Delayed Gratification

Cory Doctorow's latest LOCUS column deconstructs the "science fictional" idea of "the right’s confidence in the role of individual self-discipline on one’s life chances. . . . Poverty, we’re told, is rooted in an unwillingness to save, which is to say, in the childish inability to defer gratification." Likewise, a career of crime is attributed to poor self-control, resulting in the inability to make a legitimate living, on the assumption that "the causal arrow runs from 'personal defects' to 'poor outcomes'."

Marshmallow Longtermism

The title refers to the famous (or, as Doctorow says, infamous) Stanford marshmallow experiment on delaying gratification. Children were left alone in a room with a marshmallow for fifteen minutes. The experimenter told them if they didn't eat the marshmallow, they would get two instead of just the one. Follow-up studies showed that the vast majority of the kids who ate the marshmallow instead of waiting had poor futures socially and economically, whereas the "patient" kids grew up to prosper. Hence the value of self-control in predicting life outcomes was supposedly validated.

Personally, in my opinion the experiment was intrinsically flawed. How many people, even little kids, consider a boring old marshmallow an irresistible temptation? I would have held out for chocolate. But that's beside the point. Later replications of the study revealed that most of the "impatient" children came from poor backgrounds, while the "patient" ones belonged to secure, well-off families. In short, the "causal arrow" ran in the other direction. The "impatient" test subjects, having experienced numerous disappointments and broken promises from the adults in their lives, decided quite rationally to take no chances and chose the treat in front of them, a bird in the hand being preferable to any number of imagined birds in a future bush. "Which means that the 'patient' kids weren’t demonstrating 'self-control' -– rather, their willingness to wait for a second marshmallow reflected a charmed life in which adults came through with the goodies they promised." That same "charmed life" resulted in their adult success. Doctorow concedes that of course self-control and hard work have positive effects on one's chances in life. On their own, they don't guarantee success, though.

As he summarizes the issue, "Self-control is a virtue, one that we could all stand to cultivate. The difference between the rich and the poor isn’t who has self-control. It comes down to whether your life has such thin margins that single lapse kicks off an avalanche of devastating consequences, or whether you have the kind of cushions that allow you to recover from your slips."

I first encountered the concept of "discounting the future" in Steven Pinker's HOW THE MIND WORKS. People tend to heavily discount the future in their decisions when they lack any certainty of having one. If you see many of your contemporaries dying young, you don't have much incentive to avoid risks or accumulate wealth for a hypothetical old age. You might as well live fast and hard, enjoying the fun while it lasts. What looks from outside like a "childish" habit of pursuing instant gratification might be a logical choice in terms of that person's experience.

In Aldous Huxley's BRAVE NEW WORLD, instant gratification is a way of life. Conditioning its people to think of a carefree, pleasurable existence as the highest good, this society views delayed gratification as purely negative. A character in the opening scene asks a group of young adults whether they've ever had to wait for anything they wanted. The responder who admits having endured that experience describes it as horrible, and everybody else agrees with him.

Growing up, most of us learn to put off some pleasures in anticipation of greater rewards in the future. To persist in that habit requires that we have a sound basis for trusting in the future reward. College students who witness seniors only a few years older graduating and moving on to financial security and fulfilling jobs can believe in their own prospects of similar success. The connection between some kinds of delayed gratification, though, such as dietary changes and weight loss, is less obvious, especially given seemingly random day-to-day fluctuations in the number on the scale. Dropping enough pounds to notice a real difference takes a long time. Abstaining from favorite treats long enough to achieve that goal often feels futile. With our brains fighting us at every step, we fall back on strategies to trick ourselves. Don't keep the treats in the house at all. Or if we're eating them but strictly rationing ourselves, store them in a location where impulsive consumption isn't easy, forcing ourselves to stop and think first. In the financial realm, we trick ourselves into accumulating money for the future by setting up automatic transfers into a savings account or withdrawals directly from our salaries into retirement funds. However, before people can devise or implement such strategies, in whatever area of daily life or long-term planning, they have to make a rational decision that the desired outcome is worth the short-term deprivation.

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.

Retro Futures

Watching the first few episodes of STAR TREK: STRANGE NEW WORLDS, which takes place during Captain Christopher Pike's command of the Enterprise, started me thinking about the phenomenon of science fiction set in the near future with technology that gets overtaken and surpassed by real-life inventions. "Retrofuturism" brings to mind elevator operators in Huxley's BRAVE NEW WORLD (a world that relies on reproductive tech far beyond our present capacity) or slide rules coexisting with a lunar settlement in Heinlein's HAVE SPACESUIT, WILL TRAVEL. It's an inescapable hazard of writing about the near future that "cutting edge" can quickly become dated. The TV Tropes site has a page about retrofuturism under the term "Zeerust":

Zeerust

The page includes examples from the Star Trek universe under "Live-Action TV." The best-known one from the original series, of course, is the communicator. To avoid having its communicators look outdated in comparison to real-life cell phones, the prequel series ENTERPRISE had to feature devices more "modern" than those shown chronologically later in-universe.

In the original series, Captain Pike appears after the accident that made him a quadriplegic. According to Wikipedia, he operates his whole-body automated chair by brain waves, a not-implausible distant-future invention, in view of the brain-computer interface devices currently in development. Captain Pike, however, can communicate only by activating Yes or No lights on his wheelchair. In our own time, the late Stephen Hawking used a computer program that allowed him to speak through an artificial voice -- although, toward the end of his life, at the rate of only about one word per minute. Thereafter, as explained on Wikipedia, an "adaptive word predictor" enhanced his ability to communicate. The system developed for him used "predictive software similar to other smartphone keyboards." Therefore, surely by two or three centuries in the future, Captain Pike could have equipment that would enable him to produce full sentences in a completely natural-sounding manner.

