo.
> Marinetti expressed a passionate loathing of everything old, especially political and artistic tradition. "We want no part of it, the past", he wrote, "we the young and strong Futurists!" The Futurists admired speed, technology, youth and violence, the car, the airplane and the industrial city, all that represented the technological triumph of humanity over nature, and they were passionate nationalists. They repudiated the cult of the past and all imitation, praised originality, "however daring, however violent", bore proudly "the smear of madness", dismissed art critics as useless, rebelled against harmony and good taste, swept away all the themes and subjects of all previous art, and gloried in science.
Notice in particular "admired [...] violence", and "however daring, however violent".
The original article cites numerous examples, centrally the one about a futuristic workplace without women, and my post cites a GK Chesterton piece that directly criticizes, with quotes, Marinetti's manifesto.
For HN, just consider that threads dealing with "women in tech" or "minorities in tech" or "gentrification" are routinely flagged down, with a share of the website being very vocal about wanting articles focused on technology and gadgets. Insofar this is hacker "news", about new and upcoming things, many users feel like these human topics do not qualify. They still make the front-page, proving that it's far from a universal opinion, but the contingent is there.
I dunno, I'd could see myself reading a newspaper in that situation... probably on my tablet, but you never know. Pretty decent UI with tactile feedback, high-contrast display, lightweight, disposable.
>So in terms of predictions, I think we will be getting only worse over time.
Are there any serious minds trying predictions? When we talk about futurism, in reality it just ends up being weirdos on the internet (hi /r/futurism which is always 10-15 years away from some tech revolution) or whatever sci-fi authors are doing today. Except sci-fi isn't futurism, its literature. These authors aren't trying to divine the future, they're trying to write sellable dramatic stories. There's a reason Star Wars has action-packed dogfighting and not boring over the horizon missile launches. Or up-close-and-personal lightsaber fights instead of drones attacks from miles away.
Maybe getting the future right isn't that tough. Some investors seem to be able to do it. It just doesn't seem that anyone is seriously trying outside of the limited scope or very near future investing. I imagine there's a poor value proposition here. Maybe you can tell us that in 30 years some hot new tech will be common, but if it costs $50m to get to that conclusion, is it worth it? Especially if you can't monopolize that tech?
I also think its a little foolish for the author to conflate technology and society. You can get a car or an iphone in Saudi Arabia with no problem, but if you're a woman, you can't drive the car, but you can use the iphone. Social advances don't propagate out like technological ones do. Or if you're gay you can run a powerful company and be influencial like Tim Cook or Peter Theil, but Tim Cook's equivalent in Russia would have been discriminated away from any position of power.
> One futurist noted that a 1960s film of the “office of the future” made on-par technological predictions (fax machines and the like), but had a glaring omission: The office had no women.
To be fair, most futurist thought work will be fully automated by now, and there would be NO people needed in the office or factory.
It's a prediction in the sense that they didn't even consider the fact that women are capable of working in an office. It was a lack of prediction, an unspoken assumption that an aspect of the status quo would never be upended.
But it's ok, feminism won the fight for equality 30 years ago /s
The video game Metro 2033 (recently remastered for modern consoles, so it's still around and relevant) envisions a typical post-apocalyptic future. People live underground, in subway (metro) tunnels under the cities, which are hellish radioactive wastelands.
Something that struck me about the game was the role of women. You mostly see them in the context of children or, more regrettably, in the kitchen. It's not reflective of even the present day in Western cultures, let alone decades in the future.
However, the game isn't Western, it's Russian. I can't help but wonder if the role of women simply reflects the Russian male game creators' view of the world and an expanded role for the women of the future was simply not on their collective horizon.
> The video game Metro 2033 (recently remastered for modern consoles, so it's still around and relevant) envisions a typical post-apocalyptic future. People live underground, in subway (metro) tunnels under the cities, which are hellish radioactive wastelands.
> Something that struck me about the game was the role of women. You mostly see them in the context of children or, more regrettably, in the kitchen. It's not reflective of even the present day in Western cultures, let alone decades in the future.
Reversion to (or, at least, reintroduction of elements of) pre-modern social structures is a pretty common trope of post-apocalyptic fiction; insofar as social structures are adaptive to environmental conditions, its not entirely without a realistic basis.
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
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.
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).
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.
Eh... I'm not sure notions of government work at that level. The Minds don't need to work together in any way. They're each perfectly fine on their own.
>And I'd say that they're only anarcho-communists in name. Really, they're ant farms, kept by the Minds.
People seem to get really butthurt about this, but it is actually series canon that much more thoroughly "posthuman" lifestyles were "in-fashion" at some previously point, and will be again, at some future point. The author was just focusing on the period of time that happened to be easiest to understand for his readership. And there are always those who make Unusual Life Choices.
