What I learned about the future after reading 100 science fiction books

Original author: Tiago Forte
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What I learned about the future after reading 100 science fiction books

Over the past two years, I have read more than a hundred science fiction books, an average of about one per week. A complete list can be found here , I even noted my favorites.

I started reading science fiction, just to pass the time. I still have good memories of reading Jurassic Park as a child. I continued to read, because I noticed that this book gave me something: strong imagination, a dislike for everyday life.

I caught myself that my ideas are different from those that draw a lot from the same articles TechCrunch, Hacker News, Habrahabr and other "daily" sites of the residents of Silicon (Silicon) Valley. My business is selling ideas, and these books are both a real treasure and my toolkit.

As futurologist Jason Silva says:
“Imagination allows us to experience exciting future opportunities, choose the most amazing, and move the present forward in order to finally meet it.”

I think that reading these books has helped me both in creating the idea and in moving towards it.

Every good science fiction is essentially a thought experiment, and I would like to launch my own right now:

What if these books are a fair guess about what our future will look like?


This assumption is not so far-fetched. Reading the early works of the classics of Jules Verne or Herbert Wells, I am more impressed not by how wrong they were, but by how much they were right in their guesses. I chose which books to read from the collection of “Top 100 Best Sci-Fi Works of All Time”, so most likely these books contain the best (or at least the most interesting) ideas from all possible.

Here's what future we are heading for, as our greatest science fiction predicted:

1. In order to save humanity, we must lose it


We all know that the long-term survival of our species depends on the colonization of other planets, and as a result of other stellar systems. The question is not whether our planet will become unsuitable for life, it is a question of when this will happen.

Just looking at the distances and possible dates associated with this process, it becomes clear - as soon as we start it, we will begin to move away from each other.

The gap will begin with language and culture. Settlements on individual planets, separated by millions of kilometers and time intervals in the transmission of communication signals, will begin to develop their own dialects, their slang, their music, their tendencies and aspirations.

Just look at the changes in the English language, between mountain Scots and California surfers, South African drillers and Caribbean residents - this will give you a clear hint of the upcoming cultural drift.

The next will be the political and economic gap. Like the formation and cultural self-determination of American society, which culminated in independence, the colonies will begin the process of self-identification of themselves, their differences, and ultimately they will require a government that will represent their interests. Given the distances, we will be able to suppress the first few uprisings, but their separation will only be a matter of time.

Economic integration will expand, but much more slowly than the speed of colonization and intelligence. By the time we can fully integrate these colonies into our economy, they will have developed self-sufficient economic systems.

Finally, we begin to see the genetic gap. Despite our great diversity here on Earth, we are all one species, and this means that any person can have a child with any other person of the opposite sex, for more than 160,000 years.

But it happened historically. For most of the prehistoric period, at least several species of hominids roamed the planet and only the rapid emergence and expansion of the species homo sapiens sapiens from Africa around the world was the key to a single humanity.

The moment some of us leave the planet, our shared DNA will begin to diverge again. Starting from the conditions of a limited gene pool and at different pressures, different sources of mortality, at different levels of radiation and mutation, “space explorers” will embark on a new evolutionary path of development.

After all, over hundreds of years or over thousands, one fatal mutation in one remote, isolated colony will make reproduction impossible, cutting off this branch of humanity forever.

In order to save humanity, we must colonize the stars, and at the same time, a single humanity, such as we know it, will be lost forever.

2. Time will be our greatest enemy


With the conquest of three dimensions of space, the 4th dimension of time will become our greatest problem.

The first reason is time dilation, which is proved by the result of the theory of relativity (most recently this topic was raised in the Interstellar film), but which plays an important role in dozens of science fiction stories written over the past decades. Slowing down time is a phenomenon of the different flow of time at different speeds depending on how fast you move, which means that someone traveling at a speed close to the speed of light will age more slowly than someone on Earth.

