Thinkering Tomorrows -Playing the Future

Previously on this blog, I critiqued Science Fiction Prototyping, and talked about how role-playing games work. Today, I’d like to bring those two themes together to talk the design of my scenario planning role-playing game, Thinkering Tomorrow.  The goal here, in the words of Brian David Johnson, is to help people change the future by changing the stories they tell about the future.

To summarize the older posts, Science Fiction Prototyping is problematic because writing is surprisingly hard, and gets even harder if you want to achieve both scientific accuracy and literary quality. Additionally, the “gentle art of reperceiving” in an institutional context, which is at the heart of scenario planning/foresight methodologies, is diametrically opposed to the individual task of finishing a story. Role-playing games (RPGs) serve as a method for a group to successfully negotiate a common outcome, both by determining who speaks at a given time, and providing some way to foreclose debate over contentious issues. I thought that the strengths of role-playing games could compensate for the weaknesses in Science Fiction Prototyping.

The main concept behind Thinkering Tomorrows is a basic set of rules and pieces to help a group use their narrative imaginations and intrinsic understanding of ‘good reasons’ on the future.  To do this, the group first generates a set of random elements chosen from a list using a deck of playing cards, figures out in some loose way how all the elements work together, and then plays through a story about the future in 16 or so brief scenes. It’s inspired by the award-winning Fiasco, but different enough that I feel safe in saying that it is its own thing.

The Set-Up, laying out the disparate elements and figuring out how they fit together, is a game in and of itself. It is synthetic, in that is about challenging and exercising the players’ collective ability to generate meaning out of chaos. The items on the list are meant to be provocative and inspirational. A game that simply repeats culturally embedded stories about technology, like Frankenstein, Icarus, Telsa, etc. is not particularly successful. At minimum, the elements mean that everybody is working with the same pieces, and that the group can get over the terror of the blank page.

In most RPGs, characters are defined by a series of numbers that represent a kind of ‘imaginary physics’; bodily statistics, skills, equipment. Thinkering Tomorrows instead defines characters by their social roles, their relationships with the characters to their left and right. These relationships might be something like Family: Parent and Child, and Social: Shared Subculture. This system elegantly produces internal tensions for each character; they will have two roles to play, and multiple goals that may not align. Characters in the game will almost certainly be inspired by the experiences of the players, but hopefully will be different enough to inspire empathy and speculation. The space between “what would I do?” and “what would this other person do given who they are?” is a very productive one.

The Gizmo and the System Failure are the most important elements for the shape of the game. The Gizmo is a technology, composed of a Mechanism, Interface, Infrastructure, and Output. An earlier version of the game focused on lists of technologies that you might find in futurological forecasts, but playtests revealed that not all technologies were created equally, and that the technology was ignored for most of the story. Some of the Gizmos are ordinary, and some are quite fantastic, but all are detailed enough to help provoke design fiction style speculation about the daily use and purpose of technology.

The System Failure is what sets the plot of the game in motion. It is only realistic to say that technology rarely works right, and almost never does exactly what it was specified to do and only that. A technology might be misused, or it might have negative externalities, or it simply might break down unexpectedly. Dealing with the consequences of this failure; trying either to put it right or take advantage of the chaos, kicks the drama into high gear.

Objects and Locations help define the setting of the game, providing a few concrete places for the players to hang around in and McGuffins to fight over. They’re not supposed to be the only locations used, but rather serve as Chekov’s Guns which force the story towards some kind of conclusion. The Values serve to say in the broadest sense what the game is about: Democracy vs Authoritarianism, Transformation vs Tradition, or Independence vs Integration. Values are designed so that a reasonable person could support either side of an issue, but conflict is inevitable.

As I mentioned earlier, the game plays out in brief scenes of 3-5 minutes, rotating through the group so that everybody has equal ability to participate and shape the story. While some players will have better ideas and be more forceful in arguing them, there’s no single authority in Thinkering Tomorrows.  At most, someone might serve to facilitate play. In the first half of the game, players declare which elements on the table they want to use, and gain tokens if they successfully incorporate those elements into their scene. If they fail, the tokens go to a communal Crisis pool, to represent the situation getting worse.

The second half of the game takes on elements of a collective action problem, as players can choose to allocate their hard earned tokens to Fixes, Values which shape the big picture, or their own personal well-being. Depending on how the game plays out, there could be agreement on what is to be done and an efficient and easy implementation, or a bloody struggle that leaves the problem triumphant, and all the characters exhausted in pursuit of their ideologies.

Now, Thinkering Tomorrows needs more playtesting, and I won’t claim that it is the be-all-end-all of foresight exercises. The plot of problem-crisis-solutions-outcomes is a little stereotypical. The game’s ability to provoke interesting discussions is highly contingent on the group, how much they know about the future, and how well they work together. And finally, there’s no formal mechanism for players to introduce analytic components, to make the game “about” some technology or issue of specific interest, although that could be modified easily enough. But I do think that it’s an unique way to rapidly prototype science fiction stories in the span of an evening, rather than weeks or months.

If you’d like a copy of Thinkering Tomorrows, please contact me.

Science Fiction, Seriously.

Recently, ASU launched the new Center for Science and the Imagination to use science fiction in serious ways. Things like CSI are literally unbelievable; they could only happen at ASU, and it’s why I’m a grad student here. I’m look forward to working with the new center, and I have some ideas.

In the words of the center’s director, Ed Finn:

Our mission is to foster creative and ambitious thinking about the future. We want to bring writers, artists, scholars, scientists and many others together in collaboration on bold visions for a better future. But more than this, we want to share a sense of agency about the future, to get everyone on the plane thinking about how our choices inflect the spectrum of possibilities before us.

Right now, the center is bringing people together around big visions for the future, the most prominent of which is Neal Stephenson’s Giant Space Tower. Unlike a space elevator, which would require tens of thousands of kilometers of catbon nanotube fiber at an unprecedented production scale, Neal’s tower is only 10-20km tall, and built out of conventional materials like steal. However, by getting a launch platform above the thickest parts of Earth’s atmosphere, rockets could reach orbit much more efficiently, opening up new frontiers in space travel. The idea is that as a potential rallying point for interdisciplinary studies in engineering, sustainability, the politics of siting the tower, economics of operation, design of human living quarters high in what climbers call the ‘death zone’. It’s a big vision, but are we really thinking about choices and possibilities?

The tower is a fascinating project in many aspects, but as a spaceflight critic, I have my doubts. The tower is an interesting idea, but it’s closest analog isn’t the Apollo program, it’s large scale infrastructure like the Panama Canal, which was at its time an incredibly ambitious and fraught undertaking, cost $375 million, was politically tied to the imperial domination of Central America and moneyed shipping interests, and killed tens of thousands of workers. While it was a bridge between worlds in its time, and a worthy and impressive project, these days, its most enduring legacy is not heroic engineering, but cheap consumer goods and the Panamax ship standard.

Science fiction asks us to dream big, but history tells us we should be cautious. The legacies of innovation are rarely what we think they will be. The most important technologies are rarely the most impressive ones, human genome projects and particle accelerators and rocket ships. The science and technology that impacts us the most are quiet, omnipresent, invisible, things like air conditioning and standardized forms, forms of transportation that are cheap, efficient, and safe, buildings that stay up in storms and earthquakes, and the millions of other things that modern living requires, and which we notice only when they break.

