It's not often I read something that has me screaming and thrashing around in annoyance and disgust, but Rudy Rucker's "Psipunk" thing did it for me. Go read it and then come back here.
Okay, we're back.
Ugh.
Let's leave off the fact that the whole n-punk thing has been wrung through more permutations than there have been cover versions of "Louie, Louie". That's bad enough. What's worse is the way the whole thing is pure, unreconstructed Nerd Rapture, without a hint of irony or skepticism. It's today's version of SF from the Fifties, wherein were solemnly predicted food pills and world government — and how silly and quaint does most of that stuff seem today? Swap "quantum" for "atomic" and a few other buzzwords, and it's the same thing: In The Future, All Of Us Will Drive Standing Up!
Even the stuff in part 4 — the short-term predictions — are annoying in varying measures. The reason we still don't put everything into network links is because even in this day and age network links are notoriously slow and flaky. A home file-sharing system is one thing; leaving all your music on the other side of the country and accessing it through the same pipe through which is also being shoved your phone, wireless, NetFlix streaming and god knows what else ... that's another. (I'm not suggesting that this is impossible, just that most people need only to experience a couple of network outages [as I have] to find out why this is nowhere nearly as dependable as just caching things locally.) And the bit about tapping into the quantum energy of rocks as a computational system made me want to shove Rucker headfirst into the LHC. Sorry, gang, but quantum computing is not the Xanadu Technology it's been made out to be. Better people than Your Humble Narrator have explained why.
[Addendum: Right guy, wrong link. Most of what he talks about there is a refutation of the idea that quantum computing is impossible. Scott believes it is possible, but does not believe it will be as earth-shattering as the conventional wisdom has claimed. I'll find a better link.]
[Addendum #2: Go here and here for some perspective on the utility of quantum computing. Evidently there's just as much negative hype as positive hype.]
I do give him credit for provoking some thought, even if not as he intended. E.g., telepathy. I wonder if it might not be such a great idea, for one reason. Does it suddenly become that much easier to spoon-feed people predigested concepts that they never question, never grapple with, never test with their own skeptical viewing equipment? I suspect it will be possible to award people knowledge, but I doubt it is possible to do the same with wisdom and perspective. I don't think he was deliberately trying to conflate knowledge with thought, but that's part of the problem right there. Ideas are cheap. Perspective is priceless, and I doubt it can be boiled down into a Brain Pill that can be passed from one person to another.
I don't say any of this because I think SF or fantasy has a duty to predict anything, which is a misleading concept. I think it is the duty of such work to envision possible futures, and as a way of building a degree of skepticism about them — to allow us to keep guard against the worst of it so that we can have a future in the first place. The biggest problem I have with essays like this is the complete lack of a sense that the implications of anything they bring up are anything but "Hey, man, awesome toys!"
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You should read his wares books
http://www.rudyrucker.com/wares/
It's a free download.
They are full of humor, skepticism and warnings about playing with "awesome toys".
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Thanks, and I shall look into it. I just didn't get the impression from this essay that he had much skepticism about the implications of what he was contemplating, so I'm willing to concede my perspective is one-sided.
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Hmmm...no, your perspective isn't one-sided at all. Quite a few people hold that viewpoint.
One of the best things that SF of yesteryear--back in the 50's and 60's and yes, the 70's--did was to show us what the good--and the bad--of advanced technology. Two particular writers stand out in my mind: Thomas Scortia and Frank Robinson. If their names sound familiar, it's because they wrote THE GLASS INFERNO, THE PROMETHEUS CRISIS, and THE GOLD CREW, with TGI being one of two books adapted into the film THE TOWERING INFERNO. Granted, they were not so much SF (although both men started out writing SF) as they were cautionary tales about blindly following technology and not noticing the downside.
I think what upsets me more is that, like you said, we're only being told about the absolute positives...and no one seems to consider the other side, the fact that the tech can fail and cause serious damage to both man and the environment. Take a look at nuclear power, for instance, or even today's modern tech gadgets.
As Harlan Ellison once remarked, he's not against progress or technology--he just wants us to be careful, to be aware that there is a dark side to advanced tech, and we should be fully aware of it.
(One more thing--perhaps one of the best SF novels to showcase this theme was Jim Hogan's THE TWO FACES OF TOMORROW...which was adapted into the manga by Hoshino!)
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"TFOT" sits on my desk in the To Read pile. I've had to put it aside for the time being to deal with work (I have this weird thing about not reading when I have assignments in front of me). As further contrast I turned to one of my other inspirations, "The Stars My Destination", which despite being written in 1956 seems to have dated less than most stuff written only fifteen years ago -- and has a "transhumanist" conclusion of its own that I find a good deal more palatable and, well, humane than many other things I've read under that label as well.
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Ah, THE STARS, MY DESTINATION...you're right, it still holds up, and still feels relevant, even though it's been, what, nearly sixty years since it was published. Ironically, I did not read the novel first--I read the "illustrated" novel that Byron Preiss and Howard Chaykin worked on (with Bester's approval, of course).
What still blows me away about the book is just the way Bester wrote the conclusion--what he pulled off is, on one level, insane--and yet on another level, sheer genius.
As for writers who add a level of caution to their SF writings...perhaps the late Michael Crichton would be worth mentioning. That "be cautious!" element ran not just through his books but through the films he did, such as WESTWORLD and LOOKER (which gave a pretty scary view of computer-generated graphics at a time when they were in their infancy).
I mean, yeah, we have got really awesome toys. But have we forgotten that fact that toys can, and do, break?
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