The pace of change
I’m an IT director in our provincial government, and last week my ministry organized a two-day conference to explore themes and trends in technology.
One of the biggest messages I took from those two days - reinforced by one speaker after another - was the pace of change in the technology world.
It’s scary!
No, I mean really scary, as in ten years from now will anyone who’s an adult today even understand the world any more?
Ideas that were pure science fiction ten years ago are reality today. And the scariest part is that the pace of change is exponential. That means that in five years time we’ll be living with technology that is speculative and far-fetched today. And the same will be true a mere two years after that. Then a year after that.
Will we be able to recognize the world a generation from now?
Regardless of the real world, this poses serious problems for sci-fi writers. We all know how novels from the 1950s feel dated today because of the changes in technology, but they still enjoyed a few decades’ shelf life first.
Ten years ago I was writing a novel (which I never finished) that involved computers worn as jewelry, gesture recognition, direct neural stimulation to provide sensory input, and an exclusively virtual interface. That all seemed safely far-fetched back then, but ten years on all those elements are here today in some form or another.
When I wrote Tiamat’s Nest, autonomous self-driving cars still seemed safely a few decades away because computers as a whole were still too prone to stupid errors and failures to be entrusted with the task. But this year we have them on the streets in some cities. That frightens me because no matter how well they perform when things are going well, computers are still dangerously error-prone. Not to mention prone to malware, and how about the prospect of being kidnapped by your own car - the ultimate in ransomware?
So, to all member of Homo Sapiens V1.0 out there, how do you cope with the accelerating pace of change in the real world. And to sci-fi writers, how do you stay speculative when the most way-out ideas you have might become reality before your book is even published?
One of the biggest messages I took from those two days - reinforced by one speaker after another - was the pace of change in the technology world.
It’s scary!
No, I mean really scary, as in ten years from now will anyone who’s an adult today even understand the world any more?
Ideas that were pure science fiction ten years ago are reality today. And the scariest part is that the pace of change is exponential. That means that in five years time we’ll be living with technology that is speculative and far-fetched today. And the same will be true a mere two years after that. Then a year after that.
Will we be able to recognize the world a generation from now?
Regardless of the real world, this poses serious problems for sci-fi writers. We all know how novels from the 1950s feel dated today because of the changes in technology, but they still enjoyed a few decades’ shelf life first.
Ten years ago I was writing a novel (which I never finished) that involved computers worn as jewelry, gesture recognition, direct neural stimulation to provide sensory input, and an exclusively virtual interface. That all seemed safely far-fetched back then, but ten years on all those elements are here today in some form or another.
When I wrote Tiamat’s Nest, autonomous self-driving cars still seemed safely a few decades away because computers as a whole were still too prone to stupid errors and failures to be entrusted with the task. But this year we have them on the streets in some cities. That frightens me because no matter how well they perform when things are going well, computers are still dangerously error-prone. Not to mention prone to malware, and how about the prospect of being kidnapped by your own car - the ultimate in ransomware?
So, to all member of Homo Sapiens V1.0 out there, how do you cope with the accelerating pace of change in the real world. And to sci-fi writers, how do you stay speculative when the most way-out ideas you have might become reality before your book is even published?
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Thanks Marie. As some of the discussion on the blog site mentions, it's getting hard to invent convincing technology without risking it getting overtaken too soon but there are other approaches. Extrapolate a bit but focus on what can go wrong with it, go way out into the future so there's no connection to today, or explore alternate realities. And of course there's always the approach of inventing a completely sideways breakthrough rather than an extrapolation.
So, yes. Really scary. I imagine that this is leading to a new version of "survival of the fittest" in which one must keep up with and master technology in order to survive the new world. The trip to set up colonies on Mars is only 7 years away for crying out loud. I don't know where this leaves sci-fi writers, other than future generations looking to you as the Nostradamus of the early 2000's :D.