We live in an era characterized by technologies, and as Langdon Winner noted in his classic The Whale and The Reactor, these artifacts have politics, but their values, costs and benefits, and forms of responsibility disappear into a fog of engineering details accessible only to experts. The architectures of technological systems structure and direct our lives in subtle ways, and yet we lack good tools to evaluate these technologies. I can think of three primary ways we approach technology: elegance, expense, and inertia. Technophiles love the newest most technically sweet solution or gadget for its own sake. Accountants are concerned with how much it will cost, and who will pay. And most people approach technology from a position of minimizing disruptions in how they live their lives, and interoperability with the current standard.

When people to come together to discuss technologies, the result is all too frequently confusion because they are coming from mutually incomprehensible perspectives. Rationality is not a fair and even-handed way of adjudicating between perspectives; demanding rationality is a way of enforcing the use of only one perspective. Cost-benefit analysis and similar “rational” techniques of technology assessment and governance take in only a very small slice of the human experience. For democrats, people who believe that everybody should have a fair say in the development of the community, this ungovernability of technology is a perennial problem.

Instead of bemoaning the perennial irrationality of the public, or elite decision-makers, or the morons who programmed the menu system on my internet enabled BluRay player, I think we should look for a different way of communicating. People may be irrational, in that they do things other than how we would have done then, but their actions make sense internally. They are never unreasonable.

Walter Fisher, in his work on the narrative paradigm delimited his theory that:

(1) Humans are essentially story tellers; (2) the paradigmatic mode of human decision-making and communication is “good reasons” which vary in form among communication situations, genres, and media; (3) the production and practice of goods reasons is ruled by matters of history, biography, culture, and character… (4) rationality is determined by the nature of persons as narrative beings-their inherent awareness of narrative probability, what constitutes a coherent story, and their constant habit of testing narrative fidelity, whether the stories they experience ring true with the stories they know to be true in their lives… (5) the world is a set of stories which must be chosen among to live the good life in a process of continual recreation.

In short, good reasons are the stuff of stories, the means by which humans realize their nature as reasoning valuing animals. The philosophical ground of the narrative paradigm is ontology. The materials of the narrative paradigm are symbols, signs of consubstantiation, and good reasons, the communicative expressions of social reality.

We need to bring reasons to the forefront, and stories are some of the densest, most fruitful areas for discovering reasons. We need to start taking stories seriously, and specifically stories about technology. We need more people telling stories about technology, better stories about technology, and better channels for getting good stories out there. And for better or worse, science fiction is the genre of stories that deal with technology and the future. As Clark Miller and Ira Bennet, two professors at CSPO wrote, “Science-fiction is technology assessment for the rest of us.”

Jay Oglivy, a futurist with the Global Business Network, argues that, “Part of the role of futurists… should therefore be to articulate in an understandable and appealing way images of a better future. We need an antidote to Blade Runner, a foil for A Clockwork Orange, a better sequel to 1984, a truly humanized Animal Farm.” I hope that the new Center for Science and Inquiry can take up this challenge, creating a community of interdisciplinary scholars and methods to use science fiction to articulate, discuss, and create this better world. Anything less would be a betrayal of our ambitions. 

Musings on the Post-Human Condition

Back in April I wrote a short story for ARC’s fiction contest, that while it didn’t win, was a lot of fun. They have a second contest up about the post-human condition, which has got me thinking seriously about where we’re going, and what we’ll become.

I’m going to start with two axioms
1) A post-human upgrade is about more than seeking a competitive or aesthetic edge, it is about the type of community that you want to belong to.
2) Late-stage capitalism is fucked, along with the ecosystem and 90% of the current population, and everybody with more than three brain cells knows it.

With those premises, what kind of world shakes out?

One option is space colonization, getting off this rock entirely. Now, there are a surprising number of weird cryptic billionaires backing private spaceflight, but this isn’t about sub-orbital hops for tourists, this is about saving humanity, and if you run the number of kilos to orbit per year times the number of years left before the global economy goes kablooie, it’s obvious that there isn’t enough lift for everybody who wants to be saved. Space colonization is inherently incredibly dangerous, and you need the best colonists to have a chance: experts in a variety of technical fields, in peak physical condition, fitting effortlessly into teams, working best under pressure, and with the self-discipline of a Zen master. NASA does this by selecting the best of the best military pilots and starry-eyed scientists, and running them though a brutal training lottery to earn a dwindling number of spaceflight seats, but our program is run by tech CEOs, and they do things differently.

The only best way to run the system would be a meritocratic lottery.  Prospective applicants put themselves under constant technological surveillance to demonstrate that they have the Right Stuff emotionally to make it in the tight confines of a space colony. They master abstruse scientific fields, discipline their bodies with exercise and technology, and talk politics with their fellow Emigrants, trying to build up enough of a rep to qualify for a seat on a rocket out of here. And of course there’s no way a mere human could earn their way in, which is why these people enhance their brains with drugs and cybernetics, harden their body against radiation, reduce their caloric and oxygen intake, and otherwise demonstrate their commitment to the program. The whole system is orchestrated by Sergey Brin, Jeff Bezos, and James Cameron, as they tweak the social scoring parameters on the whole system to cultivate an elite race that can thrive in the empty vastness of space.

It’s easy to imagine what these people look and act like. They spend all their time cooped up learning how to repair solar panels in vacuum and run a closed cycle life-support system, and when they get out of their rooms they argue with their friends about utopia and the end of the world. They think everything on Earth is going to shit, so they don’t care about material possessions or friendship, but they’re also all ambitious and socially adept and self-effacing, possessing a brittle layer of charisma over the zealous flame of the true believer. You can spot them on the street in an instant, thin and pale in their simple black clothing with the logo of the colony they hope to join, expensive electronics discretely recording everything they do, and the same haunted, hunted, look. Immortality awaits them, if they can please their masters.

The second route is to think seriously about what it will take to be in the 10% that survives the collapse of civilization. Part of it is physical: they need to be able to eat anything or nothing at all, because our agricultural system needs cheap oil and constant irrigation and a stable climate to work, and all of that’s going to change. Resistance to disease is critical because refugee camps breed epidemics. Plague is one of the Four Horsemen for a reason. Civilized psychology gets people killed when the savages take over; toughness and a willing to kill those who will try and kill you become virtues. The most important component is social. When the government breaks down, people turn to their primary loyalties, and unlike Somalia or Iraq, most people in the Western World are a long way from authentic tribalism. Losers will try and fake it with fandoms, or their job, or ethnicity, or some other dumb 20th century identity marker, but at the end of the day the survivors will need an unbreakable bond of trust with those who will be watching their back.

They’re out there, running through the woods and practicing martial arts and stockpiling weapons and tools for the end of the world. They pick subtle enhancements sensory and physical enhancements to give them an edge in combat and wilderness survival. They build trust with a combination of the oldest and newest methods, using orgies and designer drugs to bind each other into fighting packs closer than any family. By day, they go about their lives like anyone else, the only difference a certain gleam in their eyes as they calculate what sudden violence could get them in while standing in line at the supermarket, but when night comes, they’ll be ready. They will be the wolves, and everybody else will be the sheep.

