Sci Fi Visons : Gloom vs Optimism

Some brilliant anthologies for your shopping list! These include one about war and one that’s free, one about Star Wars and one by me! 

Your best deal is a free download (thanks to corporate sponsorship) of Future Visions: Original Stories Inspired by Microsoft featuring tales that explore possible impacts of future technology, such as quantum computing, machine learning and other trends gathered from cutting edge research. (Authors were invited to talk to mavens at at Microsoft Labs, but free to tap all kinds of sources. Just released!

With contributions from top science fiction authors, including Greg Bear, Elizabeth Bear, Nancy Kress, Robert J. Sawyer, Ann Leckie, Seanan McGuire, Jack McDevitt and  — there's also one of my own best recent scribblings -- about the science of prediction. A topic which has long fascinated me.

War Stories of the Future is another sponsored anthology, this time from the Atlantic Council’s contest for fictional portrayals of how future combat might be transformed by rapidly changing technology. This volume is edited by August Cole, whose novel with Peter Singer, Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War, is now a best-seller. "The collection features stories from best-selling science-fiction writer David Brin (the nature of heroes and warriors) and Linda Nagata (linked ground combat overseen from afar), as well as entries by Ken Liu, Madeleine Ashby, Matthew Burrows and August Cole." I also helped judge the tales that were winners of a special contest exploring the future of defense and security.

Then there’s the the recent re-launch of Star Wars on Trial: The Force Awakens Edition. Your big chance - if you missed the earlier editions - to experience full-on combat between folks who are critical of the quantum-shallow Lucas universe and those unthinking zombies who actually swallow the faux-eastern “wisdom”-claptrap of that awful little green pixie-ovenmitt Yoda...

… but no, we’ll save that rant for this truly fun and pyrotechnic and intellectually stimulating volume!  

Oh, you can also vote on the various charges, like a jury. Innocent... or guilty as charged? And sure, we know many will vote acquittal out of reflex, without reading the arguments. But you won’t! There's also a book giveaway on Goodreads.

All three of these great volumes are coming out this  very month!  But want more?  Well, I saved the best for last. Coming in late winter — will be my long-awaited third short story collection Insistence of Vision, from Studio Digital and The Story Plant.  With a beautiful Patrick Farley cover and some of the best tales I ever wrote… and which you are very unlikely to have read, like “Chrysalis,” “The Logs,” “Transition Generation,” “Mars Opposition,” and “Insistence of Vision.”  Pre-order on Amazon.

== Gloom vs Optimism ==

See a cool story (from The Oatmeal) of courage and dedication that winds up having meaning to all of us… especially science fiction fans, pondering the sour excess of pessimism and reflex dystopianism that has taken over so much of our mythology.  You’ll understand when you learn who the hero of this story turns out to be.

Many of us have been trying to combat the gloom merchants, whose lesson is too-seldom “avoid this mistake” and too-often “give up hope.” I’ve addressed the surprising and infuriationg underlying reason why so many authors and film directors habitually preach hopelessness.  Neal Stephenson’s Hieroglyph Project with Arizona State’s Center for Science and Imagination is another effort to beckon sci fi back to a guardedly and caustiously optimistic, can-do spirit.

New Utopians: This article in the New Republic adds to the rebellion: Jeet Heer writes, “The prophets of doom are unusually loud in our time, and almost every vision of the future, whether by sober ecologists or wild-eyed science fiction writers, carries with it the stench of despair. The collapse of civilization has become its own narrative cliché.” It then goes on to profile my dear and respected colleague Kim Stanley Robinson, rightfully, as a central figure in the counter-attack of problem-solving tales of (tentative) utopia. (Though many reasers of Robinson's most recent novel, Aurora, would deem it a shift to the dour side.

 Sure, this essay leaves out the rest of us hope-peddlers and can-do pushers, and it implicitly assumes that socialism is the sole route to redemption. “Robinson’s attempt to keep the flame of Utopia alive in a despairing era has made him a lonely figure.”  Um, hello?  

In another move away from dystopian visions, a relatively new subgenre - Solarpunk - promises to offer more sustainable, optimistic  -- even inspirational -- visions of the near-future, one you might even want to live in. On the Hieroglyph website, Adam Flynn writes that "Solarpunk is a future with a human face and dirt behind its ears."

