18 Comments

Wow, I’d settle for being able to figure out how to build more homes.

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The look of the built environment in Sci-Fi I always find fascinating.

While Cyberpunk may have many of today's technologies, it also features a dark and decaying massive scale built environment; a sea of dingy skyscrapers. Much spacefaring sci-fi was able to simply sidestep humanity's future built environment.

But Cyberpunk in a way is Star Wars-izing a pretty standard vision of the future, as one of the basic tenents going back to the 50's is that the built environment will tend toward spacious, modernist, and clean. Cities full of big glass boxes. If anything the vision of cities full of big glass boxes goes all the way back to the 19th century. Solarpunk is even stuck on it to degree as a starting point.

Cities full of big glass boxes needs updating. I don't think that's humanity's future even mid-term. Big glass boxes are not particularly sustainable. 3D printing will eventually grow to include much of the built environment (roboconstruction), architecture will be speaking a completely different language.

Genetic engineering will play a role as well; while there are ethical issues regarding genetically engineered food or animals, when it comes to pretty flowers and boards, almost nobody cares. Wild progenitors of many of today's domestic crops are extinct. Trees are arguably the ultimate carbon capture technology, especially the genetically engineered supertrees of the future. While domed cities were common in 20th century sci-fi, cities under a huge tree canopy should be becoming a more popular vision.

I don't think sustainability will ever leave the public consciousness. It is baked into society now. Until somewhat recently (late 20th century), when people trash the place, they can just move somewhere else. This was true throughout history, whole cities have been abandoned after people trashed the place. The ozone hole and then climate change are the first two problems where this just isn't true anymore, we can't move somewhere else. The built environment will reflect this fundamental change more and more over time.

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"Incidentally, this is also probably why you don't have a flying car yet - it has too much energy. The people who decide whether to allow flying cars realize that some people would choose to crash those high-energy objects into buildings. Regular cars are dangerous enough!"

If this was true, how do you explain how easy it is for someone to get access to a Cessna 172? At 1100kg and a 188mph Never Exceed Speed, you have 24x the kinetic energy of a car.

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We have a lot more sunlight than Cyberpunk predicted.

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Energy too cheap to meter was such a lynchpin of Golden Age SF. We had rolling sidewalks, domed cities, underwater colonies, One of my favorite obscure books is N.U.K.E.E. by Don Widener. There premise is that a self-expanding nuclear power plant becomes self aware and decides that if all its output wasn't used, that would be evidence of sabotage and would merit retaliation. Chaos and hilarity ensue and wilder and wilder schemes to massively waste energy. It's such a hilarious concept that flies in the face of all we know about conservation.

And the retro-future concept I am most distraught never came to be isn't flying cars. It's luxury transcontinental dirigibles. I cannot count the number of times these were feature on the cover of Popular Science or something similar, yet we have never even come close to this dream.

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Flying cars are such a dumb thing for people to have latched onto as a vision of a glorious future. The boundless limits of human imagination, and people fixated on... not having to sit around in traffic, at least not in two dimensions. It's hard to see what else you can get in a flying car that you can't get in a regular car or train, an airplane, a roller coaster, the view from a tall building, or a drone-mounted camera. But to be charitable, I think "flying cars" are probably a stand-in for any invention that visibly changes the physical environment, which contemporary inventions haven't done to the degree that transportation and engineering innovations had revolutionized the way the world looked in the 100 years leading up to the exotic-physics era of sci-fi. (Or maybe I'm just not thinking of the recent innovations that have! I thought of air pollution regulations and LED lighting... anything else?)

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Regarding AI, I actually think sci-fi does not imagine far enough. We're going to get a world with so much more than just robot butlers, for better or for worse.

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Energy is spot on.

But AI - not so much. The implicit assumption behind the "inevitable AI" people is that adding more raw transistor = compute capacity will eventually create AI.

This assumption is wrong, because it is the software - not the hardware - that creates intelligence. There are plenty of large animals out there with brain masses/# neurons comparable to early hominids.

If they didn't develop intelligence, why would fundamentally stupid, incapable and real world uninvolved hardware?

The same thing applies to CRISPR and what not. If it takes 4 years and about a dozen dead people to fix a single base pair mutation (sickle cell anemia), this is a clear indicator that geneticists are far more alchemists than technicians.

Technicians know what is wrong, how to fix it and do it; alchemists apply manticore lashes and trial + error to sometimes get a result. Kind of like medical practice.

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Is sci-fi genre missing spread of a lethal virus?

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Great piece! Sharing a link to this in the next issue of my own newsletter, Star Trekking.

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We did get nuclear-powered 200 mph trains, though.

I've travelled on them: TGVs. Of course the nuclear power is in distant power stations and the trains are just regular electric trains picking it up via pantograph from an overhead line, but SNCF gets the vast majority of its power from France's robust nuclear generation sector.

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Everything said here sounds about right. But it should be noted that according to the best and what APPEARS to be the most reliable evidence we have, there are solid objects moving through Earth's air and water at incalculable speeds while also changing directions at rates that defy our current knowledge of physics. They also appear to be intelligently controlled.

If upon further inspection and investigation this evidence bears out, it could provide a needed stimulus to thinking. Our current models of physics tell us that many things are impossible. We're at what appears to be a dead end. But if these strange objects are somehow confirmed, they may open an intellectual door, making it imperative for scientists to set aside their research within known boundaries and concentrate on looking beyond what they thought was possible. It's much easier to challenge the mind to think novel thoughts when a novelty is staring you in the face.

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Wow, this triggers some interesting nostalgia thinking about the transition to post-cyberpunk SF. I remember when Steve Jackson Games published Transhuman Space (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transhuman_Space ). Right around the time I was running out of time and energy for gaming and drifting away from the hobby (checking, I see it was 2002). I still have my copy but have never played it-- though I admit, even if I had time, it looked like a difficult setting for a game.

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Personality upload would require mapping every neural synaptic connection.. we're centuries away from that sort of resolution. Which might be good, because the Methuselas of Altered Carbon are just bad. Like.. worse than a 0% estate tax.

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> But maybe it's the authors at the very beginning of a tech boom, before progress in a particular area really kicks into high gear, who are able to see more clearly where the boom will take us.

This is a tricksy prediction that basically can't fail: if you're right about it all and AI progress slows, then you're right. If AI progress is not near its peak but merely at the beginning, then you would look back and say "Aha! In fact these authors *were* at the very beginning of a boom, we just didn't know it at the time! And look, they were right!!!". Projecting a linear trend pretty much by definition only starts to fail near the end of a trend, but that's not a prediction or a theory, since you can't know beforehand where you are in the trend.

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