SF authors generally make up their technologies based on the needs of the story they’re trying to tell, rather than based on reality, but the more “hard” science-oriented ones try to make their science as believable as possible too. This site seems to fit a common theme in this blog, of “track[ing] predictions and descriptions of the future made by scientist, technology pundit and science fiction author David Brin.” It looks like he’s got a pretty good track record too.
“The freakonomics of smut: Does it actually cause rape?”
There’s a good bit of evidence suggesting just the opposite. Though it might all be down to Porn-Induced Sexual Dysfunction.
“One week playing violent video games alters brain activity”
More news on the effects of violent video games. Only preliminary results, but it’s something to keep an eye on.
As a somewhat-related item: most of us figure out the difference between reality and make-believe when we’re very young. Apparently those who don’t end up in organizations like the Red Cross, which is considering accusing six hundred million videogame players of war crimes.
You just can’t make this stuff up.
“Paul Krugman: save the economy by staging an alien invasion hoax”
A nice idea, but I suspect the execution would be pretty difficult. Hollywood special effects are a lot better now than in 1938, but there are many more science-educated people who would be a lot harder to fool too. All it would take is one slip-up, caught and pointed out by some bright teenager, and the jig would be up.
“Japan, Russia in plan for elephant to birth CLONE MAMMOTH”
This sort of thing has been talked about for decades (it was the idea that spawned the book Jurassic Park, published in 1990, after all). I look forward to seeing the results, but I have to wonder how much mammoth behavior in the wild was learned and passed down from the herd. I suspect that’s going to be a problem whenever scientists try to bring back an extinct mammalian species.
(Of course, mammoths aren’t going to be reintroduced into the wild so far as I know, so it shouldn’t be that much of a problem here.)
“Human beings unlikely to get cleverer”
A short quote to sum up the main idea behind the article:
[…] according to researchers at the University of Warwick and the University of Basel, we’ve pretty much hit the limits, and we’re never going to develop a science fiction-style ‘supermind’.
Thomas Hills and Ralph Hertwig looked at a range of studies, including research into the use of drugs like Ritalan which help with attention, studies of people with autism and a study of the Ashkenazi Jewish population.
And they’ve concluded that there’s just too severe a penalty. For every gain in cognitive functions, they say – such as a better memory, increased attention or improved intelligence – there’s a price to pay elsewhere. […]
I have no doubt that their facts are correct, but their conclusion is simply wrong. It doesn’t take into account the fact that we barely scratch the surface of what we can do right now. I’m not talking about the mythical “we only use 10% of our brains” crap, but proven techniques. There’s one that allows anyone with a normally working brain to remember essentially anything they want to for as long as they want to. There’s a second that lets you defuse limiting emotions and painful memories at will. Those two alone would allow most people to get a lot smarter, probably twenty additional IQ points easily, forty if they put some effort into it.
That’s just the low-hanging fruit, too. I have no doubt that there are other techniques I don’t know about, and more that will be developed in the future… things that will let people evaluate logic statements more easily and with more certainty, shut off internal mental distractions and focus your entire energy on a project, completely control your emotional state and emotional health (rather than just put the brakes on damaging emotions), tap creativity that only a lucky few can now touch, and all sorts of other things. In the self-improvement industry I’ve seen a number of attempts at such things, many of which seem to work for at least a few people. These will only get better over time, as people find the similarities between the ones that it works for and determine the deeper reasons behind their successes and failures.
Is there a price, as the article says? Sure. You’ve got to work to get those kinds of benefits. But that’s a price that’s easily met, for those who are willing — the people who can do such things “naturally” paid that price, usually without even noticing they were doing so, and time is the one thing that almost everyone has. The work doesn’t have to be difficult either, it can even be fun if you approach it the right way.
And for the future, there’s technological enhancements. We’ll inevitably come up with a working brain/computer interface sooner or later, and that pretty much defines the much-touted technological singularity — the point beyond which we unenhanced humans can only speculate on. But even without it, I suspect nearly everyone could reach an IQ of 140 with a few years of part-time effort, if they had the desire and the willingness to work on it.
Of course, I can’t prove that at present, because so few people have any such desire. But that will change. Some people will learn because they enjoy learning, or excelling at something; others will learn because it’s a way to get an edge when competing with the other presently-seven-billion warm bodies on this planet. Eventually most people will learn techniques like those, for whatever personal reasons they have — and the world will be a lot better for it.
“Think you can outsmart Internet scammers?”
These are pretty good, and if you can catch them all, you’re probably pretty safe on the ‘net. For now, anyway.
I was surprised to note that they didn’t include any URLs with look-alike Unicode characters though. That’s practically impossible for end-users to detect, so they’d probably get howls of protest if they did, but I kept expecting to get tripped up by that.
“Microsoft researchers build spam filter for HIV”
Speaking of unpredictable consequences, here’s another one: techniques developed to combat spam turn out to be useful against HIV. I always thought that spammers had a lot in common with viruses, in that both are annoying and potentially dangerous, but I didn’t expect the metaphor to stretch that far! 😉
“Dog DNA nails irresponsible owners”
This is the sort of thing that happens all the time. New technologies are used for purposes that are completely mundane: in this case, identifying the dog responsible for a pile of crap, and thus the owner. But for some reason, science fiction authors and other futurists rarely think of such secondary uses for the science they dream up.
It seems to me that it’s a kind of one-way function, like those used in public-key encryption. Given a technique, there’s no way to see all the potential uses for it, because this reality is just too complex. But given a need, you might see an application of an existing technology that no one else has noticed. I’m sure Marie Curie could have predicted many uses for radiation, but even in her wildest fantasies I doubt she could have predicted that it would be used to power spacecraft at the edge of the solar system.
“What should a sci-fi spaceship REALLY look like?”
An excellent review of science fiction spacecraft to date and how close each might be to future reality, though sadly concentrated solely on TV and movie SF. I find the spacecraft in SF literature to be much more varied and interesting, and usually more realistic-sounding as well, given the science they’re based on.
(There’s a follow-up article discussing SF spacecraft design with an actual SF spacecraft designer too.)