Not so futuristic: Saruman with a palantir in The Lord of the Rings
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As we approach the Gregorian New Year, it's a great time to reflect on what's next. Are we going to use CRISPR to grow wings? Will we all be uploading our brains to the Amazon cloud? Should we wrap the Sun in a Dyson sphere? If you, like me, are a nerd who loves science and technology, science fiction is where you can find the answers. The problem is that most people get the wrong messages from these ideas about tomorrow.
As a science journalist who also writes science fiction, I give you an end-of-year gift: a quick guide to how to avoid reading science fiction stories the wrong way. Please note, all our civilizations depend on this.
There are two main reasons why people misunderstand science fiction. Let's start with a simpler problem known as the torment link problem. Most often seen at tech conferences and in business plans, it gets its name from an iconic social media post by satirist Alex Blechman. In 2021 he wrote:
Science Fiction Author: In my book, I invented the Mook Nexus as a cautionary tale.
Tech Company: We've finally created a Nexus Mook from the classic sci-fi novel, Don't Build a Nexus Mook.
You get the idea. The problem of torment connection occurs when people read, watch or act out a science fiction story and focus on its futuristic technology without paying attention to the actual essence of the story.
As a result, billionaire Peter Thiel becomes a co-founder of a company that specializes in the field of data and surveillance called Palantir, named after the fantastic technology of “seeing stones” in Lord of the Rings which drive their users to evil and madness. Palantir products have been used by the Israel Defense Forces to strike targets in the Gaza Strip. Earlier this year, the firm signed a contract with the US government to create a system to track the movements of certain migrants. J. R. R. Tolkien would not have liked this.
There are also less alarming examples. When Mark Zuckerberg decided to move Facebook to virtual reality, he renamed it Meta, after the metaverse from Neal Stephenson's book. Snow Crash. But you wouldn't want to emulate this fictional metaverse if you read history carefully. This is a hostile corporate space that unleashes a mind virus that causes the human brain to freeze, just like computers.
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Zuckerberg and Thiel missed the fact that Palantir and the metaverse are destroying people's consciousness
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You may be sensing a theme here. Thiel and Zuckerberg wanted to make fictional technologies a reality and seem to have lost sight of the fact that Palantir and the metaverse are destroying people's minds. This is a profound misreading of science fiction.
The second main way people misunderstand science fiction can be called the “blueprint problem.” Essentially, it is a misconception that science fiction provides an accurate model of what will happen next, and if we replicate what happens in science fiction, we will be taken to a glorious future.
The blueprint problem inspired many early space programs in the 1950s, which prioritized sending humans into space rather than exploring it remotely using space robots. Generations of people have watched Flash Gordon and read Edgar Rice Burroughs and was promised that people would fly in spaceships to colonize alien worlds. Today we have robots discovering incredible things on Mars and space probes. grabbing pieces asteroids for analysis. But the media is still more inclined to make a fuss about it. Katy Perry ride on Jeff Bezos's rocket rather than celebrate the advent of autonomous Voyager spacecraft hit completion shock it marks the edge of our solar system.
Much of the hype around AI products can also be attributed to the Blueprint problem. We've been promised AI servants and scientists in so much science fiction over the last century that Robocops and holographic doctors began to seem inevitable. But that's not true.
Science fiction is not a map, a recipe book, or a recipe. Instead, it is a worldview, a way of solving problems, based on the assumption that things do not have to be the way they are. This belief inspired the creation of the book. We will rise againa science fiction anthology about social change that I co-edited with Karen Lord and Malka Alder. We have collected stories and essays designed to dispel people's preconceptions about the direction in which human civilization is heading. In our book, the future is not predetermined; it is a process, and people actively shape it.
The more you value this process, the stranger the modern world begins to seem. Why do we build machines to fold napkins into boxes? Why do we believe in invisible lines called boundaries? Why do we assume that there are only two fixed genders? Asking these kinds of questions is the real essence of science fiction. They are the gateway to new worlds.
If you want to build a better future, you can't just repeat what you read. You have to imagine it yourself.
Annalee Newitz science journalist and writer. Their latest book is Automatic Noodles. They are co-hosts of the Hugo Award-winning podcast Our Opinions Are Right. You can follow them @annaleen and their website techsploitation.com
What am I reading
404 Media, an incredible online publication for investigative journalism about technology.
What am I watching
Heated rivalry a gay ice hockey romance series that is extremely Canadian.
What am I working on
Planning the European tour of a science fiction anthology. We will rise again.
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