Note - a version of this article was originally posted by me on August 2011 on the original QuantumThoughts web site
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"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."
Bonus points if you recognized the quote; it's from the classic, seminal cyberpunk novel, "Neuromancer" by William Gibson. Back in 1980 it conjured up a vision of a static-filled TV-screen, suggesting that the future which Gibson's world occupied was grim and bleak and dystopian.
It was another sci-fi author, Robert J. Sawyer (in "WWW: Wake") who pointed out that today it doesn't have quite the same meaning - a modern HD TV, when tuned to a channel that is not active, is "blue like the sky". The future, it appears, isn't as it was going to be ("wioll haven be" if you're a Douglas Adams fan).
Take it back even further - let's look at the future as envisoned by Jules Verne (who was probably considered a fantasy writer in his day, rather than a science fiction writer). He envisioned such fantastical things as ships that could travel under the surface of the water ("20,000 Leagues Under the Sea"), voyages to the moon ("From The Earth to the Moon"). Verne wrote these in the 1860's, long before we could actually undertake such feats.
When a science-fiction writer sets a story in a future, they are often creating a postulated future by extrapolating from the current state of the world. Sometimes they are very successful - Verne, for example - and sometimes they aren't. Why? Well, extrapolating a future from the current state of the world is a dangerous business. Reality doesn't always cooperate - the unexpected can throw the best laid plans of sci-fi writers completely awry.
You see, Verne had it easy. The rate of human progress was, well, slower back then. Predicting improvements in transportation was a no-brainer. Steam was King, Scientific Progress was inevitable - jitneys and trains and trolleys would get smaller, faster, cheaper, etc. etc. etc.
But the rate of that progress is ever-increasing. Hugo Gernsback was perhaps the most obvious example of a prognosticator who didn't quite make the boat.
For those of you who don't know, Hugo (who was actually a contemporary of Verne, being born two decades before Verne's death) is considered the "Father of Science Fiction". Not because of his writing, but because he promoted Science Fiction - by founding one of the most famous magazines of the 20th century, "Amazing Stories". He helped get science fiction published and read and popularized - "Amazing Stories" was published for 80 years! The Hugo Award, in fact, is named in honor of the esteemed Mr. Gernsback.
"Amazing Stories" was full of the future - the future as envisioned in the early decades of the 20th century. It was full of flying cars, family spaceships, highways in the sky - looking a lot like Fritz Lang's Metropolis, the early 20th century thought the future would be a straight-forward extrapolation of the existing trends.
Reality intruded. Computers rapidly went from large rooms full of vacuum tubes to things you could put on your desk - and it changed the way we envisioned the future. Suddenly it was "obvious" that transporation's heyday was over; the next revolution would be in information. This spawned the Cyberpunk genre (William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Neal Stephenson, Rudy Rucker, dozens more) - and moved the future to a different place.
Cyberpunk was largely grim and bleak, because the world had become darker since the 1930's. The World Wars, the Cold War, the Vietnam War, the rise of the corporation and the franchise, and the transformation of the middle class into a sort of "virtual serfdom" were the new baseline that science fiction used to extrapolate into this new future - and it was not pretty (although Neal Stephenson at least made "Snow Crash" one hell of a fun ride). Add to the mix the nanotech (or nanopunk) revolution - Greg Bear's "Blood Music", Kathleen Ann Goonan's "Queen City Jazz", and all the other biological-revolution predictions of Grey Goo or the drastic reshaping of humans and human society - and it just gets strange.
The rate of change itself is changing - and this has led many to postulate a "technological singularity", a point in time beyond which we cannot see what will happen next, because we will no longer be causing the changes. Whether we create Artificial Intelligence or it arises as an Emergent phenomenon derived from the interconnected computing power of the internet, many seem convinced it will happen, and soon - many say by 2040.
The idea of machines taking over is just part of the current obsession we have with apocalypse. Whether it's zombies or some other plague, an ecological disaster, or Terminators (Borg, Berserkers, we've seen them before), plenty of today's possible futures seem to involve the catastrophic demise of humanity. Why? Maybe we just need to have a common foe (The Soviet Union is gone, but we could still have an alien invasion - when Gliese-581d receives our directed radio message in 19 years and a jumpgate opens in Earth orbit, for example). Maybe we're feeling the pressures of economy and overcrowding and diminishing resources.
I'm not a psychologist, and if you want more about the Apocalypse I can't help you - I'm just trying to finally get to my point here, which is that the Future is a moving target - our visions of the future are always changing, and I believe that - here's the point now - we get to choose!
Science Fiction is like lucid dreaming - we project our hopes, fears, and dreams into a vision of possible futures. And the artists who create those futures, the science fiction writers, they are planting memes - viral ideas, which if they take hold in our collection consciousness, can be made form. Gibson dreamed up Cyberspace after watching his kids play video games on an original Nintendo NES (he actually wrote "Neuromancer" on a typewriter, not on a computer). It was a compelling enough vision that we started applying visual interfaces over what had previously been a simple text and file transfer system (Darpanet, which evolved into the Internet). I was in graduate school in the 1990's, and I remember quite clearly when I first saw a "Gopher" interface, let alone "NCSA Mosaic", Marc Andreesssen's invention and the first true web browser that let users view words and images simultaneously. Not the fully-immersive three-dimensional consensual hallucination Gibson envisioned (World of Warcraft comes a bit closer), but certainly a significant step in that direction.
Anyway, the point - science fiction describes possible futures. When the future is compelling enough, either by virtue of memic infection of the majority of us, or at least those of us with the ability to enact a change, we make it happen.
President John Fitzgerald Kennedy did much of the same thing in 1961. He chose our future, infected a nation with the vision of making a sci-fi dream a reality, and in less than a decade it happened.
So - our dreams create reality. In most of our lifetimes it's been through acts of engineering (The World Wide Web from Gibson's Cyberspace, Apple iPads from the Star Trek: The Next Generation P.A.D.D., etc.). But some philosophers believe that the very structure of reality can be shaped by our minds - and if consciousness really derives from quantum structures in the brain, maybe we can choose which of the many different possible futures comes to pass.
More on quantum consciousness next month….
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