As the opposite of retrofuturism or Zeerust, much science fiction displays exaggerated optimism about the futuristic features of the near future. Heinlein, in THE DOOR INTO SUMMER, predicted that advanced household robots and commercially available cryogenic "long sleep" would exist in 1970. In the same year, he has the protagonist invent what amounts to an engineering drafting program, something we've had for decades although Heinlein's versions of robotic servants haven't materialized yet. TV Tropes references this phenomenon here:

I Want My Jet Pack

As Yogi Berra is alleged to have said, "It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future."

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.

Predicting versus Contesting

Few, if any, readers and writers of science fiction believe it exists to predict the future. Strikingly on-target foretellings of future events and technology are occasional, serendipitous accidents. Rather, it speculates on the questions "What if...." and "If this goes on...." Cory Doctorow's latest LOCUS essay delivers a slightly different, more radical perspective on what science fiction does:

SF Doesn't Predict

This article consists of the text of a speech he gave in June 2023, when receiving an Honourary Doctor of Laws from York University’s Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies in Toronto. He begins with an anecdote from his educational career. At the age of seventeen, already professionally selling short science fiction, he inquired at York University's humanities department about getting into the creative writing program. He was turned down because, as he was told, "they only teach literature." I had a similar, although less blunt and final experience, as an undergraduate. After taking the introductory course in creative writing, I enrolled in an advanced, workshop-type fiction writing course. At the end of the first semester, the professor hesitated to let me into the second semester because I'd submitted only fantasy and horror. He reluctantly let me continue, and I dutifully wrote a slice-of-life story about a military wife coping with a toddler and a baby while her husband was deployed. Nobody could have asked for a more spot-on "write what you know" work. As far as I can recall, it was an okay story and certainly didn't lack vividness or realism. But that wasn't the path I wanted to follow; the marketplace abounds in writers of realistic fiction, and I knew I'd never measure up to most of them. While I sometimes enjoy reading about contemporary settings and characters with no trace of the fantastic, I have no interest in trying to write that genre. (Yes, even though it claims the status of "mainstream," it's a genre.)

Doctorow later rejoiced in belonging to a community, the tech realm, whose members didn't view his science-fiction output with disdain. Rather, he "was surrounded by people who thought that SF writing was literally the coolest thing in the world." The rest of this blog explains why he agrees.

He defines optimism and pessimism as "just fatalism in respectable suits. . . .Both deny human agency, that we can intervene to change things." He subsumes both under the category of "inevitabilism, the belief that nothing can change." This attitude, according to Doctorow, is "the opposite of SF," whose purpose is to imagine alternatives. What it contests is the assumption that there's no alternative to the status quo or the predicted future, that "resistance is futile." He lays out several examples, climaxing with his metaphor of a bus speeding toward the brink of a canyon--unless we take the risk of swerving. The essay concludes, "Hope begins with the ability to imagine alternatives. And there is always an alternative."

That affirmation reminds me of something that irritates me about the fantasy and SF shows I watch on the CW network. A continually recurring line of cliched dialogue laments, "We haven't got a choice!" (I've often wondered whether the same writers compose the scripts for all of those series.) I keep wanting to yell at the screen, "Yes, you featherbrain, you always have a choice."

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Writing to the Future

Cory Doctorow's latest LOCUS column, on writing nonfiction pieces that will still be relevant by the time they're published:

Six Weeks Is a Long Time

The time lag that may undercut the applicability of a written work, according to him, seems to be getting shorter. Circumstances can always truly change overnight or in an instant, of course. Consider the difference between September 10, 2001, and September 11 of that year. Yet it may seem odd to define an essay meant to be read a month and a half after it's written as "futuristic thinking." The near future, however, is still the future. As C. S. Lewis's senior demon says in THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS, all human beings constantly travel into the future at the rate of sixty minutes per hour.

I once read a story about a time-viewing machine that allows the user to look into the future. The culture-transformative feature of this device is that it has no lower limit on how short a time span it can look ahead. And apparently (if I remember correctly) one can view events in other places, not just where one happens to be personally located. Suppose you peer ten seconds into the future? You're effectively spying on people's actions in the present, in real time. (On second thought, it may have been a past-viewing device. Same principle applies.)

Doctorow wrote this month's article in the midst of a new, highly contagious COVID variant and the imminent invasion of Ukraine, addressing us "in the distant, six-week future" from his moment in the past when "the odds of nuclear Armageddon [seemed] higher than they’ve been for decades." He greets his future audience thus: "I bear glad tidings. Only six weeks ago, you, me and most everyone else we knew couldn’t imagine getting through these next six weeks. If you’re reading these words, you did the unimaginable. Six weeks and six weeks and six weeks, we eat the elephant of the unimaginable one bite at a time."

We're familiar with the question of what message we'd like to send to our past selves. There's a country song about writing a letter to "me at seventeen." But what message might you want to send to your future self? Unlike speaking to one's past self, this we can actually do. Are there important events or thoughts you might want to write down as reminders in case you've forgotten them a month, a year, or decades from now? What would you like to record as an important reminder for the citizens of your city, your country, or the world next month, next year, a decade from now, or generations later? People often do the latter with physical "time capsules." Would the things you choose to highlight turn out to be important to those future audiences or not?

Isaac Asimov wrote at least one essay predicting future technological and social advances, and surely he wasn't the only SF author to do that. Some of his predictions have come true; many haven't. An essay like that could be considered a message to future generations.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Planes, Trains, and Automobiles

The October 2021 issue of NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC features a pair of lead articles about "green" power for aircraft and cars, mainly electric. The cover optimistically proclaims, "The Revolution Is Here." The issue abounds with information about the past as well as the future of electric-powered transportation. I was surprised to learn that in 1900 electric cars held over one-third of the market. Gasoline-powered internal combustion automobiles came in third, after steam (!) and electric. Then as now, the main obstacles to widespread acceptance of electric cars were battery weight and range. On the other hand, electric vehicles are quiet and emissions-free, and they have fewer moving parts to maintain. In the early twentieth century, "cheap oil and paved roads" enabled the internal combustion engine to dominate the market by the 1930s. Now auto manufacturers are embracing EVs with fresh enthusiasm, not only the big names such as Tesla, but even Volkswagen. Driving range and charging times are improving as prices decrease to become comparable to the cost of gasoline-fueled cars. Driverless, electric-powered delivery vehicles may eventually become commonplace. Meanwhile, Amazon and FedEx are switching their fleets to EVs.

This NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC's second article on the energy revolution deals with flight. Commercial airliners produce vast quantities of fossil-fuel pollution. France is considering a ban on all domestic flights to destinations that can be reached by train in less than two and a half hours. Implementing that policy, of course, would imply a passenger rail system adequate to efficiently serve the needs of the traveling public. In most of the U.S., a situation like that is an incredible fantasy. Peter Kalmus, a NASA climate scientist, insists on "the hard fact" that "we don't need to fly." What world does he live in? Most vacation travelers crossing the Atlantic or Pacific can't afford the cost of a cruise ship or the extra time off work for the round trip by sea. If you have to get to the opposite coast of the U.S. for an emergency such as a family funeral, you certainly do need to fly; you can't drive that distance in a day or two.

For large aircraft, electric power runs into the problem that a battery of adequate size would weigh as much as the plane itself. One type of clean airplane fuel being contemplated is liquid hydrogen. For small aircraft, however, electric engines can succeed. A California company named Wisk is one of several working on designs for "air taxis," self-flying, vertical-takeoff-and-landing small electric aircraft. In fact, our long-awaited flying car may soon become a reality, although not owned and operated by individual consumers (thank goodness, considering the typical level of driving skill on the roads).

Each proposed solution, naturally, carries problems of its own. But, as Isaac Asimov maintained, the solution to such difficulties isn't to give up on technology but to develop better technology. If you don't subscribe to NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC, do try to pick up a copy of the October issue at the library or newsstand, especially if you're a fan and/or writer of near-future SF.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

More Futuristic Forecasts

"Prediction is hard, especially about the future." Over the past week, I've been rereading LIFE AND TIME, a 1978 collection of essays by Isaac Asimov (some of them written as early as the 1960s). In contrast to the imaginative speculations in his fiction, these articles include serious forecasts about potential developments in technology and society.

Most strikingly, he anticipated the internet, a global repository of information anybody could draw upon. He envisioned everybody on Earth having a personal "channel" just as most people now have individual telephone numbers. We sort of have that system now, considering the unique IP address of each computer as a personal channel. Also, an individual tablet or smart phone serves the same function. Incidentally, J. D. Robb's "In Death" SF mystery series anticipated today's smart phone as the pocket "link" most people in her fictional future carry with them, long before such devices became common in real life. Asimov hailed the future possibilities of lifelong, customized learning through the worldwide computer bank. Granted, many people benefit from the internet in that way, yet the satirical lament too often holds some truth: We have a network that gives us access to the entire accumulated knowledge of humanity, and we use it mostly for political rants and pictures of cats. Asimov suggested computer learning could overcome one of the main disadvantages of our educational system, the necessity for one teacher to instruct a large group of students, making it impossible to adjust lessons to the comprehension level, interests, and learning style of each individual. Computer education could effectively give each pupil a private tutor. Although we've recently had over a year of experience with online education, it's still been mainly a group-oriented activity. Advanced AI might fulfill Asimov's vision. He also foresaw cashless monetary transactions, electronic transmission of documents, and virtual rather than in-person business meetings, all of which exist now. Unfortunately, his expectation that these developments would greatly reduce travel and its attendant pollution hasn't come to pass yet, probably because many employers are reluctant to embrace the full potential of remote work.

On some topics, he was too pessimistic. For example, he foresaw the world population reaching seven billion by the early 21st century, a point we've already passed. However, we're not forced to survive on synthetic nourishment derived from genetically engineered microbes, as he speculated might become necessary. We still eat a lavish variety of fresh foods. He seemed to believe a population of the current level or higher would reduce humankind to universal misery; while many of the planet's inhabitants do live in abject circumstances, Earth hasn't yet become a dreary anthill.

Not surprisingly, Asimov favored genetically modified agricultural products, which already exist, although not in some of the radically altered or enhanced forms he imagined. He also focused on the hope of cleaner energy, perhaps from controlled fusion or large-scale solar power. He proposed solar collectors in orbit, beaming energy down to Earth, far from a practical solution at present. And, as everyone knows, fusion-generated power is only twenty years away—and has been for a generation or more. :) Asimov predicted autonomous cars, almost commercially viable in the present. He also discussed the potential advantages of flying cars, however, without apparently considering the horror of city skies thronged with thousands of individual VTOL vehicles piloted by hordes of amateurs. Maybe self-driving vehicles would solve that problem, being programmed to avoid collisions.

To save energy on cooling and heating as well as to shelter inhabitants from severe weather, he proposed moving cities underground, as in his novel THE CAVES OF STEEL. This plan might be the optimal strategy for colonizing the Moon or Mars. I doubt most Earth citizens would accept it unless it beomes the only alternative to a worldwide doom scenario. Asimov, a devoted claustrophile, seemed to underestimate the value the average person puts on sunshine, fresh air, nature, and open space.

In general, he tended to be over-pessimistic about the fate looming over us unless we solve the problem of overpopulation right now (meaning, from his viewpoint, in the 1980s). As dire as that problem is in the long run, the decades since the publication of the essays in LIFE AND TIME demonstrate that Earth is more resilient than Asimov (and many prognosticators at that time) feared. Moreover, the worldwide birthrate is declining, although the shift isn't spread evenly over the world and for the present global population continues to rise through sheer momentum. Asimov analyzed the issue of whether a demographic pattern of old people far outnumbering younger ones would lead to a rigid, reactionary culture. He maintained that the mental stagnation traditionally associated with aging could be prevented by an emphasis on lifelong learning and creativity. He devoted no attention to the more immediate problem of declining birthrates some nations already begin to face now—a young workforce that isn't large enough to support its millions of retired and often infirm elders. Encouraging immigration would help. (But that's "modpol"—shorthand for modern politics on one list I subscribe to—so I'll say no more about it.) In the long run, however, if and when prosperity rises and births decline worldwide, there won't be anyplace for a supply of young workers to immigrate from.

