Some of you have started reading the serial novelet by me
over at Light Reading, "Silence
Like Diamonds." Episode 1 came out last Friday; as I write this, Episode 2
is a few hours from being officially live, and that link should already be
working for anyone who likes that "advanced peek" feeling.
While the serial lasts, I'm going to try to say something
around the time each episode comes out.
The whole trick with this "credible near future"
stuff is arithmetic and minimum times. Yip and her sister Yazzy are somewhere
in their mid thirties at the time of the story, since each of them have
established careers in a difficult field, but they're not grizzled old
veterans, and what they actually do for a living (more about that in a future
blog) is an occupation that doesn't fully exist in 2015.
The story is set around 2030, plus or minus maybe two
years. So right now, Yip and Yazzy are going to some university and will
graduate within a couple of years. They're at the young end of Millennials or the old end of Generation To Be Named.
So that's who they are: your kids (if you're my age), the
summer intern where you work now, perhaps your students, maybe you on your
first real job (assuming you just grabbed your first foothold on the tech
ladder).
Now what about the world they're in?
The idea of near-term hard sf is to try to move things out
of the lab into the real world, not to pull wish-fulfillments and sheer magic utterly out of fantasy. So this version of 2030 has no
city on Mars, no hoverboards, no indistinguishable-from-people androids, no
immortality injection and no franchise called "Just Fingers" that
specializes in regenerating appendages for accident victims.
The time it takes from research results being announced to
full commercial deployment varies a lot more than the time from early
20-something to experienced mid-30s, but there are some predictable aspects to
that as well.
Here are nine of my favorite tricks for guessing how far into the future the deployments of new technologies are:
• Everyone lies about how close lab-only things are to going
into application, prototype, and production. It's essential for getting
funding, after all. So things that are just being shown off in lab tours now,
and are supposed to be shrink-wrapped and delivered next year, will probably
happen in three.
•home products come
in at very high cost and fall rapidly in price, deploying swiftly as they do
(some of you will remember when a smart phone was called a Blackberry and was a
symbol of trendy wealth). It was a long, long trip from the Altair 8800 to the
Apple IIe, TRS-80, and Commodore 64, about ten years to get to 5% market
penetration -- but ten years after that,
the home computer was ubiquitous and a majority of students going off to
college were taking a computer with them.
•software and mathematical breakthroughs deploy all but
instantly, because it's really just a matter of a proficient coder
understanding what the math/logic says and writing it in valid code, and the transition from "one smart coder" to "a hundred thousand script kiddies" is nearly as quick as cut and paste.(This is particularly obvious in data science, where, for example, the time between a mathematician developing a new technique and a package to perform it becoming available in R, SAS, MySQL, etc. is measured in weeks rather than years).
•new business models flare up, go dormant, begin to grow
quietly, and then suddenly have already taken over. "Oh, them, they're
certainly trendy ... hey, they're still around but it's not exciting like it
was ... gee, every year they have more market share, I wonder if ... I, for
one, welcome the new masters of our humble economy..." For many years entrepreneur-coaches have used the example that anyone can make a better hamburger than McDonalds but making a better business model is something else again; I'd go farther and say that often even long after there has been a spectacular success, it's very difficult for most companies even to plagiarize a great business model. So no matter how advanced the tech, it will still have to be distributed via a large number of companies that don't know what they're doing, don't do it very well, and really aren't sure what they should be doing.
•"the street finds it own uses for technology,"
as William Gibson taught us all. Just the other day I saw an ad for a singing
teacher who offers rates for "in person or Skype." I very much doubt
that the developers of Skype intended that, any more than the developers at Google,
Amazon, YouTube or Craigslist had any idea what else they'd be doing in the
world. Whether it's as humble as WD-40 and duct tape, or as high end as DNA sequencing and nuclear magnetic resonance, somewhere out there someone will make it do something its creators never thought of.
•exponential growth without limit is exciting for sci-fi writers, but it is vanishingly rare; far
more commonly, what looks like an "explosion" is merely the middle part of a logistic curve,
•almost as fun and entertaining as exponential growth is the often-forgotten possibility of reversal. Nuclear arsenals grew at apparently exponential rates for more than a decade, but today there are only about as many as there were in 1960.
