What We Get Wrong About Technology (timharford.com) 197
Tim Harford, a columnist for the Financial Times, uses the example of Rachael and Rick Deckard from Blade Runner to explain how we humans, when asked about how new inventions might shape the future, often tend to leap to technologies that are sophisticated beyond comprehension. Also spoiler of the Blade Runner plot is ahead. He writes: So sophisticated is Rachael that she is impossible to distinguish from a human without specialised equipment; she even believes herself to be human. Los Angeles police detective Rick Deckard knows otherwise; in Rachael, Deckard is faced with an artificial intelligence so beguiling, he finds himself falling in love. Yet when he wants to invite Rachael out for a drink, what does he do? He calls her up from a payphone. There is something revealing about the contrast between the two technologies -- the biotech miracle that is Rachael, and the graffiti-scrawled videophone that Deckard uses to talk to her. It's not simply that Blade Runner fumbled its futurism by failing to anticipate the smartphone. That's a forgivable slip, and Blade Runner is hardly the only film to make it. It's that, when asked to think about how new inventions might shape the future, our imaginations tend to leap to technologies that are sophisticated beyond comprehension. We readily imagine cracking the secrets of artificial life, and downloading and uploading a human mind. Yet when asked to picture how everyday life might look in a society sophisticated enough to build such biological androids, our imaginations falter. Blade Runner audiences found it perfectly plausible that LA would look much the same, beyond the acquisition of some hovercars and a touch of noir.
The perfect woman (Score:3, Funny)
The perfect woman has a "restore to factory settings" button.
Re: The perfect woman (Score:2)
Try chocolate.
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The perfect woman has a "restore to factory settings" button.
I'm sure that your woman does.
The payphone isn't the important part (Score:5, Insightful)
The crux of the matter is that the payphone isn't the important part of the story. Rachel's unnatural nature is. While the payphone is becoming less common they're not entirely gone either.
Also, one can imagine a scenario where a police detective knows how the technology works, and actually makes a point of avoiding technology that's personally tied to him where actions he takes could arguably be used to demonstrate that he's compromised in some fashion. If you will, he uses the payphone because it's not his phone, so it's harder for a cursory investigation to identify that he made that call in the first place. Admittedly this would be something of a retcon since I doubt that it was even a consideration when the film was made. On the other hand we don't have flying cars, a postapocalyptic landscape, or extraterrestrial colonies either.
Enjoy the story, don't focus on the inane details, they're not important in this case.
Re:The payphone isn't the important part (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, the truth of the matter is, what makes Science Fiction frequently valuable is not that they accurately portray the future. One of the great things about science fiction is that it alters our own reality slightly so we can look at it better.
A story with an android in it frequently isn't about androids- it's about examining what it is to be human. 1984 wasn't about the technology of two way televisions.
Very few science fiction books get everything right, and if they did, it would take away from the message being delivered.
Re:The payphone isn't the important part (Score:5, Funny)
Correct, if you're talking about soft science fiction.
[gets out popcorn, retires to a safe distance]
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Greg Egan FTW.
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Sometimes, the intention isn't even to try to get the predictions correct. To use an obvious example, I doubt anyone working on "The Matrix" was anticipating that the human race would actually be imprisoned in a huge VR world so that AI could use their bodies as batteries. That wasn't the point.
I think this is the case with a lot of SciFi. The technology is there as a plot device, not as a prediction.
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What's really scary, and that most of you will never know, is that The Matrix got things 99% right. The only flaw was when they compared humans to Duracell batteries. You're actually Energizer batteries.
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Yes, that would have made more sense. First, I wouldn't think humans made for efficient batteries, but our brains are good at processing information (in some ways, at least). Second, it would have made more sense of a lot of the phenomena in the Matrix. For example:
* Agents being able to run themselves on people makes more sense if people are processing units. Software doesn't really run on batteries.
* The importance of the Matrix for the machines. If people are just batteries and the Matrix is to ke
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Well, the truth of the matter is, what makes Science Fiction frequently valuable is not that they accurately portray the future. One of the great things about science fiction is that it alters our own reality slightly so we can look at it better.
Science Fiction will tell us much less about the future then it tells us about the time it was written - their hopes and fears about the future.