Asimov seemed over-optimistic about the technological marvels and wondrous lifestyle we'll all enjoy IF over-population and its attendant problems are conquered. He envisioned the 21st century as a potential earthly paradise. Judging from the predictions of such optimists over many decades, just as controlled fusion is always twenty years away, utopia is always fifty years away.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Failures of Prediction

To dispose of one point up front, of course we know the purpose of science fiction isn't literally to predict future technology and social structures. Its speculations typically explore hypothetical paths that may or may not become reality, some of which are so extreme nobody seriously expects their fulfillment. They're extrapolations that answer "What if. . . ?" or "If this goes on. . . ."

Nevertheless, it's entertaining to contemplate some of the future technological and cultural developments in older SF works that drastically missed the mark. One classic example shows up in Robert Heinlein's HAVE SPACE SUIT, WILL TRAVEL, where human colonies on the moon coexist with slide rules. In I WILL FEAR NO EVIL, the fabulously wealthy protagonist has to wait several days for the result of her pregnancy test, although at the time of the novel's publication, such a test could be completed in less than half an hour. (Ordinary patients had to wait only because of lab backlogs. Now, of course, we have instant home pregnancy tests, which ought to exist in the future setting of I WILL FEAR NO EVIL.) I don't count Heinlein's transplantation of 1950s family structures into the spacefaring future in his "juveniles" as a failure of prediction, because it's obvious he was simply bowing to the constraints of the market in those books. His posthumously published utopia FOR US, THE LIVING demonstrates how early in his career he envisioned alternative marriage and sexual customs.

Isaac Asimov did foresee the hand-held calculator, but that story imagines a future in which people have become so dependent on calculators that even scientists with advanced degrees don't know how to do arithmetic the old-fashioned way. I can't believe that's meant as a serious prediction rather than a fanciful thought experiment. I suspect the same about a story in which people aren't taught to read, since computers and robots convey all information (apparently -- it's not quite clear) in audible speech. (So what about deaf users?) It comes as an incredible revelation to the two boys in this tale that their recent ancestors could decode "squiggles" on paper.

Recently I reread a collection of Asimov's robot short stories, along with his novel ROBOTS OF DAWN, and was amused at some of the predictive "fails" perpetrated by such a visionary author. For one thing, the robots are almost all roughly humanoid-shaped, supposedly because the public would feel less wary of them in that form. The plan doesn't work; throughout the series, most Earth people (as opposed to Spacers, who tend to embrace the convenience of artificial servants) fear robots, and it's pretty clear that the crude approximation of human shape makes the animated machines more distrusted, not less. It would make more sense to design robots' bodies for maximum efficiency in performing their particular tasks, as real-life industrial robots usually are. Furthermore, to learn new information robots are shown reading books rather than having the contents uploaded directly into their positronic brains. Very odd from a present-day perspective, when astronomers in one story want to identify extrasolar planets likely to harbor life, they teach a robot to perform the analysis rather than programming a stationary computer to carry out the search. This piece, of course, is set in the distant future, yet we have methods of finding Earthlike extrasolar planets right now.

In terms of social change, Asimov's robot series includes elements that require generous suspension of disbelief. For instance, THE CAVES OF STEEL emphasizes how overcrowded Earth has become. As one consequence, personal hygiene occurs in what amount to huge communal bathhouses, called Personals. All right, if overpopulation means apartments are so small it makes more sense to centralize baths, showers, and related functions, I can accept that. But it's strongly implied that individual dwellings don't have toilet facilities, which would imply no running water! This assumption is confirmed in ROBOTS OF DAWN, where Earth investigator Elijah Baley is suprised to find one-person Personals in private homes. Asimov must not have thought this through. In a technologically advanced society hundreds of years in the future, people don't have any means of washing at home? And when "nature calls" in the middle of the night or first thing in the morning, they use -- what? Chamber pots? Family structures on the Spacer worlds, at least the two we see in the series, are also problematic. One world has developed a culture in which people abhor personal contact so deeply that they never touch or even meet in person if they can help it. Almost all contact happens holographically. Children are brought up in group care homes, where they're gradually trained out of the crude desire for physical proximity. Even spouses don't live together. They have sex only for reproduction, and most people detest that "duty," yet the obvious alternative of universal artificial insemination isn't embraced. On the planet Aurora in ROBOTS OF DAWN, casual recreational sex is commonplace, children are the only purpose of formal marriage, the young are reared in communal nurseries and may not even know the identities of their parents, and sexual jealousy allegedly doesn't exist. Asimov must have subscribed to the early and mid-20th-century belief that human nature is infinitely malleable. (For a lucid, detailed, entertainingly readable rebuttal of that notion, see Steven Pinker's THE BLANK SLATE.) Consider how recognizable to us are the portrayals of marriage, family, and sexuality in the early books of the Old Testament, thousands of years ago. Are a few more centuries and the relatively minor change of venue to different planets really likely to inspire radical changes in those areas of human interaction?

Famously, when later series in the Star Trek universe were developed, the producers had to cope with the fact that some technology in the original series had already become outdated, notably the flip-phone communicators. On the other hand, some SF works predict too ambitiously, as in the proverbial plea, "Where's my flying car?" The classic 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY envisioned a level of routine space travel in 2001 that we haven't attained yet. Heinlein's DOOR INTO SUMMER promised all-purpose housecleaning robots in 1970. I wish!