Getting down to specifics, this article from Big Think argues that: “All Space Colonies Will Begin as Dictatorships…” because the rough and tumble of democracy won’t work where one shattered window can kill everyone. Well… um… duh? Except the analogy of “dictatorship” is silly and harmful. A better parallel is the captaincy of a ship. On a ship, with death just meters away, there must be a captain whose orders are swiftly obeyed.

Yet that is not a 'dictatorship,' because the owners of the ship have sovereignty over who gets to be captain! The owners dictate policy, such as deciding the next destination, while the captain is a “dictator” regarding implementation. That is, unless and untill the owners (who might be a democracy of people aboard either a sea or space vessel or a Mars colony) decide to fire her and pick someone else.

We live in an era of such simplistic metaphors that few people grasp this distinction. That even under conditions that are stressful and dangerous, we can still be citizens and sovereign adults who – ultimately – share responsibility for the course we set.

On Denialism, Altruism, Breaking filibusters and... space!

Denialism includes “denial of progress.”

One of the most insidious poisons going around, spread not only by the mad right but also by the lazier and more self-indulgent portions of the left, has been the notion that progress has failed.

Even when wagging their fingers at us, in hope that we’ll become better people, Hollywood films like Avatar emphasize guilt and despair as motivators to become better people. Say what?  Exactly how is that supposed to work? Instead of ... well, how about pride in what we’ve accomplished and encouragement that we can do more? Directors like James Cameron are sincere. They mean well.  They really do want to propel us forward. They genuinely hope their guilt trips will make us better people... while showing in their films a belief that the goal is impossible to achieve!  Which makes it all the more tragic that their messages kill the very ambitions they aim to stoke.  The ambition to accomplish great things.

In fact, civilization is not vile and useless.  Progress happens.  It has never been happening faster.  See just this one short summary for a partial list of reasons to feel restored faith in our can-do spirit.  Of course, the list was compiled by some folks at Cato, who give all the credit to globalization and none to intelligent planning.  But the facts still are what they are.

Lesson number one in human motivation, Jim.  Guilt trips aren’t as effective as pep talks that positively reward and praise people for the great stuff they have already done, encouraging them to strive harder to move forward even faster.  Go back to school.  Re-take psych 1.

=== On Altruism ===

What benefit does altruism serve?

I provided two papers in the psychological research volume Pathological Altruism, edited by Barbara Oakley, Ariel Knafo, Guruprasad Madhavan and David Sloan Wilson. Published by Oxford University Press.

This volume takes on a once verboten topic -- can surficially beneficent or altruistic behavior sometimes be motivated by more unsavory drives like aggression, egotism or even rapacious self-interest?  Can it even hurt the one who is being helped?

My chapters are: "Self-Addiction and Self-Righteousness" and "A Contrarian Perspective on Altruism: The Dangers of First Contact". Those interested will have to wait at least half a year for Oxford to publish the volume.  But  make note, now.  It will be worth the wait.  (It also proves I am still doing science... albeit in the form of continuing guerilla raids outside my formal PhD!)

Not that I disagree... but the study was done by a liberal atheist. ;-) In fact, the lurid headline disguises an interestingly more complex article about whether higher general intelligence is associated with “evolutionarily novel” traits -- or much more recent adaptations -- like nocturnal activity (dependent upon artificial light), complex discourse.

The author argues that humans are evolutionarily designed to be conservative, caring mostly about their family and friends, and being liberal, caring about an indefinite number of genetically unrelated strangers they never meet or interact with, is evolutionarily novel.  So more intelligent children may be more likely to grow up to be liberals.  This jibes closely to my “horizons” model that saitiation trades off against the radius of inclusion, how widely you feel your sense of kinship extends, in space, time, and kind.  The satiation tradeoff only works if a person has both certain personality traits (including satiability) and enoigh empathy-imagination.

