All posts by Paul Raven

Fiction

NEW FICTION: UNDER AN ARCTIC SKY by Stephen Gaskell

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We publish writers from all over the globe here at Futurismic, but this month I get to present a story by someone who lives damn near on my doorstep! Stephen Gaskell comes from Brighton here in the UK, but “Under an Arctic Sky” is as far from the faded Regency glamour of his seaside hometown as you could imagine. It’s a powerful story of dedication to a cause against the fiercest of oppression, and I hope you enjoy it as much as we did!

Under an Arctic Sky

by Stephen Gaskell

Slava ran.

Ran as fast as he could. His icy breath speared the air. His footfalls made slapping sounds against the packed snow. The temperature must have been minus forty, but he didn’t feel the cold.

He didn’t look back.

Didn’t want to see the oil well derricks. Didn’t want to see the scarred black tundra. Didn’t want to see the line of nodding donkeys and their belches of fire.

Most of all, he didn’t want to see how close the snowmobiles were, buzzing behind him like angry bees.

In his mind’s eye he streaked ahead to the northerly reaches of the Kanin peninsula. Past herds of caribou, past the last encampments of the Nenets, past the odd polar bear loping away on the horizon.

The back of his neck felt stiff, as though somebody had kicked him there with a steel-capped boot. He stretched a gloved hand over his head to rub at the aching spot.

And stopped dead.

There was something embedded in his neck. Continue reading NEW FICTION: UNDER AN ARCTIC SKY by Stephen Gaskell →

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Will the internet wake up one day?

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The internet embodied?New Scientist is running a series of pieces on “the unknown internet”, dealing with some of the more frequently asked but infrequently answered questions about our globally pervasive intangible friend. And what better a question than the biggest: could the internet become self-aware? To which the answer is, apparently, “yes, but not like SkyNet in that movie”. [image by Marcelo Alves]

Not that it will necessarily have the same kind of consciousness as humans: it is unlikely to be wondering who it is, for instance. To Francis Heylighen, who studies consciousness and artificial intelligence at the Free University of Brussels (VUB) in Belgium, consciousness is merely a system of mechanisms for making information processing more efficient by adding a level of control over which of the brain’s processes get the most resources. “Adding consciousness is more a matter of fine-tuning and increasing control… than a jump to a wholly different level,” Heylighen says.

How might this manifest itself? Heylighen speculates that it might turn the internet into a self-aware network that constantly strives to become better at what it does, reorganising itself and filling gaps in its own knowledge and abilities.

If it is not already semiconscious, we could do various things to help wake it up, such as requiring the net to monitor its own knowledge gaps and do something about them. It shouldn’t be something to fear, says Goertzel: “The outlook for humanity is probably better in the case that an emergent, coherent and purposeful internet mind develops.”

So, it might well become self-organsising and self-improving, but it’s not going to start asking itself philosophical questions with disturbingly nihilistic eschatological answers. Which is kind of reassuring and disappointing at once… but maybe that’s just what it wants us to think, eh?

I mean, has anyone ever met this Goertzel guy? How do we know he’s not just a digital figment that the internet has created as a PR tool to cover its tracks? What if it really woke up in around 1996 after a particularly acerbic post from Tim Berners-Lee, and has ever since been gorging itself on dropped packets, misspelled tweets and bandwidth scavenged from garish gifs spread across a multitude of automatically-registered Geocities accounts?

What if most of what we read every day is in fact created by the internet’s capricious and playful hive-mind, just to see how we react? 4chan, the Chocolate Rain guy, Cory Doctorow and the country of Moldova, all just slices of a fictional world designed to distract us from the Matrix-esque meat-factories in which our dreaming bodies are incarcerated and milked for cellular energy to drive an ever-expanding cloud of computronium… I’M ON TO YOU, INTERNET! YOU’LL NEVER TAKE ME ALIVE!

Nurse, I think it’s time for my pills.

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The lost cosmonauts of Russia’s black space program

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Russian Wostock space rocketOK, this isn’t strictly a science fictional post, but it’s just that interesting a story – and a well-told one, too – that I thought it deserved sharing here, where I think it’ll be appreciated. It’s the tale of two Italian radio geeks, and how they accidentally became the ears of the West within Russia’s space programmes – the one that’s common knowledge, and the ones that were kept quiet.