Still trying to work out precisely what the story is; who the characters are, and what the tension pivots on, but I have until July 8. As if I don’t have enough on my plate…

The Affective Component-A John Carter Movie Review

Last weekend I saw John Carter, an action-adventure blockbuster based on a series of early 20th century books that are considered to be some of the foundational works of science-fiction. I enjoyed the movie well enough for what it was, an effects driven spectacle without much substance, but it looks like it’s going to lose money. A Lot of money. And that means Hollywood is hunting for somebody to blame. It’s the usual story of mismanagement, poor marketing, and an unwilling audience, but maybe we can learn something useful about science-fiction and story-telling.

A little background from the LA Times

Instead, with a weak opening this past weekend, Wall Street analysts expect the company to take a $165-million loss on a movie that has joined "Heaven's Gate," "Ishtar" and "Howard the Duck" in the constellation of Hollywood's costliest flops.

What happened? The very things Disney thought would guarantee box-office success may have left "John Carter" star-crossed from the start. The acclaimed director had never made a live-action movie before. The executives guiding and helping market his movie were new on the job and had limited experience running movie divisions. And the source material, written beginning a century ago by Tarzan creator Edgar Rice Burroughs, had already been so picked over by its admirers that critics and audiences found the film hackneyed and stale…

By the time "John Carter" started filming in January 2010, however, Cook had been replaced by Rich Ross, a television executive who had never overseen a film of this scope. Ross named as president of production Sean Bailey, a movie producer who lacked experience as a studio executive, then installed MT Carney, an outsider from the New York advertising world who'd never worked at a studio, as marketing chief. Then Carney left in early January and was replaced by veteran Ricky Strauss — just as the film's promotional efforts were to kick into high gear.

The geek contingent on the internet is blaming bad marketing (and the marketing was truly awful, despite a Superbowl ad and $100 million budget) and political intrigue at Disney. Some critics say that audiences don’t like science-fiction films. And the studios are trying to turn director Andrew Stanton into a whipping boy for the flop. But the simple fact is, John Carter wasn’t a particularly good movie. I can’t tell you who’s to blame for that, but I can try and explain why the movie flopped, and in one word, it’s the characters.

The best comparison for John Carter is Pirates of the Caribbean (credit is due to Marci for pointing that out to me): Both movies are Disney-produced action-adventure flicks based on slightly silly material (a set of 100 year old books, and a theme park ride). Pirates, however, was a massive smash, and went on to spawn a series of increasingly bad sequels.

What made Pirates of the Caribbean so good was the quality of the characterization. Not necessarily their depth or the subtly, but the way that the personalities and desires of the characters drove the plot: Will Turner wants to become a hero, Jack Sparrow wants revenge on his traitorous first mate, Elizabeth Swann is torn between being a responsible English lady and a life of adventure, and the villainous Captain Barbossa wants to break the curse and kidnaps Elizabeth Swann to do so. Jack and Will team up to get her back, and the story basically writes itself.

In John Carter, the eponymous hero at first wants to get back to Earth and his cave of gold, then he wants to save Dejah Thoris from being murdered at her wedding. Dejah doesn’t want to get married to the brutal warlord Sab Than (but does so to save her home city of Helium), who is being controlled by the truly evil Therns as part of a plan to destroy Barsoom and feed off the destruction.

You see the problem? Nobody in John Carter has a clear motive, or a point where they have to make a meaningful decision, or even an opportunity to come into conflict. Everybody is just set up at the beginning, and they bash together, and stuff happens, and the movie ends. There’s no reason to get involved with the characters, care about what happens, or give the movie more than a second of thought once you leave the theater.

Now there are more differences between the movies. You might argue that the actors in Pirates were just better, and this charisma carried over to their characters, and to be fair, Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow was amazing. But are you really going to say that Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightly are great actors and head-and shoulders better than John Carter’s Taylor Kitsch and Lynn Collins? They're all pretty and young and otherwise unremarkable in my opinion. John Carter has some of the best visual design I’ve seen in a long time: the airships, the barbaric Tharks, the landscape, and the cities of Zodanga and Helium are beautifully rendered. But graphics can’t save a movie without a clear heart.

I have a lot more complaints about John Carter: The over-abundance of sidekick characters who ate up screen time; The tragic underuse of Dominic West (McNulty-The Wire) and James Purfoy and Ciaran Hinds (Marc Anthony and Julius Caesar from Rome); poor pacing and tactical sense in the action sequences, the marketing campaign (Oh god, the marketing campaign. Has Hollywood forgotten how to put a beautiful and badass lady on a poster? Did somebody take their testicles away or something? And don’t get me started about the Superbowl ad). But this would divert from my main point.

People want to relate to other human beings, or their fictional representations. They need to have motives that the audience can comprehend, that they can in some way link to their own lives and experiences. Now this is all melodrama, so you don’t need many many layers of complexity, but we like a little conflict and indeterminacy. Is Jack Sparrow a dashing rogue or a ruthless pirate? Who will Elizabeth Swann fall in love with? Will Will Turner acknowledge his father the pirate? This mystery and suspense sustains the audience’s interest through the slack periods.

John Carter doesn't have anything like that. The motives are all negative, about not wanting to do something, or wanting to smash and destroy. The characters have a single layer of personality and no real internal conflict, and since the good guys and bad guys are so obvious, there’s no point in thinking about it. Everything that happens and that they see is laid out for you in expository dialog as it happens, which kills the mystery of exploring Mars (compare this to the first scenes on Pandora in Avatar). There only mystery is in the framing narrative with a young Edgar Rice Burroughs.

What bothers me is that there’s an actual core of a good movie in John Carter. Make Carter more excited about being on a planet where he is a superhero. Give Dejah Thoris a moment where she genuinely considers marrying the enemy warlord because she wants peace. Be more clear about how terrible Sab Than will be if he becomes the supreme ruler of Mars. Cut down the extraneous characters and make Tars Tharkas or Kantos Kan the sidekick. Throw in some Indian Jones style tomb raiding to explore the weird history of Barsoom (In the books John Carter kills a god who’s religion consists of eating the souls of pilgrims. Why that wasn’t Act II of the movie I will never know?). And if you’re making a science-fiction blockbuster, don’t try and hide the fact (they removed 'of Mars' from the title, reportedly because it didn't test well with women, leaving the utterly generic 'John Carter'), glory in it! A movie with aliens and flying ships is science-fiction, and science fiction does pretty good at the box office.

Science-fiction is the literature of wonder. A movie like John Carter is supposed to be amazing, it is supposed to leave the audience dazzled, it is supposed to show us the unknown and how cool that is. But too much wonder leaves us dazed and confused, future-shocked into numbness. In the face of the unknown, we need a fixed point to hold on to, and that anchor is humanity, characters that are clear, likeable, and relatable, characters who act a window into a new world. Screw up the characters, and you screw up the audience’s affective connection to the story. And if there isn’t that affective component, if they don’t care, they won’t go and see your movie.

It’s simple as that.

Science Fiction Prototyping: A Preliminary Assessment.

