OGWiseman Ponders!

Writing Sci Fi in what used to be The Future.

If you brought someone from 1000 years ago to present day America, and could only take them to one, indoor location to impress them the most, where would it be?

My answer is, the grocery store. More than a hospital, more than a computer cafe, more than an airport, the visceral effect of all that food, in its unimaginable variety and abundance, would seem to our ancestors (from 100-200 years ago, much less 1000) to be a true miracle. I don’t think you could convince that person (were they Christian) that they had not died and gone to Heaven.

There’s a (possibly apocryphal) story about an American General who realizes we were going to win the cold war as he’s escorting the Russian ambassador on a tour of rural Virginia. The Ambassador demands they stop at a local grocery story. When he sees the abundance, they just cannot convince him that it isn’t a setup, put in place by a clever American government to dupe him. He finds it impossible that this is simply… everywhere.

And what’s amazing about these stories is that the actual grocery store—the part you see—is by *far* the least impressive part of the apparatus that generates the grocery store. Behind the store’s gleaming, fluorescent edifice are not just farms and dairies and ranches but trucking companies and roads and electric generation companies and wires and packaging companies and plastic manufacturing companies and oil companies and semiconductor manufacturers and ultimately governments making trade deals and guaranteeing contract enforcement enough to allow the people who own and operate grocery stores to make deals with all of these people, and banks to lend them dealmaking money with low amounts of catastrophic default tail risk.

But the person who walks into the grocery store does not see that. They see the rows and shelves. They see the abundance. That’s why it would be the most inexplicably impressive to our hypothetical ancestor.

You can explain an airport in terms of birds. You can explain a hospital in terms of pain and death. You can’t explain a computer cafe at all, and they can’t even see what’s useful about it. But a grocery store is too simple, and built too much on miracles. You can’t explain it in terms of a farm in any satisfying way.

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There are many ways to divide up Science Fiction (Using SF as a very broad term here, as I always do in this space). Here’s one: SF describes technologies of two basic types. (“Technology” is also used very broadly here; “anything humanity uses instrumentally”.)

One type of SF describes things at the very edge of humanity’s capabilities (Real World Examples: Space X, Amazon’s logistics, mRNA vaccines). These things *seem* very impressive. A Falcon 9 Rocket taking off makes everyone stop what they’re doing. You’re watching Science, and the ‘S’ is noticeably capitalized. Call this “Edge-Tech Sci Fi”.

The other type of SF describes technologies that are everyday, used mostly without the users really even thinking about what they’re doing (Real World Examples: Cars, Grocery Stores, Democratic Government). Call this “Daily-Tech Sci Fi”.

So “The Martian” is Edge-Tech. So is “Gravity”. “Gattaca” is Daily-Tech, because we don’t see Ethan Hawke go to space, we just see his life. But it’s not all about whether someone goes to space or not! “Inception” is Edge-Tech, but “Mad Max” and “Blade Runner” are Daily-Tech, because the characters aren’t impressed by the technology.

Some things are interesting blends of the two. “The Matrix” is Edge-Tech for Neo, but the other humans who are awake on the Nebuchadnezzar (Morpheus’ ship) don’t think The Matrix is amazing at all—they use it like we use our Iphones.

And it’s not just the more traditional SF that can be viewed this way. “Lord of the Rings” is Edge-Tech all the way. Characters are literally in awe of the One-Ring. There’s only one of them in the whole world! Gandalf uses magic, but not casually, and he’s one of the only ones who uses it even that much. He’s fighting Balrogs and getting reborn; nobody’s doing the dishes with it.

“Harry Potter”, however, is Daily-Tech with a few exceptions (The Horcruxes in particular). Children are using magic! People are cleaning their houses and catching trains with it. Magical brooms are used primarily to play a sport. The delight of it is how ordinary and everyday it all seems.

Neither of these is better than the other, but it’s important to understand where an idea fits on the spectrum, because there are different rules that govern how to write both, and different things that make each interesting. Exactly what all those are is beyond the scope of this essay, but trust me, they exist.

