Tag Archives: science fiction

my vacation reading list

Here’s my vacation reading list, just in case anyone is interested:

The Fear Index (about a hedge fund running an automated trading algorithm – way more fun to read than it sounds)

Count Zero (the sequel to William Gibson’s Neuromancer – great dystopian technology and artificial intelligence fiction although similar to Neuromancer, he uses a lot of made-up slang, weird sentence structure, and multiple points of view that keep me from getting really absorbed in the book)

Monster Hunter International (what it sounds like – pure escape fiction, basically an updated Ghostbusters with a Walking Dead-like gun fetish, violent but lighthearted)

MaddAdam (the third and final book in Margaret Attwood’s Oryx and Crake series)

The original I Am Legend (because why not, I seem to be on a monster kick – if I don’t get to this one, I may save it for around Halloween)

can/should machines run the world?

From “futureoflife.org“, here is a short excerpt on future directions of artificial intelligence research.

What policies could help increasingly automated societies flourish? For example, Brynjolfsson and McAfee [12] explore various policies for incentivizing development of labor-intensive sectors and for using AI-generated wealth to support underemployed
populations. What are the pros and cons of interventions such as educational reform, apprenticeship programs, labor-demanding infrastructure projects, and changes to minimum wage law, tax structure, and the social safety net [26]? History provides many examples of subpopulations not needing to work for economic security, ranging from aristocrats in antiquity to many present-day citizens of Qatar. What societal structures and other factors determine whether such populations flourish? Unemployment is not the same as leisure, and there are deep links between unemployment and unhappiness, self-doubt, and isolation [34, 19]; understanding what policies and norms can break these links could signifi cantly improve the median quality of life. Empirical and theoretical research on topics such as the basic income proposal could clarify our options [83, 89].

Please follow the link if you would like to see the references.

Also see The Evitable Conflict, the last story in Asimov’s I, Robot. No, not the Will Smith movie! Just put that out of your head and read the book, it’s short. Anyway, in that story humans have handed control of the global economy over to “Machines”, artificial intelligences which are supposed to smooth everything out and keep everything perfectly balanced. Only it doesn’t work out exactly that way, and the humans are trying to figure out why not, and whether or not they should try to do anything about it. This story was written in 1950, so it should be in the public domain soon. Another great old story that is in the public domain is Forster’s The Machine Stops. In that story (from 1909!), a machine runs the entire world, and is supposed to smooth everything out and keep everything perfectly balanced. Only it doesn’t work out exactly that way. Or, it does for awhile, but then the machine… well, I don’t want to spoil it for you. It’s free and it’s short, so give it a read!

December 2014 in Review

At the end of November, my Hope for the Future Index stood at -2.  I’ll give December posts a score from -3 to +3 based on how negative or positive they are.

Negative trends and predictions (-12):

  • When you consider roads, streets, and parking, cars take up more space in cities than housing. (-2)
  • The latest on productivity and economic growth: Paul Krugman says there is risk of deflationary spirals in many countries, and the U.S. economy is nothing to right home about. (-1)
  • There are a few legitimate scientists out there warning of sudden, catastrophic climate change in the near future. (-1)
  • Automation (meaning robots and AI) is estimated to threaten 47% of all U.S. jobs. One area of active research into automation: weaponry. Only one negative point because there are also some positive implications. (-1)
  • Margaret Atwood’s Year of the Flood is a depressing but entertaining reminder that bio-apocalypse is possible. (-2)
  • Before the recent rains, the drought in California was estimated to be a once-in-1200-years event. Major droughts in major food growing regions are not good news, especially with depletion of groundwater, and loss of snowpack and glaciers also in the news. (-2)
  • William Lazonick argues provides evidence that the rise in the gospel of shareholder value correlated with the growth slowdown that started in the 1970s – his explanation is that before that, retained earnings were a cornerstone of R&D and innovation in the economy. Loss of a point because it’s good to hear a dissenting voice, but the economy is still run by disciples of the profits for now. (-1)
  • Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are warning that the U.S. financial system may still be dangerously unstable. (-2)

Positive trends and predictions (+6):

  • There are some new ideas out there for teaching computer programming, even to young children: Loco Robo, Scratch, and for-profit “programming boot camps”. (+1)
  • You can now get genetically customized probiotics for your vagina. (+1)
  • There are plenty of ideas and models out there for safe, walkable streets, some as simple as narrower lanes. But as I point out, the Dutch and Danish designs are pretty much perfect and should just be adopted everywhere. (+1)
  • I linked to a new video depicting Michael Graves’s idea for “linear cities“. These could be very sustainable ecological if they meant the rest of the landscape is left in a mostly natural condition. I am not as sure about social sustainability – done wrong, they could be like living in a mall or subway station. This was one of my all-time more popular posts. (+1)
  • There are new algorithms out there for aggregating and synthesizing large amounts of scientific literature. Maybe this can increase the returns to R&D and help boost innovation. (+1)
  • There will be several international conferences in 2015 with potential to make real progress on financial stability and sustainability. The phrase “deep decarbonization” has been uttered. (+1)
  • Some evidence suggests that the oceans have absorbed a lot of global warming over the past decade or so, preventing the more extreme range of land surface warming that had been predicted. This is a good short- to medium-term trend, but it may not continue in the long term. (+0)