This is day 2 of the EMERGE event write-up, and my reflections on the workshop, Science Fiction Prototyping with Brian David Johnson, Intel futurist and director of The Tomorrow Project.

I believe that science fiction can be an incredibly powerful tool for shaping public perceptions towards emerging technology. Governance involves assessing risks and policies and making decisions between options, but how can we assess an emerging technology when such basic information as costs, benefits, and consequences are unknown and perhaps fundamentally unknowable? One of the major findings of STS is that supposedly value-neutral methods like cost-benefit analysis and linear extrapolation of trends in fact contain large implicit biases towards certain kinds of ‘valid knowledge’ and ‘rational outcomes’, and more-over, these methods fail to deal with major uncertainties, whether they’re Black Swan events like the collapse of the Soviet Union, or more subtle systemic shifts, like the rise of cellphones and social media in politics.

But the real strength of science-fiction is its broad appeal. Very few people read the white papers produced by bodies like the National Academy of Sciences, the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment was shut down in 1995 by Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America” Congress, and the public engagement efforts like EU’s Café Scientique are considered blockbuster successes if they reach tens of thousands of people. Popular science-fiction, whether in film, game, of print form, reaches billions of people world-wide. My own work on nanotechnology, biotechnology, and the space race has shown the critical role that science-fiction stories have played in framing the policy debate.

People are narrative thinkers; they naturally organize their world into stories, and understand when a story makes sense, and when it does not. By combining realistic characters and social milieus with novel technology, science fiction can engage multiple ways of thinking, and draw out underlying values and sites of conflict and confusion. There are no barriers to participation, anybody with a pen and paper can write, anybody with an internet connection can publish. Science fiction is technology assessment for the rest of us.

But all of the above are just my idiosyncratic and scattered jottings towards some sort of coherent foresight methodology, which is why I was really excited to see how the professionals did it. I’d read Brian Johnson’s book previously, and my impression was the he was on to something, but he hadn’t bothered to write it down.

The first day, Brian delivered a lecture on science fiction prototyping and how to do it. The key points were:
A) The minimalist vision of the future is wrong, because it looks like a prison
B) People like clutter, houses are hairy, look at what makes people comfortable
C) The extremes are what makes a story interesting
As we broke up the day, he instructed us to think about what kind of story we wanted to tell, and gave us the 5 Step Plan for science fiction prototyping.




This is the diagram in the book, and you’ll note that it’s incredibly skeletal and linear. The abbreviated plan for Scenario Development has 8 steps, and requires that you examine both your own biases and purposes, and pretty much every shaping external force in the world. Science-fiction prototyping asks that you dive write in.

The actual process of science-fiction prototyping only sort of matches the diagram above. This is what I experienced in the process of making my prototype.



I want to make some notes here on what worked and didn’t.

The envisioning process depends on the information you have access to: What you know about science and technology, your own life experiences and beliefs, and any materials provided by the organizers. At EMERGE, despite the disparate disciplinary backgrounds of the workshop participants, we were all academics interested in the future, and we had all had the same full day of presentations and lectures.

Pitching and dialog are definitely learned skills, and different people have very different levels of aptitude at them. Some people can’t express a story concisely, others dominate the discussion, and some are simply boring and unknowledgeable. We worked in groups of between three and five people, which allowed everybody to participate in the dialoging process. Unsurprisingly, Brian David Johnson was far better at these tasks than the rest of us. Just a few minutes with Brian could clarify the key issues at in the prototype, and the best way to bring them to the forefront.

Development, the part where you write, draw, film, or otherwise produce the prototype itself, appears to be inherently time-consuming and isolating. Everybody (except for a group working on a comic, which had a clear division of labor), retreated to their laptops to write their own stories. Most people had full outlines, but writing fiction is hard; one manuscript page an hour is a very optimistic rate. Judging from my previous writing workshops, it can take up to a month for an amateur writer to get a 3000 word story into some kind of readable form. The single day we had allocated simply wasn’t enough.

Finally, prototypes are useless unless you bring them out into the real world somehow. In our report out, we pitched the prototypes to the rest of the group, who then asked questions, and tried to nail the prototype down to its essential core. By this point, it was late in the day, we were tired and hungry, and the quality of the discussion suffered. A second pitch attempt with a completed draft is important, but in our case, we could have used more structure and time for the reporting out.

The biggest impression that I got from the workshop was that there’s a lot to science fiction prototyping that isn’t in the book. The relies on tacit knowledge about science, technology, people, institutions, narrative structures, the creative process, and proper presenting and critiquing skills. There’s nothing wrong with tacit knowledge; indeed, the world would collapse without it. The problem with relying on tactic knowledge for foresight is that your visions are going to be infected with unexamined biases, and may confirm what you want to know rather than challenge and transform your vision of the future. The only check against this bias is the skill of the other participants in the process.

Making the tactic knowledge that goes into science fiction prototyping explicit would make for stronger prototypes. This diagram has just some of the invisible entities that surround the prototyping framework.



Science fiction prototyping is definitely useful, but there are many questions which should be answered before I’d be willing to fully trust it as a foresight methodology.

Some questions are procedural: What is the best preparation before going into the prototyping process? How should information and questions be framed so that non-practitioners find it productive? How can you train people to pitch and critique ideas more effectively? Is there a way to develop the prototype that is faster than writing a whole story around it? How can the constructive process of dialog continue throughout the development cycle? How can individual communicate a prototype to a group in an impactful way?

Other questions are related to the core concepts of science-fiction prototyping, and are harder to resolve: What is the proper way to develop the technology through the course of the story, is it a character, a prop, or something else? How does an author recognize their biases and blind spots? How can science-fiction prototyping be used to prompt reflexive deliberation on the future? What does the dialog involved in prototyping imply for the authorship of the work, and the origins of its ideas? Does one need to make science fiction prototypes to find them useful, or is consumption of the right kind of science-fiction adequate for foresight?

I don’t have good answers for these questions now, but I hope that over the course of the next few months, I can finish my own prototype and resolve some of these theoretical and procedural questions. And any thoughts my loyal readers have on this would be very welcome.

Ten Books for the Future

“The problem is that science-fiction writers have stopped writing new futures and just started rehashing the past.” "No, the problem is that scientists and engineers have stopped doing exciting things." As I understand it, Michael Crow and Neal Stephenson had an exchange like this at a Future Tense conference about a year ago. I might not have the wording down right, but I agree with the sentiment entirely. Our leaders are drifting aimlessly towards a future of debt so large that money loses all meaning, paranoid overreactions to boogeymen like ‘international terrorists’ and ‘internet pedophiles’, a decaying industrial infrastructure on which we are all reliant, and an increasingly autonomous culture of radical novelty, self-expression, and technological change. But hey, they’re politicians. What do you expect, some kind of vision thing?

The problem is that one vital place where we as a culture might look towards some sense of futurity, science-fiction, has become increasing generic, old-fashioned, and basically nostalgic rather than forward thinking. Disney, which is a good indication of the cultural pulse of America, is stellar example as the original Space Age, techno-utopian Tomorrowland was revamped into a Jules Vernian steampunk nostalgia trip.