==A  Trick to Defeat the Filibuster==

I've mentioned before that the New York Times ran an especially cogent article -- Mr. Smith Rewrites the Constitution, by Thomas Geoghegan -- about the absurd filibuster, its unjustified constitutional context, and possible ways around it.  It’s one of the most enlightening legal articles I've read.  I like especially Gohegan’s recommendation that Vice President Joe Biden simply rule from the bench that his own constitutional powers have been abridged.

On further consideration, in fact, the “Biden Option” could be even simpler than Gohegan suggests.  Instead of the vice president using his presiding powers to rule against the cloture process, he can arrange for circumstances that simply bypass cloture, on a constitutional quirk. Here’s how. Simply coordinate enough Democratic Senators in order to arrange for a perfect match of the predictable, lockstep GOP nay vote.  Say the result is a 41-41 tie, at which point Biden says:

 "The vote for cloture being a tie, the US Constitution takes precedence over any mere Senate procedural rule. I shall now cast the tie-breaking vote. I vote 'Yes' for cloture. The motion carries, and debate on this bill shall close 30 hours hence."  BANG!

The great thing about this approach is that it leaves Republicans with no wriggle room at all. Their sole option is to evade the tie, by changing some Republican votes from nay to yea! But the Democrats have far more inherent flexibility.  Up to twenty extra Democratic senators may lurk in the cloakroom, ready to descend and vote either way -- to restore the tie or else using those GOP "yeas" to help add up toward a regular 60-vote cloture.

Sure it will be decried as trickery.  So?

==Hollywood and Our Notion of Progress==

I was also interviewed for the new documentary “The People vs. George Lucas.”  I have no idea - yet - whether they used their footage of me appropriately.  I attempted to be circumspect and speak well of Lucas -- where he deserved it. For example, I loved the “Young Indiana Jones Chronicles” and adored “The Empire Strikes Back.”  So my disappointment in the films that followed came honestly... leading to my participation as editor and “prosecutor” in the book STAR WARS ON TRIAL. (by far the best and most fun way to explore these issues!)

Those guys at the SETI Institute sure have chutzpah!  They plan to turn their first SETIcon August 13-15 at the Hyatt Regency, Santa Clara. “The Search for Life in the Universe in Science Fact and Science Fiction!” Thus perpetuating the myth that they love science fiction.... only don’t mention any possibility that the universe might -- just might -- be different, even slightly, than their standard model.  Watch how quickly any alternate scenario is dismissed as “crazy science fiction stuff.”  Anybody planning to attend? Oh, don’t get me wrong, it should be fun and interesting in its own right.  The topic has fascinated my, all my life and I am glad the are pursuing the worthy search... (as opposed to some of their other, cultlike activities.)  But if anyone is interested in some questions to raise....

==Podcasting Outer Space==

I've been recording and posting some brief (for me) monologues on YouTube, starting with

Space Exploration Part 1 - Planning our next steps in beyond Earth  ... followed by

Space Exploration Part 2 - Mining the sky: Are there economic incentives out there?    ... and then

Space Exploration Part 3: The Big Picture, Where is the excitement? And what about warp drive? Finally, and just posted, there is

Space Exploration Part 4: Ambitious technologies for space: Space tethers, solar sails and space elevators.

More space-related postings will go up soon, plus some fun rants about SETI, andon the (crazy) notion of "cycles" of falling civilizations.

Nature interviews David Brin on scientists writing fiction.


=== On the Brain, Health Care and more! ===

The worlds first commercial brain-machine interface.

See Mike Treder, of the Institute on Ethics in Technology, write about basics of health care.

Another for the predictions registry... e-readers like the Amazon Kindle.  Now see this from EARTH (1989)   “That's enough for now. More than enough. Go feed your pets. Get some exercise. I slipped some readings into your plaque. Go over them by next time. And don't be late.”   Hm?  Anybody know an earlier hit on this?

I wish I could find where I also predicted this! That nerves are only the flashiest active elements in the brain.  The so-called “support” cells may be just as important, multiplying vastly the number of “active” elements and making the human brain that much harder to emulate! 

And finally, some some political items I had lying around...


===  Miscellanea ==

The fundies have made it blatant and open: ”Science fiction is intimately associated with Darwinian evolution. Sagan and Asimov, for example, were prominent evolutionary scientists. Sci-fi arose in the late 19th and early 20th century as a product of an evolutionary worldview that denies the Almighty Creator. In fact, evolution IS the pre-eminent science fiction. Beware!”

