Filed under: Augmented Reality, General Musings, Government, Guns, Iraq, movies, NPR, Predictions, Press, RFID, Science Fiction, Society, tech, Writing stuff
A story this morning on Weekend Edition – Saturday about the military’s efforts to recover lost or captured soldiers in Iraq brought up the topic of “tagging” our people with some kind of tracking device. Retired Marine Lt. Col. Gary Anderson was somewhat critical of the current Pentagon leadership that such an application of technology hadn’t been put into more widespread use yet.
His reaction is understandable. The idea of tracking devices of one sort or another has been extremely popular in fiction (everything from spy novels to SF) for decades, and we now have a widespread tech which could be fairly easily adapted for such use: Radio Frequency Identification, or RFID for short. Combine this with the already extant use of battlefield electronics, it should be possible to increase the range of such passive devices without sacrificing size and concealability, allowing for hiding such tags in clothing or even within the body of the soldier. Certainly, this would seem to fit with the current mindset of the military, and would fill the gap until current military tech evolves to have an ‘information-integrated force’ such as I stipulate for Communion.
[Mild spoiler alert.]
In Communion, I apply the tech of the period to have the soldiers ‘wired’ with an array of information-sharing devices, analogous to the type of integrated ‘cyberware’ used by the general population. For military applications, though, the tech is more robust, a little more cutting edge, a bit further advanced in application, to the point of even having “smart guns” which would only function for those using the correct encryption key. This does play a minor part in the plot development at several junctures, and assumes that at all times anyone can be tracked fairly easily.
Anyway, the idea of tagging our people in that kind of war environement seems to be a no-brainer to me. Yeah, there are privacy issues to be concerned with for the use of such tagging in civilian life, but that is much less an issue for someone in the military. I expect we’ll see it implemented across the board in the near future…the first step into my predictions about in-body cyberware.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, Diane Rehm, Flu, General Musings, Genetic Testing, Pandemic, Predictions, Reproduction, Science Fiction, Society, tech, Writing stuff
There was a very interesting segment on the Diane Rehm show this morning about how reproductive science has advanced considerably in the last few decades, and the impact that is having on both individuals and society. In the course of the discussion, the participants touched on a number of issues both of interest to me personally, and pertaining to Communion of Dreams.
In this post in March, I discussed the genetic disease which runs in my family, and how that helped inform my decision not to have children. At the time I entered the normal child-rearing years, the appropriate testing wasn’t available. Now it is. And while I could still make the decision to have children, my wife and I are content without those additional responsibilities.
Anyway, in the course of the discussion on Diane Rehm’s show, there was mention of the fact that couples seeking IVF treatment have the option to perform genetic testing on the individual embryos produced by the procedure, and could then select which embryos to have implanted with the hope that they would quicken and grow. Huxley’s Brave New World is potentially here with this level of scrutiny and selection.
So, what about Communion? In it, I stipulate a history of a pandemic influenza, which kills hundreds of millions, and leaves most of the surviving population sterile. But here I left off from my usual attention to scientific detail, in not specifying exactly what the mechanism in effect was. Because, knowing full well the potential that modern medical science has to offer, I thought it might be a simple answer to just have non-sterile couples producing lots of viable embryos using current IVF tech, and then have those embryos implanted in host mothers, thereby circumventing the threat of human extinction. Like the parents who can now pick and choose which embryo has the greatest potential for survival, I made my own selection of what plot mechanisms were most viable. (Please note, I am not trying to equate the two!)
This is something that all writers have to do: make decisions on what to include, what to exclude. Science fiction writers have to do more of it, since in theory you can decided to invent just about any new technology or science to suit your purpose. But for me, I try to establish a given technological level, and see what makes sense within those constraints. According to most who have read the book and responded to me (either in person or in comments here), I did a pretty fair job in resolving most of the issues. But I know that in this particular case, I pulled a little sleight of hand, and my own sense of honesty pushes me to acknowledge it.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Reality, Expert systems, General Musings, Predictions, Science Fiction, Society, tech, Writing stuff
Sheesh.
