The future

The Future 101: Science Fiction

I’ve been thinking about the future, but in a different way. Can we understand the future in any meaningful way? Now, I don’t mean the actual future that will unfold, but the concept of the future as a feature of reality. Asking “What is the future?” is more like a Zen kōan than a scientific inquiry. We think of time as the 4th dimension, as one long continuous stretching of three dimensional space. And because of science fiction we picture traveling to other points in time as if they were another spatial coordinate. I think this is a false concept that corrupts our sense of the past and future.

Another problem we face, is we think of time personally. Consciousness experiences the now, so it feels like the past is our life before now, and the future is what happens next. But if the Earth is sterilized by a gamma ray burst in the next minute, reality would continue without us, and so would the future. Although we experience time as self-aware beings, time exists outside ourselves. We might exist in the future, and we might not.

Time exists without our consciousness being aware of it. A tree has very limited awareness of its moment in existence, but its there in the now, and it has a past and future. Our conscious mind observes the now, remembers the past, and anticipates the future. Science fiction is the literature about anticipating the future. We like to think that science fiction both prepares us for possible futures, and helps us build specific futures. For example, science fiction warns us against the singularity, yet inspires us to build intelligent robots.

The trouble is we don’t take the future seriously. If we did we would eat healthy and not alter the carbon dioxide ratio in the atmosphere. We regularly interact with the future, like a squirrel burying nuts, or humans going to the grocery store to buy a week’s groceries, but reaching into the future has a limited range. Instead of using science fiction to prepare us for the future, we’ve often turned it into Coca-Cola and cotton candy, empty calories to enjoy in the present moment of now. Our immediate desires always overwhelm any knowledge we might have about the future. Dealing with the future requires tremendous discipline that most of us lack, including myself.

One analogy that has occurred to me is to think of our brain as a CPU which is the now. The past is everything written on the hard disk, and the future is the output we’re going to write to the hard disk. Over time that contents of the hard disk changes. The now is the main loop of our programming, just idling through the processing cycles. If we want to interact with the future, we have to write something out to the hard drive, or delete an old file.

Most of us have great expectations about the future. Some of us worry about the future. Between dreamers and doomsayers, we find all hopes and fears. Tomorrow is often pretty much like today, but ten years from now will be more surprising than how memories of ten years ago feels now. Everything we want is in the future because everything we have is now. When we throw the dice we want to win big and not come up snake eyes. We’re all futurologists in that we hope to plan our future accomplishments and predict the obstacles.

We want to know the future even though we know we can’t. We predict the future even though we know we’ll be wrong. We just can’t help ourselves. Some people believe in crystal balls, others in statistics, but some turn to science fiction. Science fiction plays on the same dichotomy as most people feel about the future—some SF writers write about what they hope will happen, and others write about what they fear will happen.

For over a century before space travel writers wrote about humans traveling to the Moon, planets and to other star systems. Did science fiction writers predict that humans would travel in space, or did they inspires people to build rockets and space capsules? Would space travel ever been invented if we hadn’t dreamed about it first? Some people believe the future already exists and its just a matter of waiting for it to play out. Others believe the future does not exist, only the now exists, so whatever the future will be won’t be determined until we reach that now to be.

From my personal experience, and reading piles of science books, I don’t think the future exists yet. Nor do I believe time travel is possible. I’m a now person. However, I do think we can interact with the future in limited ways. On the other hand, I’m not sure our many fantasies about the future do anything at all.

Ever since I was a kid I’ve always said, “The future is everything I never imagined” even though I spent all my time trying to imagine the future. Now that I’m living in the future, or a future now, it feels like any fantasy I had wiped out its possibility of coming true. Sort of a weird corruption of the Uncertainty Principle. I pictured myself going to Mars, so I never went to Mars. I pictured humans going to Mars, so no one made it to Mars. Sorry guys, to jinx things. My mother had a variation on this theme. She believed worrying about something bad will happen would keep it from happening.

Most of us will wake up tomorrow and find the future, and we’ll do that on average 30,000 times. Each time a little surprise—until the day we don’t. Now will cease to exist. What divides us from the rest of the animals on this planet is we have hopes for the future. We all want something from the future. If we’re a child, we want Santa to bring us something exciting, if we’re a teen we want to fall in love and lose our virginity, if we’re in our twenties we want to graduate college and find a great job, and so on, until our only hope is to have a tomorrow, any tomorrow. Some people want to be rock stars in the future, and others just want more to eat, and some just hope to keep existing. To me happiness is having something to look forward to, even though it might not happen.

