Analog SFF, November 2008
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Cover Art by George Krauter
Cover design by Victoria Green
CONTENTS
Reader's Department: EDITORIAL: THE GREAT RUSH FORWARD by Stanley Schmidt
Serial: WAKE: PART 1 OF IV by Robert J. Sawyer
Science Fact: THE 3D TRAINWRECK: HOW 3D PRINTING WITH SHAKE UP MANUFACTURING by Thomas A. Easton
Reader's Department: IN TIMES TO COME
Novelette: GREENWICH NASTY TIME by Carl Frederick
Short Story: COLD FIRE by Alan Dean Foster
Short Story: BUG EYES by Richard A. Lovett
Short Story: MEA CULPA by Stephen L. Burns
Reader's Department: THE ALTERNATE VIEW: TURNINGS by Jeffery D. Kooistra
Short Story: RECREATION by Oz Drummond
Novelette: UNBURNING ALEXANDRIA by Paul Levinson
Reader's Department: THE REFERENCE LIBRARY by Tom Easton
Reader's Department: BRASS TACKS
Reader's Department: UPCOMING EVENTS by Anthony Lewis
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Vol. CXXVIII No. 11, November 2008
Stanley Schmidt Editor
Trevor Quachri Managing Editor
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Stanley Schmidt: Editor
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Reader's Department: EDITORIAL: THE GREAT RUSH FORWARD by Stanley Schmidt
Long ago—as far back as junior high school—it occurred to me that many aspects of people's lives are controlled by “phantom tyrants": forces that dictate behavior as surely as any crowned ruler, yet are not embodied in any actual person. Back then, for example, a great deal of cultural emphasis was placed on the “necessity” for every boy or man to remove his hat whenever he was inside a building. This struck me as rather bizarre. I never heard anyone suggest a logical reason why it was preferable to remove the hat rather than keeping it on. I find it quite believable that there wasn't even one person, anywhere, who had actually thought about the Hat Question and decided that he should always remove his hat because it was the best thing to do, or that he should have any interest in whether anyone else did. Yet practically everybody felt obliged to do so, and too many people (including some busybodyish female teachers) felt empowered, even obliged, to insist that any passing male student comply.
Educationally, this struck me as odd: completely incompatible with the idea that actions should be based on logically coherent reasons. Vast numbers of people were deciding how to behave, not on the basis of what behavior made sense, but simply what “everybody” said they “should” do—even though few, if any, of the individuals making up the alleged consensus actually held the beliefs being attributed to them!
I've continued to marvel at this phenomenon, in several variations, ever since. Most recently I was reminded of it while reading a letter from John F. McMullen, a professor of information technology with decades of experience in his field (see “Brass Tacks” in this issue) about the complex of emerging internet phenomena called “Web 2.0.” Professor McMullen correctly observes that this looks likely to be the next “disruptive technology” (or at least one such), radically transforming how people live, work, and play. He furthermore observes that in previous such disruptions, early adopters of the new technologies tended to profit from the changes, while those who resisted or waited tended to be left behind—and that a similar pattern can be expected in future disruptions.
This seems almost obvious—but what does it have to do with my initial observation about “phantom tyrants"? Well, while it's true that successfully disruptive technologies will provide lots of opportunities for those who are quick to take advantage of them, at the expense of those who aren't, there are also hidden dangers in people trying too hard to exploit this observation. It can encourage risky kinds of conformity for its own sake: e.g., jumping on bandwagons without any clear idea of where they're headed.
Remember, not all early adopters are big winners—only early adopters of those new technologies that actually thrive and crowd out their predecessors. Nobody knows in advance which those will be, though there's a clear evolutionary advantage in having a knack for “picking winners.” Early investors in Xerox did very well; those who bet on Betamax, considerably less so.
Not everyone has the knack (or the luck) to guess which new technologies will be either (a) the ones that will catch on, or (b) the ones whose catching on would be most beneficial overall.
Those two are not necessarily the same. It's fashionable in some circles to hold a naive faith that the best world will result from everybody trying to make the biggest bucks possible, and competition and selection will lead to evolution of the best products and methods. But it ain't necessarily so. Sometimes competition just leads to the prosperity of the cleverest and most ruthless, if they can hit on ways to get lots of people to buy what they're selling. Which technologies are adopted quickly and widely enough to become disruptive is not determined by how good they are, intrinsically, but by how many people buy into them.