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I think this is one of the more difficult things that a good storyteller does. While they may want us to see an alien world/time, they still must ground it in the reality of the audience. I find it taxing to have to "transpose" things all the time. The best example that comes to my mind is the Original Battlestar Galactica show. The time units sometimes drove me nuts, is a centon equal to a minute, a second or an hour? The term for a year was yahren. They sound similar enough, but pull you out of the s
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So follow the "hello moto" model and introduce a projector screen into a portable videophone, use a blank section of wall to stare at.
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You've clearly not been to Phoenix and its surrounding metro area. In 1980 the population of the county was about 1.5 million people, now it's around 5 million people. The uptown part of higher density construction has yielded importance back to the old downtown and its convention center, sports arenas, and the supporting businesses. Most of the taller buildings were built sometime after 1980, and the blight that the construction of the lightrail inevitably caused has given-way to four and five story mix
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It is used but not nearly as much as expected. the GP is right that people thought the natural progression was text to speech to video. Text to speech happened because the telephone replaced a lot of uses of telegrams. Mostly that's because of convenience. Turns out we really love text.
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It really comes down to how much of your concentration each method of communication requires. Also, deciding to dedicate time and concentration to something is your decision, but in real-time communication, you require the other person to do the same. If they aren't willing to, you are wasting everyone's time.
Texting takes a small amount of time, and the recipient can dedicate the small amount of time to read it at a time of their own choosing. Voice takes more concentration but, like radio, you can be doin
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Texting is also leaving a message for them, not requiring them to read it now and never have access to it. Texting creates a record that the recipient can refer back to.
Most people don't care for the idea of their phone conversations being recorded, but they don't have a problem with the records created by text messages unless those records are later used as evidence against them.
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Most people don't care for the idea of their phone conversations being recorded, but they don't have a problem with the records created by text messages unless those records are later used as evidence against them.
People to love to rag on millenials but one reason they all seem so enamoured with snapchat is it has the default of not keeping messages (anything saved has to be saved explicitly).
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It really comes down to how much of your concentration each method of communication requires
It starts with as simple things like having to get dressed for a call.
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In addition, the camera picks up stuff you don't want other people to see. If I'm on voice, it's harder to tell where I am. It's not possible to get a look at what I'm working on. It's not possible to tell the state of my housekeeping or my clothing.
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The envisioned 2019 Los Angeles seemed to be lifted directly from Seventies Tokyo, from the constant rain and underground flea-market stall shopping mazes to the advertisements in kanji for golf equipment and Atari computers.
Easy, sort of (Score:2)
Things that get replaced more often will be more advanced.
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Unless we're talking about UIs or init systems.
Not that much of a leap (Score:5, Insightful)
We still use roads built with gauges governed by ancient carriages. London streets still wend and wind because many were simply not designed for motorised traffic, yet we still use them.
It's not at all a stretch of the imagination to consider that cities a hundred years from now will be built on the recognisable and still in use bits that we see today.
Blade Runner - bad example? (Score:5, Insightful)
Blade Runner is artistically styled specifically to be a false future that blends 1940s noir and high tech, which means you end up with a lot of paradoxical technology elements.
If it was meant to be a coherent high-tech universe, it wouldn't be able to pull off the noir styling it's famous for.
The author really should have tried to make his point with a pure science fiction story that didn't intentionally try to map older styles into the future. I wonder how his analysis would hold up with Star Trek.
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The author really should have tried to make his point with a pure science fiction story that didn't intentionally try to map older styles into the future.
He could have easily looked to the Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov. Set 20,000 to 50,000 years in the future, when humanity has the capability of interstellar flight, humans are still using microfiche to store their information, and pneumatic air tubes to transfer information.
I mean, c'mon - interstellar spaceships could be developed without requiring that computer consoles first exist? Many authors and artists of the past projected the mechanical-only nature of then-contemporary machines, and extrapol
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> The remake of Battlestar Galactica has non-networked computers and wired phones.
Those are not out of place in the neo-BSG universe. They exist there for a reason.
They aren't nearly as silly as some of the stuff in Trek that suffers from 50 years of accumulated cruft and contradictions.
