Category Archives: Blog

Blog

Looming digital dark age

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The possibility of a digital dark age has been noted before, but I hadn’t realised the problem was this acute, according to Prof Jerome P. McDonough at the University of Illinois:

“Even over the course of 10 years, you can have a rapid enough evolution in the ways people store digital information and the programs they use to access it that file formats can fall out of date,” McDonough said.

Magnetic tape, which stores most of the world’s computer backups, can degrade within a decade. According to the National Archives Web site by the mid-1970s, only two machines could read the data from the 1960 U.S. Census: One was in Japan, the other in the Smithsonian Institution. Some of the data collected from NASA’s 1976 Viking landing on Mars is unreadable and lost forever.

It is a pity – and it highlights the importance of non-proprietary file types.

I imagine extracting data from obsolete formats will become a major industry in the future.

[story at Physorg][image from altemark on flickr]

Blog

Near-future sf is not impossible, says Gareth L Powell

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Gareth L Powell has decided to refute Charlie Stross’s recent claim that near-future science fiction is impossible to write. As a quick recap, Charlie said:

We are living in interesting times; in fact, they’re so interesting that it is not currently possible to write near-future SF.

Gareth sees that as shrinking away from the challenge:

I don’t see SF as a dry, intellectual game of prediction. I don’t feel the need to be proven right by posterity. If the immediate economic future looks a little uncertain, I’ll fudge a little. I’ll make my best guess and hope for the best. I’ll write a story about people.

After all, this kind of uncertainty is hardly new. Science fiction writers in the 1980s had to consider the fact that the futuristic stories they were writing could be rendered obsolete at any moment by a full-scale global nuclear war – but they kept on writing. They made some basic assumptions and they went for it.

For instance, William Gibson wrote Neuromancer in the early Eighties, at the height of the Cold War, when the superpowers were on the brink of a holocaust, and as far as he knew, he could have been vapourised before finishing the novel, but he finished it anyway.

I’m going to side with Gareth on this one – after all, we publish near-future stories here at Futurismic, and no other type!

But what about you lot? Do you find the plausibility of the predictions in a piece of near-future science fiction as important as the plot and the characters?

Blog

Turn on, jack in, zone out – the coming of the global computer hive-mind

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Metaverse cyberpunkKevin Kelly admits he’s not the first person to postulate that “a superorganism is emerging from the cloak of wires, radio waves, and electronic nodes wrapping the surface of our planet.“ He also reckons that cloud computing is amplifying the effect:

The majority of the content of the web is created within this one virtual computer. Links are programmed, clicks are chosen, files are moved and code is installed from the dispersed, extended cloud created by consumers and enterprise – the tons of smart phones, Macbooks, Blackberries, and workstations we work in front of.

Nova Spivak agrees – which makes sense, as he’s trying to build Web3.0, a.k.a. the Semantic Web – but suggests that we’ll avoid a Terminator-esque ending because human consciousness may be the key to the whole thing:

What all this means to me is that human beings may form an important and potentially irreplaceable part of the OM — the One Machine — the emerging global superorganism. In particular today the humans are still the most intelligent parts. But in the future when machine intelligence may exceed human intelligence a billionfold, humans may still be the only or at least most conscious parts of the system. Because of the uniquely human capacity for consciousness (actually, animals and insects are conscious too), I think we have an important role to play in the emerging superorganism. We are it’s awareness. We are who watches, feels, and knows what it is thinking and doing ultimately.

Maybe that sounds a little bit Mondo-2000 techno-hippie nineties-retro to you, hmmm? OMGZ maybe Spivak is a victim of terrible brain changes wrought by teh ev1lz of teh intarwubz!!!1 OH NOES:

Researchers have found that the brains of ‘digital natives’ are developing to deal more efficiently with searching and filtering large amounts of information, and making quick decisions. On the down side, that behaviour is changing the brain’s neural patterns impairing the social skills of heavy web users (what’s new?) and even triggering an increase in conditions like Attention Deficit Disorder.

Well, it looks like the internet must have eroded the fundamentals of cause and effect, too… who knew? I guess there’s no point in delaying the inevitable, so I’m off to get my cerebral jack fitted so I can transcend the limitations of this stupid meat prison. The future is within our grasp, brothers and sisters! [image by Katiya Rhode]

Blog

Raytheon in underwater UAV shocker

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Kudos and congrats to the US military industrial complex for continuing to output such consistently high quality James-Bondworthy widgets and gizmos. The latest is an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle from arms megacorp Raytheon that can be launched from a submarine without having to surface:

The new U-UAV is dubbed SOTHOC, for Submarine Over the Horizon Organic Capabilities. The launch system works by deploying a sealed can through the sub’s waste disposal lock. The can then sinks away safely to get clear of the boat. On reaching a preset depth it dumps weight to become positively buoyant and ascends to the surface. Once stable at the surface, it aligns itself into wind and launches a one-shot, disposable UAV.

Gawd bless America for supplying the rest of the worlds military hardware geeks with a consistent supply of goodness with no only minimal risk to our own person (unless you live in one of the Axis of Evil countries).

Peace out.

[from the Register][image from Ardyiii on flickr]

Blog

Twitter – the newest addition to the terrorism toolbox?

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Yes, folks, you read that correctly – Twitter is becoming the latest channel for the multipronged assault on Freedom as promulgated by nebulously defined ideologues everywhere! At least that’s what the US Army intelligence types reckon, ranking Twitter and other microblogging services alongside GPS maps and voice modulation software as the latest potential tools of terror.

I think the person who submitted the story to SlashDot summed it up best: “Just wait until the Army finds out about chat rooms and email!“