So, I was reading one of my fav online comics today (Dinosaur Comics), and came across a term I wasn’t familiar with, even through I describe it and use it extensively in Communion of Dreams. The term? Augmented Reality.
I posit that the use of expert systems and the integration of computing applications will become so widespread by the time of the novel (2052) that there will be a fairly seemless overlay of additional information on everyday reality for anyone who wants it. In fact, this plays a rather important role in the plot development, and ties in with my vision of what will necessarily delineate the divergent tracks between human intelligence and true Artificial Intelligence (see yesterday’s post).
But I didn’t know that it had a common term. *sigh* I am so out of it sometimes…
Jim Downey
Filed under: Artificial Intelligence, BoingBoing, Cory Doctorow, Expert systems, Feedback, Predictions, Ray Kurzweil, Science Fiction, Singularity, Singularity Institute, Society, tech, Writing stuff
A good friend of mine, who is a big science fiction fan, read an early version of Communion of Dreams and loved it, providing me some valuable feedback and support. And he was *really* excited when he heard that I was going to write more in the same ‘universe’ as the book, wanting to know what happens after the events portrayed in Communion. When I told him that I would be working on a prequel to the book rather than a sequel, he was disappointed. “But I wanted to know what happens after the Singularity!” he protested.
[Mild Spoiler Alert]
As you are probably aware, the notion of a technological Singularity occuring, when we create the first true artificial intelligence which is superior to human intelligence, has been a popular one in SF for some time, and actually took on the term Singularity following coinage (I think) by Vernor Vinge. In many ways, Communion of Dreams is my take on that moment when humankind crosses this threshhold, embodied in the character of Seth, the expert system who makes this transition.
The folks over at the Singularity Institute are working towards this goal, and wanting to help us prepare for it. Cory Doctorow has a brief blog entry up at BoingBoing this morning about his experience speaking at the Singularity Summit hosted by Ray Kurzweil at Stanford last year, along with links to some vids of that event now hosted at the Institute. It is worth a look.
I am intrigued by the notion of a technological Singularity, but think that it is fundamentally impossible for us to know what happens after such an event has matured. Oh, sure, there’s good reason to speculate, and it is rich and fertile ground for planting ideas as an author, but…
…but I think that in many ways, leaving Communion as the end-point perhaps makes the most sense. It is analogous to ending a book with the death of the character from whom everything is presented as a first-person account. Because just as we do not know what happens after death, we do not know what happens after an event such as a technological Singularity. For, in some very real ways, the same kind of transcendence will take place.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Artificial Intelligence, General Musings, movies, NYT, Philip K. Dick, Predictions, Press, Science Fiction, Society, Writing stuff
There’s a pretty good article about Philip K. Dick in yesterday’s New York Times. Odd man. Fine author. Source of a lot of my musings on the subjects of society, artificial intelligence, the human condition – not things I would necessarily point to as being inspirational, but definitely a big part of the mix of attitudes I developed from a premature exposure to lots of science fiction as a kid. As an adult, I came to appreciate more his writing for what it was – inspired, drug-fueled, more than a little scary around the edges.
And as a writer I completely understand his desire for more ‘legitimacy’ – something to which many of us who work in the nebulous genre of SF share, I think. From the NYT piece:
So it’s hard to know what Mr. Dick, who died in 1982 at the age of 53, would have made of the fact that this month he has arrived at the pinnacle of literary respectability. Four of his novels from the 1960s — “The Man in the High Castle,” “The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch,” “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” and “Ubik” — are being reissued by the Library of America in that now-classic Hall of Fame format: full cloth binding, tasseled bookmark, acid-free, Bible-thin paper. He might be pleased, or he might demand to know why his 40-odd other books weren’t so honored.
Take a moment, read the article. And if you haven’t had a chance to do so, dive into some of Dick’s work. It may now be gaining some ‘respectability’, but that’s no reason to avoid it.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Flu, Government, Health, Pandemic, Predictions, Press, Science Fiction, Society, tech, Writing stuff
[Mild spoiler alert.]