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They aren't nearly as silly as some of the stuff in Trek that suffers from 50 years of accumulated cruft and contradictions.
Maybe Firefly with six-shooters and Chinese?
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The only real question is why has no-one pounded out an AK from a shovel?
As a history teacher once pointed out regarding the Old West, shootouts didn't use as many bullets as the movies usually do. Bullets, supposedly, were expensive back in the day and weren't wasted on shooting up the town. As for Firefly, it might be a similar situation. Besides, do you really want to have an AK on a spaceship?
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> The remake of Battlestar Galactica has non-networked computers and wired phones.
Those are not out of place in the neo-BSG universe. They exist there for a reason.
They aren't nearly as silly as some of the stuff in Trek that suffers from 50 years of accumulated cruft and contradictions.
My biggest WTF in Trek was more cultural than tech. They had no problem with Japanese, black, and even Russian officers. But women couldn't command starships? Yes, I know it was the 60s, but it was supposed to the 23rd century!
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The first time they mentioned 'no networked computers' i lost all interest. There is no way you would ever do that. You would find a way to keep the Silons out or you would have to give up electricity altogether.
Out of a fleet of battlestars, the Galactica survived because its non-networked computers were immune to the Cylon computer virus, and the Pegasus did a FTL jump without coordinates out of dry dock while under attack and ripped out the computer code after their computer expert got identified as a Cylon. There was an episode where the Galactica got separated from the fleet, had to jump back to their previous coordinates, and networked the computers to calculate the new coordinates while the Cylons bang down
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Show me a way to truly secure a networked computer network against human attackers. I'll wait.
Now imagine the attackers are intelligent, creative computers instead. You're screwed.
You could *maybe* secure a wired-only network, as long as you could guarantee no node was ever compromised - but clearly the Psilon's already had the run of the ship, so the only real hope is physically securing the computers and ensuring that if a node gets infected anyway it won't spread, and hope you noticed the infection bef
Re: Blade Runner - bad example? (Score:2)
The term is "air-gapped", and it's done all the time in real life.
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Re: Blade Runner - bad example? (Score:5, Interesting)
The funny part I always found (even when Star Trek was new) was that they had PADDs not PADD. Why plural? why would you carry around a stack of PADDs? it never made sense. The concept that one PADD could only have one document seemed ridiculous to me even at the time, let alone now.
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"Why plural? why would you carry around a stack of PADDs?"
To display multiple things at the same time.
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> was that they had PADDs not PADD.
What if it was designed to hold only one particular data set at a time ?
Like a book.
Or maybe you could stuff a bunch of unrelated things on it, they just didn't do it because it was easier otherwise ?
I mean, we could probably go on for 5 hours with these what ifs. Making a conclusion, why somebody hasn't done something, is not very productive.
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Apparently in the 24th century you need thousands of volts available at every control panel.
Missing some things (Score:5, Interesting)
Science fiction stories, if they're good, sacrifice versimilitude for the sake of being understandable by the audience. Blade Runner had the option of using something like these science fiction tropes: the "Dick Tracy" wrist radio, portrayed in the police comic since 1952, or the Star Trek communicator, used in 1965. But instead they might have chosen to portray a community in which down-trodden people would still be limited to pay phones, or it simply wasn't important to the story and would have been a distraction from the main story thread.
People gave me a hard time because Pixar's A Bugs Life (on which I am credited) had the wrong number of legs on the impossible talking anthropomorphic ants and Antz had the right number of legs on its impossible talking anthromorphic ants. But it wasn't important to telling the story, and we just did not care.
The LA portrayed was vastly different from what viewers knew at the time, in that video wall mega-advertising was everywhere. Although this is taken for granted today, it was a stunning departure from the reality of the day when the film was produced.
Also, the weather of LA was overturned. In the movie it always rains in California.
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That's because it's always night and it's always raining or at least wet in night shots in movies.
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Not in most movies I watched.
Wait... does it matter that they're all porn?
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That's because it's always night and it's always raining or at least wet in night shots in movies.
It is said that Ridley Scott never in his life shot a dry sidewalk.
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To me, science fiction is fiction that explores the implications of technology and human society. ST et al are just fantasy.