Of course, many elements in current print and film SF that seem to us like cutting-edge predictions may turn out to be laughably wrong. As far as dystopian visions such as THE HANDMAID'S TALE are concerned, we can fervently hope so. However, I still want my autonomous housecleaning robot. I'm pleased with my Roomba, but it's only a start.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Robot Caretakers

Here's another article, long and detailed, about robot personal attendants for elderly people:

Meet Your Robot Caretaker

I was a little surprised that the first paragraph suggests those machines will be a common household convenience in "four or five decades." I'd have imagined their becoming a reality sooner, considering that robots able to perform some of the necessary tasks already exist. The article mentions several other countries besides Japan where such devices are now commercially available.

The article enumerates some of the potential advantages of robot health care aides: (1) There's no risk of personality conflicts, as may develop between even the most well-intentioned people. (2) Automatons don't need time off. (3) They don't get tired, confused, sick, or sloppy. (4) They can take the place of human workers in low-paid, often physically grueling jobs. (4) Automatons are far less likely to make mistakes, being "programmed to be consistent and reliable." (5) In case of error, they can correct the problem with no emotional upheaval to cloud their judgment or undermine the client-caretaker relationship. (6) The latter point relates to an actual advantage many prospective clients see in having nonhuman health aides; there's no worry about hurting a robot's feelings. (7) Likewise, having a machine instead of a live person to perform intimate physical care, such as bathing, would avoid embarrassment.

Contrary to hypothetical objections that health-care robots would deprive human aides of work, one expert suggests that "robots handling these tasks would free humans to do other, more important work, the kind only humans can do: 'How awesome would it be for the home healthcare nurse to play games, discuss TV shows, take them outside for fresh air, take them to get their hair done, instead of mundane tasks?'” Isolated old people need "human connection" that, so far, robots can't provide. The article does, however, go on to discuss future possibilities of emotional bonding with robots and speculates about the optimal appearances of robotic home health workers. A robot designed to take blood pressure, administer medication, etc. should have a shape that inspires confidence. On the other hand, it shouldn't look so human as to fall into the uncanny valley.

As far as "bonding" is concerned, the article points out that "for most people, connections to artificial intelligence or even mechanical objects can happen without even trying." The prospect of more lifelike robots and deeper bonding, however, raises another question: Would clients come to think of the automaton as so person-like that some of the robotic advantages listed above might be negated? I'm reminded of Ray Bradbury's classic story about a robot grandmother who wins the love of a family of motherless children, "I Sing the Body Electric"; one child fears losing the "grandmother" in death, like her biological mother.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Hopeful Futures

Kameron Hurley's column for the April issue of LOCUS explains how her writing has recently shifted from a pessimistic to an optimistic view of human possibilities. She decided "being grim and nihilistic is boring" rather than "exciting or edgy." Instead, in a world that seems increasingly darker, she finds her writing "to be a perfect outlet for exploring how people can still make good decisions in bad situations."

The Future Is Intrinsically Hopeful

This message resonates with me. As argued by Steven Pinker in THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE and ENLIGHTENMENT NOW, we are living in the best of times, not the worst of times (although, admittedly, with considerable room for improvement).

A few striking quotes from Hurley's essay on why she believes in the future:

"Humanity didn’t survive this long because of its worst impulses. We survived this long because, despite all of that, we learned how to work together."

"What a time to be a creator, when believing humanity has a future that is not just a series of dystopic post-apocalypse nightmares is the most radical position one can have."

"What if what we are presenting to our audiences, as artists, is 'This is how the world could be really different. Have you thought about how to get there?'"

"Increasingly, I find that writing any type of work at all is hopeful....It is profoundly optimistic to assume there is a generation after ours that will create a society one hundred years from now that is recognizable to us at all."

The last two quotes seem to me to encapsulate a major theme and purpose of science fiction. Dystopian futures serve the important function of warning us and potentially motivating us to change our course: "If this goes on...." The other classic SF question, "What if...?" is equally or more important, however. One reason the original STAR TREK became so beloved was surely its optimism about human destiny. At the height of the civil rights movement, the Enterprise crew portrays men and women (even if female characters didn't fully come into their own until later iterations of the ST universe) of many races and cultures working together to discover new worlds. In the middle of the Cold War, STAR TREK envisions Russian, Americans, and Asians exploring space as a team. And many of those "predictions" have come true! THE ORVILLE, as a drama-comedy homage to ST, further develops that hopefulness about mutual tolerance and cooperation and the joy of discovery in the context of 21st-century sociopolitical concerns.

Writing as if we "believe in the future" can infuse readers with hope and perhaps inspire them to create that kind of future.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Replicators on the Horizon

Right here in Annapolis, a 3-D printer at the local Home Depot has been used to create a prosthetic limb for a five-year-old boy born without a hand. You can read the story and watch a video of the new hand in action here:

Prosthetic from 3-D Printer

The maker, John Longo, a staff member at the store, has produced and donated about 120 of such devices over the past year and a half. One cool feature of the system is that new limbs can be printed from the same design in larger sizes as the boy grows.

Could 3-D printers be precursors of the replicators in the Star Trek universe? Currently, a wide variety of objects can be made from a generic material, spools of plastic filament. The versatility and usefulness of the technology has proven itself in many fields; simple replacement organs such as bladders and external ears have already been transplanted into patients. Presumably, replicators, on starships and elsewhere, create items from a supply of undifferentiated, cheap mass (like those plastic filaments), not out of thin air. The basic concept could evolve from the principles behind 3-D printers. Long before the imagined era of Starfleet and the Federation, those machines might become advanced and versatile enough to make almost any product needed in everyday life, as well as in specialized fields such as medicine and industry.

What about food? While we wouldn't expect that to be crafted out of plastic (I hope!), maybe a nutritionally balanced supply of goop could be shaped and flavored to simulate almost anything the consumer would want to eat. Could replicated food someday feed the world's hungry people? To a great extent, maybe, but considering the strong resistance to GMO crops by some factions, a movement might develop to reject such "fake" food.