With all that in mind, I’d like to put together a bibliography for the people looking to use science-fiction to influence the future. I’m a science-fiction fan, a science policy scholar, and history buff, and this is my idiosyncratic list of 10 books that everybody should read if they want to understand Science, The Future, and how we’re going to get there.

Paolo Bacigalupi - The Windup Girl

How can I even describe this book? The Windup Girl won the Hugo, the Nebula, the Locus, and the John W. Campbell Award. It’d be easier to list best-SF-novel awards it didn’t get. Set in a Thailand teetering on the brink of collapse, Bacigalupi paints a picture of a world where the oil has run out, global trade has collapsed, science has stalled, and the horsemen of plague, famine, war, and climate threaten to smash what little remains. Global warming has permanently altered the climate. Agriculture remains barely one step ahead of rogue genetic plagues unleashed decades ago, and only the fading expertise of big Midwest biotech consortiums keep the world fed. Yet giving into the Calorie Men means giving up national autonomy, something which proud Thailand will never accept. The novel follows a complex cast of characters, Thai environmental police officers, an agent for the biotech concerns looking to loot a hidden seed bank of its genetic riches, a Malaysian exile seeking to rebuild his fortune by any means necessary, and the titular Windup Girl, an abandoned genetically modified “New Person” forced into sex slavery. Even in a world on the brink of collapse, people still want what they’ve always wanted: Money, power, ideological success, or love. But at the end of the day, the Future is going to be born, whether we like it’s shape or not, and new beasts will live in the ruins of our cities.

When I read The Windup Girl, I couldn’t stop shaking. I could smell the elephant shit, feel the desperation, know the inexorable trajectory of our technological crimes against nature. I’m afraid that The Windup Girl is going to be our future, and that’s why you have to read it.

Bruce Sterling - Distraction.

I’m holding myself to one book per author, and picking the right Sterling is no easy task. But I choose Distraction because A) it’s about a political operative trying to fix a white elephant scientific installation (A giant airtight dome and bioengineering laboratory in East Texas) and wandering into something far deeper, and B) even after a decade, it still smells like The Future to me. American politics has become an absurd carnival, invisible networks of dissidents do strange and terrible things to corrupt financial institutions, pretty much everybody is broke, but if you have money you can live like a king. And if you don’t, life is Burning Man! And somehow, in the midst of all these brilliant fragments of futurity, Sterling manages to tell a story about the American Soul, about what we need from our leaders, and about how science is remaking the world.

Charles Stross - Singularity Sky

The New Republic is an interstellar empire that Bismarck would love: Obedient peasants, heroic soldiers, honorable aristocrats, and none of that nasty disruptive technology; nothing more complex than telegraphs and nuclear powered steam engines, and they’re willing to do anything to keep it that way. So when an interstellar fleet of post-humans arrives over one of the New Republic’s colonies and begins dropping cellphones and nanoreplicator cornucopias from the sky, it ranks as a major breech of national security. But in this universe, God (or at least a super-human AI that use time-travel in its computation) is watching, and it doesn’t want the regressive militaristic morons of the New Republic to do anything too stupid. Which is why two interstellar spies, one working for the UN and the other working for the Eschaton, have to figure out what’s going on and stop it before the Big E decides to clean up the whole mess by plowing a comet made of anti-matter into the planet. Power, politics, panopticons, the terrorizing liberation of a true post-scarcity economy, and some of the most kickass and realistic space combat combine to make this my favorite book about The Singularity and what it might mean to you.

James C. Scott - Seeing Like a State

What does a state require to govern? What does the process of being governed entail? Before a state can rule, it must be render its subjects visible and record them with maps and censuses. Scott explores an ideology he calls high modernism, which aims not just to record things, but to change them to make them more visible, more legible, and more controllable by a central authority. But from the sterile new cities of Brasilia and Chandigarh, to mono-cropped farms, to Soviet industry and Tanzanian rural development, the modernist ideology that tries to render everything down to single-function units inevitably distorts and damages the subtle and complex fabric of society. The more heavily anything is planned, the more it is sustained by the informal sector. Scott’s reminds us to reflect on our own work and ask: what are we making visible? What is being obscured? What necessary stories are not being told?

Neal Stephenson – Diamond Age

Some people think this book is about the social implications of nanotechnology. These people are wrong, or at least they’re missing what I think are the most interesting parts of the book, which are about how we create identity in a globalized world. The Neo-Victorian aesthetic, the rituals of the Pacific Northwest Software Khans, and even the Primer-educated Mouse Army are all different attempts to craft personal and group identities in an era when borders have melted and the means of production have become entirely disassociated from human hands. Once the making of things becomes effortless, all that’s left is the making of stories; what kind of stories do you want to tell?

Neil Sheehan - A Bright Shining Lie

Those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it, but some parts of history are more fruitful than others. The Vietnam War was the high water mark of American power and faith in the wisdom of our politicians. It’s where the American Dream turned sour, and we still suffer from the cultural wounds. The Vietnam War is like a fractal of horror and unintended consequences. Every level echoes the lies, short-sightedness, and bad decision-making of every other level, from the grunts fighting at Khe Sanh to the generals and presidents running the war from Washington D.C. A Bright Shining Lie covers every level of that war, following the career of John Paul Vann from his role as a lowly military advisor at the disastrous battle of Ap Bac to his madcap triumph as the absolute military authority in I Corps during the 1972 Easter Offensive. The corruption of the war is mirrored by Vann’s personal fall, the national quagmire become ones man quixotic quest to save a foreign nation. If you were to read just one book about America after 1950, this would be it. Vann makes Colonel Kurtz from Apocalypse Now look like an amateur at going Up River and Never Coming Back.

China Mieville - The Scar

China Mieville writes about monsters: ambitious, fearful, oppressed, misguided, occasionally generous or brave monsters that have beetle heads, immense wings, chlorophyll for blood, mechanical parts, or sorcerous talents. In other words, people just like us. His richly imagined stories put a Socialist and Anarchist spin on the fantasy tropes, and in The Scar, an exiled translator is kidnapped by the exotic city of Armada, built on the backs of ancient ships from 1000 nations and ruled by brutal pirates. The diversity of the races, the novelty and depth of the world building, and they way that ordinary concerns are filtered through the lens of pulp adventure simply has to be read to be appreciated. I can’t think of any other author who deals as well with ideas of social justice, imperialism, absolute power, or what a single person can do in the face of History.

Peter F Hamilton – Fallen Dragon

These days, Peter F Hamilton is known for writing incredibly long space operas. But before he got on the six-book series kick, he wrote this philosophical military-SF novel that follows a space marine from his privileged upbringing on the sole successful interstellar colony to being a foot-soldier for “asset-realization raids” (aka, Interstellar Corporate Piracy backed up with powered armor and orbital lasers), to attempting to retrieve his own broken past in a desperate battle against his corporate masters and a native insurgency. Hamilton invites us to consider the economics of spaceflight while at the same time exulting in the joys of exploration. The planets of the novel inspire reflection: the tired homeworld of Earth, the blank slate of Amethi, the tropical freedom of Thallspring reproducing the failures that came before, and the post-human threat of Santo Chico. Hamilton doesn’t hammer this point home, but the novel also has many interesting reflections on how governments and corporations interact, and how people might modify themselves to wield power or achieve liberty over generation through cloning, brain transplants, cybernetic links, and even more exotic modifications.