See an interesting, if myopic, discussion of why economists failed to see the bubble crisis coming.  And sure, none of them mention crackpot theories like my “Betrayal of the Smarter Sons.”  I can’t blame them.  That one was pretty bizarre, even if it contained some possible validity.

The honest truth is that I suspect other reasons.  Oligarchy is an especially pernicious human trend that's rooted in our genes and also in capitalism's very roots.  Marx was right that it is the ultimate, recurring threat. He was wrong to say that there aren't solutions that can keep capitalism vibrant, competitive and creative, for generations at a stretch.  But those solutions tend to be "captured" by smart proto-oligarchs, much in the way that parasitic viruses and bacteria adapt to attack hosts in new ways.

Right now our immune system cannot adapt to oligarchy-driven distortions because our immune system (politics) has been suppressed by "culture war."  Throw in some deliberate sabotage by certain hostile foreign elements and you have a theory that is more than adequate... if far too dramatic for anyone but a science fiction author to concoct or credit.

Too bad, since economic and political thinkers used to ponder a bigger picture.  Krugman and Galbraith are peering at individual trees.  They do not see the forest.

-- Is the Iraq War over? ---

enough for now....

Various Miscellaneous Apolitical items

No, this is not the Great Big Arrogant Posting that I promised. That will go up tomorrow or the next day. This one is just a chance to dup onscreen whole bunches of cool stuff that has accumulated in the Apolitical Try. Especially the all important FIRST ITEM which might be called David Brin's newest book. well.... sort of...

Announcing in June 2006: Star Wars on Trial : Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Debate the Most Popular Science Fiction Films of All Time (Smart Pop series) by David Brin and Matthew Woodring Stover, with two dozen wonderfully articulate authors "testifying" either for the prosecution or the defense. Is SW fantasy disguised as science fiction? Does the series spread doom-pessimism about democracy? Has it been a let-down since "The Empire Strikes Back"? Does it even make any sense? Contributors include Scott Lynch, Lou Anders, John Wright, Tanya Huff, Adam Roberts and many others.

Pick up a copy of Star Wars on Trial -  and be prepared for a wild, extravagant "trial" - brash and entertaining and
downright fun!

About my Exorarium Project, a Virtual Extraterrestrial Terrarium to envision varieties of Intelligent Life on distant exoplanets -- a collaboration with UCSD professor Sheldon Brown, here are a couple of items that are highly relevant:

--The Virtual Planetary Laboratory (VPL) site is a team of scientists who are building computer simulated Earth-sized planets to discover the likely range of planetary environments for planets around other stars. These simulated environments allow us to visualize what these planets look like from space to help future missions recognize signs of possible life in the spectra of planetary atmospheres and surfaces.

--One fun planet-building site is ASTROVENTURE: Try the "Design a Planet" feature.

Another topic from a while ago: “dusting” vast stretches of “desert ocean” (most of the ocean, in fact, where there are no nutrients and therefore no food chain) with trace nutrients to creat new fisheries and such carbon out of the atmosphere. The quintessential modernist notion -- well here are a couple of Nature news stories on some Ocean Fertilization experiments. The web sites below provide some additional insight. mix of good/bad news.

==Looking toward the wider world==

Have a sampling-glance at a fascinating book -A Nation Among Nations: America's Place in World History: America's Place in World History by Thomas Bender, elucidating some “connections” that might never have occurred to you.

As we experience a major secular oil price rise, there are two major economic effects. One is the huge macroeconomic effect upon today’s spendthrift lifestyles, forcing new economies and efficiencies, at last. The other is supply/demand, stimulating use of tar sands and other oil sources that will profoundly change what we mean by “peak oil production.”

The latest news? That Canada’s vast supply of tar sands may be eclipsed by even greater supplies in... Venezuela. Accessible barrels numbering in the TRILLIONS, suggesting to some that Bush & Co may have ulterior reasons for “drumming up” hostility toward Chavez down there. I am less concerned about that than I am with how this may affect the timetable thinking in the Saudfamily’s Grand Plan for us.