Science fiction books are fantasies about the future, some about things we want to happen, and some about things we hope won’t happen.

The common assumption is science fiction does not predict the future, but speculates on possible futures. The truth is science fiction is a bunch of wild ideas that we find entertaining and has no relationship to the actual future even when it’s seriously speculative, extrapolating on current events, and is of little use for preparing us for the future. Science fiction is fun escapism from the present for the most part, and occasionally insightful observations about the here and now. Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell is a brilliant use of science fiction, but does it help us with the future, or help us with how we live now?

Robert A. Heinlein took himself quite seriously as a writer of speculative fiction. He thought three books expressed his ideas best: Starship Troopers, Stranger in a Strange Land and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. I doubt he meant to be remembered for starting military SF, creating a hippie Bible, and not starting a popular catch phrase about free lunches. I’ve read these books many times and I don’t think they say anything about the future at all, but a whole lot about Robert A. Heinlein. He wanted them to be about freedom and responsibility, but I’m not sure even that comes through. Stranger in a Strange Land was Heinlein’s idea of 1990 from 1960. Many people think it’s about the 1960s. After living through both times I don’t feel its about either, but it seems to say a whole lot about Heinlein’s pet ideas and peeves.

I’m starting to wonder if science fiction is about no time at all, like The Song of Ice and Fire series by George R. R. Martin.

I’m reading Capital in the 21st Century by Thomas Piketty. I don’t think we can predict the future, but I also think the only way to talk about the future is through statistics based on knowing a whole lot data about the past. I’ll write The Future 101: Statistics in the future. (Is that a prediction or plan?) But for now, I shall ask, “How many science fiction novels study the past to extrapolate the future” like Piketty? I think the common quick answer will be: Many. However, I think that’s wrong. If a science fiction writer writes a well thought out book about people living in the year 2114 and how global warming has changed the world, is that really doing the same thing that Piketty is doing with all his graphs and data sets? It’s obvious that it’s what climate scientists are doing, but is it the same thing for novel writers?

I don’t think so. Is there any past science fiction novel about our times that sounds anything close to what’s happening now? Climate scientists have been graphing changes in average world temperature and CO2 concentrations for decades, and our current temperatures and concentrations fall nicely on their graphs. Is this predicting the future? Maybe that’s as close as we can come to predicting the future. The thing about graphs is they do change, and sometimes surprisingly so, but there’s always a reason why the numbers do something different that changes the direction of the curve. Being able to say what those things will be ahead of time is really predicting the future. And we can’t do that.

We can predict rising CO2 concentrations, but we can’t predict what we will do about them

Scientists had hoped twenty years ago that humanity would have heard their warnings and changed their habits so their curves would have reversed direction. They were hoping to change the future. Science fiction writers writing about the future of humans colonizing the solar system and the galaxy were hoping they were influencing such a future to happen. Has that happened?

Science fiction never wanted to predict the future, it never has. Science fiction has always been about shaping the future. And strangely, isn’t that what we do all the time. When Apple rolled out the iPhone didn’t they shape the future? Without Amazing Stories and Astounding, would we have the space programs we do have today? Did “The Man Who Sold The Moon” shape the future to produce SpaceX? I don’t know. That’s why I writing this essay.

The future is relentless, it’s always coming. Everything in the now makes the future. A tree making a seed effects the future. When we buy groceries how much is just putting food in a shopping cart and how much is reaching into the future to make Thursday’s night dinner? If we knew that, we’d know how much science fiction influences the future.

JWH – 6/19/14

The New Normal (NBC)–Now and Then

The New Normal – I love the title of this NBC show that premiered back in September, it says so much. Makes you ask, “What was the old normal?” Is there such a thing as normalness? Having grown up back in the 1950s during the Leave it to Beaver and Father Knows Best normalcy, I can remember a long parade of new television seasons where Hollywood tried to capture the new normalness of the American family every Fall for a half century.

(Some of the more famous shows about the American family from the last 50 years were My Three Sons, Andy Griffith Show, The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Brady Bunch, All in the Family, The Waltons, An American Family, Good Times, Little House on the Prairie, The Jeffersons, Eight is Enough, Family Ties, The Cosby Show, Our House, Married with Children, Full House, My Two Dads, thirtysomething, The Wonder Years, Roseanne, Life Goes On, Family Matters, The Simpsons, Home Improvement, My So Called Life, South Park, That 70’s Show, The Sopranos, Family Guy, Freaks and Geeks, Malcolm in the Middle, Grounded for Life, Two and a Half Men, Weeds, Big Love, Jon & Kate Plus 8, Breaking Bad, The Secret Life of the American Teenager, Modern Family, Parenthood)

But were Ward, June, Wally and the Beav ever a normal family? ABC, CBS and NBC painted America as if everyone were WASPs (white Anglo-Saxon protestants) in the 1950s, and even though my family was just as waspy, George, Virginia, Becky and Jimmy looked and acted like nothing we watched on TV. America wasn’t lacking in people of color or various sexual orientations back in that black-and-white TV era, television just didn’t report on their normal day-to-day lives. Some of those old gay couples getting married today were together back during the old normal.

