[extropy-chat] ENOUGH already

Charlie Stross charlie at antipope.org
Mon Dec 22 20:37:44 UTC 2003


On 22 Dec 2003, at 19:33, Robin Hanson wrote:
>
> I have mixed feelings about the role of science fiction here.  If we 
> were sure no one else would look at these topics, we should certainly 
> be glad that at least science fiction looked at them.  But I 
> constantly run into academics whose reason for ignoring these issues 
> is because "that's science fiction."  Now perhaps they would still say 
> that if there were not actual science fiction novels about these 
> topics.  But it does seem that the fact that some scenario is popular 
> in science fiction is often taken as a reason not to consider it in 
> "serious" discussions about the future.

As Dirk Bruere notes, "that's science fiction" is a tag that could be 
applied to numerous everyday artefacts today as little as thirty years 
ago (test tube babies, personal computers, etcetera). One need only 
look back to the 1930's or 1940's and the dream of a rocket to the moon 
to see an example of something that was clearly nothing but SF then 
becoming reality a couple of decades later -- with a big budget behind 
it.

It seems to me that many people -- and academics are a subset of 
"people", no more and no less prone to this than anyone else -- have a 
large and unacknowledged emotional investment in the current paradigm. 
You grow up, go to school, work, get married, buy a house, work hard, 
have children ... and anything that jeopardizes this behaviour is, 
clearly undesirable. If you've invested decades in your nest and your 
family, the idea that developments in the next decade or two will turn 
it upside down is deeply threatening because, working on the basis of 
prior experience, it will have invalidated a large part of your life 
and you won't have time to repair the damage.

It's hard to criticize people for feeling this way, because for most of 
our species' history this has been survival-oriented behaviour. 
Circumstances changed slowly if at all -- rapid change was due only to 
disasters like plague, war, famine, and civil disorder, and is 
therefore almost inevitably negative.

As I believe Kuhn observed, old paradigms tend to be displaced only 
when the academics who hold them die or retire. By writing SF I'm 
hopefully reaching the next generation before they have invested so 
much in the current prevalent paradigm that they come to see change as 
threatening. It's a long, slow process.

> Science fiction authors are well aware of the may biases that are 
> introduced into their future scenarios due to the need to have an 
> entertaining story.  Academia has its own biases, but my guess is that 
> they are not as bad.

You're probably right, in general. Special pleading: those SF writers 
who are currently using these ideas -- there aren't many of us, because 
they haven't yet hit the mainstream awareness the way that, say, 
nanotechnology has -- are still, I hope, a bit more serious in outlook. 
Even when we're taking the piss. (Go Google on "Jury Service" and click 
on the topmost link it returns if you've got a free hour :)


-- Charlie




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