Of course, even in the utopian future of a genie-magic level of technology, replicated products would have costs. The energy has to come from somewhere, and the raw material, although cheap, wouldn't be free. Moreover, well-off people wouldn't be satisfied with only replicated consumer goods. Doubtless foods made from fresh ingredients would taste better, and individually crafted items would become status symbols. Still, mass-manufactured products from some device analogous to the replicator would have profound effects on the global economy. Imagine living in a world where abundance, not scarcity, becomes the default assumption.

Welcome to the future!

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Is the World Improving?

Psychologist Steven Pinker has just published a new book, ENLIGHTENMENT NOW, a follow-up to his 2011 book THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE: WHY VIOLENCE HAS DECLINED. In that earlier work, he demonstrated with page after page of hard facts that we're living in the least violent period in recorded history. ENLIGHTENMENT NOW, subtitled "The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress," expands that project to support the claim that human well-being has increased in virtually every measurable way since the dawn of the Enlightenment in the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries. (I have to confess that I bristled a bit at the title itself, since "Enlightenment," like "Renaissance," was a self-designated label meant to dismiss previous eras as centuries of benighted superstition, barbarism, and stagnation.) Contrary to the widespread belief that the world is going to Hell in a handbasket, according to Pinker this is the best time in history to be born, even in third-world nations. The headlines that make many people wonder, "Why is it getting so hot, and what are we doing in this handbasket?" represent, in Pinker's view, a distortion of the facts. (Why a handbasket, by the way? If all of us are in it collectively, wouldn't a bushel basket make more sense? Or a laundry basket? Of course, then we'd lose the alliteration.) Health, education, the spread of representative government, overall quality of life (evaluated by leisure time, household conveniences, access to information and entertainment, etc.), among many other metrics, have measurably improved. Fewer children die in childhood, fewer women die in giving birth, many diseases have been conquered or even eradicated, in the U.S. drug addiction and unwed teen pregnancy have decreased, fewer people worldwide live in extreme poverty, and in the developed world even the poorest possess wealth (in the form of clean running water, electricity, and other modern conveniences) that nobody could have at any price a couple of centuries ago. As for violence, Pinker refers in both books to what he calls "The Long Peace," the period since 1945 in which no major world powers have clashed head-on in war. What about the proxy wars such as the Korean and Vietnam conflicts? Faded away with the Cold War itself. Anarchy and bloody conflicts in third-world countries? While horrible present-day examples can easily be cited, the number of them has also decreased. Pinker also disputes, with supporting figures, the hype about "epidemics" of depression and suicide.

Despite Pinker's convincing array of statistics, readers may still find themselves protesting, "But—but—school shootings!" Why do we often have the impression that the condition of the world is getting worse when it's actually getting better?

For one thing, as we all know, "If it bleeds, it leads." News media report extraordinary, exciting events. Mass murder shocks us BECAUSE we're used to expecting our daily lives to remain peaceful and safe. Yet even the editorial page of our local paper recently noted that, although high-profile episodes of "rampage killings" (as Pinker labels them) seem to have occurred with alarming frequency lately, incidence of gun violence in general in the U.S. is down. We tend to be misled by the "availability heuristic" (things we've heard of or seen more frequently or recently, or that we find disturbing, loom large in our consciousness, appearing more common than they really are) and the "negativity bias" (we recall bad things more readily and vividly than good ones). Then there's the well-known confirmation bias, the inclination to notice facts in support of a predetermined position and ignore those that refute it. As for the actual numbers for mass murder, the stats for 2015 (the latest year for which he had data while writing the book) classify most rampage killings under the category of terrorism. The total number of deaths from "terrorism" in the U.S. in that year was 44, as compared to over 15,000 fatalities from other kinds of homicides and vastly more deaths from accidents (motor vehicle and other).

What does Pinker's thesis that the arc of history bends toward justice (and peace, health, and prosperity) imply for the prospect of encountering alien civilizations? Isaac Asimov believed we're in no danger of invasion from hostile extraterrestrials because any culture advanced enough to develop interstellar travel would have developed beyond violence and war. Pinker would probably agree. I'm still dubious of this position, considering that one of the most technologically advanced nations of the twentieth century perpetrated the Holocaust. Moral advancement may tend to grow in step with scientific development, but I don't see that trend as inevitable. The reason I think an alien invasion is unlikely is that any species capable of interstellar travel would have the intelligence and technological skills to get anything they need in much easier ways that crossing vast expanses of space to take over an already inhabited planet. I trust that any hypothetical aliens we eventually meet will be intelligent enough to realize, as most of the nations on Earth have, that trade and exchange of ideas trump genocidal conquest as methods of getting what they want from other sapient species. Much of science fiction has traditionally offered hope, for instance many of Robert Heinlein's novels. Today, amid the fashion for post-apocalyptic dystopias, we can still find optimistic fiction. S. M. Stirling's Emberverse, which begins with the downfall of civilization in DIES THE FIRE, focuses throughout the series on cooperation in rebuilding society rather than on the initial collapse.

While Pinker doesn't deny that our world is far from a utopian paradise, there's a lot of work yet to be done, and any mass murder rampage is one too many, this is fundamentally an optimistic book. It's a refreshing reminder that we're not necessarily doomed.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Food Production of the Future

Here's an article about tabletop greenhouses controlled by a computer program:

A Byte to Eat

Food computers "use up to 90 percent less water than traditional agriculture and can help reduce food waste." The ones built in the class showcased in this article are the size of a moving box and very cheap—the "computer" part of the system costs about $30.00.

These devices are too small, of course, to feed a household. However, they could allow people without yards or gardens to supplement their diets with home-grown vegetables. Furthermore, the design can be scaled up to the size of a warehouse.