Robert Charles Wilson - The Chronoliths

In early 21^st century Thailand, a 200 foot stone monolith appears in the jungle, it’s arrival heralded by a destructive blast of freezing air. The monolith is a monument to the victory of a warlord named Kuin, celebrating a battle 16 years in the future. Soon, Kuin monoliths are landing in major cities, killing millions, shattering nations, and sending the world towards a global holocaust. But as the years march on, the identity of “Kuin” and the means by which he launches his weapons remain unknown. The main character is drawn into a battle by scientists, philosophers, and unclassifiable ordinary people to save the world from destruction at the hands of duped Kuin cultists, seeking any surety they can find, even in the destruction of their lives, and the mysterious conspiracy behind the attack. An amazing journey into the relationship between the present and the future, the mutability of tomorrow, and the power of belief.

Bruno Latour - Science in Action

Sometimes, when you need theory, you just have to turn to a Frenchman. By and large, nobody in politics actually understands what science is, how it works, or the kinds of questions that it can answer. Latour uses a combination of lab ethnography and Actor-Network Theory to explain how facts gain their facticity, the characteristic of being accepted as true by the broader community. Inscriptions, networks of people, things, and ideas, and conflicts between the durable and the transient all serve to distinguish the uncertainty of “science-in-the-making” from the absolutely truth of “ready-made-science.” Science in Action is a dense book, but if you read it closely, it will explode your conception of scientific knowledge and replace it with a much more powerful and flexible framework. If you want science-fiction to be more than gadget fetishism, you’ll need an epistemological account like Science in Action.

Limitless Review

The potential implications of human enhancement is one of the main reasons why I’m at CSPO, so I was excited and a little worried when the trailer for Limitless appeared. Would Hollywood do justice to the topic, or would they make yet another trite cautionary tale?

Limitless follows one Eddie Morra, a hapless failure at the age of 35, unable to write, living in a squalid Chinatown walk-up, and recently broken up. A chance encounter with his ex-brother-in-law introduces Eddie to NZT, a drug which improves intelligence. From there, he is catapulted into a whirlwind of conspiracies and violence as he tries to stay one step ahead of his own mistakes.

The theme of the movie come out most clearly in two dialogs, one with Robert De Niro’s financier, who says “Your powers are a gift, they are not earned, and you are careless with your powers.” The second comes from Eddie’s girlfriend, when she finds out that his remarkable transformation in the past few months is due to NZT, “How do I know what’s you, and what’s the drug?” These are two common critiques of human enhancement, and psychopharmaceuticals in general; that they are a false path to knowledge which should be gained through hard work, and that they alter people in ways that damage their humanity. Neither of these critiques is particularly valid. Even when pressed, bioconservatives cannot specify what it is about human beings that enhancement threatens. Francis Fukuyama takes an entire book to weakly claim the existence of his ‘Factor X’ that defines humanity, to give one example.

This is not the position I hold to. Rather than try and defend a non-existent line between treatment and enhancement, it is better to note that human beings are continually enhancing their abilities through education and technology. We invent cars to extend our legs, books to extend our minds, and teach our children so they can benefit from our mistakes. Rather than view enhancement as a danger in and of itself, it is better to analyze the features of a particular enhancement for its risks.

By that metric, Limitless’s NZT would obviously fail. It is addictive, and leads to brain damage and death. The effects of NZT, increased alertness, pattern recognition, and focus, are certainly impressive, and impressively conveyed through camera effects in the film, but are by no means worth risking serious health problems. But let’s assume the health problems of NZT are solved, which they seem to be by the end of the film. Beyond its effects on intelligence, does NZT have any effect on morality?

Eddie Morra is not a bad person, but he’s not a particularly good person either, and his plan could be described as “1) Get rich, 2) Get powerful, 3) ???”. He’s a likeable enough jerk, with enough charisma to counteract his complete lack of actual values or goals beyond immediate pleasure. In that, the continued short-sightedness of Eddie’s planning throughout the movie is a commentary on America, and how best and brightest go into finance, law, and politics rather than the practical arts. The Russian loan-shark is a terrifying figure on NZT, but he was already a criminal psychopath. What a good person, not under duress, would do with their new powers is unknown.

NZT does certainly inspire a kind of paranoid egomania. Those who can survive the effects of the drug make one of their first priorities stamping out everyone else who might be using it, or who might pose a threat to their own wealth and power. Eddie Morra is not the first, and certainly not the last, of a series of chemically enhanced wunderkinds who shake the world of Limitless. This point is one the film makes effectively; it is the secrecy and limited access surrounding NZT that cognitive enhancement so dangerous. But would a more open system of enhancement lead to a better world, or deeper and deeper levels of Machiavellian scheming? That question remains unanswered.

Cognitive enhancement is not good or bad, but it is powerful, and like all instruments of power, it should be introduced with careful consideration. Information is not knowledge, and it certainly isn’t the wisdom to know what should aim for in life. But compared to who already populates the halls of power: the ambitious, the deceptive, and those who measure lives in dollars, is Eddie Morra so much worse? He gets everything he wants, and he doesn’t even have to drink much blood to do it.

(And a note for my friends who criticize the scientific accuracy of NZT: “It lets you access 100% of your brain.” That claim is made only by a completely unreliable drug dealer who lied five second previously. The only scene that makes no sense whatsoever is the one where… well, I won’t spoil it.)

Flash Fiction

The New Scientist has a Flash Fiction contest. The topic is "futures that never were." Maybe the geniuses at We Alone have 350 words.

This week, New Scientist goes in search of lost classics of science fiction – brilliant books that could stand alongside The War of the Worlds andNineteen Eighty-Four as masterpieces of speculative literature, but have somehow or other lapsed into obscurity. Each is a forgotten vision of the future.

Now we'd like to read yours. Send us your very short stories about futures that never were. Tell us where we'd be today if the ether had turned out to exist after all, or if light really was made up of corpuscles emitted by the eyes. You don't have to be scientifically accurate, but the more convincing your story, the more likely it is to win!

The Immortals

Yesterday, I visited the Immortals. I abandoned my car at the periphery wall, no vehicles are allowed inside the Old City, lest immortality be cut short by accident. The narrow streets were packed with shuffling, cautious forms, cast into darkness by the overhanging extensions and expansions of the longevity hospitals, their needs for space long impossible to meet on the ground.

I met Enos at a sidewalk cafe-clinic, where he was undergoing a routine bloodscrub. Enos was my great-great-great-grandfather, and my sponsor among the Immortals. I leaned down and gave him a peck on the cheek. "How are you, Enos?"

"Well enough. My nanocyte count is down. Perhaps soon they will require replacement. These mechanical parts wear out so quickly." He peered at me suspiciously. Perhaps he did not remember who I was, or why I had come. I had arranged this appointment with his calendar, a time where he was free to talk, but not to leave.

"I've been thinking about what you've said, about what I'll want to do when I come here. I was thinking... art. Nothing big mind you, just some nice virtual landscapes. Exploring the aesthetics of simulated universes." When we had last met, Enos had given me this assignment. What do you want to do when you live forever?

