things that make you go hmmm
Thing One: Who else watched Margaret, the feature-length drama about the last days of Margaret Thatcher with flashbacks from her career, last week? It was great - if very slow - but the focus was weird. It was all on the pecking-order upheavals and the personalities of the people involved. Every so often someone would make an oblique reference to some policy or other - congratulating her on her economic programme or saying "you're tearing the country apart for a theory!" - or there'd be two seconds of poll tax protesters on a TV in the background, but that was it. And I was like, wot no miners' strike? Wot no Falklands? Etc.
Someone who didn't know any recent history would have been at a loss to say anything she stood for, on the basis of the drama. The zoom was always tight on her - the brilliant Lindsay Duncan, swinging from chilly to neurotic to vulnerable to sometimes actually kind of awesome. But I wanted to wrestle the camera away from the crew and swing it around, zoom it out, to point at all the stuff going on off-screen, and I was left confused as to how we were meant to feel. Scared or sympathetic? I wondered if it was part of a rehabilitation - a swing back towards thinking she was all right really, in preparation for the next election. (Which seems weird to me, that we should be looking more positively at her right now. Didn't her free market policies do a lot to get us in this current mess?) Dan and I mused that it felt as if there had been more about her policies which had been edited out.
And look! We were right! The script did have more specific, critical stuff, including an anti-war speech by hubby Denis, and it was defanged in the final draft. Hmmmm.
Thing Two is Three Worlds Collide, a thought experiment in the guise of an old-fashioned SF story about first contact between future humans and two different alien species (thanks
amuchmoreexotic). It's not very well written - hackwork at best - but it's full of interesting concepts and moral dilemmas. One of the species has based their whole system of goodness and morality around eating their own babies. The others are telepathic, regard the happiness of all as the most important thing (because what hurts one hurts them all, through the freaky and squishy communal psychic sex thing they refer to as untranslatable 2), and thus think not doing one's utmost to eliminate unhappiness is evil. It has a lot of thought-provoking stuff about how difficult it is to conceive of things outside of our evolutionary and cultural worldview. I liked that the baby-eating aliens had science fiction in which all their imaginary other races, however bizarre, also ate their own babies.
(Edit: hey
gothwalk, you might enjoy it, given that economics is one of your Fannish Things. The ship uses a model economic system, with things and ideas constantly rising and falling in value, to help make decisions.)
So that's the good kind of hmmmmm, with one exception. The writer says in the comments that he wanted to include some shocking things in his future human society, since the future will almost certainly include things which are normal for the future people but would be appalling and disgusting to us. Fair enough. Unfortunately, his example of this is that in the future, rape is legal.
(In their society there seems to be quite a lot of gender role reversal. There's a coy little bit where the main character thinks how boring his sex life would be if there wasn't the constant background risk of women raping him. It's also implied that everyone is so nice in the future that, for various reasons, rape is no big deal. They use the phrase "risky dating" a lot in the comments.)
It turns out, down in the comment thread, that the writer's working on a whole story about the implications of this supposedly revolutionary idea.
And I mean, seriously, future shock FAIL. Is that really the most out-there, shocking thing he could come up with? He seems to think that in today's world rape is the ultimate taboo, and that 21st-century males are shocked by the very idea because it violates "gentlemanly conduct" and the rules of competition for partners. Dude, I opened the paper just now and found an article about soldiers being ordered to rape villagers in Sudan. And then there's the screeds and screeds of victim-blaming every time there's a prominent rape case or a change in the laws. It's kind of like saying "In the future, everyone thinks [child labour/environmental damage/famine] is okay! Which is shocking because it's completely different from today. Yeah. We don't have any of that stuff now."
I was curious as to what his female commenters would say in the discussion of that part of the story, but he seems to have hardly any. Except for one, who identifies herself as "a female" and tells him to google female rape fantasies. Hmmmmm.
Come on. "What if rape was legal?" isn't brave thought-experimenting into the unknown (especially when you're a bloke and seem to think of it as a man-woman thing; he doesn't read like he's talking about men getting raped by other men, which is a whole 'nother mostly-unacknowledged problem). It's the Gor books.
This is occupying my mind because it's something I've been wondering about in general for years. When you come up against people of former generations who seem to be closed-minded and set in their ways and suspicious of anything new, it's easy to declare that will never happen to you. You'll always keep up with the new stuff and move with the times. But I suspect everyone thinks that when they're young, then encounters new things they can't cope with. I had been trying to come up with changes that would make me uncomfortable, make me want to huddle up with people my age and complain about the young folks. But "rape is the new socially acceptable fun thing!" isn't the sort of thing I mean. It wouldn't be the shock of the new and inconceivable, it would be the gloom of same-shit-different-century.