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.
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.)
All other metrics aside, Heinlein always impressed me not only for being something of a polymath, but for his prescience in some areas.
In particular, I often find myself citing his depiction in _Friday_ of its titular character using a multimedia hyperlink system which seems analogous to the web and media-rich hypertext generally. (He gets wrong that it's an exclusive closed private system... that is wrong... isn't it...)
It's not the depiction of hypertext research that I find compelling...
...it's his dead-on intuition that such systems will naturally lend themselves to browsing by associate leap, far afield from the original research topic. And that serendipity and unanticipated (and unsought) correlations will prove both more compelling to users and more illuminating that narrow document retrieval would be.
Whether that same book paints a reasonable depiction of the current devolving global political climate is another question... but one which also continues to come up in idle conversations...
Btw @cstross just finally read Saturn's Children, Neptune's Brood, and the connective-tissue short work whose name escapes me. I greatly enjoyed the winks esp. in SC to _Friday_ etc. Thanks!
Heinlein stated writing "Friday" in 1981. This is well after Vannevar Bush's highly influential "As We May Think" from 1945. It's hard to find someone in information retrieval in the 1950 and 1960s who wasn't directly influenced by Bush's Memex. One of those is Ted Nelson, who coined 'hypertext' and wrote "Computer Lib / Dream Machines" in 1974. This book in turn influenced the early microcomputer hackers, which is the era when Heinlein wrote Friday. (Eg, Jerry Pournelle started writing for BYTE in 1980; there isn't a huge gulf between SF and microcomputers.)
You regard Heinlein's 'dead-on intuition that such systems will naturally lend themselves to browsing by associate leap' as being prescient. I can't say what you mean by prescience, but I can point to "As We May Think" to show the importance Bush placed in associative thinking some 35 years earlier:
> The human mind does not work that way. It operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain. .... Yet the speed of action, the intricacy of trails, the detail of mental pictures, is awe-inspiring beyond all else in nature.
> Man cannot hope fully to duplicate this mental process artificially, but he certainly ought to be able to learn from it. In minor ways he may even improve, for his records have relative permanency. The first idea, however, to be drawn from the analogy concerns selection. Selection by association, rather than indexing, may yet be mechanized. One cannot hope thus to equal the speed and flexibility with which the mind follows an associative trail, but it should be possible to beat the mind decisively in regard to the permanence and clarity of the items resurrected from storage. ...
> Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified.
I can also say that in 1951 Heinlein was well aware that research was much more than 'narrow document retrieval'. Consider "The Puppet Masters" from that year, chapter IV:
> "At the library I went to the catalogue, put on blinkers and started scanning for references. "Flying Saucers" led to "Flying Disks," then to "Project Saucer," then "Lights in the Sky,", "Fireballs," "Cosmic Diffusion Theory of Life Origin," and two dozen blind alleys and screwball branches of literature. I needed a Geiger counter to tell me what was pay dirt, ... Nevertheless, in an hour I had a handful of selector cards. I handed them to the vestal virgin at the desk and waited while she fed them into the hopper."
That's catalogue-assisted associative thinking, followed by document retrieval. I don't think requires prescience in the early 1980s to get a sense for how a Memex-like machine embodied in a modern computer might improve upon a paper catalogue for associative thinking.
To be more concrete, remember too that France was rolling out Minitel across the country the same year Friday was published. While Minitel specifically did not likely influence Heinlein, I bring it up to show that the ideas of online research terminals was no longer pie-in-the-sky dreaming, but something that many people thought about and were implementing. (Another example from two years later is the 'the Bloomberg terminal', which is now a mainstay of business research.)
(Minor disambiguation fix; too late to edit: I wrote "One of those is Ted Nelson", in a context which makes it sound like Nelson was one of the small number of people not influenced by Bush. The opposite is true. Nelson was one of the many influenced by Bush.)
There is an additional consideration with dystopian science fiction, which is that, to the extent that it may be predictive of what the author sees to be the direction society is (or might be) currently heading, its also very much an attempt at influencing a change in the opposite direction.
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.
A bit of a pet peeve, but futurism already has a meaningful definition - it refers to an art movement at the start of the 20th century. Just because you like how the word sounds, it's pretty poor form to recycle it to indicate a particular trend you've 'identified'.
Culture is made up of many abstract ideas ranging from values and customs that combine to make an interdependent complex system, prediction is impossible. And as the norms and values were shaped by situations that were random and or completely different to the situation we currently experience, we get another layer of complexity.
Dystopian anticipations have been 180 degrees wrong:
1.Genetic Testing -
Anticpated: GATTACA
What we got: A bunch of innocent people freed from jail. Who, today, would want to live in a world without genetic forensics?