"No, no good." Enos said, languidly waving a hand. "Even we Immortals find our art boring. Simulation spaces are toys, what happens when you grow bored and want to grow up? We have no such thing here."

"But I thought this was what you wanted, nothing big, nothing expensive, nothing that would shake the boat. My simulations are harmless." I said, perplexed.

"Harmless, but sign of else-where, else-whens. There is no else. When the Immortals made this city, they made a covenant with the lifers. Immortality would not be allowed to expanded, it would be to dangerous, would destroy the Earth. Immortality is too small for grand projects. All the time in the universe turns human ambition into dust. No, what you want to do is live. Do you understand what it means to live?"

Philosophy. I was on shaky ground, but I had to advance. "To live is to experience, to grow, the opposite of death. I want to survive forever, Enos, that why I came here."

He laughed, a thin sound from a man who conserved his body's strengths. "No, you still don't get it. What we do is exist. Life and death are two sides of the same coin, you cannot have one without the other. I walk, I eat, I see, I exchange pleasantries, but I do not experience in the same way you do, always changing and reacting. Each day is the same as before. Eventually, the sun will expand. I hope to be able to see it, but no more. As long as you want to live, you can never join us. Goodbye, and trouble us no more."

I left, back to the world, back to my hopes, and dreams, and ambitions, such as they were. All I wanted was to live forever, but that is impossible. Nothing that lives can be forever. I turned on my simulations, already they bored me. What a foolish idea, eternity with things such as these, I deleted them forever. We have one life, one brief, finite period in which to laugh and love and dance and live, and when we're gone, so is everything else. I will die, but until I do, every moment, every experience, will be unique. Not like Enos and his eternal sameness till the sun grows and the universe dies.

Yesterday I visited the Immortals.

In Honor Of

We bought the sky, the greatest ticket the universe had to offer. 100,000 of the best and brightest Terra had to offer. Brave pioneers who sacrificed everything for a chance to make it on new planet, free from the troubles of home. They said we were fools; there was no way to build something that big, that the cryosystems would never work, that our ship would break. They said we were traitors; Earth needed our skills, the resources that went into our ship came out of the mouths of the starving. But we were heroes, out on the grand question for evolution. Some of us died before the work was completed, their children carried on. When the time came, we took the shuttles to geosynchronous orbit, started the fusion Orion/pulse drive, sealed up the cyrochambers, and slept. We dreamed of green fields and blue skies.

A stranger opened the cyrochamber door. “Welcome to Eredani Prime. Please present your papers for inspection?” Not an alien, not a pioneer, just the children of those who had take waited for the technology of interstellar colonization to become accessible to the masses. They had brought everything we hated about home with them. We closed the cyrochamber, turned our ship towards the outer darkness, and engaged the main drive.

Fuck physics, and fuck FTL.

Science, Technology, and Society Movie Night

I'm chilling at the CSPO start of year conference, which I can only describe as fantastic. The quality of the people and ideas here is like nothing I've ever seen. One of the activities was everybody writing down one thing they'd be willing to, and I volunteered to run an STS Movie Night.

A preliminary list:
Koyaanisqatsi-grab hold of your brainstem, because your view of man and nature is about to explode. Literally.
Zardoz-Some people say that this is a movie about life, death, immortality, the technosocial elites, and the nature of an apocalyptic ecological collapse. Other people say this is a movie about guns, penises, and Sean Connery in a red leather diaper. Both are wonderfully right.
eXistenZ-Cronenberg could compose a series all his own, but I like eXistenZ because its a higher budget film, and deals with virtual reality and levels of reality.
The Fly-mad science
Altered State-human subject experimentation
Jurassic Park-Chaos, man! And dinosaurs.
Hackers-Fact-25% of CS majors are a young Angelina Jolie. A look into the wacky computer underground of the early 90s.
The Terminator/Terminator 2-Military robots, technological inevitability, and of course Ahnold.
Idiocracy-A very funny movie about social Darwinism and the future of intelligence.
Gattaca-Genetic engineering, social stigma, transhumanism and equality. Also a damn good film.
Minority Report-Crime and thought. Note that DHS is working on 'multimodal mind-reading sensors' to detect terroristic intent. Can you charge someone for being nervous in an airport.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind-Memory and love, who we are when we can cut away parts of our souls.

I've only scratched the surface. Loyal readers, can you suggest more movies?

Science in the Media

I just got back from a PCAST briefing on K-12 Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math education. As we all know STEM is totally broken, and aside from the usual platitudes, we don't have great ideas about how to fix it. There was one interesting thing: Kids these days spend 12 hours a day accessing media (guilty as charged). Only 10% of characters in media are scientists or engineers, and 70% of them are portrayed as the bad guy. We need some new positive role-models.

TV:

The Real Adventurers of Richard Feynman: Nobel prizing winning physicist and international playboy travels the world from Los Alamos to Rio de Janeiro, solving mysteries, seducing beautiful women, and stopping the evil machinations of VIPER, a sinister organization bent on destroying the world with nuclear weapons. Featuring cameos from historical figures, and the Feynman Action Science Team of Bobby Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe, and Time-Traveling Teddy Roosevelt.

The Lab: You've seen The Office, right? Like that, but with science. NBC already has two shows that are basically The Office, so one more can't hurt.

Games:

Chrome Streets: A cyberpunk action/RPG in the style of Mass Effect. The player is an underground scientist, battling megacorporations for the fate of mankind. Heavy transhumanist themes, as the game revolves around your continual human advancement. Skills are divided between Robotics/Biotech/Nanotech tracks, each one offering a different combination of powers. The game is supported by a robust crafting/research system that mimics real science. Written by Charles Stross, and with a better title.

EDIT: Apparently there's a Deus Ex 3 coming out. Dues Ex was one of the best games of all time, and pretty much exactly the above. Do it right, Eidos, or I will go to French-Canadia and go all JC Denton on you.

Avatar

Let's cut the preliminaries: Avatar is the most visually stunning movie I have ever seen. It is a feast of lush alien rain forests, lithe bodies, and the pornography of violence. Cameron invented the cinematic space marine in Aliens, he perfected it in Avatar. But this is supposedly a serious blog about science-fiction, what can we say about Avatar as sci-fi?

In that regards, I am disappointed by Avatar's failure to transcend what David Brooks calls the White Messiah fable. Not because the fable is racists or imperialist, but because it is trite, and because it ends the story too soon. The purpose of the Avatar project in the movie was to bridge human and Navi culture, but that bridge inevitably fails. "There is nothing we have that they want," and the unequal negotiations of imperialism end in violence. Two cultures clash, helicopter gunships explode, and the forces of Nature triumph. The hero leaves his human past behind, gets the girl, and lives happily ever after.

A good enough, if stereotypical story, but can there be an agreement between human and Navi, technology and nature? In Cameron's mythology, science is allied with imperialism, Austugine's research program is a smoke screen for further exploitation, intelligence on the next treasure from Pandora. Try as I might, I cannot find a compromise. Technology is a different form on life, once it has been introduced, evolution takes on a faster pace, one in which older, slower systems are at a disadvantage. The complex ecosystem of Pandora is resilient enough to defeat technology, but I doubt it could integrate it.

