Hey, remember me mentioning a kind of Mundane SF/futurist social media roleplaying game back in July? Well, The Superstruct Game finally kicked off this week, and you can get involved on a number of levels – hundreds of participants (including a number of Futurismic staffers) are already helping to invent the future, so hop in and join them.
What are the requirements? That you can imagine what the world might be like in 2019… so ideal for science fiction fans, I’d have thought. Get involved!
Regular readers (including, embarrassingly enough, The Man Himself) will be aware of my status as a card-carrying Bruce Sterling fan-boy, but as it’s a fandom I know many Futurismic readers share I feel I can more than justify linking to a recent interview with Sterling conducted by David de Beer at the Nebula Awards website.
As usual, you get both sides of the Sterling coin: the lengthy and discursive answers:
The Commercial vs the Artistic in writing – is there a genuine difference between these two philosophies or are they artifical attributes? Are they in opposition, and if so, can they meet?
Well, I hang out a lot in countries where the creatives write in minority languages, and really, that’s just not an issue for them. They know what American commercial writing looks like, but they themselves don’t HAVE any “commerce.” There aren’t enough potential readers to establish a market.
What they DO commonly have is “political writing,” the kind of stuff that gets your fingertips broken by the secret police. So: take a guy like recent Nobel-Prize winner Orhan Pamuk — super-popular worldwide, a real old-school deep-thinking artsy literatus, and the crazy-fascist wing of the Turkish secret police are trying hard to kill him. Now that guy is a writer’s writer. He’s got all those supposed oppositions stuffed into one refugee valise. You know, fretting about a commercial sell-out is the least of Orhan’s problems.
Furthermore, it’s dead obvious that the writing problems that matter in America now are political rather than “commercial” or “artistic”. America’s suffering a Civil Cold War. Or at least, they were until the Right’s culture-warriors started losing it.
And the short sharp punches-in-the-nose:
Electronic vs Print publishing – any thoughts on the matter?
You should talk to my colleagues in newspapers. If you can find any newspapers left.
Go read – even if you’re not a fan of his fiction, Sterling keeps an ear to the ground of reality better than any sf writer of his generation, and that alone makes him worth paying attention to.
The latest instalment of Sven Johnson’s Future Imperfect is part of the Superstruct project.
Within it, a future iteration of Sven takes a moment on a cruise-gone-wrong to reflect on the history of 3D spam – the flipside of the fabrication revolution. Continue reading When 3D spam got old
The official Google blog isn’t always the most exciting of reads, but every now and again they post up something worth a read. Today saw the first of ten articles from the top boffins at the Googleplex to celebrate the company’s tenth anniversary; it’s about the future of cloud computing, and it hints at a fairly science fictional end-point:
Traditionally, systems that solve complicated problems and queries have been called “intelligent”, but compared to earlier approaches in the field of ‘artificial intelligence’, the path that we foresee has important new elements. First of all, this system will operate on an enormous scale with an unprecedented computational power of millions of computers. It will be used by billions of people and learn from an aggregate of potentially trillions of meaningful interactions per day. It will be engineered iteratively, based on a feedback loop of quick changes, evaluation, and adjustments.
Underneath that corporate gloss is the enthusiasm of researchers who believe they’re working toward a useful form of artificial intelligence. This isn’t news, of course – Larry Page has been quite open about that particular long-term goal – but it’s the assured confidence that Google has which never ceases to astonish. From the introduction to the article:
As computer scientist Alan Kay has famously observed, the best way to predict the future is to invent it, so we will be doing our best to make good on our experts’ words every day.
One can’t help but be reminded of the Genius Inventor archetypes of pulp science fiction… but in this case that blue-sky vision is backed up by the bankroll of one of the most powerful organisations on the planet. [image by dannysullivan]
So, is it hubris, hype or hope… or a mixture of all three? Should we fear the Big G, or look to it to usher in something like the Singularity and save us from ourselves? Or is AI just a pipe dream for big-budget geeks?
History may only just be beginning, but we already have a lot of data stashed away as a species, and as we know, it’s always good practice to back it up.
But if you’re thinking in terms of centuries or millennia, it might also be a good idea to record information about our languages so that future historians won’t have to contend with undecipherable writings, like Rongorongo, due to linguistic drift.
The Long Now Foundation has created a modern day Rosetta Stone to help solve this problem, here is a description from Kevin Kelly’s website:
One side of the disk contains a graphic teaser. The design shows headlines in the eight major languages of the world today spiraling inward in ever-decreasing size till it becomes so small you have trouble reading it, yet the text goes on getting smaller. The sentences announce: “Languages of the World: This is an archive of over 1,500 human languages assembled in the year 02008 C.E. Magnify 1,000 times to find over 13,000 pages of language documentation.”
This graphic side of the disk is pure titanium. A black oxide coating has been added to the surface. The text is etched into that, revealing the whiter titanium. This bold sign board is needed because the pages of genesis which are etched on the mirror-like opposite side of the disk are nearly invisible.
This business side of the disk is pure nickel. Picking it up you would not be aware there were 13,500 pages of linguistic gold hiding on it. The nickel is deposited on an etched silicon disk. In effect the Rosetta disk is a nickel cast of a micro-etch silicon mold. When the disk is held at the right angle the grid array of the pages form a slight diffraction rainbow. You need a 750-power optical microscope to read the pages.
Kelly’s description of the project is fascinating, and it seems like a wonderful project, both in practical terms and in artistic terms.