My parents were on the ass end of middle class, drank enough to be called alcoholics, fought and smashed things like Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, and my and I sister ran wilder than any switch or belt could control. Although television didn’t chronicle my family or anyone I knew, I think it did influence American society, and may have even shaped us. TV showed us there was no such thing as normal. Have you ever seen your family on TV?

Conservatives might swear to God that television news is biased to the left, and shows like The New Normal and Glee are propaganda for the liberal lifestyle, but television news reporting and fictional shows have always trailed the changes in society – they have never led the way. Television has always been the fantasy of how we want to live. I think America has always wanted television to chronicle the countless types of people that we are, and the accidental byproduct of all this voyeurism was that we have adapted to diversity. Real life strangers would flair up your xenophobia, but put that same subculture or ethnic group on TV and they became endearing.

Real life and television life seems to have some kind of reverb going, with television echoing changes in society and stimulating society with its feedback. The New Normal is about two gay men, Bryan (Andrew Rannells) and David (Justin Bartha) hiring Goldie (Georgia King) to be the surrogate mother of their baby. This arrangement is far from new in the real world, or even on TV, but it’s taken for granted normalcy is a way to convince all those Americans who haven’t gotten the memo, that this is the new normal.

I find The New Normal just as comforting and pleasant as Leave it to Beaver, Father Knows Best or The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet back in 1958. These happy families, both then and now, make me feel good and wish all families were just as happy. Like Modern Family, to which The New Normal is often compared, these and other feel-good liberal shows are designed to make us feel better about life in America in 2012, they are our Sunday School classes about how to be good people. Our economic lives might suck, but at least we’re evolving as accepting and empathetic beings.

Sadly, this doesn’t work with everyone in our polarized society. We’re still fighting the war between extreme religious belief and the Enlightenment. I wonder what Descartes, Bacon, Locke, Voltaire and Rousseau would make of our modern times, and what philosophical issues would they make out of our television shows?

That’s the thing, I don’t think television initiates social change, but soothes us to accept it. Many Americans don’t like gays or gay marriage, but as a whole, those attitudes are changing. Last October, GLAAD released a report showing the 2012 television had the highest percentage of gay LGBT characters ever. Not only are there more gay characters on TV, gay characters are finding more fans, and even the hateful grumpy people who protest their outrage are becoming fewer.

Television makes us comfortable with new ideas. Television is an agent of integration, and I don’t mean that in just the racial integration sense, but in the integration of all change that’s going on in society. Television is the spoon that stirs the American melting pot.

Television has been programming my social awareness since the 1950s, and it’s fascinating to contemplate all the changes the TV has made to America in the last fifty years. If we had a time machine and could go back to 1962 and convince NBC to show The New Normal to America back then, how would it have been received? Of course the show would be seen as a kind of science fictional view of the future. There’s more new to The New Normal than two gay guys living together, and besides they did have gay people in 1962 so it wouldn’t have been a totally new concept, but they didn’t have surrogate mothers, or iPhones, video games, an African-American president, global warming, etc. Change is relentless.

Remember, 1962 was before the sexual revolution of the 1960s. The pill had just been released a few years earlier and it still hadn’t made it’s social impact. If you watch The New Normal it has an whole spectrum of liberal ideals integrated into the show that would have been overwhelming to the “normal” people of 1962 to digest. On the other hand civil rights and feminism had already begun by 1962, so maybe the viewers of 1962 would connect the dots between then and now. And even though America was a technological giant in 1962, I just don’t think those 1962 TV viewers had any clue as what computers would do to our society.

Today we have hindsight to see how far we’ve come. All too often we judge the citizens of the past by the morality and political correctness of today, but let’s reverse the tables. How will people fifty years from now look back on us in 2012 and will they judge us harshly? I’m sure in 2062 there will be a sitcom that’s the equivalent of The New Normal, and if we could see that show today, how would we react?

