Dire warnings - and hope - from science fiction

Posting just before the U.S. Thanksgiving Holiday - my favorite - let's step back for some big perspective.

For starters: the Planetary Society proposes that space brings us together! So if you're expecting to gather with extended family on Thanksgiving, avoid politics. TPS offers conversation starters about space. Like Monday's Mars landing! Or the search for life out there. How to stop an Earth-aimed asteroid! The arrival of space tourism for the rich. Earth sensing finding the truth about the Arctic and... oops, some things do circle back to politics. Like our outward, exploring spirit. And facts.

You’ll enjoy and be edified by Eliot Peper’s passionate and fascinating interview with journalist and science fiction maven Annalee Newitz about her new novel “Autonomous,” which explores how intellectual property and dominant corporations might (if we’re not careful) lead to coercive oppression and quashed innovation in the future. It’s a vital topic. Both Intellectual Property (IP) trolls and corporate-rights fanatics have taken important enlightenment-pragmatic innovations and turned them into fundamentalist excuses for oligarchy. 

As fitting and proper in a dire-warning tale, Annalee portrays these trends getting worse in the future, with both organic and AI beings suffering effective slavery.

Today we see innovative creations thwarted or forbidden or hidden away — from screenplays to medicines to spare parts that would let you repair your own tractor. Generic drugs get unscrupulously blocked and rapacious giants like Monsanto persecute farmers for accidentally growing wind-blown seeds. This could all get much worse as synthetic agents like AI or blockchain programs start developing their own needs or else exist as wholly-owned sepoys of controlling corporations.

Warnings like Annalee's are apropos and needed. Still, I have yet to see any of the modern jeremiads against “IP-abuse” delve into why our enlightenment experiment created and fostered these things — patents, copyrights and corporations — in the first place. 

Yes, rapacious exploiters have found ways to use patents etc. against innovation and competition. But that masks the reason that copyrights and patents were created in the first place ... in order to foster those good things! (I have a chapter about this in The Transparent Society.)

Ponder the tragic comedy of errors called “human history.” Sure, most of the calamities were wrought by one thing -- stupid governance by feudalism . But there were some other dampers on freedom and progress. 

One was simple human self-interest. If you invented something – say a new plow or better glass – there was only one way for you and your children to profit from the new technology… if you kept it secret.

Consider how many techs we once had, then lost, across 6000 years. Clear glass. The Baghdad battery. Forceps. Damascus steel. Antekythera devices, suggesting there were geared clocks and sophisticated computer-calculators. The steam machinery of Heron of Alexandria. All vanished because someone died, or forgot the recipe, or some invading army killed the two sons who knew the secret.

Patents were designed to solve this by luring inventors and inventions out of the shadows, bribing innovators with a reliable income stream so they would feel an incentive to immediately share their breakthroughs, rather than hide them. And then the miracle would happen. Someone across town would swiftly make an improvement and patent that… and we were off. (See my posting: Considering Copyright - and Patents.)

Sure, over time, shyster lawyers found ways to twist the meaning of this reform in directions never intended, perverting it into a methodology for cheating, parasitism and innovation suppression. So? Please dig the real lesson. Cheating… will… always… happen. That kind of human will always be with us. And correcting such parasitic maneuvers is what politics is supposed to be for.

Which is why politics itself -- as a mature methodology for discussing problems and adults negotiating solutions – had to be killed, starting with the “Hastert Rule” and diving into Murdochism. Indeed, liberals aren't fault-free!  Because they let these perversions of the IP reform turn them away from remembering what IP was originally for. Instead of seeking to correct the perversions, the standard dogma is to toss it all. Both bathwater and baby.

None of which is said in order to turn you away from Automonous, by Annalee Newitz! Her thought experiment is excellent and insightful…

…as is a vivid novel by Karl Schroeder, soon to be offered for pre-sale: “Stealing Worlds,”  which portrays a tomorrow  fully as dark as Annalee’s, for many of the same reasons. It’s a hacker/cyberpunk novel set in a future dominated by dark corporations and even darker rogue algorithms, only with some twists informed by Karl’s expertise in the new world of blockchain coinage and contracts.