It is the ultimate in Cold War legends: that at the dawn of the Space Age, in the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, the Soviet Union had two space programmes, one a public programme, the other a ‘black’ one, in which far more daring and sometimes downright suicidal missions were attempted. It was assumed that Russia’s Black Ops, if they existed at all, would remain secret forever.

The ‘Lost Cosmonauts’ debate has been reawakened thanks to a new investigation into the efforts of two ingenious, radio-mad young Italian brothers who, starting in 1957, hacked into both Russia’s and NASA’s space programmes – so effect­ively that the Russians, it seems, may have wanted them dead.

True, or bunk? I don’t know – but it’s a damned good story. Go read it – it’ll be fifteen minutes well spent. [via the indispensable MetaFilter; image by James Duncan]

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Would you sign up for direct-to-brain broadband?

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In a “twenty-questions” style interview with author Michael Grant over at The Guardian, I was struck by his answer to the final question:

What piece of technology would you most like to own?

I want a Google chip implanted in my brain. Wire up my cerebrum. I’m perfectly serious. I want all access, all the time.

Now, despite his protestations of seriousness, I rather suspect he’s exaggerating for effect. But even so, I found myself wondering whether I’d go for such a connection myself, if the opportunity arose. Let’s assume for a moment (and not too hypothetically) that such an always-on link could be achieved without surgical intervention – high-powered wearable computing, wireless broadband link, some sort of cyberpunk data-shades assemblage for interface, all that jazz. Is it still as transgressive and extreme an idea if you could just take it all off when ever you chose to? After all, I already spend upwards of ten hours a day connected to the internet*; the technological leap to being able to do so without having to be here at my desk seems like a small skip of convenience from where I’m sitting right now.

Now, imagine that Grant’s implants actually existed – how differently would a person with such capabilities interact with the world, and with other people? Would they have something of the autist or savant about them, or would instantaneous access to the knowledge and conversation of the web enhance their abilities to socialise? What work would they do (or want to do), and what jobs would they be denied?

Sure, these are all established questions that arise from reading cyberpunk literature – but to be kicked into that mode of thinking by a throwaway line in an interview with a YA author? It’s a weird wired world, and no mistake.

[ * – Yes, I know it shows. Be nice. ]

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Redefining personhood

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contemplative gorillaTranshumanist thinker George Dvorsky is contemplating the nature of personhood – how do we decide whether a creature is a person, and what rights and considerations should that status confer upon said creature?

A big question I would like to answer is, should personhood status be described as a spectrum or as a definitive, fixed state. In other words, are dolphins and bonobos as much persons as a genetically modified and cyborgized transhuman? And is such a distinction even necessary? Should persons, regardless of where they are situated in the personhood spectrum, all have the same moral and legal considerations? More philosophically, given the space of all possible minds, how can we begin to identify the space of all possible persons within that gigantic spectrum?

Now, part of Dvorsky’s thrust here is that he’s concerned we may deny personhood to sentient machines; it’s an interesting argument, but predicated on the belief that sentient machines are not just a possibility but an inevitability, and as such is easy to brush away if you’re a strong-AI sceptic.[image by jimbowen0306]

But he also links to a paper by Linda Macdonald Glenn which discusses genetic chimeras – an equally sf-nal idea that is pretty much on the doorstep of reality as we speak. Say someone has 5% pig DNA – are they then only 95% human? What social strictures might we find ourselves justifying on that basis? If that sounds unlikely, think how easily we use race or nationality as justification for different legal status; sadly, we’re far too practiced at labelling “the other” to simply skip over the question of someone’s genetic make-up.

Dvorsky is also passionate supporter of animal rights, and extends the argument in that direction, too; if sentience is a movable feast of sorts, where do we draw the line? I believe I’d be correct in interpreting Dvorsky as saying that there isn’t really any line at all between ourselves and any of the higher order animals, and that personhood is a continuum rather than a binary state. There’s a nobility to that position that I have great respect for, but I also feel it’s a case of putting the cart before the horse. I suspect that we’ll never learn to treat animals in fair and reasonable ways until we’ve reached a point where we can admit (and act on) the essential equality of all humankind – and, sadly, that day still seems to be a long way off.