Sci-Po

Typical. You think you’ve invented something brilliant and within a matter seconds find out it’s been around for years. I’m working on a timeline to celebrate 70 years of teaching humanities at Imperial College London (I know, who knew right?) and I’ve been speculating about things that might happen over the next 70 years. One entry was going to be ‘Sci-Po (science poetry or science fiction poetry) becomes a wildly popular course’. Been around for decades! There’s even a society dedicated to the genre that’s been going since 1978. Loads about science and technology poetry elsewhere online too,

On other matters, I’ve been thinking about how one can look at things from a very great distance in the sense of removing oneself from the deluge and detail of everyday drugery and see things from afar, especially big themes, patterns, shifts, trends and so on. I know from personal experience that one way to do this (on a country or regional level at least) is to live somewhere else for a significant time and then come back. I’m sure the use of psychedelics could work too (and who knew that Imperial had a department focussed on that!?!).

VR

A post from Matt, who is usually hidden behind a screen…

Virtual reality systems have been around since the late 1960s, but the technology is now reaching a tipping point. In 1991, a complete Virtuality headsets-and-gloves VR system would set you back up to $73,000. In contrast, when it launches next year, the highly-anticipated, Facebook-owned Oculus Rift VR headset is likely to cost around $1,500 for a complete system, including the PC. Not to be outdone, Sony’s Playstation VR headset — also due out next year — is slated to cost around $400. Moving further down the price scale, by the time you read this you should be able to pick up a Samsung Gear VR headset for just $99 (though you’ll need a high-end Samsung phone to power it). But for a “cheaper than chips” option, you can’t beat Google Cardboard: a cardboard-box headset into which you slot your smartphone. You can buy pre-made ones for less than 20 bucks, or even make your own out of some card, a couple of lenses and magnets, some strips of velcro, and a rubber band.

 
Now that virtual reality is affordable for anyone, it just needs some killer apps for it to take off. Games are the obvious one, but they may just be scratching the surface of VR’s potential. Coming next year, The Martian VR Experience is a tie-in with Ridley Scott’s hit movie The Martian. The 20-minute VR adventure puts you in the lead character’s shoes as you try to survive solo on the Martian surface. Movie fans will also be excited by 20th Century Fox’s plans to bring over 100 movies to the Oculus Rift and Gear VR headsets. Titles so far include Alien (if you dare), Die Hard, and Office Space.

 
Another exciting development is Jaunt, A Silicon Valley startup that provides an end-to-end cinematic VR system for filmmakers, from a custom 3D camera and editing tools through to apps that run on the Google Cardboard and Oculus Rift platforms. They already have some pretty impressive demos that you can try today, from immersive news reports and sporting events through to rock concerts and documentaries. Other future boom areas for VR include education and training, urban design, and even therapy for anxiety disorders and phobias. At this point, virtual reality still has some drawbacks and challenges to overcome, including motion sickness, balance problems, and possibly even addiction. But as VR has become affordable for almost everyone, and VR applications are starting to take off, the technology’s future over the next few years looks very bright indeed.

Relationships between Science and Fiction

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Still digging into science vs. fiction – looking at holography, artificial reproduction, high-speed trains and fibre optics among other things. Just stumbled into this (below) whilst researching Jules Verne. Some good points, for example…

what is usually cited as an “invention” is almost always the last development in a long series of discoveries that led to the first successful commercial product.”

 

Jules Verne

 

Scientific Prophet or Just a Good Guesser?

 

Although his books were written well over a century ago, Jules is rightly considered the father of modern science fiction. A number of his tales are still good reading and – particularly when adjusted a bit – have been quite adaptable to the silver screen. Two films which stand up particularly well are 20,0000 Leagues Under the Sea and Journey to the Center of the Earth. Both movies starred James Mason and the latter film had Pat Boone’s famous nude scene – a nude scene with sheep and nuns no less.

 However, as the millennium approached, Jules’ stories seemed to be falling out of favor as video games, rather than well-written novels, became the basis for science fiction movies. True, there were a couple of attempt to remake Journey to the Center of the Earth as made-for-TV movies, but both were flops. So it seems like Jules was finally going the way of most pre-Twentieth Century science fiction authors. After all, once technology catches up with the imagination, the sci-fi books become fantasy at the best and period peices at their worst.

