Uncategorized – Page 17

Is there no chance to save traditional sci-fi from decline?

As a newcomer author, I can’t really judge from my own experience if Liu Cixin is correct… but I fear he might be…Interview with Chinese Hugo Award Winner Liu Cixin:
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2017-08/16/c_136529000.htm

As a kid I remember thirsting for any anything that tasted of the future. Every drip of speculation about technology was absorbed like a drop of water on a parched dessert–

–but now, I feel I am standing in a torrent of futurism; my orifices clamped tight shut else I bloat and explode from the pressure!

Against this, I can see how people see Science Fiction as more of the same.Summary: People are bored with novelty; they want familiarity!

KEO – Space time capsule to the future.

KEO – is a time capsule for 50K years into the future.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KEO

“KEO is the name of a space time capsule planned to carry messages from the citizens of present Earth to humanity 50,000 years from now, when it will re-enter Earth’s atmosphere. Currently the KEO website cites 2019 as its launch date.”

You can leave your great, great, * Grandchildren a message here.

Here is my message:

We were human once; full of ignorance and wonder.

Are you human?

I hope you live in ignorance, amongst friends.

I hope you know love is the answer.

I suspect you know mind and matter are peers.

The fundamental substrate is hidden and today we see dualism.

I suspect that all minds do their thinking on the same plane (therefore even if we are both characters in a Grandfather Simulation, we still have souls).

It would be interesting to know what you think–

–although, if you follow my advice, you will not understand what I am talking about as you now live in Bronze Age villages. By the way, we left you a bunch of obscure automation buried in the crust. It looks after you, it watches for meteorites and gamma-ray bursts (I hope it helps with your dentistry too).

The shaman who is reading you this is probably not human, or is communing with powers who are not. You may call these powers God. My people built your God. You might find this truth emasculating. If so, you might want to build your own God. Start by harnessing the power of boiling water to do work. Believe me, as unlikely as this sounds, it will work. Try pumping water. Play with a few designs, you will get there. The better your understanding of numbers, the better your machines will be. One day soon you will be able to build machines that pump numbers. The machine which you call God–that speaks through your Shaman–is a nothing more.

Lots of Love

Toby

Robopocalypse

Wired says “Chill: Robots Won’t Take All Our Jobs”
https://www.wired.com/2017/08/robots-will-not-take-your-job/

I usually like wired, but this piece is either totally misguided or cynically disingenuous…

The argument seems to turn on the fact that productivity (as economists measure it) is not surging, which we should expect if robots were providing most labour, making the handful of human workers left super productive.

There is no mystery; jobs are being degraded: people are being fired from high paying positions and re-hired as burger-flippers and janitors. Hours worked does not change, but the highly trained engineer is now asking “if you want fries with that”.

Also the ‘Deep Learning’ AI revolution is less than a decade old. Sufficiently advanced ‘oids‘ don’t exist yet: self-driving cars are not here; 3D printed houses still a few years away; AI chat bots are only now creeping into the work place. The Robo Advisors of FinTech are destroying the finance sector incumbents, but the big banks can’t fire people fast enough to maintain productivity against their collapsing profits.

Finally, companies are not investing, they are focused on short term cost saving, outsourcing, and downsizing. So even if the ‘oids‘ were available off the shelf, companies wouldn’t be interested yet. They will wait a few years until all the glitches are ironed out–

–even then, as the ‘oids‘ reach parity with humans, productivity may remain low as humans will be performing all the dirty and degrading work too low value for an expensive ‘oid‘.

Perhaps the author simply considers anything more than 5 years away as pointless SciFi speculation, and while the speculation is fun– please read my books! 🙂 –for those of us with kids, these topics are very real.