My last post on technological change seems to have struck a nerve and I’ve been running across a lot of things along similar lines this week… Here are a few links on the subject:
- Charlie Stross is writing his next novel on his cell phone:
Being inclined towards crazy stunt performances, I’m planning on writing “Halting State” on my mobile phone. This is technologically feasible because the phone in question has more memory and online storage than every mainframe in North America in 1972 (and about the same amount of raw processing power as a 1977-vintage Cray-1 supercomputer). It’s a zeitgeist thing: I need to get into the right frame of mind, and I need to use a mobile phone for the same reason Neal Stephenson used a fountain pen when he wrote the Baroque cycle. Afters all, I want to stick my head ten years into the future. Personal computers are already pass�; sales are declining, performance is stagnating, the real action is all in the interstitial networked devices that keep washing up on the beaches of our bandwidth ocean, crazy-weird things like 3G phones and battery-powered network attached storage boxes and bluetooth-controlled vibrators. (It’s getting weird out there in embedded intelligence land; the net is alive to the sound of pinging toasters, RFID chips are the latest virus target, and people are making business deals inside computer games.)
I have yet to read one of Stross’s novels, but he’s in the queue…
- Speaking of speculative fiction, Steven Den Beste has a post on Chizumatic (no permalinks, so you’ll have to go a scrollin’) about the difficulties faced in creating a plausible science fiction story placed in the future:
1. Science and engineering now are expanding on an exponential curve.
2. But not equally in all areas. In some areas they have run up against intransigent problems.
3. Advances in one area can have incalculably large effects on other areas which at first seem completely unrelated.
4. Much of this is driven by economic forces in ways which are difficult to predict or even understand after the fact.
For instance, there was a period in which the main driver of technical advances in desktop computing was business use. But starting about 1994 that changed, and for a period of about ten years the bleeding edge was computer gamers. …
You look at the history of technological development and it becomes clear that it isn’t possible for any person to predict it. I can tell you for sure that when we were working on the Arpanet at BBN in the 1980’s, we didn’t have the slightest clue as to what the Internet would eventually become, or all the ways in which it would be used. The idea of 8 megabit pipes into the home was preposterous in the extreme — but that’s what I’ve got. This is James Burke’s “Connections” idea: it all relates, and serendipitous discoveries in one area can revolutionize other areas which are not apparently related in any way. How much have advances in powered machinery changed the lives and careers of farmers, for instance?
With acceleration in development of new technologies, just what kind of advances could we really expect 200 years from now? The only thing that’s certain is that it’s impossible for us to guess. But if you posit interstellar travel by then, then there should be a lot of advances in other areas, and those advances may be used in “unimportant” ways to make life easier for people, and not just in big-ticket “obvious” ways.
It’s an excellent post and it ends on an… interesting note.
- Shamus found an old 2001 article in PC Gamer speculating what computers would be like in 2006. It turns out that in some areas (like CPU speed), they were wildly overoptimistic, in other areas (broadband and portable devices), not so much.
- Your Upgrade Is Ready: This popular mechanics article summarizes some advancements on the biological engineering and nanotechnology front.
Weddell seals can stay underwater comfortably for more than an hour. As concrete-shoe wearers have discovered, humans can’t make it past a few minutes. Why not? The seals don’t have enormous lungs in comparison to humans–but they do have extraordinary blood, capable of storing great quantities of oxygen. Robert Freitas, a research fellow at the Institute of Molecular Manufacturing, has published a detailed blueprint for an artificial red blood cell, which he calls a respirocyte. Injected into the bloodstream, these superefficient oxygen-grabbers could put the scuba industry out of business.
As Freitas envisions it, each respirocyte–a ball measuring a thousandth of a millimeter across–is a tiny pressurized gas tank. Inject the balls and they course through the blood vessels, releasing oxygen and absorbing carbon dioxide in the body’s periphery and recharging themselves with oxygen in the lungs. Freitas says respirocytes would transport oxygen 236 times more efficiently than red blood cells–and a syringeful could carry as much oxygen as your entire bloodstream.