Yes, I differ with both authors over where we may be heading – I don’t deem their described failure-mode paths to be highly plausible. (How do you have ever-rising automated production of ever-cheaper and even home-printable goods coincide with massive, super-depression poverty, in which no one can afford to buy anything and revolution simmers around the corner, empowered by spectacularly democratized means of destruction? 

Such a future would have to entail mass bribery of the lower orders and quelling them with pleasure – Huxleyan rather than Orwellian despotism. There are several possible attractor states  -- many of them unattractive -- that such a society may drift toward -- feudal fealty pyramids, revolution, intelligent-though-uncompassionate social contracts – but none of them plausibly combine vast-cheap production with simmering-resentful world-slums, as enticing as those seem for a fiction author.

Still, these are great reads! Moreover, it’s kinda flattering how both novels wind up delivering an ultimate plot resolution similar to the one I came up with, in EARTH (1989) -- a democratized transcendence that replies to the monolithic saviors offered earlier, by the likes of Asimov and Clarke!

Indeed, it is the sort of literal, plausible deus ex machine that might offer our best hope for a soft-landing, amid this ongoing good-and-bad singularity.

== Other explorations of SF ==

Here's as essay on "What is SF" by I guy I've long known. He tries to parse Science fiction as science fiction.

As you know, I prefer "Speculative History," since science does not have to be central to our stories, but change is.  (I've long believed fantasy is about static social structures - generally feudal/demigod - and SF is drawn to thought experiments about how things might be shaken into new forms.)

This essay is more focused, peeking at speculative fiction books set on single-gender planets. An interesting sampler that includes my Glory Season, tangentially. Of course there are many left out. The most important would be Philip Wylie’s 1950s novel The Disappearance in which women-only and men-only worlds both exist in parallel (as the title suggests, separation is sudden), and the overall lesson is surprisingly advanced for the era when it was written.  

The biggest sub-genre that is not alluded-to is the SF’nal world where one gender is so marginalized that it might as well be cattle. In that sub-genre, there are as many angry feminist authors as callously contemptuous male ones.  

== And more fecundity!  ==

Ray Kurzweil's first novel, Danielle: Chronicles of a Superheroine, tells the story of a remarkable girl who, with her super-intelligence and smart technologies, plus help from her friends — solves some of the world’s largest challenges: curing cancer, brokering peace in the middle east, and providing clean water to millions in Africa. And she does it all before her 16th birthday. 

2001: An Odyssey in Words: Celebrating the Centenary of Arthur C. Clarke’s Birth, is an anthology edited by Ian Whates and Tom Hunter, with fiction by Alastair Reynolds, Bruce Sterling, Neil Gaiman, China Mieville, Becky Chambers, Chris Beckett and others, with each story exactly 2001 words in length.

Unfit: a new sci fi magazine worth a look… they aim to explore some kinda surreal stuff… like my own “The Crystal Spheres.”

For a little optimism, and some online vividness, see Seat 14c, a  shared anthology sposored by ANA Airlines, in which one of their 2017 flights winds up in the year 2037. Fun from some of the best writers in the genre.

Here's a fun rundown of novels that play mind games with reality, in the spirit of the recent Nexflix show MANIAC.

And an interesting historical document. A 1964 Playboy interview with Asimov, Pohl, Anderson, Serling, Budrys, Clarke, Sturgeon, Blish, Heinlein… Dang they could and should have then included Judith Merrill, C.L. Moore, and Leigh Brackett, but still, kinda fascinating. Naturally, where they were on-target, you feel a sense of awe.  As you’ll wince at some myopia and failure to see what should have been obvious. And well, there's an unfortunate cartoon. But hey, we’ve made progress!

