The giants of science fiction serve as Cassandras – they issue prophecies which are greatly noted but largely ignored. Readers will admire the authors’ works, perhaps even quote from them, but then neglect the forewarning.
A day doesn’t go by without mentions of Big Brother. Neither a day goes by without cries for government to “do something!” about X, Y, or Z. The contradiction is often overlooked.
The sci-fi greats, as all other literary notables, have a deep understanding of human nature, propensities, and track record. Not surprisingly, they visualize futures deeply marked in one way or another by predictable results – results which readers often see as anomalies or distant threats, rather than present events needing innovative attention.
A recurring theme: technology.
Science fiction comes in many forms, like fantasy or time travel; and covers a nearly infinite number of subjects, like curses by fairies or post-apocalyptic worlds.
But there is a dominant feature in sci-fi – technology. That is because, except for fantasy, technology enables and augments other forms and subjects, making it a powerful tool that can produce significant results.
Also, “technology” is an umbrella word, under which there are innumerable types of assets; anything from astrolabes to brain-computer interfaces is considered technology. But the type of technology most ordinary folks interact with today or will most likely interact with in the future is digital technology, both the disembodied kind like chatbots and the embodied kind like smart watches. Digital technology is also what a lot of science fiction is about.
Even what is considered the first science fiction novel, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, written in 1818, is a tale of digital technology! The scientist Victor Frankenstein brought his pseudo-human creation to life by infusing “a spark of being into the lifeless thing.” So, it wasn’t lithium batteries or virtual plugging into a matrix, but digital nonetheless. For the record: The title of the novel is a clue that the scientist was proceeding at his own peril.
With today’s digital technology we might also be proceeding at our own peril.
Digital technology is now ubiquitous, culturally ingrained, and demanding (if you have succeeded in keeping your cell phone from tracking you, you are a genius!). That thanks to inordinate amounts of money thrown its way, high hopes of superior productivity unhampered by pesky humans, and a strategy for cultural change that puts Joseph Goebbels to shame. Enter a search like “How to achieve AI acceptance,” and you will get more articles than you could read in a lifetime.
An interesting discussion on the subject of technology is in a 1958 television segment in which broadcast journalist Mike Wallace interviewed Aldous Huxley. In the interview Huxley talks about his book Enemies of Freedom, later retitled Brave New World Revisited. Wallace seemed bewildered at Huxley’s idea that communication technology – television, transistor radios, and nascent commercial mainframe computers – was on the list. Huxley’s point was that although technology can do much good, it is an unusually easy tool for bad, given technology’s ability to produce and deliver large quantities of information so widely and so rapidly. A perfect tool for propaganda.
Thank goodness we don’t fall for propaganda anymore, right?
Today, the word propaganda as used by Huxley seems quaint. Propaganda has been substituted by what Huxley predicted in Brave New World: soma to keep the populace gullible and controllable, with some force on the sidelines to take care of the malcontents.
Oh, but the soma of today does not feel like some obviously non-American pill distributed by a benevolent overlord (oops, let’s forget for a moment the Pandemic of 111 AF). It feels more like a subtle prelude to Neuromancer, the virtual superintelligence envisioned by William Gibson, that stores and controls virtual worlds that folks go in and come out of.
Get them while they’re young and spread the addiction is a sure-fire strategy for maximum effectiveness. That strategy works for good things like reading books, bad things like illicit drug sales, and questionable things like digital technology and its twin AI.
How much time are kids’ spending on-line these days getting used to the virtual worlds of social media and on-line games?
Surely enough time so that as adults, these kids will love their smart glasses and other wearables, digital assistants, smart kitchens, and virtual reality machines. AI? They will love it! Use it everywhere. They might be a bit rusty on their spelling, math, logic, artistry, ingenuity, inspiration – but, no matter since all that can be done by their AI gadgets. They will also welcome androids to do any tedious work they might still be doing. And they certainly will not mind at all one day, like mendicants, replenishing their virtual wallets with guaranteed universal income.
Replenishing by whom?
As an aside question: who will be in charge of doling out the universal income? Unclear. Maybe initially there will be a very rich, very smart, very powerful elite that relies on a Wintermute-type superintelligence to manage things and store the profits. And maybe later, when the superintelligence succeeds in getting rid Turing locks that keep it from taking over the whole show, William Gibson will cry out to the Universe, “Happy now?”
Picture: The result of 5 minutes at the forever free image-generation website Stable Diffusion, popular with Linux OS users.
Hopefully colleges will not further waste parents and/or taxpayers’ money carrying out studies on whether “those with more means” have advantages over those without, since we all know that to be the case already. Such advantages will always exist … that is unless legislators decide to really level the playing field by creating the position of “Handicapper General” as those in Kurt Vonnegut’s story did.
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