change during December 2014: -12 + 6 = -6

Hope for the Future Index (end of December 2014): -2 -6 = -8

best of best of 2014

This time of year, you pretty much have to do a “best of” post. I’ll get to a review of some of my own posts eventually, but in the meantime here are a handful of “best of” posts. I actually don’t know if they are the best of the best of, but they are just a few that caught my eye.

  1. from Wired, The Best and Worst in a Tumultuous Year for Science: Despite the annoyingly un-reader-friendly slide show format, there are some serious eye openers here, such as synthesis of completely new, man-made DNA base pairs; custom-designed monkeys with a “gene-editing system”; a potentially huge breakthrough on diabetes; and a study concluding that the number – not the number of species, but the actual number of wild animals – has decreased by half in the last 40 years.
  2. Longreads Best of 2014: Business Writing: This links to some great articles on education reform, the status and future of Microsoft, and Airbnb. But be warned, these are some seriously long reads!
  3. Economist Money talks podcast, End of year edition. I would always rather read the transcript, but still this goes through some major trends from the year like oil prices, financial regulation, Uber and Lyft, and is worth a listen.
  4. from Wired again, The Best Science Visualizations of the Year. Some interesting ones depict “genetic activity of ocean bacteria”, loss of Arctic summertime sea ice, and the origin and early spread of AIDS.
  5. From Urbanful, Film’s 6 coolest (fictional) hydrid cities. Yes, the Los Angeles version of Blade Runner makes it. So do Gotham City and Metropolis, which are described as “New York by night” and “New York by day”. Finally, “Big Hero 6, the first collaboration between Disney and Marvel, takes place in the futuristic city of San Fransokyo, a fusion of San Francisco, California and Tokyo, Japan.”
  6. One more from Wired: The Craziest Sci-Fi Fantasies That Got Closer to Reality This Year. There’s plenty of Star Wars vs. Star Trek here, but my favorites are that you can now get your dog cloned in South Korea, and a “cheetah robot”.

Happy new year!

The Year of the Flood

I finally got around to reading The Year of the Flood, the second book in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAdam trilogy. And I liked it. I remember not loving the first book, Oryx and Crake. Sometimes whether or not you love a book depends on where you are and what you are doing when you read it. Often, I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing when I read a book I loved. And I don’t remember where I was when I read Oryx and Crake, which is a telling sign. However, I remember exactly when I read The Space Merchants by Frederik Pohl – 2009. And I remember thinking that Margaret Atwood lifted themes directly out of that book, only didn’t use them quite as well, so I guess I read Oryx and Crake after that. And I remember being annoyed that Atwood would not admit that the book was a work of science fiction, and that serious people were reading and positively reviewing the book who thought they were too serious for science fiction. Well, I have news – it was science fiction all along, and not only that, it’s cyberpunk. Well, I’ve decided to forgive all this. I can give her the benefit of the doubt, or else I can decide that she was paying homage to an earlier science fiction master and give her credit for that. As I’ve gotten more into science fiction, I’ve seen that done several times, obviously on purpose, and it seems to be acceptable where it might not be acceptable in another genre. So, I’ve decided since then that both books are pretty good after all, and I plan to read the third book.

In The Year of the Flood, there are themes that seem like they are taken right out of The Hunger Games. I found this interview online where Atwood says she has never heard of The Hunger Games, and forgives the author of The Hunger Games for taking her idea.

Have you had a chance to read or see The Hunger Games? The games are designed for the districts to pay back the Capitol for a past rebellion, via the lives of their children, like the heroine Katniss Everdeen. It seems to be inspired in part by elements of The Handmaid’s Tale, Oryx and Crake, and Year of the Flood, especially in terms of the structure of postapocalyptic society, how the disenfranchised are “chosen” for an honor that is anything but …
In kind of a game show? So, basically it’s Painball from Year of the Flood in which people are pitted against other people so other people can watch it on TV? And the origin of that of course is paintball, which is a real thing! It’s always nice to have people see the beauty of one’s ideas. I’m flattered. [Chuckles.] It sounds interesting. Some of these things go way back, mythologically. How did she end up in this position?

Because there’s a lottery, and her sister was chosen, and so she volunteers to take her place.
Shirley Jackson! How old are they?

Between the ages of 11 and 18.
Theseus and the Minotaur! Love it. And so they put these people in a very large area? It’s Painball. Same idea. If you survive, will they let you out?