I bet between us we can come up with some genuinely shocking possible future developments. Ones that, if they came about when we were all old fogeys, would make us feel the ground had melted away under our feet and we no longer had any place in this crazy new world. Ones which were unknown in recent history and challenged things we had always taken for granted as part of the basic rules of being human.
Just off the top of my head, perhaps medical technology advances - to the point where you can regenerate from almost any damage like Claire in Heroes - have made grievous bodily harm a normal way of expressing annoyance at someone the way swearing at them would be today. Lovers and friends routinely stab and mutilate each other for fun, because internal organs are just so interesting to examine, and it's a different kind of intimacy. Duels to the death, person-hunts and jumping out of planes without parachutes are popular extreme sports.
Or perhaps plastic surgery is standard for all. Or the written word disappears and only the most dedicated scholars learn to read. Or (like in The Meme Machine and the end of The Invisibles) the very idea of the individual self disappears. That sort of thing.
Not, y'know, a 'shocking future development' which reverses something which only changed relatively recently and which is still the case in many parts of the world.
What would you be shocked and horrified to find had changed if you woke up in the future?
Someone who didn't know any recent history would have been at a loss to say anything she stood for, on the basis of the drama. The zoom was always tight on her - the brilliant Lindsay Duncan, swinging from chilly to neurotic to vulnerable to sometimes actually kind of awesome. But I wanted to wrestle the camera away from the crew and swing it around, zoom it out, to point at all the stuff going on off-screen, and I was left confused as to how we were meant to feel. Scared or sympathetic? I wondered if it was part of a rehabilitation - a swing back towards thinking she was all right really, in preparation for the next election. (Which seems weird to me, that we should be looking more positively at her right now. Didn't her free market policies do a lot to get us in this current mess?) Dan and I mused that it felt as if there had been more about her policies which had been edited out.
And look! We were right! The script did have more specific, critical stuff, including an anti-war speech by hubby Denis, and it was defanged in the final draft. Hmmmm.
Thing Two is Three Worlds Collide, a thought experiment in the guise of an old-fashioned SF story about first contact between future humans and two different alien species (thanks
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(Edit: hey
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So that's the good kind of hmmmmm, with one exception. The writer says in the comments that he wanted to include some shocking things in his future human society, since the future will almost certainly include things which are normal for the future people but would be appalling and disgusting to us. Fair enough. Unfortunately, his example of this is that in the future, rape is legal.
(In their society there seems to be quite a lot of gender role reversal. There's a coy little bit where the main character thinks how boring his sex life would be if there wasn't the constant background risk of women raping him. It's also implied that everyone is so nice in the future that, for various reasons, rape is no big deal. They use the phrase "risky dating" a lot in the comments.)
It turns out, down in the comment thread, that the writer's working on a whole story about the implications of this supposedly revolutionary idea.
And I mean, seriously, future shock FAIL. Is that really the most out-there, shocking thing he could come up with? He seems to think that in today's world rape is the ultimate taboo, and that 21st-century males are shocked by the very idea because it violates "gentlemanly conduct" and the rules of competition for partners. Dude, I opened the paper just now and found an article about soldiers being ordered to rape villagers in Sudan. And then there's the screeds and screeds of victim-blaming every time there's a prominent rape case or a change in the laws. It's kind of like saying "In the future, everyone thinks [child labour/environmental damage/famine] is okay! Which is shocking because it's completely different from today. Yeah. We don't have any of that stuff now."
I was curious as to what his female commenters would say in the discussion of that part of the story, but he seems to have hardly any. Except for one, who identifies herself as "a female" and tells him to google female rape fantasies. Hmmmmm.
Come on. "What if rape was legal?" isn't brave thought-experimenting into the unknown (especially when you're a bloke and seem to think of it as a man-woman thing; he doesn't read like he's talking about men getting raped by other men, which is a whole 'nother mostly-unacknowledged problem). It's the Gor books.
This is occupying my mind because it's something I've been wondering about in general for years. When you come up against people of former generations who seem to be closed-minded and set in their ways and suspicious of anything new, it's easy to declare that will never happen to you. You'll always keep up with the new stuff and move with the times. But I suspect everyone thinks that when they're young, then encounters new things they can't cope with. I had been trying to come up with changes that would make me uncomfortable, make me want to huddle up with people my age and complain about the young folks. But "rape is the new socially acceptable fun thing!" isn't the sort of thing I mean. It wouldn't be the shock of the new and inconceivable, it would be the gloom of same-shit-different-century.
I bet between us we can come up with some genuinely shocking possible future developments. Ones that, if they came about when we were all old fogeys, would make us feel the ground had melted away under our feet and we no longer had any place in this crazy new world. Ones which were unknown in recent history and challenged things we had always taken for granted as part of the basic rules of being human.