Which leads us back to “phantom tyranny.” Some early adopters of a new technology will be people who understand its potential and want to get in on the ground floor. But many others simply want to be early adopters, per se: to ride the latest fad, to buy whatever is being touted as the latest and greatest, whether they understand it and have thought about its possible ramifications, or not. Or they may feel that they have to go along with the newest trend, whether they like it or not, for fear of being left behind.
And that way lies danger. A technology or business model can become wildly successful, at least by conventional short-term measures, not because it's the best way of doing what it does, but because many people believe that everybody else thinks it's the best, even if very few of them have actually thought about it at all. The long-range downsides may become apparent only after it has become thoroughly entrenched, by which time it's hard to change our collective minds.
An example from the past: Until a few decades ago, almost everyone “knew” that swamps and marshes were unpleasant places with no redeeming virtues, breeding grounds for dangerous insects and reptiles, of no value to humans unless they were drained and converted to “good” uses like farmland and construction sites. So a large percentage of them were. Only recently have significant
numbers of people come to recognize that wetlands play exceedingly important parts in the ecosystem of which we, too, are a part. So now we have widespread efforts to protect what's left and restore some of what was lost, but that's much harder than it would have been to leave it alone in the first place.
A couple of potential examples from the present: We are currently bombarded by exhortations (and impending legislation) to replace all our incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescents, and to replace some of our gasoline with ethanol. Only recently have we started to hear much about what's to be done with those bulbs when they're broken or when they've finished their useful lives. They contain mercury, in small enough quantities for a single bulb to cause relatively little trouble, but large enough to cause significant problems when large numbers of them start finding their way into landfills. Few localities have set up any real system for dealing with them, but some are just beginning to recognize that it might be premature to encourage adopting them too widely until there is such a system. As for ethanol, the main effect we've seen so far from making more ethanol for fuel is that the feedstocks are being diverted from food supplies for humans and livestock, thereby driving up food prices, both directly and indirectly.
In all three of my past and present examples, we see the widespread adoption of a practice, followed by the belated recognition that it's not an unmixed blessing. Maybe it would be better, at least occasionally, to try to think through the likely repercussions of a way of doing things before getting too heavily into it. Or at least to start out small, monitor and analyze the results, and carefully consider whether some course corrections might be in order.
But that isn't easy, especially at a time when instantaneous worldwide communications and convergences of many technologies cause ideas to propagate—and be adopted or rejected—with unprecedented and rapidly increasing speed. This is the sort of process Vernor Vinge had in mind when he invented the “Singularity” in his novel The Peace War. Look at the curve representing the time variation of any variable representing an aspect of “progress” (such as speed of transportation, energy use per capita, computer operations per second, etc.), and you'll likely find that it's a curve that grows ever steeper. Some such curves, like y = x 2, keep getting steeper but never become vertical or reach a limit. Others approach an asymptote, climbing closer and closer to a limiting line: y = 1/(1-x), for example, is finite for all values of x between 0 and 1, but as x approaches 1, y climbs faster and faster in such a way that the graph becomes practically indistinguishable from the vertical line y = x and the climb rate effectively infinite. Vinge speculated that cultural variables might act like that, with advances enabling new advances to come faster and faster, till eventually they're coming so fast that individuals are hardly even aware of them, much less able to plan them in advance or think about their consequences before the next big change.
In such a situation, people are no longer planning their own lives. Instead, they're swept along by a new kind of phantom tyrant: the net result of all the accelerating changes that have been set in motion and taken on a life of their own. Ostensibly what's happening represents a sort of general consensus, but it may be a consensus of beliefs held by none of the individuals composing it.
And none of them can do much to stop, slow, or divert it.
Whether any of these curves will ever actually grow steep enough to closely resemble a true singularity is debatable. You might say no, because actions still have to be taken by individual human beings and they can only think or move so fast. That's not necessarily a valid objection; we're already delegating a great deal of what we do to machines (such as the computer on which I'm writing this) that can handle the details so that we don't have to. They do that very rapidly, and their speed is increasing at a rate that is, at least so far, awfully close to exponential. But whether we ever get a true singularity or not, we're definitely seeing a lot of curves get very, very steep. That trend is exacerbated by the tendency to let very fast machines do a lot of our work, and by the convergences and synergies of technologies that push each other along. Fast computers, for example, help physicists and engineers learn to make ever smaller components, and ever smaller components let them build ever faster computers.
All of this means that, while we still have at least some ability to make choices and think about their consequences, we will be facing increasingly crucial and increasingly difficult decisions, both individually and culturally, about which bandwagons to ride. Individuals run risks by holding back from ones that will have enduring influence. Cultures run risks by plunging ahead too hurriedly, doing too much without a chance to think through or react to the unintended consequences. At the same time, these are heady times, offering a dizzying array of unprecedented opportunities. Naturally people will—and should—take advantage of them.