I always felt that way about BSG. I absolutely love the updated series, and talk it up to everyone. I invariably get the comment, "Oh, I don't like scifi." And my response is always, "It's not scifi. It's a human drama in a space setting." For example, they have warping ability, but literally all the viewers know about it is that you need coordinates, it's called "FTL", and it has a fancy key to turn it on. The focus isn't on the "sci" at all.
I've managed to convince many non-nerds to get deeply engrossed i
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People gave me a hard time because Pixar's A Bugs Life (on which I am credited) had the wrong number of legs on the impossible talking anthropomorphic ants and Antz had the right number of legs on its impossible talking anthromorphic ants. But it wasn't important to telling the story, and we just did not care.
I've seen authors get plenty of stuff wrong because they "don't care" and clearly feel it's not important. Great way of telling the reader you don't respect their time and breaking suspension of disbel
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I think you are underestimating the complication of telling a compelling story while supporting a high level of anatomical realism on what is still an anthropomorphic humanized character. You can enter the Uncanny Valley [wikipedia.org]. Making an anatomically accurate yet anthropomorphic ant was very likely to be making
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Just before we start, I like reading and I like thinking about why I like or dislike books. Suspension of disbelief is a funny thing. I'll happily buy into pastel-coloured talking magical ponies then complain bitterly when one does something out of character.
Even if you're set in a quite unlikely fantasy world, things have to be somewhat consistent, because without consistency, the audience has no hook to hang anything on.Anything can be tweaked or played with, but things have to be set up, not done at rand
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People gave me a hard time because Pixar's A Bugs Life (on which I am credited) had the wrong number of legs on the impossible talking anthropomorphic ants
I have a big problem with how Gravity completely ignored the hard reality of orbital mechanics, flitting between orbits as whimsically as walking to the corner convenience-store. And they used not only not impossible but current space hardware. I hope I am right to think there's a difference there! Maybe if they had done it with cartoony space ships (a space version of Cars?), I would be more okay with it. But I still wouldn't watch it.
I don't watch movies for CGI wank-fests (or mushy "kids" movies which a
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They aren't making the film for you. 99% of the people who viewed Gravity would not have been able to see orbits as wrong immediately while viewing the movie, and would not have felt any dissonance in the mix of vehicles.
It was always difficult to explain to technical people how the main priority was telling a story and that accuracy was nice, but not really necessary.
I don't actually like watching movies much, and watch almost no television. It was my perception that a lot of people involved in making tele
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Still don't care! Nyaah, nyaah! Want to get a refund? I won't give you one! Don't like it? Listen to my loud raspberry!
More seriously, just in case this is the problem, it is a fact that there are a lot of films about people on the autism spectrum, but few films for them.
Naive Premise (Score:2, Interesting)
OP assumes in Blade Runner that all things progress linearly. That because we have smart phones today, we will still have it tomorrow. Perhaps the "sharing economy" takes off and pay phones give you what you need wherever and whenever you need it easier.
That's the point (Score:5, Informative)
Much of Science Fiction takes one or a small number of technological advances and examines how it will impact society, humanity. In Blade Runner it's looking at how the addition of manufactured "humans" will impact people. We examine it through Deckard and how he comes to view them as fully human.
The payphone isn't important to the story and is simply part of the visual style of the film.
Blade Runner is a poor example to use for the topic of the article, we don't have replicants so we can't compare how they "got it wrong". If you want to look at how science fiction gets technology wrong, look at something from 50 years ago about how computers are going to change society, then compare it to how computers have actually changed society.
But even then you're wasting your time because science fiction is not about making accurate predictions, it's about examining current reality by contrasting it with a potential/imagined future.
Re:That's the point - the missed point (Score:2)
Much of Science Fiction takes one or a small number of technological advances and examines how it will impact society, humanity.
But Harford's point (I read the article when it was published a couple of months ago) is that the approach doesn't work. You cannot say "This story explores the relationships between humans and androids" and then only make it about them.
The reason is that the development of androids does not happen in isolation, without a load of supporting technological developments. Ones that would have knock-on effects on everything else.
There is a reason it is called ... (Score:2)
Science FICTION!
It isn't supposed to be future reality. It is a mutual day dream to amuse us.
