Read moreTrying to get a bead on the New Year in the atemporal landscape of the end of the world.
The puma leave the bones behind to bleach next to the trail, reminding you to give them their space.
You sleep in a shelter folded into the hill, like a wing built by cargo cultists with advanced degrees.
You try to see the summits of the torres through the clouds, and glimpse a future where new modes of deferentially weaving our lives into planetary wonder are more evenly distributed.
Read more*Opinion polling about drones.
*Q. Did anybody else’s drones blow you up yet? A. No, so I like them”
For these troubled humans, the easy emotional satisfaction gained from technology is so gratifying that everything can be sacrificed on its behalf, including the autonomy of their inner lives. That is the nightmarish economic vision of Her: the distinction between production and consumption is meaningless, affective labor has spread from the office to the most private realms, and technology has become so sophisticated that the brutality of that economy vanishes into air. […] Just because there aren’t any killer robots around doesn’t mean you’re free. In Jonze’s all too plausible dystopia, we are enslaved not to robots but corporations, and the invisibility, even desirability of that enslavement is what makes Her so chilling.
The plan for 2014 is to spend half the year waiting to see this, then the other half repeatedly watching it and telling other people to go see it.
Also… Hypnotoad sez <blink>watch CLOUD ATLAS</blink>
Read moreCyberpunk genre (and post-cyberpunk) is frequently centered on the transitional inter-periods between Type-0 and Type-I status. While frequently focused on how the concepts of “Transhumanism” and “Singularity” will eventually overcome the problems that have, up until now, been endemic to human nature, Cyberpunk subverts this to describe the Dystopian side should a civilization “self-destruct” in the process of achieving Type-I status. In such fiction, most current world problems are local in warfare, local in culture, and usually mono-cultural, and theistic; further aggravated by various groups trying to retain a Type-0 monoculture through religious fanaticism and opposition to technological progress, and others trying to move forward to a Type-I global civilization through technological advances and institutional change.
A lot of the sci-fi stuff in Orwell and Huxley, and cyberpunk too, looks “eerily similar to what’s real” because it was built to look that way, on purpose. It was science fiction, but derived from events that were genuinely going on in real life. Only people didn’t talk about them much in polite society. The readers hadn’t caught on yet.
Bruce Sterling qna on /. – http://m.slashdot.org/story/195971
This style is akin to the “eyeball kicks” so enamored of the cyberpunks, among whom Di Filippo is sometimes taxonomized by association. But cyberpunk’s eyeball kicks were intended as the colorful gelatin capsule around a payload of cognitive dissonance, a Trojan horse concealing mind-expanding new ideas about human relationships as mediated by information technology; in Di Filippo, by contrast, the dazzling cascades of technical nomenclature perform a superficially contemporary science-fictionality that fails to disguise the unexamined narrative clichés of the Golden Age that lie beneath. The cyberpunks – whether successfully or not – set out to subvert and undermine (and ultimately replace) their predecessors, but Di Filippo simply dresses the plot-shapes of older men in trendier clothes.
A Genre in Crisis: On Paul Di Filippo’s “Wikiworld”
Read more "A Genre in Crisis: On Paul Di Filippo’s “Wikiworld”"Robots will neither be common nor very good in 2014, but they will be in existence. The I.B.M. exhibit at the present fair has no robots but it is dedicated to computers, which are shown in all their amazing complexity, notably in the task of translating Russian into English. If machines are that smart today, what may not be in the works 50 years hence? It will be such computers, much miniaturized, that will serve as the “brains” of robots. In fact, the I.B.M. building at the 2014 World’s Fair may have, as one of its prime exhibits, a robot housemaid large, clumsy, slow- moving but capable of general picking-up, arranging, cleaning and manipulation of various appliances. It will undoubtedly amuse the fairgoers to scatter debris over the floor in order to see the robot lumberingly remove it and classify it into “throw away” and “set aside.” (Robots for gardening work will also have made their appearance.)
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Much effort will be put into the designing of vehicles with “Robot-brains”*vehicles that can be set for particular destinations and that will then proceed there without interference by the slow reflexes of a human driver. I suspect one of the major attractions of the 2014 fair will be rides on small roboticized cars which will maneuver in crowds at the two-foot level, neatly and automatically avoiding each other.
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For that matter, you will be able to reach someone at the moon colonies, concerning which General Motors puts on a display of impressive vehicles (in model form) with large soft tires intended to negotiate the uneven terrain that may exist on our natural satellite.
Any number of simultaneous conversations between earth and moon can be handled by modulated laser beams, which are easy to manipulate in space. On earth, however, laser beams will have to be led through plastic pipes, to avoid material and atmospheric interference. Engineers will still be playing with that problem in 2014.
Conversations with the moon will be a trifle uncomfortable, but the way, in that 2.5 seconds must elapse between statement and answer (it takes light that long to make the round trip). Similar conversations with Mars will experience a 3.5-minute delay even when Mars is at its closest. However, by 2014, only unmanned ships will have landed on Mars, though a manned expedition will be in the works and in the 2014 Futurama will show a model of an elaborate Martian colony.
Visit to the World’s Fair of 2014
By ISAAC ASIMOV – http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/03/23/lifetimes/asi-v-fair.html
The Committee to Nuke Elysium 