In an essay written several decades ago, Isaac Asimov calculated how long it would take for the Earth to reach maximum sustainable population at the then-current rate of reproduction. In a surprisingly few centuries, he figured, the entire surface of the planet would reach the population density of Manhattan at noon on a weekday. (I don't remember whether this estimate includes paving over the oceans.) Setting aside the practical fact that this end point will never be reached, because societies would collapse long before then, how would all those people living in one continuous urban sprawl be fed? Agriculture on almost every rooftop would be needed. Asimov visualized giant algae vats producing the raw material for nutritive substances. The society of Harry Harrison's 1966 novel MAKE ROOM, MAKE ROOM, set in 1999, feeds the overcrowded planet with a protein substance called Soylent Green. (Interestingly, Harrison predicts this desperate condition in a world with 7 billion people. Global population today measures about 7.5 billion, and we're nowhere near those dire straits. Maybe there's hope.) Contrary to the movie (in which the authorities falsely claim that the product's base ingredient is plankton), Soylent Green in the book isn't "people." Thoughtful consideration makes it obvious that relying on cannibalism to feed everybody would make little sense. It's not efficient to sustain human livestock on food that people could eat directly. Any consumption of human meat would have to be sporadic and opportunistic, not the main source of nourishment. In the novel, Soylent Green is made of soybeans and lentils, a highly nutritious combination of proteins. Still, most likely, the majority of people would prefer "real food" if it could be cultivated in such an environment. And inexpensive computerized growing units like those in the tabletop greenhouse project could be part of the solution to the problem.

Not that I'd want to live in a world like that. As much as I would miss the modern conveniences I'm very attached to, I would almost prefer the low-tech future of S. M. Stirling's "Emberverse" series (beginning with DIES THE FIRE), whose inhabitants enjoy fresh, locally farmed foods as one compensation for the high-tech marvels they've lost.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Trazzles and Tweedlers

While re-shelving our books in our newly redecorated basement "library," I came across WHICH WAY TO THE FUTURE? (2001), a collection of essays from ANALOG by the long-time editor of the magazine, Stanley Schmidt. While most of the stories in ANALOG don't excite me, because I don't really get into "hard science fiction" (a term Schmidt doesn't like; he maintains that rigorously science-based SF should be called simply "science fiction"), I've always loved the editorials. My favorite article in WHICH WAY TO THE FUTURE?, "Bold and Timid Prophets," contemplates how visions of the future (in both factual predictive writings and fiction) typically measure up to the actual development of culture and technology. Often a story set in the future imagines the technology as a perfected version of the cutting-edge inventions of the present day. For example, a nineteenth-century speculative novel might envision the twentieth century as powered by highly advanced steam engines. Making an imaginative leap into a world filled with devices that do things impossible in the current state of knowledge is much harder.

Schmidt illustrates this problem by starting the essay with an ordinary letter written in the late 1990s as it would appear to a reader in the 1860s. He substitutes a nonsense word for every term that didn't exist then (or combines familiar words in ways that would have made no sense in the mid-nineteenth century, such as "answering machine"). (I think he cheated a bit with "pilot." Boats had pilots for a very long time before airplanes began to need them.) "Plane" becomes "trazzle"; "computer" becomes "tweedler." "Fooba" substitutes for "e-mail" and "zilp" for "fax." Even where the nineteenth-century reader could recognize all the words, many of the sentences would appear to express impossibilities. How could parents know the sex of a baby in utero? How could a person travel a total of 20,000 miles in only one month? How could a human heart be transplanted? How could a transatlantic trip take "just a few hours"?

Doubtless the distant future will include inventions and achievements we can't currently imagine because they'll depend on discoveries and technologies unknown to us, just as the nineteenth century couldn't predict the practical applications of electromagnetic theory and quantum mechanics. Even the boldest and best of classic SF writers get things amusingly wrong when writing about the not-so-distant future. "Where's my flying car?" illustrates one well-known unfulfilled prediction. Personally, I shudder at the thought of flying cars being anything other than toys for the rich. Autonomous ground cars, which now seem just over the horizon, sound much more desirable. What I really want, however, is my housecleaning robot, which Heinlein in THE DOOR INTO SUMMER expected by 1970. Also, in HAVE SPACE SUIT, WILL TRAVEL, Heinlein envisioned a near future with a moon colony—and slide rules. The social structures portrayed in some of his juvenile novels are even less "bold" than the concept of slide rules on the moon—the families of the twenty-first century look like suburban American households of the 1950s—but, in light of his posthumously published first novel, FOR US, THE LIVING, that absence of innovation probably wasn't his fault. I suspect editors of books for teenagers in the 1950s wouldn't have accepted anything unconventional in that area.

Schmidt concludes that "well-balanced science fiction" needs "both extrapolation—things you can clearly see are possible—and innovation—the things you can't see how to do, but also can't prove impossible." That's one thing I like about J. D. Robb's Eve Dallas mysteries; their vision of the 2060s strikes me as convincingly futuristic but also plausible in terms of current technological and social trends.

WHICH WAY TO THE FUTURE? addresses a variety of other intriguing topics, such as the definitions of "intelligence" and "human," why we haven't been contacted by aliens (the Fermi Paradox), the proliferation of unrealistically exaggerated fears of marginal hazards, etc. Fortunately, Amazon offers numerous used copies of this fascinating collection.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Privacy Under Siege?

Speaking of privacy, as Rowena's recent post does: Cory Doctorow's column in the latest LOCUS delivers warnings about privacy threats from the Internet and the cutting-edge "Internet of Things."

Privacy Wars

Doctorow discusses the "absurd legal fiction" of the ubiquitous "notice and consent" requirement. You know, those policy statements and conditions of use for which we have to check "accept" before we can run software or access certain web content. As Doctorow points out, nobody can really read all that stuff. To do so in detail with every device or program would eat up most of our waking hours. Yet by checking "accept," we often give permission for all sorts of tracking software to interact with our computers and phones, without even realizing we've done so. Pokemon Go players probably realize the game "knows" where they are at all times, but they accept that knowledge as part of the cost of playing the game.