Children of Time – the sci-fi novel by author Adrian Tchaikovsky that won the Arthur Clarke Award, portrays what may be the last humans attempting to colonize a world already occupied by sapient spiders who had been uplifted by humans with good taste in ship names. And Lionsgate films is in pre-production. It could be great! (The novel sure is.) So here’s hoping.

And finally an important endeavor in civics education by the creator of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comix.  

Considering Copyright

"Current copyright law does not merely distort some markets -- rather it destroys entire markets." 

--So reads the final line of a report released by the Republican Study Committee of the House of Representatives that is highly critical of current copyright law.

Are Patents and copyrights Inherently Evil?

The report points accurately to many of the flaws that have crept into modern copyright.  Including the absolutely false notion that Intellectual Property is -- or ever  was -- about what the content creators “deserve” or are “entitled to” by virtue of their creation. Or that the purpose of copyright is to benefit the creator. Rather, the purpose of copyright is to benefit the public: to  “promote the progress of science and useful arts.”

Ars Technica heaps further praise: "The memo, titled 'Three Myths about Copyright Law and Where to Start to Fix it,' is a direct assault on the relentlessly pro-copyright worldview dominating Washington for decades." 

It is certainly worthwhile to go visit these two linked articles and see what the fuss is about...

... before pausing, taking a step back, and lamenting that even the Good Guys in this controversy proudly display shallow thinking while smugly proclaiming themselves to be wise.

To be clear, I pay college bills for my kids out of my copyrights and patents.  Nevertheless, I am philosophically willing to posit that people should not and cannot inherently "own" ideas or knowledge in any fundamental way, even if they created it in the first place. They have interests, some rights. But those are more constrained.

Moreover, let me further avow that IP law has become a warped thing, twisted by lobbyists to serve the interests of mighty corporations and not the public or progress. All of the complaints cited in the articles have valid points that should be addressed. And yes, the chief villains are those who would use "ownership" to make "intellectual property" serve lawyers and oligarchs, rather than creative people.

Still, I am unsympathetic to those who righteously demand the very opposite, tearing down all copyrights and patents, under the proclaimed theory that we would then automatically enter some sort of Open Source Nirvana.  An Age of Aquarius and infinite sharing and endless voluntary creativity.

Yipe!  I lived through that sort of talk in the 1960s.  And what species do these fellows think they are part of? Elsewhere I have repeatedly proved that I am a friend to the Maker and Open Source movements! But please, don't make it religious dogma. We are practical men and women, with practical problems to solve.

I come close to despair over how proudly ignorant all the righteous people are (right or left, techie or troglodyte) about actual human history. For example, have you ever heard of the Antikythera Device?  The Baghdad Battery?  The fabulous piston steam engines of Hero of Alexandria?  Our ancestors were creative people! Yet, all of those technological advances and a myriad others were lost!  Why?

Until you can answer that question clearly, you will never grasp why patents and copyrights were invented in the first place.  And you should always understand the thing that you want to replace.

Put yourself into the shoes of an inventor or innovator in 99% of human cultures. Unless you found a patron in the king, you had only one way to benefit from your innovation -- by keeping it secret! By scribbling your designs in cryptic verse and murky code, in just one carefully guarded grimoire, in a hidden attic.  Under a floorboard. Only then could you keep customers flocking to you... till the clever blacksmith in the next town reverse engineered your improvement and started competing with you.

Self-interested secrecy was the failure mode that ruined human progress for at least ten thousand years, keeping the process clogged and slow.

And when you and your son died in a plague or fire? Or when the town was pillaged... what happened then to your invention? Do you get the picture?  Secrecy slows things down, and very often means that advances are simply lost. And yes, this resonates with The Transparent Society - should you be surprised?  

A way had to be found that would lure inventors out into the open, eager to announce, avow and declare their innovations!  While pondering how to fix the flaws in Intellectual Property, we are fools if we don't consider how much better things got, when it was invented.

