James Pethokousis of AEI interviews me about the current miserable state of modern science fiction, which is just dripping with dystopian dread in every movie, show, and book plot. How does all the techno-apocalyptica affect societal and political attitudes about innovation broadly and emerging technologies in particular. Our discussion builds on my recent a recent Discourse article, “How Science Fiction Dystopianism Shapes the Debate over AI & Robotics.” [Pasted down below.] Swing on over to Jim’s “Faster, Please” newsletter and hear what Jim and I have to say. And, for a bonus question, Jim asked me is we doing a good job of inspiring kids to have a sense of wonder and to take risks. I have some serious concerns that we are falling short on that front.
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I really enjoyed this editorial in today’s Wall Street Journal by sci-fi novelist Orson Scott Card, author of Ender’s Game, among many other books. Card engages in some interesting soul searching about the impact of the Net and digital technology on our lives, economy, and culture. He concludes his essay by noting that:
We’re still the same human beings we always were. Consumers still act like consumers; people still search for love and friendship. But the Internet has freed us from the boundaries of distance and many of the risks of embarrassment in social interactions. This re-sorted geography has brought its own pitfalls and forced us to create new rules of etiquette.
But just as I have no desire to give up cars, trains and planes to return to the hay-eating, vet-needing, poop-generating, one-horsepower horse, I don’t want to go back to pre-Google research, pre-Amazon shopping, pre-blog newsmedia, or the loneliness of villages limited by geography.
Quite right. Card is expressing the sort of “pragmatic optimism” I’ve written about here before in my essays about the ongoing battle between Internet optimists and pessimists. I’ve tried to articulate a sort of middle ground position in this debate that embraces the amazing technological changes at work in today’s Information Age but does so with a healthy dose of humility and appreciation for the disruptive impact and pace of that change. As I’ve noted before, we need to think about how to mitigate the negative impacts associated with technological change without adopting the paranoid tone or Luddite-ish recommendations of the pessimists. Read Card’s entire essay to get a better feel for how we can begin to think in that way.
None other than Sci-Fi author, civil libertarian, blogger, activist, and TLF commenter Cory Doctorow drops in at the Bureaucrash Podcrash (that’s a podcast for “crashers”) to discuss his new book Little Brother.
Austin Grossman’s review of the book for the New York Times remarks:
An entertaining thriller and a thoughtful polemic on Internet-era civil rights, “Little Brother” is also a practical handbook of digital self-defense. Marcus’s guided tour through RFID cloners, cryptography and Bayesian math is one of the book’s principal delights. He spreads his message through a secure network engineered out of Xbox gaming consoles, to a tech-savvy youth underground (we are now post-nerd, I learned — hipsters and social networking experts have replaced the unwashed coders of yore).
We at TLF may disagree with Mr. Doctorow on a number of policy issues, but I must admit that he’s a talented writer. I bought Cory’s
Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present, a collection of short stories, at Capital Books here in DC and read it cover to cover by the end of that weekend. A great read available free in digital form at Cory’s Craphound.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.