Liberal education marches on. Will we ever reach an end and be perfectly enlightened? I’m sure the seeds of future liberal standards of political correctness exist in our day-to-day life now. Our treatment of the environment and animals will horrify our descendants. Our polarized politics and fundamental religions will make the people of 2062 scratch their heads in amazement wondering how we could have been so irrational. Our wasting of natural resources will be judged criminal. But those are the easy issues. What are the harder ethical issues we can’t discern with our quaint old-fashioned minds?

What will be the next new normal?

JWH – 12/10/12

Is Cynicism a Side-Effect of Aging? – The Mark Twain Syndrome

Samuel Clemens, known famously as Mark Twain, became extremely bitter and pessimistic about the human race as he got older. I’m 60 and I’m starting to feel I’ve caught a touch of pessimism myself, so I’m wondering if I’m developing the Mark Twain Syndrome? And will I get more negative as the years pile up?

Is cynicism a side-effect of aging?

Now Twain had a lot of reasons to feel depressed and bitter. His wife, and two of his three daughters, died before he did. He made fortunes and lost them. He ran up staggering debt. In his old age he had to constantly tour the world giving talks so he could honorably pay off his creditors. Plus he saw a lot of the world that he just didn’t like, and he felt he had good reasons to think humans were a nasty species. Twain died in 1910, so he never knew the horrors of the 20th century, but the vicious satirical stories he wrote in his later years feel spot on to modern readers.

I would think anyone following the highly polarized politics of the 2012 presidential election would feel depressed about our political system. I would think anyone studying how humans treat the environment and our fellow creatures would feel gloomy about the Earth. I would think anyone comparing the growing greed of the rich versus the expanding misery of the poor would feel doomed over the fate of mankind. It’s hard not to believe that homo sapiens aren’t going to use up every last resource on this planet and never feel guilty.

How can you have faith in Congress when the national debt grows and all they can talk about is tax cuts? How can feel good about America when one party stonewalls the other for four years in hopes of winning the next election? When did serving the party become more important than serving the country?

Our current economic calamity is due to a man-made economic catastrophe. Billions were stolen but no one was ever put on trial. And the rich are spending billions to get a President in office so they can go back to business as usual.

I can’t help but believe that a perfect storm of national collapse is brewing. Is the U.S. in decline like the Roman and British empires were long ago?

Here some of the factors:

Growing economic chaos
World-wide shift to fundamental religious thinking
Global warming
Diseases becoming immune to our medicines
Population growth
Dwindling resources
Relentless pollution
Accelerating species extinctions
Uncontrolled debt
Political polarization
Aging population
Growing segment of population that’s not in labor force
Escalating crime and corruption around the world
Rising healthcare costs
Rising food costs

Now, do I dwell on all of that because I’m getting older? If I was young would I feel that all of those issues were just problems to be easily solved? I don’t know. It’s not like I want to walk around with a sandwich sign proclaiming “The End is Near” but I feel like I’m on a fast train and the brakes just went out. Is that feeling caused by getting older?

How do you know when things are bad or when you’re just feeling bad and think civilization is in decline?

Conversely, when I read about developments in science, technology, medicine, I feel positive and my thoughts about the future are uplifted. Science is the one constant positive – but most people reject science. What makes me feel good makes other people feel bad.

When I was young and read about Mark Twain I hoped I’d never become bitter and negative like he did. Even now I try to stay positive. But its not easy. Oh, if I keep busy and ignore the problems I’m as happy as a two-year-old with a box of cookies. And I tend to think that’s how most folks handles the problem–they eat more cookies.

When I was young, growing up with the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo space programs, I assumed we’d have permanent bases on the Moon and Mars by now, and men and women would have explored the entire solar system. In my teens, I felt before I died engineers would be drawing up plans interstellar spacecraft. Maybe not manned ones, but at least for interstellar robotic explorers. I think part of my disappointed about getting old is none of this has happened.

I’ve read enough history to know that the present has always been on the tipping point of chaos. I should feel confident that we’ll continue to bumble though. But I’ve also read enough history to know that nations rise and fall, and that all over the globe there are sites where people live who think about their country’s former glory. We revel is the decline of communism, but who is to say capitalism will last? Personally, I think free market capitalism will fail under overpopulation. We have over 12 million people defined as unemployed, but we have over 87 million people not employed, or considered unemployable. This population is over 16, not in jail or in military service that doesn’t work. They are retired, mentally or physically can’t work, gave up trying to find work, or won’t work. Less than half the U.S. population has jobs and they must fund the living expenses for the entire population. Capitalism isn’t creating enough jobs. It’s worse in other countries.