Go.  Read history. Hold conversations with Ben Franklin in your mind. Maybe even read The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?. Understand the actual problem. Then, instead of railing at us quasi-religious incantations like "information wants to be free" come up with another way to keep creative people shouting "look what I just came up with!"  Instead of slumping back into the old ways that stifled innovation for 10,000 years.

Then we can talk about a replacement solution, admitting that it is time for patents and copyrights to give way, gradually, to another innovation. 

Another invention.

See also: People Who Don't 'Get' Transparency and Zero Sum Games

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LATE ADDENDUM: Were you surprised the sensible call for copyright reform cam from the GOP's Congressional staff?  Well relax.  You haven't plopped into a parallel universe where the Republican Party is run by adults.  You are still at home in this cosmos. 

"The Republican Study Committee, a caucus of Republicans in the House of Representatives, has told staffer Derek Khanna that he will be out of a job when Congress re-convenes in January. The incoming chairman of the RSC, Steve Scalise (R-LA) was approached by several Republican members of Congress who were upset about a memo Khanna wrote advocating reform of copyright law."  Ah, the world is as it was.

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* After-note for authors! If you sold rights to your copyrighted works after 1978, you should be aware that based on Section 203 of the 1978 Copyright Act,  authors may cut away any contract after 35 years. It happens that my own very first book contract (Sundiver) was signed in the year... 1978... and is coming due for such a release or renewal right about... now.) It is still a world where you're well-advised to keep informed. Now go and be creative.

A Threat to the Internet as We Know It

A United Nations summit has adopted confidential recommendations proposed by China that will help network providers target BitTorrent uploaders, detect trading of copyrighted MP3 files, and, critics say, accelerate Internet censorship in repressive nations. Approval by the U.N.'s International Telecommunications Union came despite objections from Germany, which warned the organization must "not standardize any technical means that would increase the exercise of control over telecommunications content, could be used to empower any censorship of content, or could impede the free flow of information and ideas."

Internet activists are warning that this month’s meeting of the International Telecommunications Union, a United Nations body charged with overseeing global communications, may have significant and potentially disastrous consequences for everyday Internet users. Some of the proposals for the closed door (though leaky) meeting could allow governments more power to clamp down on Internet access or tax international traffic, either of which are anathema to the idea of a free, open and international Internet. Other proposals would move some responsibility for Internet governance to the United Nations.  Things could get scary. Rule changes are supposed to pass by consensus, but majorities matter and can you imagine the internet run by majority rule in the UN?  Not by the world's people, but by the elite rulers of a majority of bordered nations?

To be plain, I consider one of the watershed moments of human history to be a period in the late 1980s and early 1990s when powerful men in the United States of America chose a course of action that, in retrospect, seems completely uncharacteristic of powerful men... letting go of power.  I know some of those -- for example Mike Nelson, now with Bloomberg Government -- who served on staff of the committee under then Senator Al Gore, drafting what became the greatest act of deregulation in history: essentially handing an expensively developed new invention and technology, the Internet, to the world.  Saying: "Here you all go. Unfettered and with only the slenderest of remaining tethers to the government that made it. Now make of it what you will."

And oh, what we've made of it! You, me, us... a billion other "usses" around the world. Mind you, there are many ways that I think the design can and must be improved, e.g. in order to enhance the effectiveness of argument.  Still the Internet has become a spectacular thing -- the nexus of our rising human intelligence. What could have been a system wrought for the purposes of control (and there were plans afoot to do exactly that) was instead unleashed to become the chaotic and problematic but utterly beautiful thing that empowered private individuals across the globe.  Gore and Nelson and the other visionaries (assisted in the House  by then-Congressmen Newt Gingrich and George Brown, in bipartisan-futurist consensus) proved to have been right. And, by the way, elsewhere I discuss how -- in the struggle between underlying planetary memes - this was also the savvy thing to do.