The humanitarian consequences of this phenomenon are striking. Long-term space travelers will return to their home planet where everyone they knew is dead and there are no more. Families will be stretched across centuries, with people who survived their great-great-grandchildren. Historical characters come out of space capsules as young. Those who want to see the future will be sent on a long, high-speed round trip, arriving at the desired time. It will be like a time machine without the possibility of a return to the past.

The second reason lies in the vast distances involved in interstellar travel. It is likely that the first to go on an interstellar journey will not be the first to arrive - while they are on their way, new technologies will develop, allowing a later expedition to overtake them. Imagine that you are immersed in a cryogenic dream, in the first group of interstellar travelers, only to wake up and discover that the purpose of your journey was colonized hundreds of years ago.

The third reason is technological differences. Technology will be crucial in space civilizations and will improve so quickly that even small differences will have far-reaching consequences:
  • Take two systems with a slight difference in the speed of technological development and you will find a huge gap between them in a few decades or centuries. Their society can be so fundamentally different that communication and exchange between them will be difficult to imagine.
  • Technologies sent to remote systems will be obsolete by the time they receive them. Even sending information at the speed of light cannot be fast enough for stellar systems that are several light years apart. This will nullify trade, except perhaps for extremely rare raw materials.
  • Wars at such vast distances will be futile, because any attacking forces sent at sublight speeds will be obsolete by the time of arrival. But it can also mean endless war, where neither side can win, as Joe Holdeman describes in The Forever War, 1975.


We are already experiencing time limitations in space travel. In a recent documentary about the Rosetta spacecraft launched by the European Space Agency, for landing on a comet, it is noticeable that the probe cameras have a resolution of only 4 megapixels, which was pretty good in 2004 when it was launched. Today, even smartphones have more modern cameras.

The Philae landing probe was equipped with a carefully calibrated system of harpoons and ice drills, and we thought that would be enough for a successful landing. But in subsequent years, we found that the surface of the comet is actually a mixture of dust, gravel and ice, which makes this equipment much less suitable for work.

Over the years, our understanding of the very essence of time will change, and we will find that the 4th dimension creates much more problems for us, all 3 physical dimensions taken together.

3. The future will be strange


If I had to choose one word to describe the future, as it seems from the stories that seemed to me the most convincing and believable, it would be strange . Let me explain.

Writers like Ray Kurzweil have done a good job explaining why it is so difficult for us to imagine the future we are heading towards. He claims that all of our original heuristics are linear - like tracking an antelope passing through the savannah, counting the remaining products in the store - but due to Moore's law, we are entering a phase of exponential change that these heuristics are simply not ready to handle.

In other words, we look at the rate of change from the recent past, and extrapolate to the near future. But now, when we reach the exponential part of the graph, this type of extrapolation is simply not applicable.

I consider this argument convincing, but what is most interesting to me is not just the speed of change, but also the unpredictability of its direction. The stories that I read led me to the idea that we barely knew about the future consequences of some of the technologies already developed, and that these consequences manifest themselves in a completely strange way.

Take dating for example. How will acquaintances in the world of highly developed anti-aging methods occur? Imagine a man and a woman on a date. They both look about 25, but their appearance doesn't mean anything at all. They have to play a difficult game of testing and probing each other's knowledge of pop culture and not only to try to determine each other's age without naming them independently. There will be entire industries, schools and a new worldview about how (and why?) To meet people who are many decades (centuries?) Older or younger than you.

The area where we will see this strangeness in the very near future is virtual reality. It is funny that most assumptions about virtual reality are based on the fact that it will inherit ordinary reality, with realistic human bodies in realistic worlds. But I think that we will very quickly understand that this kind of reality is more of a bug, not a feature.

What would you look like if you could take any shape? There will be new industries designed to help us experience life as other people, animals, inanimate objects, and foreigners. Other industries will be dedicated to designing the environment, the laws of physics, mental states, personalities, memories, and many other things that we will have control over. An example of such a scenario was presented by Robin Wright, in 2013 in the film Congress (based on the science fiction novel by Stanislav Lem).