2. Pacifying Narcotics -
Anticipated: Brave New World
What we got:War on Drugs, 80's crack epidemic. Huxley foresaw the gov't forcing people to take drugs. The real problem was the gov't trying to stop people from willingly taking drugs.
The protagonist doesn't wish his brother was born with his same gene for heart failure, he wishes companies would stop using genetic tests to filter out candidates.
Most of the movie deals with bad guys trying to find trace hair and DNA from imposters. Genetic testing.
What? In the movie he wishes for the companies to stop doing something they are actually doing. They are overzealously testing for any possible problem and marking people as unclean.
It's unsubtle textbook discrimination, removing perfectly good candidates from consideration. The company is hardly affected, there are plenty of candidates, but since these people are shunned by most companies they suffer terribly.
How in the world does that related to people with imaginary causes of autism.
From his perspective it certainly must seem that way. He can probably even point to a paper published by a legitimate researcher to show that it does happen. Even if it was written by someone who was paid to do so and all his coauthors later retracted their support.
They discriminate in the same sense that that real companies today discriminate based on candidates' skills and experience. Selecting the most qualified candidates and filtering out candidates because they trip certain flags are procedurally very different.
Sure, when the qualifications have anything to do with the job. When you apply a test to applicants, if it happens to have a bias that touches protected groups you had better have a very good argument that it relates directly to core job requirements or you are leaving yourself open to a massive lawsuit. Which might happen anyway.
Plus all the circumstances where you must make reasonable accommodations even if it has some impact, as long as they can still do the job.
Gattaca doesn't really show off any technological problems so much as it does a new kind of racism. Which, frankly, is not a problem so unmanageable that we should avoid genetic engineering to prevent.
Basically, Gattaca's problems could be managed by passing a couple of well-designed laws.
"...This could explain why well-educated, intelligent people, all across the political spectrum, so often make the unspoken assumption that good intentions and well-crafted words are sufficient for making good public policy"
Why make a quip that can be pulled out for just about any topic, when we have an actual law in place - the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008? Is that a 'well-designed law'?
It's certainly more than "good intentions and well-crafted words", as the $2.25 million award for the GINA lawsuit earlier this year shows. See http://www.nature.com/news/why-the-devious-defecator-case-is... . While that's the first one to get to trial, the article says that the EEOC filed 333 cases last year which cited GINA.
Bad examples. Both of those things were pretty much spot-on. Just don't get hung up on details.
We don't yet have genetic testing as an entry barrier for things, but we have other similarly arbitrary tests. Companies checking your credit ratings and requiring annual health evaluations of their employees. Some companies "encourage" everyone to wear company-provided health monitors 24/7. Claims that you're predisposed towards certain diseases based on various parameters are everywhere.
Brave New World wasn't wrong about drugs. People dope themselves on painkillers, antidepressants and other mood-altering drugs.
Gattaca was specifically about genetic testing. Saying that's analogous to checking credit ratings is moving the goalposts.
The government doesn't force or encourage people to take antidepressants or other "mood-altering drugs", except when they are eg incarcerated. Government involvement in the entire population taking such drugs is a crucial and explicit element of the BNW dystopia.
"Moving the goalposts" implies that I established some criteria and than changed it. I did no such thing.
>Gattaca was specifically about genetic testing.
If that's how you read/watch science fiction, you're wasting your time. Gattaca and Brave New World are dystopian stories. Dystopias are not meant to precisely predict the future. They are mean to show how the future will look like if certain conditions are met. The overall reasoning matters far more than specifics.
The overall reasoning in Gattaca looks solid. And we're nowhere near the level of genetic testing/engineering technology shown in the movie. But we're getting there.
>Government involvement in the entire population taking such drugs is a crucial and explicit element of the BNW dystopia.
I don't recall the book explicitly speaking about government involvement with Soma at all, aside from the implication that government approved of it. FDA approves all the anti-depressants and painkillers as well. So?
One problem is what demographics futurists tend to be. White men are less likely to imagine a future with full gender equality and black liberation than black women are, I would imagine. People living in the West will think less about the rise of the rest of the world.
Unnecessary? This is not a novel suggestion about the problems with futurists. It may be a generalisation, but it's pretty accurate generally. People privileged in some way aren't going to think much about that privilege. The rich won't envision a future with less (or more) poverty.
Or perhaps it's the reverse. If you ask "white men" about the liberation status of women/minorities, you're probably going to find them MORE likely to say that equality has already been achieved. So when they write stories, they'll write them as if everyone is equal and living the same utopian dream they are.
On the other hand if someone comes from a background where they feel oppressed, they're going to write that into their work.