Pandemic flu is at the heart of my novel Communion of Dreams. It is the ‘history’ of the novel, which has shaped the society of 2052 (the setting of the book). And it turns out to be the threat faced by the characters again in the latter third of the book. I won’t go into further detail, in case you haven’t read the book and would like to see how that all plays out.
When I first started formulating the novel, I immediately turned to the model of the 1918 flu pandemic to give me some idea of how I had to cope with the impacts that a renewed pandemic would have on our society. Since then, there have been additional pandemic scares crop up which have allowed me to see new aspects of this (and which, I am convinced, would make the book potentially a best seller, if it was allowed to escape the ‘sci-fi ghetto’). Why? Because pretty much everyone is slowly becoming convinced that we’re due for another pandemic, perhaps a really bad one.
And that fear has public-health officials nervous. Because they know that managing fear during a pandemic will be difficult. One example of this is the current research into whether conventional face masks would be effective or counter-productive in the event of a flu epidemic, and the recently announced guidelines from the CDC about who should wear masks, when.
While I worked in an abulatory surgical center during grad school, I had to wear a surgical mask at all times. You get used to it. And it does help control certain behaviours which can lead to the spread of disease (sneezing, absent-mindedly touching your nose or mouth, et cetera). But masks are not a panacea, and if used improperly or with a false sense of the protection they provide, could actually make matters worse on a societal scale.
It’ll be interesting, from an intellectual standpoint, to see how this plays out. Because I do expect a pandemic flu ‘event’ to happen within my lifetime. Not that I particularly want to actually have to experience it, mind. Mostly, I just hope that I have my book published before it hits, so people don’t think that I am just playing off of the fear and grief of recent history…
Jim Downey
Filed under: Artificial Intelligence, Expert systems, General Musings, Predictions, Press, Science Fiction, Society, tech, Writing stuff
So, it seems that we’re taking another step into the development of the types of “experts” (expert systems) that I envision for Communion: today Reuters news service is launching an automated stock-trading algorythm which will scan news articles and make stock purchasing decisions for clients. From Yahoo! Finance:
Reuters Group PLC plans to launch a computer program today aimed at hedge fund and bank trading desk clients that are already Reuters subscribers. The program is unique in that it scans news articles, originally just from Reuters’s own news service but eventually from other news services too, and measures whether companies are getting positive or negative news coverage. The program will then trigger stock trades based on the algorithmic computations it makes. In addition to tracking individual company names, the program can track entire industries or exchanges, ideal for ETF plays.
Is this Seth’s great-great-whatever- grandpappy?
Jim Downey
Filed under: General Musings, Predictions, Science Fiction, Society, Space, tech, Writing stuff
Wow. It may not seem like it, but the universe just changed.
No, this doesn’t mean that there is life elsewhere other than our little rock. Let alone intelligent life. But make no mistake – this is something of a milestone.
Welcome 581 c. Welcome to the history books.
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to UTI.)
Filed under: Constitution, General Musings, Government, Predictions, Science Fiction, Society, Writing stuff
Writing in today’s Guardian, Naomi Wolf has a fascinating and frightening piece about the current arc of fascism in America, in which she outlines the 10 common steps taken by those who wish to move an open/democratic society to a closed/fascist one. Go read it. If you’ve been paying attention to the country over the last decade, it’ll scare the hell out of you.
There are so many ways that a society such as ours can fall prey to totalitarianism, or just fall apart. Another major terrorist attack would probably do it. So would a pandemic, collapse of the oil markets (precipitated by anything from civil unrest in Saudi Arabia to war with Iran), global warming, et cetera et cetera. If you’ve read Communion, you know that I base the “history” of that book on the chaos caused by a flu pandemic. For reasons of my own, I use that particular device because it serves a purpose with the plot. But I could have almost as easily come up with another mechanism by which our society collapses.
Science fiction is all about making reasonable predictions about what may happen, and how people will then react to the situation.
Unfortunately with real life, there are so many unreasonable things that will happen, and we have to live with the results rather than just read about them.
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 