Same thing with real technology (Score:3)
People also imagine inconceivably-complex technology when they think not just about machines that can automatically flip burgers, but machines that can automatically do all the mining, run the refineries, handle the orders, run the farms, slaughter the cows, manufacture the fry cartons and burger wrappers, maintain itself, and maintain all the infrastructure to run the entire economy without a shred of human input. They imagine this is just five years away--they've imagined it was feasible already and just not taken up yet since the 1800s--and so conclude that jobs are going away forever.
That's not a blind extension of peoples's ignorance, either.
I've repeatedly brought up that the cost of products is the wage-labor cost, and technology reduces the amount of time (labor) and thus the cost. Market forces set the price as cost plus profit, and those same forces will push it down toward the new cost insofar that further reduction in prices won't increase profits even if all your competitors do it because they won't draw enough of your customers away. Thus people end up working the same hours, getting paid wages, with prices set by those wages (payrolls, really--wage, benefits, tax), and necessarily get an increase in purchasing power. They buy more stuff, which requires more labor to produce, ship, and retail, thus jobs to replace those lost.
The usual answer?
People just claim that won't happen anymore because no human labor will be involved at any stage in the entire production process of anything. Very soon. Like, as soon as self-driving cars hit the streets.
Magical machines of inconceivable design, but they must exist because we can fantasize about them.
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It's not just that. People think an apocalypse is coming. Not a technical revolution the likes of which would drive high unemployment and long recovery periods, a collapse of our economy in a new Great Depression or Industrial Revolution which will destroy today's nations and leave our peoples to pick up the pieces and form new works of them; but a complete, unrecoverable end to all employment as humans are no longer needed by their technology.
Deploying new technology across months or years--early adop
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Someone (maybe Asimov) said that short term technological predications were overly optimistic, and long term ones weren't optimistic enough. People who think there will be self driving cars in 5 years (or AI) are the former.
Well most AI is "just" automation and heuristics on steroids, where I find the most predictions fail are those that border between technology and physics like fusion reactors, flying cars, supersonic passenger airplanes and so on. That SpaceX can make a rocket land is an incredible trick of technology, but it doesn't bring us any closer to a warp drive.
Right now I think there's so much money spent on researching self-driving cars it will happen, it's like when they pumped billions and billions into Amazon a
Really... (Score:2)
No shit, Sherlock!
Dystopian techology backslide (Score:2)
To a degree, a dystopian future implies that at least SOME technologies would actually backslide. We see evidence in movies like Star Wars when lightsabers become unknown. Or books like Frank Herbert's 'Dune' with computers. The technology existed at some point in the past, but reverted due to significant societal stresses. It may be that payphones make a comeback when some global threat manages to take out all the cell phone towers.
SF isn't really predictive (Score:5, Insightful)
The whole idea that SF predicts the future is just marketing speak for SF books and movies. It succeeds occasionally, but so does religious prophecy: make enough predictions, and you score some hits, but at the cost of many more misses.
As far as Blade Runner (and most SF) goes, the writers seldom sit down to prognosticate. Most of them think of an interesting premise and see where it goes.
Wait - Posting a spoiler alert for an old movie (Score:2)
Seriously,
If I talk about the Wizard of Oz - do I have to say Spoiler alert still? Does this apply to books as well? Spoiler alert - Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep has androids in it - and not modern phones either
to further hammer on the example... (Score:2)
(This post has nothing to do with the thrust of the article: that people's minds leap quickly to obvious-but-nigh-impossible things rather than possible-but-subtly. But they made the mistake of putting forth an example (Blade Runner) which is more interesting to talk about than the premise itself, so here's some comments on sci-fi storytelling.)
If the past is another country, the future is an alien planet. We can conjecture on a number of technologies that may become available, or even practical and common,
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For example, we could (and did) predict a network like the internet, but no one really understood what it would be like to be connected to everything all the time.
E M Forster nailed what social media would be like in an always connected world, in 1909. The details of the tech are obviously rather far off, but it seems he understood people.
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For example, we could (and did) predict a network like the internet, but no one really understood what it would be like to be connected to everything all the time.
Get yourself a copy of John Brunner's The Shockwave Rider (1976). You're in for a treat.