 Then suddenly Jules’ reputation got a shot in the arm. With much fanfare it was announced, a “lost” manuscript, Paris au XXème Siècle (Paris in the Twentieth Century) would be published! Sure enough, in 1994 out came a French edition and that was followed a year later by a printing by an American publisher.

 The truth, though, is the manuscript had never been lost, but was just so bad that Jules’ publisher, Pierre-Jules Hertzel, didn’t want it. Pierre had just published “Five Weeks in a Balloon” and thought Paris would actually hurt Jules’ burgeoning reputation. So Verne fans had to wait a year until Voyage au Centre de la Terre came out. Pierre’s judgment was sound. At almost every level Paris in the Twentieth Century is an unintentionally comic novel while Journey to the Center of the Earth is still a great book to read.

 Strangely enough and once it was published, Paris in the Twentieth Century became the talk of the Sci-Fi community despite its ridiculous plot (what there was of it) and absolutely horrible characterizations. Verne fans hailed Jules as the Great Predictor of the Future. Gasoline powered cars, electric motors, electric lights, high speed trains and subways were all predicted way back when people rode on horses, burned whale oil lamps, and chugged along coal driven and soot begrimed railroads. Jules hit the 20th Century right on the button. And all in 1863. Amazing!

 Actually it’s modern education that is failing here. Far from predicting products of the Twentieth Century, most of what Jules wrote about were already the high tech R and D gizmos of the time, and he simply speculated that they would eventually become commercial. Practical internal combustion engines, incandescent light bulbs, electric motors, and the London Underground were around in 1863. And when you read Jules’ predictions on how they were actually implemented you have to smile a bit.

 High speed trains? He has them going at 1000 kilometers per hour (almost Mach 1). More laughably they are powered by compressed air which pushes a flat metal disk through a tube. A magnet attached to the end of the train pulls it along.

 Motor vehicles powered by internal combustion engines? The concept was old even in Jules’ time, and a practical prototype was designed as early as 1807. Working vehicles had been built long before Jules put pen to paper, and as Jules was writing his book, Jean Joseph Etienne Lenoir actually drove a car powered by liquid petroleum the 50 miles from Paris to Joinville-le-Pont.

 Did Jules know about this? Absolutely. Jules has everyone driving the Lenoir automobiles in his book. But even that prediction was off. Jules has everyone driving an earlier version of the car that was powered by illumination gas – that is, the precursor of natural gas that was used in gas lamps and stoves.

 Jules apparent prescience seems so incredible simply because people are forgetting that what is usually cited as an “invention” is almost always the last development in a long series of discoveries that led to the first successful commercial product. So we have Edison inventing the light bulb in 1880, Benz the automobile in 1885, and Marconi the radio in 1896.

 Overall Jules’ predictions are about par for someone who is up on current technology and has a fertile imagination. Certainly when you consider Jules was not an engineer or a scientist, and in fact had studied to be a lawyer and worked as a stockbroker, his guesses are not bad. It also helps, though, when the readers don’t pay that close attention to the details and mistranslations and only remember the guesses that hit pretty close to the mark – and not the ones that fell flat.

 Link to original article here.

 

 

Relationships between science and fiction

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Still working through whether or not there might be a good graphic in the linkages between scientific fact and speculative fiction. In this vein, came across this today, which is one of the best things I’ve read about trends and counter-trends, especially with regard to technology. Full article from the Guardian here.

“It’s always wrong to extrapolate by straightforwardly following a curve up,” he (Kim Stanley Robinson, a sci-fi writer) explains, “because it tends off towards infinity and physical impossibility. So it’s much better to use the logistic curve, which is basically an S curve.” Like the adoption of mobile phones, or rabbit populations on an island, things tend to start slowly, work up a head of steam and then reach some kind of saturation point, a natural limit to the system. According to Robinson, science and technology themselves are no exception, making this gradual increase and decrease in the speed of change the “likeliest way to predict the future”.