I don’t want to spoil it too much for you.
That’s okay — I can guess. I haven’t written my third one yet, so whatever’s in it can’t be used in The Hunger Games.

The original Hunger Games novel was released in 2008, and The Year of the Flood in 2009. So it’s plausible that it was a coincidence and I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt again. Anyway, maybe she’s right and there are only a certain number of themes and plots out there, and good fiction is all about how you apply them to your characters and your time.

The MaddAdam books present a near-future dystopian society in a very entertaining way, and I was entertained by that. I don’t think I would be giving away too much if I told you there is a collapse of industrialized, urbanized civilization in this story. You find that out in the first few pages of the first book. Then the rest of the story is really about who, how, and why that happened. The first book focuses more on consumer society and dangerous technology in the hands of amoral – in fact immoral – private corporations, while the second mixes that with a bit of climate change, habitat and species loss.

You find out pretty early what actually caused the collapse, but the more interesting part to me, which Margaret hints at but ultimately leaves to our imaginations, is how the society got to the point it was at before the crash. Any sort of representative government seems to be completely absent, but you don’t get the sense that the corporations muscled it aside through any sort of armed means. Maybe they simply starved it of resources to the point where it gave up. The entire society is designed to accumulate wealth and power at the top, but it is a bit of a puzzle how that works. The corporations themselves create new value through their research into the new technologies, but then they have to make the whole society want to buy those things from them. They have to let just enough wealth trickle down to enough people so they can spend the wealth and let it be gathered back up. So there must be a very, very large number of relatively poor people working hard to support the elite few, without realizing they are doing that. I say relatively poor because they can’t be so poor they decide to drop out of the consumer system entirely (as a few people do, which is the focus of the second book.) They can’t realize how poor they are, and they have to have a little bit of income that they can spend on all the things the corporations provide, which is everything – food, shelter, clothing, drugs, even access to reproduction. They have to believe in money, and want to accumulate money, but they have to want the products and services of the corporations so much that they never actually accumulate much money but spend it all. Of course, the corporations are exploiting not just all these people but the natural environment, so at some point that is either going to catch up to them, unless there is an accident or deliberate act to help the process along first…

Michael Graves’s linear cities

I had forgotten about this idea for long, linear cities laid out along transportation corridors.

It’s interesting. I’m a little skeptical for a few reasons. First, I can imagine it being a cold, corporate world. Who would own the buildings and transportation systems? From my little row house I can walk in many different directions and engage in many different activities on little parcels of land owned or controlled by many different entities. Would this linear city be more like living in a mall, where everything is ultimately controlled by one owner and sanitized for my protection? Also, a line is by definition a one-dimensional world – in a linear city it seems to me like I would have only two choices of direction and that sounds boring. Although the prospect of being close to a natural or agricultural landscape is intriguing. A final concern would be the capacity of the transportation system. As the city keeps getting longer indefinitely, it seems like you might come up against a finite transportation capacity and bottlenecks could develop in the system.

I’m also reminded about a couple works of science fiction, both of which are dystopian. Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash is laid out along “linear cities” that are definitely not cold, corporate, sanitary or mall like (or safe). They are more like trashy interstate truck stops. Paul McAuley’s Invisible Country alludes to enormous “ribbon arcologies” where most people live. They don’t have to work because they have slaves, so apparently they spend most of their time tripping on drugs and virtual reality, and don’t really go out much. So the linear city is an interesting idea, but we need to be a little cautious how it unfolds.

the cyborg moths are finally here!

Well, they’re finally here – the cyborg moth slaves. First it was cockroaches and I didn’t say much because, well, they’re cockroaches. But moths – they’re just one step from butterflies, and it just doesn’t seem like you should do this to butterflies. From butterflies the obvious next step is Paul Mcauley’s cyborg baboon-human hybrids. If you read his book of short stories The Invisible Country, it is not until about the second page that you start to think this sort of technology could raise some ethical issues.

 

California by Edan Lepucki

California: A Novel

Here’s a new entry in the apocalyptic fiction genre: California by Edan Lepucki. I haven’t read the book yet, only a review in the New York Times. Anyway here is what the NYT has to say:

…characters traverse a cross-section of mid-collapse landscape, framed by the gradual decline of civilization. This approach may seem too optimistic given dire news about melting icecaps and acidic oceans, but it does allow for a reading of the novel as satire, skewering the elements of modern life that have brought us to this tipping point…

Perhaps the world as we know it will indeed end this way for many Americans: terrified of porcupines, longing for the sound of S.U.V.s, unable to ­distinguish between an artifact and a keepsake, helped to find temporary sanctuary by the last black man on earth. If it does, we won’t be able to say that “California” didn’t warn us.

There’s also something about a turkey baster. Hmm…I’m not sure this will immediately float to the top of my reading list.