Certain high-fashion products show similar patterns: plumes for ladies' hats, plus-fours, and white plastic go-go boots. And in the larger scale of history, there are the concluding lines from Andrei Amalrik's Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984? (written in 1969, another attempt at a 15 year forecast):
Meanwhile, we are told, Western prognosticators are indeed worried by
the growth of the cities and the difficulties brought on by the rapid pace
of scientific and technological progress. Evidently, if "futurology" had
existed in Imperial Rome, where, as we are told, people were already erecting
six-story buildings and children's merry-go-rounds were driven by steam,
the fifth-century "futurologists" would have predicted for the following
century r the construction of twenty-story buildings and the industrial
utilization of steam power.  |
As we now know, however, in the sixth century goats were grazing in the Forum just as they are doing now, beneath my window in this village.
What appears to be growing exponentially today may tomorrow reverse and become as dead as cassette tapes.
•"Information wants to be free" was not about
politics, as is clearly shown by the very next sentence Stewart Brand spoke:
"Information wants to be expensive." The root of this contradiction is that the value of information depends on who else has it and what they do with it, changes whenever it moves, and is catalytic for an enormous number of other processes. Information behaves rather like
money with an unreadable expiration date or a randomly tested transaction
limit; every time you gain value from it you risk making it worthless, and
inevitably, sooner or later, something does.
•forecasts about coming ages and changes in human culture
are generally rooted in observed truth, but nothing ever comes out as
predicted. Robert Heinlein made up a nice little parable about the lab where
they created four escape paths of exactly the same difficulty from a cage and put an
ape in to see which one he'd use; the ape escaped the fifth way. Collectively, humans
are that fifth-way ape; we often have some idea of where we're going but we
rarely go there by the way that seems obvious, and when we get there, it
doesn't look like much like what we thought it would.
I used all those tricks at one point or another in
devising a world for "Silence Like Diamonds," but for the moment let
me just talk about one way I used the last one.
You may have run across the currently-trendy notion of the Internet of
Things, the idea of having almost everything in your physical environment wired
to talk to almost everything else in the house. Eventually, presumably, your
car (which is driving you home while you finish some paperwork) phones your
house. It alerts the air conditioning that you are hung up in traffic and to
delay coming on till you clear that bottleneck on the interstate. The
refrigerator and blender start making up something soothing (and the fridge
issues a call so that the drone from the local ice cream store schedules a restocking
delivery). The music player queues up the "calm and happy" mix, the
shower starts warming water in the reserve tank, and so forth.
But even away from home, your phone records (by checking RFIDs or their successors) all the things you look at in the store, and reports it to the store chain's intelligence system (with the phone company collecting a small fee). Face recognition software in half a dozen businesses around your workplace pick you up from security cameras and know what way you take from the parking lot to work. Knowing who walks by and what they like, stores on your route put more clothing you like in their windows.
All the gadgets
in your life gang up to make you happier.
It always strikes me that in most such scenarios, we
assume that the human being is a petty tyrant having a bad day. The machines
either sound as if they are living in fear of our rage, or acting as very large
comforting invisible nannies who will have our milk and cookies and a big hug
ready for us no matter how bad the world has been, or like a neurotic parent desperately trying to please a tantrum-prone jaded brat. It all seems very infantilizing.
Compounding that infantilization, to give you everything
you really want, before or at latest when you want it, an Internet of Things
has to know everything you want or might want, including the wants you can't
admit to and the wants you haven't felt yet and the wants that are only just
emerging from the creative software of the marketing people. The liberal-feared
surveillance state and conservative-feared nanny state are both much less
intrusive than the probably-purely-commercial instant-gratification state. But
of course, it's all much less scary because it's not about preventing you from
doing what you want (like the cop on every corner), or making you do what
someone else wants (like the nanny in every bedroom). No, not at all. It's about always giving you what you want as
soon as you want it, and knowing enough to do that.
Like Santa. Remember, he sees you when you're sleeping, he
knows when you're awake ... (As Allan
Sherman remarked, who did he think he was, J. Edgar Hoover?)
So you've got a world that runs on the ability for
everyone to quickly know anything that is public -- and the value of keeping
information private is astronomical. The relationship between cybersecurity and
security breaches becomes something like the relationship between health care
and death: you can buy huge amounts of the former, and make the latter very
unlikely, but the reaper (or the hacker) always wins in the long run. In such a world, the
number and variety of communications security services and systems is going to
go through a "Cambrian explosion" -- the evolutionary phenomenon that
when there is a drastic increase in the variety of niches, all sorts of strange
things grow, making more niches in which more things grow --
Until the reversal, or until the first derivative of that logistic curve starts to bend downward. There, that ought to be a cliffhanger to hold
you for a while ...
Friday I'll probably talk a bit about the drones that have been a big part of the plot so far, since
I've gotten a few emails about them in the last couple days. After that ...
well, information wants to be expensive. And time is money. So after a bit more time, more information.