What we got wrong here. (Score:3)
"...we humans...often tend to leap to technologies that are sophisticated beyond comprehension."
An iPad can be easily operated by a 3-year old. You call that sophisticated?
What has grown beyond comprehension here is the fact that we are now forced to make technical devices idiot-proof in order for the masses to use them.
Put down the sci-fi bong and quit taking hits off fiction and fantasy.
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Yes, absolutely. Making it lightweight, with a consistent, easy to use UI _is_ sophisticated.
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Yes, absolutely. Making it lightweight, with a consistent, easy to use UI _is_ sophisticated.
I suppose it does take a certain level of sophistication and finesse with designs today in order to accept the fact that society continues to lower the bar and build a better idiot. Manufacturers would be stupid to walk away from that much revenue.
Seems like a good place or this (Score:4, Interesting)
I had an idea a while ago about the the failings of retro-futurism.
StarWars, StarTrek, The Expanse, Firefly, and pretty much any space opera are all based around the idea of spaceships with people flying in them. Like space is just an extension of the oceans and seas. But that's pretty silly. Robots do a hell of a lot better job with fewer requirements and no need to bring them back. The more and more autonomous they get the less we even need to be in contact with them.
We won't have people handling drills on Mars getting core samples. We won't have gunners tracking tie-fighters like AA flak cannons. We won't have navigators plotting courses on a bench with calipers and charts. These are all visions of the future which are simply wrong. As wrong as Decker using a payphone. We need to let go of the sci-fi tropes born 50 years ago in the 70's.
And then it came to me: Make a show where EVERYTHING on the spaceship has to be done by hand. Valves need to be opened, there's a switchboard operator for the intercom, there's a guy that turns the big steering wheel, pilots in the fighters need to manually target the guns. And you never tell the audience (But you drop plenty of hints) that the entire crew are all programs and computers. The main characters are some sort of AGI or bullshit awakened programs. The background characters are more like cron jobs and scripts. There's some mystical god-like creature in cryostatis which must be preserved, an actual human. The bots operate on a genetic algorithm system of judging fitness to see who lives and who is selected to procreate. They're all military conscripts and expendable second-class citizens. On the ship there's exactly 2 rooms people do things because that's the main processor and the backup. Quick-clones are a thing as copying programs is trivial. A fighter pilot dies and a copy shows up wondering how his last clone screwed up. This sort of computer-metaphor list goes on and on. I think it'd make a good show.
SETI is not a toy (Score:2)
That's because Westerns were based on horses with people riding them.
Rockets are just mechanical horses.
You can tell hard science fiction by a simple test: no one goes anywhere. You get a transmission. Decoding it might lead to a set of events that end your civilization, but only if your transmission doesn't end theirs first.
In the movie Contact, Earth goes ahead
Entertainment is made to entertain (Score:3)
Even non-entertainment predictions are often made to entertain -- and the ones that come to widespread public attention are almost always made to entertain because, well, they're more entertaining. An actual realistic projection of future tech not made to entertain would be a dry, boring read that got tossed a trash can.
The big ideas inspire us (Score:2)
I'd sat the author is basically right. While it is the 'big ideas' that inspire us, make us dare to dream, it's the 'little things' that conspire to change the world we live in while our attention is focused elsewhere.
While practically everyone posting so far has fixated on the Blade Runner part of his article (sci fi is... , film noir... , technological regression... , etc) in doing so you're essentially ignoring his point. It's not the big new things that change the world, it's a combination of little old
Future is unknowable (Score:2)
To a certain degree, this is the ineffable nature of invention. You do not know what twists and turns it will take until it happens. You can try to logically extend the consequences of an invention that you think up (like video phones or humanoid robots in the 1980s) but until it happens, real world inventions are by definition un-knowable. (If you knew what real world inventions would be created, you could make a killing running a business or trading in the stock market.)
Part of what made Blade Runner s
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Part of what made Blade Runner such a good movie was that unlike Star Trek and that ilk, it portrayed a dystopian future fraught with massive inequality, where the haves lived in massive wealth, while the have nots lived in relative poverty. The method used to portray those differences were more important to the story than the Scifi backdrop.