But the best example of how strange the future will be is artificial intelligence.

The very idea behind the technological singularity is that there is a point in our future, beyond which we do not see. Presumably this point is when human-level artificial intelligence gains access to its own source code, initiating an exponential explosion of intelligence.

But what does “super-human” intelligence mean? What can we expect from a computer whose power is, say, a million times the computing power of all the people who have ever lived?

We believe that it would be wise to direct it to solving “difficult” problems, such as solving the world's hunger problem, modeling the Earth’s climate, deciphering the structure of the brain, etc. But our anthropomorphic, linear thinking again plays a cruel joke with us.

Let's look at this through an analogy: imagine an ant observing human behavior. From the point of view of an ant, a person does not spend his time “on solving difficult ant-oriented problems”. Virtually nothing of what a person does is remotely understandable, and is not even directly observed, since the scale and complexity of the simplest human actions goes far beyond the concepts of an ant. From this point of view, I think we can conclude that the ant would use the word " strange " to describe a person .

And this is exactly the word as we will describe the actions and thinking of superhuman AI. If the explosion of the level of intelligence really happens, then it will very quickly reach a level superior to us the way we surpass ants and even more.

Who knows what actions they will take? Maybe they will invent a new logical system that is incompatible with human neurology. Maybe they will find out that our Universe is modeled and will enter into contact, negotiations or cultural exchange with our creators. Maybe they use pure mathematics to parse dark matter and shift our reality into an alternative quantum state, where they are creators, and we are an artificial form of life. Most likely, they will do something for which we don’t even have a language to describe it.

Why is it important


There are many other interesting ideas, but as this post becomes long, it is time to complete it. Maybe I'll write a sequel.

When I started reading science fiction, I thought it was an interesting way to predict the future for myself. But I began to learn a number of methods that rely on the principles of science fiction to create things in the real world. Narration and science are some of the most powerful tools to which we have free access - and their unification has great potential.

I started with a book called Science Fiction Prototyping: Designing the Future with Science Fiction. She was recommended to me by the management in the company where I worked at that time, as the most important book that could be recommended for innovation, and my curiosity was hurt.

It describes the free process of using common elements of science fiction stories to create and test the effects of new technologies. Just as the narrative reflects human experience, NF prototypes use fiction to explore the potential experiences of new technologies.

One of my favorite futurists, Thomas Frey, uses a process called situational futuring."allowing you to quickly create and explore probabilistic scenarios for the development of the future that can be used for everything: from a geopolitical strategy to product development. The huge amount of fascinating scenarios that he comes up with on his blog is convincing proof of the effectiveness of this method.

I even recently learned about the" Appreciative inquiry ", A model created at Kease’s Western Reserve University in response to our obsession with problem solving. It is based on a" proactive principle, "which states that" what we do today guided by our imagined image of the future. ”This model uses“ the artful creation of a positive image on a collective basis for proactive reality. ”

I’m not sure how to put it into practice, but I think it’s worth noting that someone is working to make sci-fi prototyping more rigorous.

The bottom line is, the line between science and science fiction is becoming very blurred. Every day brings news of stunning discoveries, advancements, or inventions that should not have happened for many years. The ability to create scenarios in a purely imaginary future, and to develop the subtle consequences of fundamentally new opportunities, is becoming useful not only for writers - it is becoming a key skill for creating these opportunities in the first place.

Posted by Nassim Taleb in his Antifragile Bookdiscusses a rule of thumb that he uses to evaluate how long something will be around us: the longer this “something” has been around, the longer it will probably remain. According to this indicator, while specific technologies come and go, and while we are experimenting with almost every aspect of our environment and consciousness, the instinct for narration will continue to be the main human trait.

I suggest learning how to use it to tell stories about a future worth creating.

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