I tend to take stuff like this with a grain of salt, as such overviews usually end up being a little more sensational than reality, but still interesting reading. [via Event Horizon]
That’s all for now…
I think I have some old gaming magazines from the early 90s lying around my house somewhere. I should flip through them and see if they have any predictions about the future of gaming. Could be interesting/amusing.
Oh, and am I the only one who finds the idea of injecting fake blood into my body a bit, um… “fucking crazy?”
Also, I wonder about the atheletic implications of something like that. One of the key aspects of sports performance is heartrate and the ability of your body to keep up increased oxygen usage, isn’t it? Now, if you’ve got this stuff that transports oxygen over 200 times more efficiently, couldn’t that have a major effect on how well athletes perform?
Me? I’ve never cared if athelets want to juice up or whatever. There’s not really any difference between using drugs to get an edge and using technology, to me. I mean, if you’re a runner with several million dollars in backing money to pay for custom research to create a bike that is to your exact style, and a super low-resistence jump-suit to cut down on drag, is that really different than if you were juicing up intead? In either case, it gives you an advantage of someone who isn’t doing those things.
Well, that was an odd tangent, wasn’t it?
There are certainly a lot of issues with nanotechnology that need to be dealt with. It’s funny, because technology is advancing so quickly in this area that we need to sort of artificially slow it down. Like you mention, puting these little artificial blood cells in your body sounds a little crazy, which is why none of these technologies are anywhere near ready for mainstream release. The other thing to worry about is the danger of a “grey goo” incident (i.e. “a hypothetical end-of-the-world event involving molecular nanotechnology in which out-of-control self-replicating robots consume all living matter on Earth while building more of themselves” see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_goo )
The one issue I see with drugs vs. technology in terms of atheletes is that drugs can have other adverse affects on the human body. Maybe some atheletes are willing to put up with that, but not everyone is (nor should they be) and it would be wrong to force everyone to take such drugs and deal with the side effects (it’s more acceptable to force everyone to use custom bikes, etc, though I suppose there is an argument to avoid that as well). If we did, we’d almost be creating a new class of people which are, well, enhanced for our own entertainment. I don’t know if I’d be comfortable with formalizing that… Perhaps I’m being a little too touchy, but I think there are some interesting ethical implications to this.
It also applies to new technologies. When brain implants that drastically increase memory or analysis capabilities are available… will that be a new class of people? How do we treat them (how will they treat us)? I posted a while ago about the speculated technological singularity ( http://mindstalk.net/vinge/vinge-sing.html ) and the implications there are enormous. In the beginning, chances are that only a small group of people will benefit from this. What are the implications of this new class of people?
The counter to that, though, is that not all performance enhancers have negative consequences. A lot of them do, that’s true- but not all.
To be honest, I don’t find sports that interesting, and I find them less and less interesting when I think about them more.
I can see how sports may have been interesting to people a few decades ago. I bet Babe Ruth’s homerun records were pretty neat at the time. In this day and age, though, it’s becoming more and more about the technology you have at your disposal, and less and less about the talant of any given player. Yeah, it takes a certain level of athleticism to get the records we’re seeing- I sure as hell couldn’t go out tomorrow, buy a fancy bike, and hope to be the next Armstrong. That being said, though, could Armstrong or whoever get the records that they have if it weren’t for the technology?
That’s why I think that the olympics is kind of a joke. There are two kinds of events, now. There are the events that technology and expensive training wins, and there are events that are subjective in regards to who wins. That’s why nobody is surprised when the United States or France or Germany or some other 1st world money-bags nation wins a gold medal. We’ve got technology on our side. We can afford the very best equipment to give our athletes an edge. We can afford the very best training that money can buy.
I know that things have always been like that, but it’s getting worse all the time.
We’re already creating new classes of people, by the way. People are already doing all kinds of weird things to have “perfect” children. Drugs are the least of our worries in that aspect. People will try all kinds of crazy diets and drugs and therepies to have children that are smarter, or healthier, or more athletic than other children.
Add to that the ability of people going through IVF to pick and choose the traits that the child they’ll implant will have…
Interesting and related to your comment about parents and children, I just ran across this story:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-2178178,00.html
“Although they did not have fertility problems, the woman and her partner created embryos by IVF. This allowed doctors to remove a cell and test it for the cancer gene, so only unaffected embryos were transferred to her womb.”