That's part of the point of the article. People continue to extrapolate from what they view culture currently is, as if it continues indefinitely into the future. I think based on that "white men" are going to view it as being more pleasant and fair (i.e. their own experience) than minorities.
Why don't more non-white people become futurists then? Why don't they write their own stuff? If white people do something why is there the implication that they are simultaneously suppressing that output from everybody else? You know why you don't find more black futurists? My guess is they spend their time on anti-white rhetoric, and hypothesizing about fictional oppression. Frankly speaking, black people in the western world have it better off than almost everybody else. I'm really getting sick of reading these type of comments. Black people in the west have it better than black people in Africa. Where else but European countries, or North America would they be better off? Maybe if they spent more time DOING things and less time complaining about white people there would be more futurists/engineers/painters/doctors etc instead we have BlackLivesMatter doing die-in's in shopping malls or protesting the deaths of career criminals...
Non it's not a non-sequitur as I am not replying to the article but to another poster. My reply is relevant to theirs. The point of the article is that we get cultural changes wrong or don't account for changes in culture the way we anticipate changes in technology. The comment I am replying to makes racist generalizations about white people and what the white people and western world are able to imagine. I imagine if one goes to Thailand you would find media and cultural creations that relate to Thai people and their future, or in China the same thing, Chinese people and their future. Would the parent poster make a similar stupid comment about Chinese men can't imagine the future of women or black liberation?
So your response was to write a comment filled with obviously racist invective attacking black people in general.
Quote: "Maybe if they spent more time DOING things and less time complaining about white people there would be more futurists/engineers/painters/doctors etc instead we have BlackLivesMatter doing die-in's in shopping malls or protesting the deaths of career criminals..."
Perhaps the original commenter is accidentally committing a subtle act of prejudice, but you are being overtly racist.
Noting that the original commenter may or may not be black, Your choice to attack black people is independent of your concern about the potential prejudice in the original comment.
At least this makes it clear where you stand; your comment was not about fighting prejudice.
Pure hyperbole, and incorrect at that, and it's equally clear where you stand.
In case you are still reading: The poster I was replying to didn't commit a subtle act of prejudice, they made an overtly racist statement about white men. Then claimed that white men can't envision a future of black liberation. That's literally what they said, I responded to that comment.
I am saying that instead of futurism (and other cultural works), the focus of a lot of black people and their effort seems to be civil rights activities. These civil rights activities have an opportunity cost, while you're doing die-ins at the mall you may not have time to write about the future. So therefore we don't have as much of a black vision of the future because they (black people) aren't spending their effort on that.
My comment was about fighting prejudice, prejudice against white people. That sort of behavior is totally kosher on the internet and in the mainstream media and it's very PC and fashionable to bash "white people" and their culture (when it's admitted that they even have a culture). I have gotten pretty sick of it.
Saying that more black people would be doctors if they complained less is absolutely racist. Do you not see that?
You claim oppression is fictional - so I guess it's possible
you don't.
You say you are pointing at the opportunity costs of protesting oppression. They are only opportunity costs if the oppression is not real - otherwise they may be part of a necessary struggle to obtain opportunity. Do you really think that there is no anti-black racism?
You may be fed up with people bashing white people on the internet - I am too. But that is no excuse for making overtly racist statements against black people, a behavior which is certainly counterproductive to what you claim to be your true aim.
They do, you just dismiss their futurism as "anti-white rhetoric, and hypothesizing about fictional oppression" because it's not sufficiently similar to the futurism someone in your position might come up with.
I don't know that I can agree with this assessment. Large-scale social norms change always seem impossible N years before they become so ingrained to seem unshakable.
So "impossible to imagine" strikes me as an uncharitable characterization. I can imagine that vegetarianism becomes a moral norm, and I can imagine how the change could happen, but that's entirely disconnected from my doubt it will happen. I also remember the time in my life when gay rights weren't the foregone conclusion they've been for the last 10 years.
If we look at the distribution of shifting societal attitudes, there is going to be some threshold that turns things from "wishful thinking" to "probably going to happen." Without knowing what the information available at the time, and methodology used was generate the prediction, lying any blame at the feet of white/male/rich strikes me as applying a currently politically fashionable one size fits all explanation.
The thing about futurology is that there are tons of people engaged in "predicting". Most of them are notoriously bad at it. Most tech journalists, for example, are so bad that they can't even "predict" the present - their descriptions of cutting-edge technologies used today often have glaring mistakes.
So you have to read the right people. Nearly every time I open a book from Stanislav Lem, I am thinking: "My god, was this really written in the 70s?!". That is predictive power.