This may be a lesson for the Navi, contact with what few (if any) remote aborigines are left, and future space exploration, but human civilization is already part of a technosphere. In this sense, preserving "nature" is a doomed project. Instead, our focus should be on designing a new world.

Visionary Nanofutures IV: Fiction in the Laboratory

Policymakers act on technology only at a distance. To fully affect the development of nanotechnology, we go directly to the source of innovation; scientists and engineers working in the field. “Whether they like the role or not, nanotechnologists are considered the essential actors of making the greatest dreams and the greatest fears come true. Therefore, more than in any other field, students of nanotechnology must be prepared to respond to such expectations, in public discourse as well as in daily research decisions.” Scientists and engineers must be engaged with full implications of nanotechnology because their involvement is the only way to counter demagoguery and neo-luddism. When scientists isolated themselves from the public debate, they surrender defining nanotechnology and framing its implications to the loudest technocritics, to the detriment of nanotechnology and society. The complexity of nanotechnoscience implies that scientists require more than technical knowledge, “[To] understand what these visions are about, what their cultural backgrounds and driving societal forces are. Because science fiction authors are arguably the most professional and influential vision writers, their texts are an ideal source for making engineering students aware of the public expectations they will increasingly face in their professional lives.”2 The positive effects of this use of science-fiction extend beyond heightened political awareness. Educating engineers in ethics is a pressing problem. Traditional approaches, whether top down or bottom up, share the dilemma that although you can teach engineers to pass a test, you cannot force them to integrate 'soft' ethical reasoning. Science-fiction analysis, because it uses imaginative as well as logical faculties, is more effective in inculcating a mindset of ethical consideration. The density of science-fiction allows a class to cover more material, Berne and Schummer provide the example of Michael Flynn's “The Fisher at the Ford,” which arranges “Six characters with different moral positions, for each of which we find almost convincing arguments.” Finally, exposure to visionary futures can alter the direction of research. At the bottom of the Drexler-Smalley divide in nanotechnology is a disagreement over whether research should be directed towards the goal of molecular assembly. While the potential of each path is an open question, I believe that powerful visions are beneficial; the grant process rewards short-term research, scientific norms should balance approachable experiments with low-probability paradigm shifting research. One inspired scientist might be enough to break the field of nanotechnology wide open.

Part III-----Part V

Visionary Nanofutures II: Engines of Imagination

The single most significant work of nanoliterature is Eric Drexler's Engines of Creation. Engines laid out the basic principles of molecular assembly, provided an extensive overview of its applications, and prefigured many current nanoethical debates; the majority subsequent nanoliterature is a commentary on Engines of Creations. In the words of Richard Smalley, Nobel laureate and Drexler's arch-rival in the nanotech community. “I was fascinated by your book "Engines of Creation" when I first read it in 1991. Reading it was the trigger event that started my own journey in nanotechnology.” More a manifesto than a technical essay, Engines is distinguished by its relentless visionary drive. Drexler writes with the fervor of an evangelist, outlining a glowing future of limitless resources, human immortality, and ever expanding consciousness in a framework of technological Darwinism, where only the most adaptable artifacts survive. In his foreword to Engines, Marvin Minsky makes two basic claims about the work: First, that it is based on the soundest technical extrapolation, and second, that it can be grouped (to its benefit) within the genre of science-fiction. Science-fiction is more successful than purely technical works in explaining future worlds because “[It is] equally concerned with the pressures and choices […] imagined emerging from their societies.” Minsky correctly identifies the science-fictional quality of Engines of Creation as the source of its enduring influence, but his grasp of the why is insufficient. Minsky implies that conventional predictions of the course of science diverge from reality because they lack a social dimension; a more accurate explanation is that science-fiction succeeds because it engages all our narrative faculties. Human beings are hardwired to understand the universe as a coherent sequence of causal relationships, or in other words as a story with a setting, characters, and events. Where the scholar uses tested theoretical paradigms and rigorous logic to make her case, the science-fiction writer instead appeals to an intuitive sense of narrative unity. Science-fiction can be distinguished from naturalist or fantastic literature by the subjunctive tension of “events that have not happened.” Science-fiction is the literature of the possible, writing it is the process of envisioning a credible alternative reality. This is why Engines of Creations endures when most futurology decays faster than a pulp magazine; as long as one of Drexler's many technical foundations remains credible, the strength of his vision binds all of his conclusions together.

Part I------Part III

Political Science Fiction

New York Times columnist David Brooks posted a provocative column on American futurism, optimism, and innovation. He proposes that the quality that makes America unique is an "Eschatological faith in the [that] future has motivated generations of Americans, just as religious faith motivates a missionary." But right now due to the sad state of politics, we have lost that faith in the future, that trust in technological progress has moved to China. What we need is a leader (Obama) who can create a national vision of the future, exciting our country to again lead the world.

I agree with Brooks; Americans no longer believe in the future, pessimism and catastrophe are the modern ideologies, and they are poisoning our future. However, the politics of the conventional will not be enough to make this change. We need visionary drive, and Brooks forgets our current visionaries and futurists: science fiction authors. Sci-fi needs to move out of the nerd ghetto, and become part of the national discourse.

Laying out this vision is the hardest challenge that President Obama faces. Even his astounding rhetorical skills may not be up to the task. But if he is going to be that transformative leader that America so desperately needs, he must articulate a national mission. More-so than health care, Afghanistan, and the economy, we have to restore the national engagement with the future

Brains at DARPA

The gnomes at the Pentagon are always pushing the limits of science, and these days they're looking into brains. A leading DARPA initiative investigates the possibility of telepathy. I can't say that faster communication between soldiers is the wave of the future. While it'd be useful to be able to communicate well in a squad that was split up, there are probably easier ways to do this. While I'm fairly sure general emotional states could be transmitted, the only one that seems useful militarily is 'danger.' Extracting enough information out of an EEG to allow tactical command seems like a major challenge. For a good look at how a developed system of this type would work, see Scalzi's The Ghost Brigade.

Where I see this coming in handy is in therapy, negotiations, and relationships. If these machines allow better interpersonal emotional understanding, i.e. empathy, they offer a path to peace. By becoming more in tune with our emotions, we can better understand ourselves and each other, reducing tension in this world.

BONUS LINK:
Techer could be new DARPA chief.

Catastrophic Futurism

A brief overview of current futurism shows that most of it is predicated on a notion of catastrophe. Global warming, energy, finance, radical terrorism, the Singularity, all of these concepts have at their core the idea that mankind is held hostage to unpredictable events beyond our control. Taleb's influential Black Swan theory posits infrequent, large scale events as the causal driver of history. There is of course a large degree of validity to this point of view. We undoubtedly do face major problems, but is catastophism a useful futurist model?

Futurism's obsession with the catastrophe has distracted us from the real goal of the discipline. The job of a futurist is not to predict the future, his job is to create the future. If a visionary is right, it is only by accident. Instead of aiming for correctness, we should aim for visionary impact and power. Mankind wants to hope. We must be allowed to dream.

Forget predictive power, these are the axioms we must build on:
1) Which human values are important?
2) What technological means are available?
3) What does a world that embodies our values and means look like?