Yet, it seems that now we're at a turning point. The world's powers, especially  kleptocratic elites in developing nations where middle class expectations are rising fast enough to threaten pinnacle styles of power, have seen what the Internet can do to all illusions of fierce, top-down control, fostering one "spring" after another.  Responding to reflexes inherited from 10,000 years of oligarchy they seize excuses to clamp down and protect national "sovereignty."

I am reminded of how the film and music and software industries, dismayed by the ease with which people could copy magnetic media, sought desperately for ways to regain control.  As you will see (in my next posting) I am not completely without sympathy for copyright holders! But those industries went beyond just chasing down the worst thieves, or fostering a switch away from magnetic media. They forced hardware makers to deliberately make our DVD players and computers cranky, fussy, often unusable, even when we weren't copying a darned thing!  Capitalism failed and consumers were robbed of choice, leaving us with products that were in many ways worse than before.

And yes, that is what will happen to the Internet. Not just a betrayal of freedom and creativity, but a loss of so many aspects that we now rely upon as cool, as useful and flexible. As our inherent right.

Nor is the threat only from one direction.  As Mike Nelson just commented: "while everyone is fixated on the UN meeting in Dubai, nations are taking independent actions that could have chilling effects.  It is not just the Great Firewall of China and Iran setting up its own easy-to-censor Iranian intranet.  It includes Australian efforts to block certain types of content, the French three-strikes-and-you're-out law, Korea's effort to prohibit anonymity online, and Russia's new Internet law." Worth noting, as an aside; some of these endeavors are being propelled not by brutal dictatorships, but by political correctness on the left. The all-too human impulse for control is ecumenical.

Few know the story of the way the Internet was set free... as, by a miracle, it was indeed freed, for a while. (In my latest novel we ponder: might this have been the fluke opening the way for us - and possibly only us - to take to the stars?)

But no generation can be forgiven for relying excessively on the miracles wrought by the previous one. It is our job to keep the Enlightenment filled with light... by crafting miracles of our own.

Read more at  the Internet Society Web site about the UN conference that is deliberating on these issues, as we speak. Urge the U.S. and its allies to - ironically - exert enough control to keep the Internet uncontrolled. And develop a taste for that thing.  Irony.

* Next time, a related matter. Is intellectual property (patents and copyrights) evil?

On Copyright, Royalties, and The New Economy

I will string out my wonderfully cogent and insightful gerrymandering piece, alternating it with postings of misc interesting items.

One note, though... may I ask you please feel free to mention even misspellings in comments! This is one reason I post drafts! Tweaking before publication in other places. CITOKATE, right?

=On Copyright and Google=

Google Takes On Copyright Laws -- (Wired -- September 19, 2005)  With Google's book-scanning program set to resume in earnest this fall, copyright laws that long preceded the internet look to be headed for a digital-age test. The outcome could determine how easy it will be for people with internet access to benefit from knowledge that's now mostly locked up -- in books sitting on dusty library shelves, many of them out of print.

I am less worried than some, about mass availability of literature. iTunes shows that I was right in The Transparent Society. Decent people will pay what seems fair.

Still, my personal bugaboo is works of copyrighted material that are kept SECRET by the copyright holders. This is not what patent and copyright law were for! They were set up as bribes to lure creative people into the open! Judges who supported Scientology, for example, in prosecuting people who shared Church of Scientology documents, were simply clueless. Those data thieves needed to be fined to compensate the CoS for the real damage in LOST ROYALTY INCOME that those pirated versions took away from normal sales. (Hint: normal sales were zero, because of secrecy. But that is none of the law’s business.)

But this does not piss me off as much as the deliberate imprisonment by MOVIE STUDIOS of something like 10,000 screenplays! Every year studios commission these as works-for-hire or buy rights outright. Fine The writer gets good money. But then the soul-killing thing happens. Only a few scripts get filmed. The others? (And other DRAFTS?) These get sealed away in armored rooms, never to see light again. If the writer so much as circulates a few private copies? Whammo!