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There is a theory that says we have picked a lot of the low-hanging technological fruit, and that technological progress from here on will become geometrically harder to attain. This would render the era we have just lived through unique, a blip on the way to a final state; entropy as the ultimate law of nature.

If this is true, it remains unclear to me what kind of SF will be possible, once this geometric progression has paralyzed us thoroughly enough. For this reason—as well as the literal future that implies for humanity—I hope it is not so.

There is a theory that says the next generation of technological progress will be about doing what we do now, except cleaner. We will still have cars, but they will not pollute or crash. We will still eat meat identical to the meat we have today, but it will cause neither carbon emissions nor animal suffering.

This is a much better outcome for humanity, but still difficult for SF. It is hard to write about what is *not* happening. Will the SF of the future all be about supply chains and grid electrification?

There is still another theory that says we are at a technological chokepoint, and that the future will be a tech-Utopia, where illness and violence and want will be banished. Most people who believe this are selling something, and those who aren’t are usually speaking of a future in which humans are no longer the prime mover on this planet—AIs are.

This makes for excellent SF, but is rather a mixed bag for us, I’d say. That which is powerful enough to bring us to Utopia is bound to have powerful and dangerous whims indeed, and even its small mistakes along the way will feel like the stomping bootheels of a god.

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I believe all of these theories are true. They will all happen to some degree on this enormous and diverse planet of ours. Technologies are not evenly distributed. The internet has improved the speed of that distribution, but only by degree. Implementation is harder than ideas. AI will rule us in some ways, and hopefully figure out what to do about the climate. Tech will get greener. We have picked a lot of low-hanging (and dirty, to stretch the metaphor) fruit in the postwar years of explosive economic growth.

I believe the SF of the future—and the future itself—will be about Integration.

The integration first of Edge-Tech with Daily-Tech, by which I mean primarily AI and the Internet but also space travel, simulation, genetic therapeutics and biomedicine. Things that we can already imagine but do not yet possess will become for us like grocery stores would be for our hypothetical ancestor—obvious and comprehensible yet unexplainable.

This already exists to some degree: Can you explain Quantum Mechanics? Me either, but semiconductors—and the computers I’m writing this and you’re reading this on—wouldn’t exist without it. Okay, that’s “not understanding” at a pretty high level of abstraction, but that’s exactly my point. It will ratchet down into lower levels of abstraction over time.

Sooner than perhaps many people realize, we will interact AI systems on a daily basis that no one—not even the people who made them—understands at a nuts-and-bolts level. Their makers will understand the programs they wrote to *train* the AIs, but the fully-trained AIs themselves will be far too vast and complex for a person to look at in full. There is a field of AI research called “Intelligibility” that is attempting to address this, but it is in its infancy, and is just bumping up against the contours of the problem.

Most people still don’t think about where their food comes from, but that information is comprehensible, it exists. People know what farms are. One day food will be made by processes complex enough that no one without a graduate-level education can understand them, and we will eat it, because it will be far more delicious and less expensive than any food currently available.

The future is Edge-Tech becoming Daily-Tech, at scale and at speed.

The SF of the future is an attempt to grapple with the implications of ignorance so profound it is terrifying combined with benefits so immense they are irresistible.

The characters in Harry Potter use magic, but do not understand its source or mechanism. This does not seem to bother them. It will bother us.

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“The Time Machine” was published in 1895. It inaugurated the science fiction of the physical—they literally had to build something out of raw materials in order to literally move around in time.

By the time of “1984” and “Brave New World”, we had entered the science fiction of the mental—the individual struggling to maintain sanity and functionality in the face of a mad and diabolical world.

We have been through the science fiction of the emotional, expressed beautifully in the works of Octavia Butler—human relationships deconstructed and exposed for their frailty and their magnificence, the enemy no longer a faceless state but our own fears and desires vis a vis those around us.

The struggle of our society today is spiritual. It is metaphysical and eschatological and teleological. It is a struggle of definitions without referents, of volume without communication, of means without ends.

We must have a science fiction to match.

END

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I’ll be back next week with another story. Have a great one!