But while doing so, we would all do well to bear in mind that when you're pressing the accelerator to the floor, it's a good idea to make sure you're headed in a direction you want to go. That's especially hard—but especially important—when you have millions of drivers, each with a different vision of the road ahead and only a vague idea of what the others are doing.
Copyright (c) 2008 Stanley Schmidt
[Back to Table of Contents]
Serial: WAKE: PART 1 OF IV by Robert J. Sawyer
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Illustration by George Krauter
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Big breakthroughs seldom come quickly or easily—or in the form that might be expected.
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What a blind person needs
is not a teacher but another self.
—Helen Keller
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Chapter 1
Not darkness, for that implies an understanding of light.
Not silence, for that suggests a familiarity with sound.
Not loneliness, for that requires knowledge of others.
But still, faintly, so tenuous that if it were any less it wouldn't exist at all: awareness.
Nothing more than that. Just awareness—a vague, ethereal sense of being.
Being ... but not becoming. No marking of time, no past or future—only an endless, featureless now, and, just barely there in that boundless moment, inchoate and raw, the dawning of perception...
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Caitlin had kept a brave face throughout dinner, telling her parents that everything was fine—just peachy—but, God, it had been a terrifying day, filled with other students jostling her in the busy corridors, teachers referring to things on blackboards, and doubtless everyone looking at her. She'd never felt self-conscious at the TSB back in Austin, but she was on display now. Did the other girls wear earrings, too? Had these corduroy pants been the right choice? Yes, she loved the feel of the fabric and the sound they made, but here everything was about appearances.
She was sitting at her bedroom desk, facing the open window. An evening breeze gently moved her shoulder-length hair, and she heard the outside world: a small dog barking, someone kicking a stone down the quiet residential street, and, way off, one of those annoying car alarms.
She ran a finger over her watch: 7:49—seven and seven squared, the last time today there'd be a sequence like that. She swiveled to face her computer and opened LiveJournal.
"Subject” was easy: “First day at the new school.” For “Current Location,” the default was “Home.” This strange house—hell, this strange country!—didn't feel like that, but she let the proffered text stand.
For “Mood,” there was a drop-down list, but it took forever for JAWS, the screen-reading software she used, to announce all the choices; she always just typed something in. After a moment's reflection, she settled on “Confident.” She might be scared in real life, but online she was Calculass, and Calculass knew no fear.
As for “Current Music,” she hadn't started an MP3 yet ... and so she let iTunes pick a song at random from her collection. She got it in three notes: Lee Amodeo, “Rocking My World."
&nbs
p; Her index fingers stroked the comforting bumps on the F and J keys—Braille for the masses—while she thought about how to begin.
Okay, she typed, ask me if my new school is noisy and crowded. Go ahead, ask. Why, thank you: yes, it is noisy and crowded. Eighteen hundred students! And the building is three stories tall. Actually, it's three storeys tall, this being Canada and all. Hey, how do you find a Canadian in a crowded room? Start stepping on people's feet and wait for someone to apologize to you. :)
Caitlin faced the window again, and tried to imagine the setting sun. It creeped her out that people could look in at her. She'd have kept the Venetian blinds down all the time, but Schrodinger liked to stretch out on the sill.
First day in grade ten began with the Mom dropping me off and BrownGirl4 (luv ya, babe!) meeting me at the entrance. I'd walked the empty corridors of the school several times last week, getting my bearings, but it's completely different now that the school is full of kids, so my folks are slipping BG4 a hundred bucks a week to escort me to our classes. The school managed to work it so we're in all but one together. No way I could be in the same French class as her—je suis une beginneur, after all!
Her computer chirped: new email. She issued the keyboard command to have JAWS read the message's header.
"To: Caitlin D.,” the computer announced. She only styled her name like that when posting to newsgroups, so whoever had sent this had gotten her address from NHL Player Stats Discuss or one of the other ones she frequented. “From: Gus Hastings.” Nobody she knew. “Subject: Improving your score."
She touched a key and JAWS began to read the body of the message. “Are you sad about tiny penis? If so—"
Damn, her spam filter should have intercepted that. She ran her index finger along the refreshable display. Ah: the magic word had been spelled “peeeniz.” She deleted the message and was about to go back to LiveJournal when her instant messenger bleeped. “BrownGirl4 is now available,” announced the computer.