And the people who are working and paying taxes want to pay less. This is at a time when our economy depends on socialism. The reality is the U.S. has been a socialistic country since the 1930s. To reject socialism now means condemning tens of millions of poverty. The growing nostalgia for fundamental religious beliefs and conservative values is no solution at all. It’s just a plea, “Stop the world I want to get off—why can’t things be the way they used to be?”

Now I’m dwelling on the bad again. Are my worries just from getting old? Or do we all have something to be depressed about?

JWH – 7/15/12

Science Fiction’s New Future

Back in the 1950s and 1960s classic science fiction promised a future of space travel, with Star Trek epitomizing our hopes. That future has been revised constantly for us Baby Boomers so what does contemporary science fiction promise the youth of today? Will it be The Windup Girl, The Hunger Games or Ready Player One? Is the Final Frontier off the table? The fact that the United States continues to ignore global warming does not bode well for science fictional speculation. Since we refused to solve our problems we must live with the results.

In Ready Player One people are happy to live in a virtual reality that lets them escape the bleak actual reality. The United States at mid-21st century is still in today’s recession. In The Hunger Games, the 22nd century U.S. has collapsed and a new government has formed that’s nothing like what we have today. In The Windup Girl corporations are even more powerful and the negative effects of technology even more pervasive. If you combined the speculation in The Windup Girl with Ready Player One they have probably foreseen a future closer to what will happen than what Heinlein/Clarke/Asimov imagined.

There’s little reason to picture the super-science futures of modern space opera happening at all, and at least not any time soon. By soon, I mean before the year 3000. And what about what Robert J. Sawyer imagined for us in his WWW Trilogy? How close is IBM’s Watson to Webmind?

I grew up believing the future would be what Heinlein/Clarke/Asimov showed us. How do teens see the future today? A generation ago kids imprinted on Star Wars, but is their faith still firm in that galactic empire fantasy? Not if they are paying attention to reality. Ignoring global warming offers plenty of addictive delusions, but really, what science fiction do today’s teens read to see their future in 50 years? That would be a great topic for a SF Signal Mind Meld. Is it dark or bright?

Fifty years ago I was ten and all excited about the Mercury program, waiting for Gemini and Apollo. My early teen years were filled with science fiction books and The Jetsons, Lost in Space and Star Trek on TV. The future was so bright we had to wear mirrored shades. As a high school kid I was absolutely positive I’d be watching men and women walking on Mars by 1980 – instead I got MTV and an Atari 400.

Do today’s kids see the future through rose colored glasses? Do they realize the 1% has already stolen their future by refusing to allow America to work on the problem of global warming, guaranteeing a life like The Windup Girl? The effects of global warming won’t end our world, but it will but the kibosh on Star Trek and Star Wars space age dreams.

JWH – 1/15/12

We can’t know the future – not the specific details but we constantly try to imagine the future. Here are some impressive videos from Microsoft that shows what the future might be like following the trends of current technology.

The first one appears to have been made in 2009.

The next one from 2011 seems very similar, as if they were actually produced at the same time. Or we have to assume that 2019 seen from Microsoft from two years apart looks very much like.

Do these predictions please you, or scare you? It certainly seems the Geeks have inherited the Earth. But if you think about it, it’s a rather tame mundane view of the future. Adults still go to work and children go to school – the difference is the physical objects around us get more intelligent. But do we?

We like to think that people are evolving too and in some ways we are. We’re moving toward a society where everyone is equal regardless of race, gender or sexual orientation. However, if you think about it, we’ll all be treated equally fair, at least under the law, but will we be different? Greed will still coexist with charity, violence will exist with peace, law and order will still fight the lawless, the rich will get richer and the poor poorer.

I think if you plotted the evolution of humans it would show one long slight incline. If you plotted the evolution of technology we’d see the classic hockey stick graph.

These two videos show a future for rich people, nothing is implied for the poor. Without technology and money, the poor of one era seem to live pretty much like the poor of another era. I’d also imagine if you are politically conservative now, or liberal, you will be the same in the future. And I’d say if you are a bookworm that loves music and movies, then you’ll probably be a bookworm that loves music and movies in the future. Most people will even be living in the same house they are living in now.

We can’t predict the details of the future, like who will win the presidential race in 2012, or what life will be like as the Earth gets warmer, or will we find a solution to the financial crisis and the economic divide between the 1% and the 99%. There are an infinity of factors that go into shaping the future that keeps us from calculating what the future will be.

Some of the tech predictions we see in these Microsoft videos might come close to happening, but I doubt the tech will be as slick and clean as how they predict them. It would be interesting to find some videos from 1999 and 2001 that Microsoft created predicting 2009 and 2011.

Jim