Satellite Could Open Door on Extra Dimension -- (New Scientist -- May 30, 2006) An exotic theory, which attempts to unify the laws of physics by proposing the existence of an extra fourth spatial dimension, could be tested using a satellite to be launched in 2007. Such theories are notoriously difficult to test. But a new study suggests that such hidden dimensions could give rise to thousands of mini-black holes within our own solar system - and the theory could be tested within Pluto's orbit in just a few years.

Watch Big Brother Watch You : Wireless Camera Hunter scans commonly used Video Frequencies in less than 5 seconds and detects any video transmissions in the area. Then the Wireless Camera Hunter locks in sources from up to 500 Feet away (depending on power of source transmitter).The device allows the user to see what the Hidden Camera is seeing, making it easier to detect hidden video. The monitor display is a high resolution 2.5 Color TFT Screen that displays the Video Image and the exact frequency of the transmission. Www. Haven’t even seen this in movies...  But it’s useless against wired models or encrypted or spread spectrum.

Three D at last? Oh Boy, now the interface can dumb-down online interaction even more vividly!!!

News of the weird: What if, seconds before your laptop began stalling, you could feel the hard drive spin up under the load? Or you could tell if an electrical cord was live before you touched it? For the few people who have rare earth magnets implanted in their fingers, these are among the reported effects -- a finger that feels electromagnetic fields along with the normal sense of touch.
It's been described as a buzzing sensation, a tingling, an oscillation, movement, pure stimulation and, in the case of body-modification expert Shannon Larrett's encounter with a too-powerful antitheft gateway at a retail store, "Like sticking your hand in an ultrasonic cleaner."

Remember the topic of how to make a better world by making people smarter? I still think (?) that the better approach is to work on our aggregate-intelligence through reciprocal accountability institutions and citokate. But others are working on improving us human components. See: Richard Restak, a Washington neurologist and president of the American Neuropsychiatric Association, who has written extensively about smart drugs in his 2003 book, "The New Brain: How the Modern Age Is Rewiring Your Mind," as well as his forthcoming "The Naked Brain: How the Emerging Neurosociety Is Changing How We Live, Work and Love."

Rare counting ability induced by temporarily switching off brain region: A minority of people with autism have one or more extraordinary intellectual talents, such as the rapid ability to calculate the day of the week for a given date, or to count large numbers of discrete objects almost instantaneously - they're often called 'autistic savants' or 'idiot savants'. Now Allan Snyder and colleagues have shown that by placing a pulsing magnet over a specific area of the brain, these kind of abilities can, to some extent, be induced in people who aren’t autistic.

Except that it still ignores every human interactive skill.... Cell phone users and instant messaging addicts can now search the web using IM chat software rather than a web browser. Kozoru, a Kansas-based startup, on Monday launched , a new search engine that queries the web with instant messages. Users send the system a question as a chat message, and the system replies with relevant links. It's similar to Google, except Byoms returns three of four replies instead of hundreds, and can be queried in plain English. "Searching the internet on a mobile phone right now is painful," said Justin Gardner, 's communications manager. "You have limited real estate when you’re looking at a phone. In that environment people want two, three, four answers." Alas... it remains... painful.

More relevant to a flattened-hierarch, truly open world: The Universal Radio Peripheral (USRP) allows for building a -defined general radio that can receive and transmit on any frequency from DC (zero) to 2.9 GHz. Matt Ettus paints a picture of radio bringing about a many-to-many revolution, like blogging, but for a wider segment of the world.

Is there hope in chocolate? Caffeine can make you more easily convinced by arguments that go against your beliefs because it improves your ability to understand the reasoning behind statements, suggests experiments at University
of Queensland....

==Finally, amusing misc items...==

Cool images from the future.

See "The cutting edge: A Moore's law for razor blades?"

Incredibly incisive (or funny) science.

Going from ridiculous tech to the sublime... take a look at http://www.lightspacetech.com/ for a real 3D display (it is real 3D because it is 20 liquid crystal planes deep, each plane separated by perhaps 0.5 cm)

A FINAL QUOTE...

"The most important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them." --Sir William Bragg

==See my next posting: Guided Allocation vs. Markets, an ancient struggle with strange modern implications