I wonder if it's not more that we're ignoring the cultural aspects because many of them didn't turn out as good as the predictions (less working hours, more equality for instance)
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 163 ms ] thread1) 'Futurism' is the early twentieth century philosophy created by Marinetti, launched with this enchanting essay: http://www.english.upenn.edu/~jenglish/English104/marinetti....
2) "Instagram began life as a Yelp-style app called Burbn, with photos an afterthought (photos on your phone, is that a thing?)."
Is this somehow implying that Instagram invented phones on your camera, or indeed anything at all? This seems a common sort of confusion, along the same category as believing Apple invented smart phones, Google invented search engines or Facebook invented social networking, rather than popularizing a particular form of a preexisting technology.
I'd read it as that the makers of Instagram initially didn't believe in people actually using cameras in their phones, so the opposite of your interpretation.
How many people did have camera feature-phones/early smartphones and did really use the camera? Granted, I was still in high-school, but tons of my peers had phones with cameras, but they were only used very seldomly and not in any phone-specific way (take picture with phone if you didn't have a digital camera with you, send to computer, treat as if it came of a crappy digital camera)
[1] http://www.readbookonline.net/readOnLine/20439/
Especially so if you've seen a lot of older sci-fis about our present time.
Note there's hard sci fi and soft sci fi, and a soap opera / action flick which happens to be "in the future" like B5 is not really predictive. I'm just saying that very soft sci fi is indistinguishable from copy and paste style fantasy or historical fiction. Hard sci fi like KSRs Mars Trilogy ages much better than "80s soap opera, on a space ship".
On Hoth, Skywalker on his Tauntaun uses a comlink to talk with Solo. And Solo uses a pocket comlink to talk with Transport to say that he and Leia have been blocked by a collapse of the ice corridor and will be using the Falcon to leave Hoth.
There are other examples of comlinks used as practical mobile communication about equivalent to a compact walkie-talkie.
"Radio has no future." -- Lord Kelvin, physicist, the father of thermodynamics.
Our inability to predict the distant future only says one thing: things that we can imagine are already happening. The gap between an idea and its implementation is narrower compared to hundreds of years ago. With very few exceptions maybe: AI, "eternal" battery cells, easy space travel and a few others. So in terms of predictions, I think we will be getting only worse over time.
I think those are trivial errors (got the car right, missed the tablet or internet).
What can be more wrong is not predicting cultural and lifestyle changes affected by technology etc in the future.
Just to make fun of the headline from the article, "We predicted cell phones, but not women in the workplace.", the failure was thinking giant buildings full of men tightening bolts on a non-automated assembly line was normal, progressive, and eternal. Men and women working side by side has been normal or at least not noteworthy for a couple hundred thousand years... a couple decades of men only manual labor factory buildings was the weird oddity. What I'm getting at is the innovation isn't "allowing" women to stop eating bonbons on the couch and go to work, the "innovation" is all male manual labor assembly line factories died out and blew away, so things are now back to more or less normal with men and women more or less working together more or less most of the time plus or minus geography and climate and individual worksite and individual instantaneous work task. Aside from fixations on imaginary pasts that never or rarely existed in the first place but fit a modern political axe to grind. Men and women not spending time together is really pretty weird on a long enough time scale.
This also shows up in the car predictions. Burning basically all our fossil energy resources in a century or so is really weird behavior, so the results are going to be very weird and very temporary and very dependent at any instant on the trajectory of that very rapid burn rate and very rapid economically viable depletion rate. There's a classic graph that shows fossil fuel use over the history of our species as a flat line around zero with a crazy vertical line blip right about now. You can't make long term trend predictions about a random sized and located momentary blip.
Finally an aspect of naming games. We have reasonably cheap extremely safe 500 mph self driving machines that we sit in while reading legacy newspapers just like we always claimed we'd have, we just call them jet airplanes instead of calling them cars. That doesn't mean the prediction the machines would exist was wrong, or that we don't sit in them and read newspapers today, it just means we insist on marketing them under a different name, not exactly a major miss for the prediction. So predictions of everyone having electric cars will basically be correct in that average peasants like us will use electricity in the daily grind of life, even if some marketing guy insists on calling it the electric minivan or the e-Bus or the Apple iStationWagon, OK whatever its still basically "everyone uses electric cars" in practice.
I think the shift to self-driving cars will be more of a social/cultural/political challenge than a technical one. I might even go so far as to predict it will never happen (at least, not for average people getting around town).
No, I just dismissed it as close enough (the 15 year gap doesn't matter much if you predict in the 50's-60's -- it's just 20-30% off in the date, and they still got the technology right).
Today, besides multiple projects (Google, Apple, Tesla, GM, for self driving cars being demonstrated etc) we have mass market self-parking cars.
