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Augspace: making life larger
Today, Shareable.net ran Everything Is Clickable, part two of two guest posts I wrote on augmented reality. Part two (running today) speculates on applications we could see over the next two decades and includes a short (and very optimistic, for me) speculative piece on what kind of AR apps we might see in the next two decades. Part one focuses on present day AR applications.
These posts are part of a series called Shareable Futures. The other guest posters and interviewees include Corey Doctorow, Bruce Sterling, Mary Robinette Kowal, and Paolo Bacigalupi. I highly recommend checking out their posts, too.
Where’s my Permanent Undercaste of Developmentally Limited Slave Workers?
(And Other Failed Predictions from the Annals of Science Fiction)
Science fiction is littered with the failures of writers who should have known better to accurately predict the future… But it’s even more littered with the failure of reality to keep up with their warped ideas. Here I shall consider a few of my favorites.
Permanent Undercaste of Developmentally Limited Slave Workers
Brave New World
A knowledge work job for life, constant lusty adulation from lower caste members of the opposite sex, after work orgies, free drugs, and a workforce of fetal alcohol syndrome hobbit monkeys at one’s beck and call… Who wouldn’t want to live in Huxley’s world?
Moralizing neo-cons, that’s who!
As someone who’s devoted a lot of thought to transhumanism lately, I have to say that this book remains a challenging one. In some ways, Huxley’s argument in Brave New World looks like the sine qua non for people like Francis Fukuyama freaking out about the H+ movement. While we don’t have the technology to do some of the things described in this book yet, perhaps the intention is there? I do hope so, because it would be a vast improvement over the Epsilons-Shopping-at-Walmart stories people on the Eclipse Phase Facebook page came back with as soon as I took up this line of thought.
Pretty People Forced to Wear Hideous Masks to Make Them Average
Harrison Bergerand
Leaving the most recent Lady Gaga video aside, Vonnegut’s parable of an average American Übermensch forced to wear myopia-inducing goggles, a racoon coat made of metal racoons, and a grotesque mask hasn’t played out as advertised. As anyone in human resources will tell you, above average people are valuable. Your best approach is to put them in offices where all the C students don’t have to look at them, stack their workload so high that their brains don’t work much better than Harrison Bergerand’s Dad’s at the end of the day, and pay them enough to behave. After just a decade of this treatment, the combination of repetitive stress injuries, office chair-related back pain, and fat rolls sprouted from years of drinking and poor diet normally add up to the same handicaps forced upon Bergerand… no mask required!
Really, Kurt, you were over-thinking the problem.
Soviets on Jupiter (or Luna, or Mars, or Anyplace, Really)
2010: A Space Odyssey
Mr. Clarke, get real. The Soviets’ played-out, oppressive social regime and internal instability meant that they couldn’t get to the friggin’ Moon, let alone building a space ship capable of travel to the Jovian system. Oh, wait… Americans can’t, either.
How embarrassing.
Reduction to the Status of Chattel for Women (May Substitute White People, Academics, Gun Lovers, Mormons, or Whatever Freaked the Author Out Most)
The Handmaid’s Tale
Although I actually think LDS paranoia about being oppressed for wanting to have lots of babies a la Ender’s Game is more entertaining, I’m including Margaret Atwood here because she’s such an ivory tower Henny Penny about being described as a science fiction author. Get over it, Margaret; no one’s going to force you to show up at Worldcon. It’s almost as silly as Lisa Gerrard and Brendan Perry freaking out about being called a goth band. Also, Ken MacLeod wrote a novel about talking squids in space, and it was fucking awesome, so you shut up.
I was going to write something about alarmist, overwrought narratives posing as plausibly framed social commentary, but look, I just ended up going off on Margaret Atwood for a whole paragraph instead. Whatever, moving on…
Food Pills
The Jetsons
I tried to make these when I was a kid by taking white bread and squishing it into the densest little dough bullets I could. When you added peanut butter and jelly, it didn’t work so well, but I’m sure modern food technology could do better than an eight year old with a rolling pin and time on his hands. Never mind that compressing a full meal into a pill would result in a pill that weighed about half a pound. The demand is out there. “But the Jetsons was a cartoon,” you protest. Pish tosh! Serious sci-fi writers kicked this idea around, too. Of course, if they had kicked an actual food pill they would have probably stubbed their toes badly and discarded this idea right quick.