Just off the top of my head, perhaps medical technology advances - to the point where you can regenerate from almost any damage like Claire in Heroes - have made grievous bodily harm a normal way of expressing annoyance at someone the way swearing at them would be today. Lovers and friends routinely stab and mutilate each other for fun, because internal organs are just so interesting to examine, and it's a different kind of intimacy. Duels to the death, person-hunts and jumping out of planes without parachutes are popular extreme sports.
Or perhaps plastic surgery is standard for all. Or the written word disappears and only the most dedicated scholars learn to read. Or (like in The Meme Machine and the end of The Invisibles) the very idea of the individual self disappears. That sort of thing.
Not, y'know, a 'shocking future development' which reverses something which only changed relatively recently and which is still the case in many parts of the world.
What would you be shocked and horrified to find had changed if you woke up in the future?
It's mostly about privacy, actually.
One of the things that I have seen change over my life and I am uneasy about is the way that people seem to have given away any privacy. There's a, what seems to me, to be a confusion between the public and the personal. I'm not sure, however, that this is a real change; I think that we yet don't understand how public we make ourselves through online communications. As I have watched people become more and more accustomed to online interactions, I have seen many of the longer term users become more wary about protecting their privacy. On the one hand, we have this protection of children thing, and on the other we have young adults who are recently children spewing forth every detail of embarassment that could possibly ever be a chain around their life in the future.
As a consequence of this, in the future I expect people to become more forgiving of the adventures of young adulthood. That is a good thing.
What do we do pretty much right about now? In this mildly communitarian country, I think we have due respect for freedom of speech and robust democratic processes. I can see how those could be improved, but I believe that society has a general respect for those principles; the eroding of rights of privacy under this government I believe to be a temporally local blip, and the result of misguided decisions by people who essentially believe in the democratic process. I would be shocked to wake up in the future and find the democratic process that allows us to protect our rights all gone.
BTW: I don't believe that the ID cards are specifically the ichor that precede this particular demon; rather, I think that they're ineffective and expensive. I'm more concerned about the data tracks that we leave all over the place and the ability to record and process communications.
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Unfortunately from a future perspective things seem to be going badly at both ends. The good kinds of privacy, such as stopping strangers from stalking people and stopping corporations from data mining us, are becoming harder to protect. The bad kinds of privacy, such as websites and blogs being crippled by identity-based locks and logins (which break search), are becoming more widespread.
I would be shocked to wake up in the future and find the democratic process that allows us to protect our rights all gone.
It's at least half gone. Did you notice how much of the US election was about spending power?
I see hints of possible futures that would shock me in the net neutrality debate. Imagine a future generation where the idea of being able to pass anonymous data around freely seems laughable and is met with looks of puzzlement and questions like "And who pays for that?".
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That's how a lot of social change happens, as I understand it: if a person believes something unconventional, there's an intermediate stage where they try it out on a few trusted friends before they're ready to shout it from the rooftops.
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Two kinds: wasted time finding information and duplication of effort.
That's how a lot of social change happens, as I understand it
It's how some people prefer to work, but it's not a good thing in my view.
Ideas "grow stronger" through criticism, redesign and combination with other ideas. They do not grow stronger through accumulating advocates... just harder to stop. Where social change is concerned that's often exactly what people want. Change that is hard to block.
It's essentially the "benevolent dictatorship is the best form of government" argument in a different guise. I'm fine with mature ideas emerging with momentum and an army of advocates if they're good ideas. But just as dictators aren't always benevolent, so ideas are not always good.
For me this kind of deployment strategy for ideas is very much rooted in the philosophy of conflict over cooperation. You talk about "stuff that goes against the status quo" - that could be Kurt Gödel working to overturn Hilbert's systematisation of mathematics or it could be armed militia planning a military coup. I prefer my social change more like the former than the latter.
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I guess my problem is that yes, in an ideal world all ideas would be subjected to healthy robust criticism, but in practice those ideas need strong champions who are prepared to take risks - with their friends, jobs, families perhaps, if the ideas are really unpopular - to get them out there. A person might have a good idea but just not be that stubborn, tough-minded or brave, and not dare to speak up. So your no-privacy system doesn't select the best ideas, it selects the ideas with the most thick-skinned champions, which is not the same thing.
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But that's just it, I don't want to "select" ideas at all! I want all of them.
Your examples are good, but to me these are not about ideas at all. What you show here is that some groups within society must make their plans privately because there exist other groups with interests opposed to their who would otherwise disrupt their activity. I'd certainly agree, but also wouldn't see that as "unnecessary privacy", particularly where illegal activity is involved.