>I think the shift to self-driving cars will be more of a social/cultural/political challenge than a technical one. I might even go so far as to predict it will never happen
If it's slowly introduced as a feature to new models, then as soon as people see how convenient it is, they'll enabled it. Some people will resist because they want to "have control" and are afraid, but most will use it. They might start using it 20% of the time or so, when in a traffic jam, when talking on the phone, when tired, etc. Soon they'll just leave it on most of the time. 15 years after they become mass market, small kids will have known them all their life, so even easier for them to adopt.
G.K. Chesterton points out, in reply to the original manifesto:
Suffice it to say that Futurism has a gratifying dislike both of Liberal politics and Christian morals; I say gratifying because, however unfortunately the cross and the cap of liberty have quarrelled, they are always united in the feeble hatred of such silly megalomaniacs as these. They will "glorify war--the only true hygiene of the world--militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of Anarchism, the beautiful ideas which kill, and the scorn of woman." They will "destroy museums, libraries, and fight against moralism, feminism, and all utilitarian cowardice."
The essay fleshes this out in a less combative way, making less assumptions about what Futurists are for, and merely critiquing their blind spots.
The article, and you, fail to make the case that this is anything more than a strawman.
> The founder of Futurism and its most influential personality was the Italian writer Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Marinetti launched the movement in his Futurist Manifesto, which he published for the first time on 5 February 1909 in La gazzetta dell'Emilia, an article then reproduced in the French daily newspaper Le Figaro on 20 February 1909. He was soon joined by the painters Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Giacomo Balla, Gino Severini and the composer Luigi Russolo.
> Marinetti expressed a passionate loathing of everything old, especially political and artistic tradition. "We want no part of it, the past", he wrote, "we the young and strong Futurists!" The Futurists admired speed, technology, youth and violence, the car, the airplane and the industrial city, all that represented the technological triumph of humanity over nature, and they were passionate nationalists. They repudiated the cult of the past and all imitation, praised originality, "however daring, however violent", bore proudly "the smear of madness", dismissed art critics as useless, rebelled against harmony and good taste, swept away all the themes and subjects of all previous art, and gloried in science.
Notice in particular "admired [...] violence", and "however daring, however violent".
The original article cites numerous examples, centrally the one about a futuristic workplace without women, and my post cites a GK Chesterton piece that directly criticizes, with quotes, Marinetti's manifesto.
For HN, just consider that threads dealing with "women in tech" or "minorities in tech" or "gentrification" are routinely flagged down, with a share of the website being very vocal about wanting articles focused on technology and gadgets. Insofar this is hacker "news", about new and upcoming things, many users feel like these human topics do not qualify. They still make the front-page, proving that it's far from a universal opinion, but the contingent is there.
Are there any serious minds trying predictions? When we talk about futurism, in reality it just ends up being weirdos on the internet (hi /r/futurism which is always 10-15 years away from some tech revolution) or whatever sci-fi authors are doing today. Except sci-fi isn't futurism, its literature. These authors aren't trying to divine the future, they're trying to write sellable dramatic stories. There's a reason Star Wars has action-packed dogfighting and not boring over the horizon missile launches. Or up-close-and-personal lightsaber fights instead of drones attacks from miles away.
Maybe getting the future right isn't that tough. Some investors seem to be able to do it. It just doesn't seem that anyone is seriously trying outside of the limited scope or very near future investing. I imagine there's a poor value proposition here. Maybe you can tell us that in 30 years some hot new tech will be common, but if it costs $50m to get to that conclusion, is it worth it? Especially if you can't monopolize that tech?
I also think its a little foolish for the author to conflate technology and society. You can get a car or an iphone in Saudi Arabia with no problem, but if you're a woman, you can't drive the car, but you can use the iphone. Social advances don't propagate out like technological ones do. Or if you're gay you can run a powerful company and be influencial like Tim Cook or Peter Theil, but Tim Cook's equivalent in Russia would have been discriminated away from any position of power.
To be fair, most futurist thought work will be fully automated by now, and there would be NO people needed in the office or factory.
That prediction came true.
But it's ok, feminism won the fight for equality 30 years ago /s
Something that struck me about the game was the role of women. You mostly see them in the context of children or, more regrettably, in the kitchen. It's not reflective of even the present day in Western cultures, let alone decades in the future.
However, the game isn't Western, it's Russian. I can't help but wonder if the role of women simply reflects the Russian male game creators' view of the world and an expanded role for the women of the future was simply not on their collective horizon.
Otherwise, great game, especially for $10.
> Something that struck me about the game was the role of women. You mostly see them in the context of children or, more regrettably, in the kitchen. It's not reflective of even the present day in Western cultures, let alone decades in the future.