We live in a present with massive inequality. The key phrase you used above though is *relative* poverty. Think about poor people in the U.S. Chances are good that a single-parent family that lives below the poverty line still has food, shelter, clothing, electricity, running water, refrigeration, an oven/stove/microwave, free education and medical care. Probably television, cable, internet, cell phones and game consoles too. Basically the poor in the U.S. today live a better standard of living than rich pe
John W. Campbell, Jr. once said... (Score:2)
As John W. Campbell, Jr. once said, if a story tries to predict all the advances that are likely, it will be unintelligible. Even if you could correctly predict how everything would change, to do so would be a horrendous mistake for an author, because nobody (including the editor) would understand the story.
I've got to admit that I don't remember blade-runner, it didn't really impress me. The pictures were nice, but the projected future was trite. (OTOH, I've been reading Science Fiction since the 1950's
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Obviously nobody is obliged to like something, but I think you are giving Bladerunner a bum rap and if you are a fan of classic SF you really are the target audience (or at least more likely to get it). The difference is that where classic SF was about how technology impacts the world, Bladerunner is about how people deal with their lives when technology makes it unclear what is actually real.
Phillip K Dick isn't for everyone, since his stories do tend to be people focused rather than technology focused - a
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Well, I generally didn't like Phillip K. Dick, though I admit he was a good writer, just not one to my taste. But I wasn't surprised in not being impressed by the movie. Most people seem to think "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" a good book, and almost never does a good book make a good movie. They always end up trivializing it, and ruining a good idea because it doesn't make good visuals. OTOH, bad books have occasionally made good movies...probably for the same reason (though I haven't seen enoug
The Assumption Of Future Technology (Score:2)
A depiction of decay. (Score:2)
Phone parts are not nec. brains parts (Score:5, Interesting)
I find the payphone dig unfair criticism. For one, it was hard to know then if airwaves could carry all the signals needed for consumer cell-phones. It took a while to perfect signal compression and other issues.
Second, it was hard to know if miniaturization of electronics (Moores' law) would continue. In fact, by many accounts it's stopping now. It's not really a law, just a recent pattern, with no guarantee of continuing.
You may then argue that if one assumes miniaturization slows, how come they have androids (strong AI) in the flick? But that assumes miniaturization is/was needed to get decent AI. There's no inherent law of the universe that says AI has to come from miniaturization. Perhaps a new algorithm or computing substance could be discovered to get AI without relying on shrinking parts. For example, if most the android's entire body is a "brain", then it's merely a big computer to get big computations. Or maybe an organic substance that's good for artificial brains but NOT for cell-phone miniaturization.
The accusers are biased by actual history where our AI advances HAPPENED TO come from mostly the same advances that our phones used. That wasn't an obvious or required assumption back then.
On a different aspect, the article made an interesting point in that the first electric motors didn't help factories much because the factories simply replaced the centralized steam systems with electric motors. It wasn't until factories decentralized power distribution that the real advantage of electricity played out. The environment around the gizmo has to change to fit the new technology before its benefits show.
Jet planes were similar: early attempts mostly just slapped a jet engine on a propeller-intended design, meaning performance often wasn't good enough to justify the extra cost and maintenance it required. It's only when planes were reworked around jet engines and the new speed that real results came. Most wind tunnels of the time didn't even have enough power to simulate jet speeds. They had to build new ones.
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I find the payphone dig unfair criticism. For one, it was hard to know then if airwaves could carry all the signals needed for consumer cell-phones. It took a while to perfect signal compression and other issues.
Old mobile phones only had about 50 or so channels available for a whole city because they used "regular" long-distance radio communication. There was really one main innovation that made cell phones possible, and that was the cell tower. Someone had to think of a whole new way to use the broadcast bandwidth for cell phones to become possible.
Having little computers (inside what was originally a big bag) to make sure the switching happened was important, but not nearly as important as breaking up the band
Cyberpunk Sci-fi is different from Futurism (Score:2)
Blade Runner is not a prediction of the future, it's science fiction adapted for the big screen.
And as such, it's not about portrayal of future based on attempts of getting it accurate or right, but rather using what serves the plot best.