I don't own a smart phone and never plan to get one (unlike my husband, who upgraded to such a device a while back). So at present my activities and movements in the physical world can't be tracked by any incarnation of Big Brother (public or private—and isn't it interesting that Orwell envisioned an all-seeing government, yet nowadays it's mainly commercial entities that observe us?). I'd direly miss the convenience of ordering from my regularly-visited websites without having the enter information every time, though. And it's a great boon, when I'm not sure whether I own copy of a certain book, to learn from a glance at the Amazon book page whether I've bought it already. To get that convenience, we have to accept cookies and all that comes with them.

Doctorow's vision of the totally connected future takes on an apocalyptic tone, as in this paragraph:

"You will ‘interact’ with hundreds, then thou­sands, then tens of thousands of computers every day. The vast majority of these interactions will be glancing, momentary, and with computers that have no way of displaying terms of service, much less presenting you with a button to click to give your ‘consent’ to them. Every TV in the sportsbar where you go for a drink will have cameras and mics and will capture your image and process it through facial-recognition software and capture your speech and pass it back to a server for continu­ous speech recognition (to check whether you’re giving it a voice command). Every car that drives past you will have cameras that record your like­ness and gait, that harvest the unique identifiers of your Bluetooth and other short-range radio devices, and send them to the cloud, where they’ll be merged and aggregated with other data from other sources."

Do you think our digital footprints will, on a practical level, become that detailed and all-pervasive anytime in the near future? What company or agency would have the time, resources, or motivation to aggregate and make active use of so much miscellaneous data? On the other hand, I agree with Doctorow that the mere fact of having all this information unguardedly accessible SOMEWHERE is frightening.

Coincidentally, in an interview in the same issue of LOCUS, Charles Stross speculates on the benefits and potential hazards of living surrounded by interactive objects. He narrates an anecdote from the pioneering days of microprocessors, back in the 1970s. Someone joked that eventually the chips would become so cheap we'd put them in doorknobs. Everybody laughed. If you've stayed at a hotel lately, you've routinely encountered computerized door locks. Stross proposes the example of replacing city sidewalk pavement with stones containing chips that have "the equivalent of an iPhone 4 in computing power." Then suppose most pedestrians are wearing clothes with radio ID tags designed to interact with the washing machine for optimal cleaning—which incidentally also contain unique identifying data. If a person collapses from a heart attack, the sidewalk could summon an ambulance instantly. But a fully networked city could also track us everywhere we go.

Forsooth, smart technology can indeed be a mixed blessing.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

What Are We Putting In The Ocean?

I'm just back from a short vaction in Florida, and I cannot say that I came away feeling very proud of people.

The signs say, "Keep Off The Dunes". Do people keep off the dunes? No. They sit on them for an elevated view. They let their dogs play on them. They sleep on them. They take a short cut across them instead of using the boardwalks.

Dunes are important and fascinating, not only for protecting the coast from winds and storm surges. Specialized creatures live in them, and specialized plants grow on them. The roots of sea oats help to keep the sand from being blow inland.  Beach grass dies if people walk on it and break its stems.
More info http://www.dnrec.delaware.gov/swc/shoreline/pages/duneprotection.aspx

The signs say "No Dogs" (between certain hours). One sees dogs during the no-dogs hours. The rules say that dogs must be on a leash during the hours when dogs are allowed. Are they?  In most cases, not.  I was harassed by a large excited dog as I stood in the shin-deep surf.

Apart from that, the beach was littered with glass, aluminum, styrofoam, and plastic trash. Alas.  It all contributes to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. or the Great Atlantic Garbage Patch. But that's nothing. I should have been in Seattle.

What is it with Seattle? Perhaps the people there are more stressed than Americans anywhere else. Or perhaps, they think they aren't because of all the drugs they ingest and excrete.

http://www.aol.com/article/2016/03/18/salmon-full-of-cocaine-and-antidepressants-study-finds-puget-so/21330104/?icid=maing-grid7%7Cmain5%7Cdl12%7Csec3_lnk4%26pLid%3D1115464555

"Researchers found cocaine, Advil, Prozac, Lipitor, Benadryl and dozens of other drugs in the tissue of juvenile chinook salmon caught in the Puget Sound in September 2014, the Seattle Times reported in February. The salmon likely picked up the drugs from wastewater in the area that's a "[cocktail] of 81 drugs," as the Seattle Times put it."

Alas. That is wild-caught Pacific salmon. And, I thought that I was okay if I avoided the farmed Atlantic salmon.

"Other drugs found in the wastewater include (but aren't limited to): Aleve, Flonase, Paxil, Tylenol, Tagamet, Valium, Zoloft, Darvon, OxyContin, caffeine, nicotine fungicides, antiseptics, anticoagulants, Cipro and other "antibiotics galore," the Seattle Times reported."

Imagine, though, the science fiction (I almost typed fishion) possibilities of self-aware, laid back, buzzed, sleepy, obese, bacteria-resistant, indigestion-free sea life! They didn't mention the sexually stimulating drugs, but one might expect that among the 81 drug cocktail, something of the sort would be there.

Toilets of the future ought to be designed with their own reservoirs... like back to cess pits!!! Or a water feature wall of their home, on the other side of the home from an Elon Musk-like solar/battery recycling power wall.  Come to think of it, if one churned one's greywater, one might create hydroelectic power, too.  Bill Gates was recently on TV drinking recycled urine. Perhaps, if people drank their own recycled pee, they would get better value from their drugs as a side effect.

A possible solution for the future might be to have two toilets in every bathroom. #1 and #2  One would save a lot of water that way.  And, keep the juvenile chinook salmon in better health.

All the best,
Rowena Cherry