Reversion to (or, at least, reintroduction of elements of) pre-modern social structures is a pretty common trope of post-apocalyptic fiction; insofar as social structures are adaptive to environmental conditions, its not entirely without a realistic basis.
Futurists (from future studies) refer to the field as futurism, futurology, and future study. See usages https://www.google.com/search?q=futurism&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&h...
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
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...
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
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.
And I'd say that they're only anarcho-communists in name. Really, they're ant farms, kept by the Minds.
People seem to get really butthurt about this, but it is actually series canon that much more thoroughly "posthuman" lifestyles were "in-fashion" at some previously point, and will be again, at some future point. The author was just focusing on the period of time that happened to be easiest to understand for his readership. And there are always those who make Unusual Life Choices.
Oy.
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.
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.)
In particular, I often find myself citing his depiction in _Friday_ of its titular character using a multimedia hyperlink system which seems analogous to the web and media-rich hypertext generally. (He gets wrong that it's an exclusive closed private system... that is wrong... isn't it...)
It's not the depiction of hypertext research that I find compelling...
...it's his dead-on intuition that such systems will naturally lend themselves to browsing by associate leap, far afield from the original research topic. And that serendipity and unanticipated (and unsought) correlations will prove both more compelling to users and more illuminating that narrow document retrieval would be.
Whether that same book paints a reasonable depiction of the current devolving global political climate is another question... but one which also continues to come up in idle conversations...
Btw @cstross just finally read Saturn's Children, Neptune's Brood, and the connective-tissue short work whose name escapes me. I greatly enjoyed the winks esp. in SC to _Friday_ etc. Thanks!
You regard Heinlein's 'dead-on intuition that such systems will naturally lend themselves to browsing by associate leap' as being prescient. I can't say what you mean by prescience, but I can point to "As We May Think" to show the importance Bush placed in associative thinking some 35 years earlier:
> The human mind does not work that way. It operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain. .... Yet the speed of action, the intricacy of trails, the detail of mental pictures, is awe-inspiring beyond all else in nature.
> Man cannot hope fully to duplicate this mental process artificially, but he certainly ought to be able to learn from it. In minor ways he may even improve, for his records have relative permanency. The first idea, however, to be drawn from the analogy concerns selection. Selection by association, rather than indexing, may yet be mechanized. One cannot hope thus to equal the speed and flexibility with which the mind follows an associative trail, but it should be possible to beat the mind decisively in regard to the permanence and clarity of the items resurrected from storage. ...
> Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified.
I can also say that in 1951 Heinlein was well aware that research was much more than 'narrow document retrieval'. Consider "The Puppet Masters" from that year, chapter IV:
> "At the library I went to the catalogue, put on blinkers and started scanning for references. "Flying Saucers" led to "Flying Disks," then to "Project Saucer," then "Lights in the Sky,", "Fireballs," "Cosmic Diffusion Theory of Life Origin," and two dozen blind alleys and screwball branches of literature. I needed a Geiger counter to tell me what was pay dirt, ... Nevertheless, in an hour I had a handful of selector cards. I handed them to the vestal virgin at the desk and waited while she fed them into the hopper."
That's catalogue-assisted associative thinking, followed by document retrieval. I don't think requires prescience in the early 1980s to get a sense for how a Memex-like machine embodied in a modern computer might improve upon a paper catalogue for associative thinking.
To be more concrete, remember too that France was rolling out Minitel across the country the same year Friday was published. While Minitel specifically did not likely influence Heinlein, I bring it up to show that the ideas of online research terminals was no longer pie-in-the-sky dreaming, but something that many people thought about and were implementing. (Another example from two years later is the 'the Bloomberg terminal', which is now a mainstay of business research.)
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.
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?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Naisbitt
Most of the movie deals with bad guys trying to find trace hair and DNA from imposters. Genetic testing.
It's unsubtle textbook discrimination, removing perfectly good candidates from consideration. The company is hardly affected, there are plenty of candidates, but since these people are shunned by most companies they suffer terribly.
How in the world does that related to people with imaginary causes of autism.
Plus all the circumstances where you must make reasonable accommodations even if it has some impact, as long as they can still do the job.
There is a big difference between picking qualified individuals vs. systematically picking certain groups over others.
He's not imagining the tests. The evidence of tests is not one guy lying in a tiny study.
Basically, Gattaca's problems could be managed by passing a couple of well-designed laws.
http://jaltcoh.blogspot.com/2015/04/what-are-we-doing-when-w...
It's certainly more than "good intentions and well-crafted words", as the $2.25 million award for the GINA lawsuit earlier this year shows. See http://www.nature.com/news/why-the-devious-defecator-case-is... . While that's the first one to get to trial, the article says that the EEOC filed 333 cases last year which cited GINA.