Still, this is a kind of naive approach to analysis of futurism in general. Anyone could pick a future prediction and say we do it wrong because of this or that. One could just as well pick another example to say we center too much on mundane everyday life stuff and don't f
This is more exception to the rule, IMO .... (Score:2)
Blade Runner was a movie that relied a lot on the "ambience". The gritty feel of the city and how relate-able some of it is to what you might encounter every day helps set the tone.
A lot of current sci-fi I've watched seems to do a pretty good job of trying to guess what the "little things" will be like in future daily life, though. TV series like Humans or Extant, for example? Lots of predictions about the style and functionality of self-driving vehicles, home automation with hand gesture controls, etc.
In
All you have to do is live a long time. (Score:5, Interesting)
What you'll find is that the bounds of technology and the line over which lies "miraculous" territory get pushed back simultaneously, because they're inextricably linked.
To me the single biggest everyday miracle is that I can put a string of text into Google and get hundreds of thousands of hits back spanning the sum of human ... well let's say data rather than knowledge; and that it comes back in what for practical purposes is instantaneously while at the same time millions of other people are doing exactly the same thing.
When I stop to think of it, which is fairly often, it strikes me as the very next thing to magic, even though as an engineer with a degree in computer science I have at least some idea of the things that make this possible. Yet it is the most ordinary and unremarkable thing to my children, who have never known a time without it, it's the most unremarkable thing imaginable.
Earlier generations of engineers probably felt the same way about radio.
meh... (Score:2)
... who cares about such details? all sci-fi space movies from before 2000 have crt screens in their space ships, which is ridiculous if you think about it now, but does it ruin the expirience of watching Alien? Not at all...
What he got wrong about the story (Score:2)
Did he even see the movie or read Phil Dick's book? We are already headed towards a future where corporations have AI and the masses would be lucky to find a phone of any kind.
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> I read one science fiction novel written in the 1980's where a computer document was searchable via a MS-DOS filenames (eight-character name, dot, three-character extension) on a different planet in 500+ years into the future.
That was an outdated idea even in the 80s.
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That was an outdated idea even in the 80s.
When I took Introduction to Computers at college in 1992, MS-DOS and 8.3 filenames was alive and well.
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That word - I do not think it means what you think it means.
Yes there were other systems besides MS-DOS in the 80s. Yes they used other file name structures. MS-DOS was still alive and well, and that's what most computer users knew. Windows 3 came out in 1992, and it was the first version of Windows to get any sort of traction in the market. Even it still used 8.3. Windows 95 was the first to use "long" filenames.
Yes, MS-DOS was the best known OS, and most people used its 8.3 filesystem until 95, and even then it took time for people to get used to long filenames.
It was still outdated in the 80s. :p
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Yeah, I was thinking about that the other day too. Apple DOS was written several years before MSDOS, and has more sophisticated filenames. (Oh, I just realized, the later ProDOS has "only" 15 character filenames.) I realize other personal computers probably have similar features, I just don't recall the specifics about them.
from https://fjkraan.home.xs4all.nl... [xs4all.nl]
4.1: DOS 3.x file names and types
DOS 3.x filenames can from 1-30
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[...] a giant neon sign that reads "ATARI".
It's called a product placement. Warner Brothers owned Atari and distributed Blade Runner at the time. Even though Warner Brothers no longer owns Atari, the Atari logo does appear in the new movie.
https://venturebeat.com/2017/05/08/blade-runner-2049-official-film-trailer-features-the-atari-logo/ [venturebeat.com]
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For an even more extreme version of this, look at Heinlein's novel Starman Jones. Published in 1953 and set in a future when humanity has spread out into the stars, the Astrogator's Guild has its 'secret books' that are essentially nothing but tables of conversions between decimal and binary, and the astrogators' job is to manually take star sights, translate the data from them into binary, then toggle the binary values into a computer that is hardwired to perform only the computation of integrating the pre
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Even better: In some Isaac Asimov Novel (forgot which) starships became way to complicated to be operated by humans. They had to be steered and navigated by "AI" (or cybernetic or positronic or electronic brains.)
But was something like a computer connected to the controls? No. Not electronic or even mechanically using servo motors: Each ship had to have a robot, as only a robot could operate all the required buttons, rudders and levers.
How can someone capable of imagining an artificial brain operating the m