In the more commonly encountered case of people fearing criticism is exactly what I'd like to see less of. The problem can be handled relatively easily: don't open all published material to commentary by the general public. Keep everything world readable, but allow the author to control who is able to discuss things. That way the ideas can get out, search still works, but trolls can't get in. And if someone does behave inappropriately then you know who they are so there's a degree of accountability.
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When I refer to "commentary", I am not intending to limit anyone from discussing a topic in a forum of their own choosing. I am referring to the author themselves providing a feedback channel.
Each person then writes to their own output channel, but subscribes to read only channels of their choosing. That way you simply never see what the trolls are ranting about, because you don't read them. The usual sorts of informal recommendations would be (indeed, are) sufficient to draw worthwhile channels to the attention of potential readers.
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Heh, exactly.
And I temped at the Child Protection Agency in Great Ormond Street Hospital for a few weeks, so I think I have an inkling of what you mean about your job. Ugh.
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Really? On what basis? I think this is like jet-packs* - a trope that people find amazingly attractive, but which practically, is just never going to happen. We're not going to find out what human consciousness is or a reasonable facsimile thereof any time soon, let alone then transferring it in some way.
Well, that's what I think based on the feeling that consciousness just ain't that sort of thing, philosophically - it's not something that you can metaphorically pour out. What's your reason for saying it, as I grant you could know a lot more about current research in psychology than I do?
* talking about it afterwards I wished I'd used the phrase "jet-pack thinking" for this - and now I have!
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'Sright. Après moi, le download.
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Actually I think we pretty much have our answer, we're just in denial about it: consciousness isn't really anything much.
The problem of transferring a mind from one host to another (whether meaty or mechanical) is really just the problem of understanding the computer we have in our heads and developing the tools needed to read and write its state. I'd be very surprised if we get there in
People have built jet packs already. They suck and are terrifically impractical in every respect, but they work. The reason they'll likely never "happen" is because of the crazy levels of fuel usage. There is no similar category of obstacle to mind copying as far as we know.
I will accept that answer as almost equivalent
My "they'll never happen" comment on jet packs isn't about whether they can ever be built as individual items, but that actually, jet packs aren't going to be part of our present / someone earlier's future in the way that popular culture expected. Regardless of what the reasons are, I'd say the same about mind-copying; we like to make futures in which this will happen, but I don't believe it will be part of any real future.
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Why not? Or would you similarly argue that a magically created perfect duplicate of you is also "not you"?
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Is this an article of faith for you or do you have some reason for believing it?
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A slight tangent, but after reading a bit of John Locke I'm no longer even prepared to accept that the person I will be five years from now is me.
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Philosophy hurts my head.
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Have you read Kiln People by David Brin? One of the first things a clone has to do when waking up from cloning is work out whether they're a clone or the original.
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Familiar with the philosophical idea, though. (Film rec: The Prestige - you'll understand the relevance after you've seen it, but I won't explain here for spoilery reasons.)
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Even if transferring carbon-based-computer data to silicon circuits is a pipe dream, we can always go down the Doctor Who route and transfer the living brain into an indestructible container of nutrient soup. As I say, I don't see why we would then march around the universe shouting "DELETE! DELETE!", when we could just lay around in our tanks and dream good dreams forever.
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So I probably would end up as a weird anachronism. Hey, would that mean that Earth was deserted - but for the power stations that run the humanity file server - and I could just wander through wild deserted forests for years, humming to myself and eating fruit off trees, if I wanted to?
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The depopulated earth idea is attractive, but I fear that the catalyst for entering into VR will be the f*cking of the environment completely beyond habitability. Doesn't seem like we're going to make it to outer space, but I can see going inwards as a viable survival strategy once the atmosphere turns into one long millennial firestorm.
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I misread the last bit as "I suspect everyone thinks they're young", and I think my misreading is nearer the truth.
I think what happens is that most people sort out their personal morality and their taste in various things by the age of about 25. Then the world gets salami-slicingly different, and you get salami-slicingly older, but you just don't notice because you still feel exactly the same inside and you're still seeing it as "your" world. So you see the shockingness of new things as a quality belonging to those things, not as a quality belonging to your age and shockability.
I keep hearing/reading about women who have cosmetic surgery in their 50s and 60s and say it's because they want to look how they feel. They feel energetic and youthful and they're tired of being dismissed as tired old hags because of their wrinkles. I think the reason they give is very significant. Of course it's a lot to do with ageism and visual culture and sexism, but I think it's also got a lot to do with how time marks itself on your body but not necessarily on your mind.
No time to assimilate all the text and comments
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I think i'd be most horrified to discover that some things hadn't changed or in fact had gone backwards so if slavery was re-legalised, the vote denied, that kind of thing.