We don't yet have genetic testing as an entry barrier for things, but we have other similarly arbitrary tests. Companies checking your credit ratings and requiring annual health evaluations of their employees. Some companies "encourage" everyone to wear company-provided health monitors 24/7. Claims that you're predisposed towards certain diseases based on various parameters are everywhere.
Brave New World wasn't wrong about drugs. People dope themselves on painkillers, antidepressants and other mood-altering drugs.
The government doesn't force or encourage people to take antidepressants or other "mood-altering drugs", except when they are eg incarcerated. Government involvement in the entire population taking such drugs is a crucial and explicit element of the BNW dystopia.
>Gattaca was specifically about genetic testing.
If that's how you read/watch science fiction, you're wasting your time. Gattaca and Brave New World are dystopian stories. Dystopias are not meant to precisely predict the future. They are mean to show how the future will look like if certain conditions are met. The overall reasoning matters far more than specifics.
The overall reasoning in Gattaca looks solid. And we're nowhere near the level of genetic testing/engineering technology shown in the movie. But we're getting there.
>Government involvement in the entire population taking such drugs is a crucial and explicit element of the BNW dystopia.
Where was this government involvement described?
http://www.huxley.net/soma/somaquote.html
I don't recall the book explicitly speaking about government involvement with Soma at all, aside from the implication that government approved of it. FDA approves all the anti-depressants and painkillers as well. So?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Illustrated_Man
It may be a generalisation, but it's pretty accurate generally. — [citation needed]
The rich won't envision a future with less (or more) poverty. — [citation needed]
White men are less likely to imagine a future with full gender equality and black liberation than black women are — [citation needed]
People living in the West will think less about the rise of the rest of the world. — [citation needed]
On the other hand if someone comes from a background where they feel oppressed, they're going to write that into their work.
That's part of the point of the article. People continue to extrapolate from what they view culture currently is, as if it continues indefinitely into the future. I think based on that "white men" are going to view it as being more pleasant and fair (i.e. their own experience) than minorities.
Or, well, pessimistic at all. One of the weird things about the post-war West is most people honestly expect the future to be better.
Quote: "Maybe if they spent more time DOING things and less time complaining about white people there would be more futurists/engineers/painters/doctors etc instead we have BlackLivesMatter doing die-in's in shopping malls or protesting the deaths of career criminals..."
Perhaps the original commenter is accidentally committing a subtle act of prejudice, but you are being overtly racist.
Noting that the original commenter may or may not be black, Your choice to attack black people is independent of your concern about the potential prejudice in the original comment.
At least this makes it clear where you stand; your comment was not about fighting prejudice.
In case you are still reading: The poster I was replying to didn't commit a subtle act of prejudice, they made an overtly racist statement about white men. Then claimed that white men can't envision a future of black liberation. That's literally what they said, I responded to that comment.
I am saying that instead of futurism (and other cultural works), the focus of a lot of black people and their effort seems to be civil rights activities. These civil rights activities have an opportunity cost, while you're doing die-ins at the mall you may not have time to write about the future. So therefore we don't have as much of a black vision of the future because they (black people) aren't spending their effort on that.
My comment was about fighting prejudice, prejudice against white people. That sort of behavior is totally kosher on the internet and in the mainstream media and it's very PC and fashionable to bash "white people" and their culture (when it's admitted that they even have a culture). I have gotten pretty sick of it.
You claim oppression is fictional - so I guess it's possible you don't.
You say you are pointing at the opportunity costs of protesting oppression. They are only opportunity costs if the oppression is not real - otherwise they may be part of a necessary struggle to obtain opportunity. Do you really think that there is no anti-black racism?
You may be fed up with people bashing white people on the internet - I am too. But that is no excuse for making overtly racist statements against black people, a behavior which is certainly counterproductive to what you claim to be your true aim.
So "impossible to imagine" strikes me as an uncharitable characterization. I can imagine that vegetarianism becomes a moral norm, and I can imagine how the change could happen, but that's entirely disconnected from my doubt it will happen. I also remember the time in my life when gay rights weren't the foregone conclusion they've been for the last 10 years.
If we look at the distribution of shifting societal attitudes, there is going to be some threshold that turns things from "wishful thinking" to "probably going to happen." Without knowing what the information available at the time, and methodology used was generate the prediction, lying any blame at the feet of white/male/rich strikes me as applying a currently politically fashionable one size fits all explanation.
So you have to read the right people. Nearly every time I open a book from Stanislav Lem, I am thinking: "My god, was this really written in the 70s?!". That is predictive power.
wow - tough crowd. I would have been interesting just to be there and experience the reaction.
was worth skimming just to learn about the mercury dime : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_dime