Is our world about to undergo a radical change? Science fiction writers believe so, and explain it precisely in their books.
Popular Sciences
Modern science fiction is facing a crisis of confidence. Most of the stories published recently took the form of fantasy (dwarves and wizards), alternate history (what would have happened if the black plague had not been stopped?), and space operas dealing with interstellar civilizations in the year 12,000. Only a small team of prophets dare to speculate where the current trends will lead and imagine how our world will look in the coming decades.
The spirit of the mythological writers of science fiction - Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein - still dominates. Clark skyrocketed our technological reach here on Earth, filling our homes with robots that clean dust, cook, and sometimes rebel against their owners, a scenario well illustrated in the movie "I am a Robot." Heinlein, in his celebrated space adventures, pushes us to distant galaxies and civilizations that will exist in the distant future; The golden age of science fiction, which spanned the XNUMXs and XNUMXs, had generations of children aspiring to be astronauts, physicists and engineers to try and make at least some of the stories come true.
Today you can find many new editions of science fiction classics that are offered for sale, but alongside them are also stories about people fighting dragons. Where is the science in science fiction? A new kind of future requires a new breed of guides - someone like Strauss, whose first book "My Singularity" won the Hugo Award. Strauss is a former programmer, crazy about computers and gadgets and follows the innovations in science. He embraces the idea of a singularity - technological and scientific innovations such as artificial intelligence and bio-technology, which will change the world as significantly as the current world is different from that of the Stone Age - as symbolizing the influx of new discoveries of our age. So is the writer Corey Doctorow who won the Campbell Award for best science fiction writer.
The idea of the singularity was coined by Vernor Vinge, a science fiction writer. Vinge predicts that the singularity will occur when the intelligence of machines surpasses that of humans. Once our computers start thinking we will enter a regime that will be radically different from our human past. The second driving factor for the singularity, according to Vinge, will be what is known as intelligence augmentation: humans will apply their engineering skill to their bodies, implants, genetic adjustments and other changes will make people smarter and give them Superman-like abilities. One of the tricks that sometimes appears in Doctorow Westeros' books that demonstrates this is mind uploading, where the characters create electronic copies of their brains on silicon. Mind uploading creates a completely separate version of you, free of disease, death and other disadvantages of physical existence. Many of the questions posed by this new world are mind-boggling - for example, "Who am I really?" You created a copy of your mind and claimed it, but the original "I" is still on the surface of the earth and continues its life.
Another main component of stories that deal with the singularity is "computernium". The idea is that nanomachines will do the dirty work of turning ordinary matter into computerium. Imagine the table in front of you, only the atoms of which it is composed are constantly performing micro calculations while they are placed there. If we were to exaggerate the process to the end and apply it to huge bodies of matter such as an asteroid, we would get huge "superbrains", mega-processors, which would make the power of the supercomputers that exist today look like that of a picnic basket.
Science fiction writers twist and distort the laws of physics for the sake of the story. Sometimes faster-than-light movement is needed to get your hero from one side of the galaxy to the other. But those who write about the singularity try to reach the highest possible accuracy in their time, and make hypotheses from current trends. The respect for accuracy is a natural trait among computer geeks, but it is also a way to avoid pedantic corrections by the great science fiction fans, whose demands do not fall short of their loyalty. Stoss, Doctorow, and writers like them don't limit their focus to just their favorite interests, or even technology. For them, writing futuristic science fiction is not based only on understanding the theory of relativity and estimating the size of the surface of a spaceship with a solar sail that can move at half the speed of light. You must also bring the factors of politics and civil rights into the equation. You have to think carefully about a robotic pet cat with human-level intelligence, and then you have to ask whether it should be given the right to vote in elections. The result of such insane attention to small details is a ton of stories overflowing with wild ideas.
Strauss's book - Iron Sunrise
In the story "Court of Appeals", which Strauss and Doctorow wrote together, a 1995D printer based on "Boss-Einstein" condensed matter, a very unstable form of matter created in 20, is described. It's a classic science fiction technique: while the physicists are busy searching for ways to create and handle the Boss-Einstein condensed matter and publishing more papers, Strauss leans over his computer, digging through copies of those papers for ideas and seeing where their work might lead in 30, 100, or XNUMX years. .
Are these writers predicting the future or are they just engaging in highly intelligent entertainment? Some may indeed succeed in predicting the future, but what is important is that the stories provide useful landmarks for the future. This new type of science fiction is not just about predicting the future or promoting some topic or even just plain technological fun. Although it includes all of these, it is also concerned with expanding the limits of what is possible, building innovative worlds and populating them with characters who bring the big ideas down to the ground of reality. The science fiction stories give the inspiration for the future.
