Tag Archives: futurism

Today's Tomorrows

Machines That Think

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Welcome to the inaugural column of Today’s Tomorrows here at Futurismic. For any readers who missed my introduction, I’m going to explore a science topic a month, with both some evaluation of current news on the topic and a chat about how it has been dealt with in science fiction.

A few days ago, I was at a futurist technology conference called FiRE in San Diego, listening to new developments in multiple fields. The speed of change right now is amazing. We first flew at all in 1903. Today, we have a space program that ranges from commercial ventures like Space-X to NASA flying by Saturn and operating remote-control rovers on Mars. In 1993, the Mosaic internet browser allowed us popular and easy access to the computing tools to create cyberspace; I’m reading information from all over the world in order to compose this article. My iPhone has more computing power than the room-sized computer I used to support the City of Fullerton, CA. Continue reading Machines That Think →

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I don’t know how to drive it, but it looks pretty wild

Concept cars are rather like science fiction – in that they never quite come true, and they say more about the time in which they’re designed that the time in which they would supposedly exist.

But that’s half the fun of designing them, I guess, and it looks like there’s still plenty of folk in the auto industry’s blue sky labs who know how to dream big… or who play a lot of computer games. Pink Tentacle has a bunch of concept vehicle drawings (or rather renderings) from Mazda, Toyota, Nissan and Honda that look like a mash-up of Akira, Wip3out and Stephan Martiniere; if this is what the freeways of 2050 will look like, crossing the street is going to be a crazy experience.

Mazda Motonari RX vehicle concept

That’s the Mazda Motonari RX; to quote Pink Tentacle:

The vehicle drives sort of like a street luge. Acceleration and direction is determined by two armrest mounted control points, and the vehicle’s exoskeletal frame shape-shifts in accordance with the position of the driver’s arms and legs when enveloped in the seat. Four omnidirectional wheels allow 360 degrees of movement, and the tread expands or contracts to suit the driving conditions. A “haptic skin” suit consisting of millions of microscopic actuators enables the driver to experience the road psycho-somatically while receiving electrical muscle stimulation from the onboard AI guidance system (or other remotely located drivers).

No mention of how much a tank of gas will cost… though Toyota’s design apparently sidesteps the issue by being “powered by pollution”.

There’s a certain irony implicit in the automobile industry being one of the last bastions of sleek’n’shiny futurism in these times of bright green thinking; I’d love to see streets full of things like this, but I’m not going to hold my breath.

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Charles Stross on the future of gaming

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Star Wars MMO game screenshotThe Zeitgeist strikes again – it appears that this week is going to throw up lots of stuff about computer gaming. Here’s a counterpoint to Sven’s dispatch; a transcript of a keynote speech that Charlie Stross gave to the LOGIN 2009 games industry conference yesterday.

In the next five years we can expect semiconductor development to proceed much as it has in the previous five years: there’s at least one more generation of miniaturization to go in chip fabrication, and that’s going to feed our expectations of diminishing power consumption and increasing performance for a few years. There may well be signs of a next-generation console war. And so on. This isn’t news.

One factor that’s going to come into play is the increasing cost of semiconductor fab lines. As the resolution of a lithography process gets finer, the cost of setting up a fab line increases — and it’s not a linear relationship. A 22nm line is going to cost a lot more than a 33nm line, or a 45nm one. It’s the dark shadow of Moore’s Law: the cost per transistor on a chip may be falling exponentially, but the fabs that spit them out are growing pricier by a similar ratio.

Something like this happened, historically, in the development of the aerospace industry. Over the past thirty years, we’ve grown used to thinking of the civil aerospace industry as a mature and predictable field, dominated by two huge multinationals and protected by prohibitive costs of entry. But it wasn’t always so.

Go read the whole thing; Stross swiftly and plausibly draws a line from the present to the future two decades hence, a future where the audience demographics for gaming have shifted to include the vast majority of the population, and the technology platforms that games run on are small, portable and ubiquitous. [image by st3f4n]

Today's Tomorrows

Introducing Today’s Tomorrows, a new column by Brenda Cooper

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Hi.  I’m Brenda Cooper.  I’m looking forward to penning a column here at Futurismic, at least for the rest of the year.  It’s an exciting spot for me, since I’m both a science fiction writer and a futurist.

So how does one become both of those things?  Well, I always knew I wanted to write.  Since I was three.  We all say that, but eventually I actually started writing real stories instead of beating myself up for not writing.  So now I’ve got about thirty stories published so far, and three novels out from Tor (one is a collaboration with Larry Niven).  The futurist part happened because I was part of a long-term strategy team for a city a little over a decade ago, and I found I really loved thinking and talking about the future.  In fact, I’m so rabid about that being a conversation that matters, that I’ve gotten somewhat known here in the Pacific Northwest region of the US and I now periodically get paid to talk to business audiences about the future.  I find the two avocations quite compatible.  Often I’m researching a talk when some fact I find demands to have a story written about it.

So what I’m planning here at Futurismic, starting soon, is to do a monthly column that mashes up the science fiction and the science of the future.  I’ll write about a technology or other futurist topic, and explore some of the ways that science fiction writers have either shaped or reacted to that topic.  I plan to explore cloning (did you know they just cloned a camel in Dubai?) and robotics (there is a robotic scientist named Adam), among other things.  I’m open to ideas, so feel free to comment on this post and leave me technologies you’re interested in.

For more information, stop by www.brenda-cooper.com.  The website won’t tell you I love dogs and reading and listening to podcasts while I walk the dogs.