Absurdist Totalitarianism
Brazil
The failure to appear of a preposterously Kafkaesque state where interrogators wear weird baby masks and dissidents get hung in garment bags aboard mobile armored hall closets would mark Terry Gilliam as one of sci-fi’s dimmest lights in the art of prediction, if not for the abject lack of imagination it displays on the part of the oppressive regimes we already have. Really, if glue-huffing African child soldiers could work out that neon wigs and women’s clothing would freak the fuck out of their opponents, you’d think the meatheads at Abu-Gharaib could have come up with something better than scaring people with dogs and making them form naked human pyramids. They could have been using, I don’t know, creepy octopus masks or something. Were I an Iraqi detainee, I’d pretty much poo myself instantly if some crazy white man dressed like a cephalopod came at me with a list of questions.
Unreliable Experimental Medical Procedures That Make Mice and Retarded People Smarter
Flowers for Algernon
Sadly, this is not a widely explored trope, but that’s okay, because Keyes had it in the pocket. The key implication of his idea, though, has not inspired the type of vigorous exploration that, say, virtual reality did. Which is too bad, because if you could perform an operation to make mentally retarded people more functional, just think of how you could improve all of the people who are technically of average intelligence but do stupid, stupid things all of the damned time.
And think of all the incidental spin offs you’d glean from the massive amount of human experimentation along the critical path to reach this outcome! It’s clearly a winner.
So There You Have It
Quit snoozing, reality, and try to keep up.
Saturday I went to Maker Faire Rhode Island and liveblogged the event from my jeejah. Here’s a hashtag search that brings up most of my tweets. For some reason, search cuts off some of my tweets (and I forgot to hashtag the first few), so here they are:
This was a great start for a first Maker Faire, and with all the wonderfully innovative minds out here, it was high time the Northeast threw one. I haven’t been to Maker Faire Austin, but this was a very different affair from the San Francisco event. The most noticeable difference was the scale of the inventions on display. The San Francisco Faire is notable for the presence of a lot of big Burning Man art. Out here, far from Black Rock City, the gadgets on display were no less cool but tended to be smaller (and fewer seemed designed to amuse tripping burners — although the REM inducer on display by the soldering tables looked straight off the Playa).
Whoever figured out how to coordinate the Faire with one of Providence’s Waterfire weekends was a genius. Unlike the San Francisco event, which is ensconced off in the San Mateo fairgrounds, the Rhode Island Faire took over an entire square and the streets radiating out from it in downtown Providence, meaning that thousands of casual passers by got to wander into the event, learn, and participate. The weather cooperated nicely, too. Of course, the SF Faire is big enough that it needs its own space and doesn’t need as much publicity, but the point is that it would have been very unfortunate if the first northeast Faire had been tucked away in a building out of the public eye.
All in all, this was a great time, and I even had a few minutes to stop for tacos at AS220 (an awesome & more permanent feature of Providence) before getting back on the train for Boston.
I did try to credit all of the Makers when photographing projects. If I shot your project and didn’t include your name, please let me know, and I’ll make sure to update this post to give credit.
Finally, I’ll pass on some information I picked up:
Photos (top to bottom): Yellow Submarine by Sean Bagge, DIY 3D printer by Makerbot Industries, Huge Foam Skeletal Robot Costume by Big Nazo. (All taken by me).
Burning Man? Yeah, sure, it’s nice… but these photos and videos by Steve Jurvetson of the Photo Synthesis blog (whose name is just three letters off from “Jetson”) made me wish my Playa experience involved more rocketry and fewer exploding oil derricks. The post linked to here is full of rocket porn and geeky stats. Jurvetson is associated with a group called Rocket Mavericks, who appear to be the exact opposite of burners — except for the drive to build crazy but impractical stuff and then play with it in the desert. Their photostream is plenty of fun, as well. At one point I was very skeptical about the idea of civilians marshaling the skill and resources to conduct space launches, but the rocket pictured here apparently has six times the thrust of most cruise missiles. These folks are hobbyists, but it shows that the game is changing.
“Happiness is Earth in your rear view mirror.”
Thanks to Aunt Emma for alerting me to this one.