More than 10,000 works of art (many awful, of course, but some possibly gems) have been locked away this way. A crime against literature! I favor a law, allowing screen writers to at least post their scripts AS STORIES.

Who knows? Maybe groundswell opinion would even convince studios they have untapped wealth and a few might even be filmed.

One thing, I would love to be able to post-compare three Postman scripts. Eric Roth’s original horrid, nasty evil piece of doggy doo... vs Brian Helgeland’s filmed version, which was pretty good in places, though uneven and faltering in the end (probably not his fault)... vs one that I wrote, that has been seen by only a dozen people on Earth. Sigh. I bet mine would win any blind taste test.

= The New Economy=

In a new article, PPI’s Rob Atkinson writes that its time for a new approach to addressing growing income inequality. The chapter appears in a new volume The New Egalitarianism edited by Anthony Giddens and Patrick Diamond (Polity Press, June 2005).

Atkinson writes that while the New Economy has brought renewed growth and dynamism, it has also brought a disturbing increase in economic inequality. Compared to the prior war mass production economy that provided a comparatively egalitarian labor market in which there was robust growth, widely shared, today the U.S., and a number of other advanced economies, enjoy growth, unevenly shared.

Where tens of millions of poor and working families, even ones without much education, were propelled into the ranks of the middle class in the old economy, today we are creating relatively few middle class jobs. Where President John Kennedy could confidently proclaim, ‘A rising tide lifts all boats’, today a rising tide lifts the yachts much higher than the dinghies. Where a confident welfare state ‘leaned into the wind’ of the remaining income inequality with tax, spending and regulatory policies, today’s conservative policies make existing inequalities worse.

If we are to develop a third way on income inequality it will have to be based in the recognition that the New Economy has brought about fundamental new realities that can’t be ignored or reversed. It will require new kinds of pro-competition, pro-innovation policies that foster both greater growth and egalitarianism. But it will also require embracing policies such as more progressive taxation, better skills training efforts, and labor law rules that level the playing field for workers engaging in collective bargaining.

In short, we need an agenda that takes both growth and progressiveness seriously. View the article on the PPI website.

=See this op-ed by Peggy Noonan  It fits right in with what we've been saying about how Katrina illustrates the “war” between citizens and their paid protectors. Yes, it isn’t as good as if your favorite author had a better soapbox...

=The Election Assistance Commission (EAC) released the results of a national study of election practices. Created in the wake of the 2000 presidential election, the commission is charged with improving how elections are run.

= Charged with Murder, Connected to Abramoff Two of three men charged with the mob style hit of a businessman a few months after he sold a fleet of casino boats to Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff were ordered held without bond Wednesday.

=The Republican Money Machine: The Hammer Falls  It isn't just Tom DeLay. The vast corrupt money machine that funded the Republican Revolution is exploding before our eyes.

=Solar Minimum Explodes -- (NASA -- September 19, 2005)  On Sept. 7th, a huge sunspot rounded the sun's eastern limb. As soon as it appeared, it exploded, producing one of the brightest x-ray solar flares of the Space Age. In the days that followed, the growing spot exploded eight more times. Each powerful "X-flare" caused a shortwave radio blackout on Earth and pumped new energy into a radiation storm around our planet. The blasts hurled magnetic clouds toward Earth, and when they hit, on Sept 10th and 11th, ruby-red auroras were seen as far south as Arizona.
Dang! I guess they were right about Global Warming... ;-)

And finally...As for my web site http://www.davidbrin.com/ I get a lot of overtures offering to make it “updated” or more similar to everything else out there that follows collective wisdom. Simplicity rules! Go with simple and large graphics! Lots of open space and big type! Be easy on the eye! To which I reply Bah! (sorry ;-) I WANT to be different. I want it clear that this is a place that is SUPER content-rich! You could have a 27” screen and still the menus only begin. I want the range of fun to be clear to the eye, even if you have to squint! This is a place for serious, not casual visitors.