“We might be in a very steep moment of technological and historical change, but that doesn’t mean that it will stay that steep or even accelerate.” Practical and theoretical constraints, which go beyond even problems such as climate change with which we’re struggling now, will eventually slow us down, Robinson continues. “What I’m assuming is that there are some fundamental issues that are going to keep us from doing things much more spectacularly than we are now.”

Sci fi movies (and books) that came true

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Just playing around with an idea, which is whether there’s anything interesting to be said about speculations in science fiction versus science fact. Seems like quite a bit of what gets written about in fiction tends to become fact given enough time. This could be chance or it could be that if it gets written about, it gets thought about.

Some examples:

1657, Savien de Cyrano de Bergerac, A Voyage to the Moon  – Apollo 8, 1969.

1888, Edward Bellamy, Looking Backwards (Credit cards) – Diners Club, 1950.

1964, Star Terk, The Cage, (mobile phones) – Motorola, 1973.

One issue is a lack of data. I have about fifty examples of things that got thought about and then happened, mostly from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, but that’s not many. There’s also the infinite monkeys argument – given enough predictions something will eventually be correct. But are these really predictions?

There’s also the issue of which writer is right. Many musings are vague in terms of how things might work out and often there are numerous examples of people ‘predicting’ the same thing. For example, the internet, as an idea, can be traced back to Mark Twain, Douglas Adams, Geoffret Hoyle, William Gibson and many others.

What interests me most, apart from who is influencing what, is the time difference between speculation and appearance or invention. It does seem to getting shorter.

 

 

 

 

Links between science fiction and science fact

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How Ideas Happen

Here’s a perfect example of how random events combine to create ideas and insights. I’ve been writing something about whether or not forecasting the future is futile or functional. It’s been a disaster. It jumps around, it doesn’t flow and I’m not really sure what the key thought is. I’ll persist for a while, but my prediction is that it’s heading for the wastebasket.

At about the same time as writing this piece I was at Imperial College and visited the science fiction library. Nothing dramatic, although the experience sparked off a thought about the extent to which science fiction influences invention. If you took a long enough time period would sci-fi writers prove to be better than futurologists at predicting the future? This didn’t really go anywhere initially, although a couple of lines in my piece did reference this thought and I had the idea of a call-out box (above) showing a couple of ideas in science fiction that became science fact.

A week later I’m at Imperial again and it suddenly hit me that you could create a rather wonderful graphic showing the connections between imagination and invention. With enough examples (50?, 100?) you could possibly make an interesting point about the time lag between speculation and appearance. For example, is the time between these two points getting shorter?

Very rough pencil sketch to come….

新兴科技时间轴(2014——2030+)

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这是和帝国理工大学技术预测同行们(尤其是阿莱克斯·阿亚德(Alex Ayad),但是在后期也要特别感谢克里斯·哈利(Chris Haley))共同创作的新型科学和技术时间轴。上面是图表完工时的图片。我们对于是否把“移动电话数量超过人口”列为“当下”讨论了很久,但是电话用户超过69亿人,已经很接近人口总数了。
请点击本段最后的链接,下载适合打印的高分辨率PDF版本(建议用彩色A3或更大纸张打印)。在一周左右时间内,将会有图表的纸质打印版。在本博文底部是一些展示该图表是如何创建的图片,以及图表是如何演进的。新兴科技-5

至于图表上有什么,有5个关键大技术:数字技术(主要是信息技术)、生物技术、纳米技术、神经技术和绿色技术(有时被称为清洁技术)。

我们把图表分成3个时间区域。第一个区域是“当下”,我们定义为现在或附近(2014-2015),同时至少1000个实际例子(事件可能是一次性出现的事,但是创新一般至少要有1000个实际例子才会纳入表中)。“很有可能”是第二个区域,被定义为2015-2030。第三个区域是“有可能”,被定义为从2030年往后可能出现的事。图表的绝大部分都是严肃的,但是我们没能抗拒在一些区域娱乐一下的冲动
希望你们都喜欢它,如果你觉得它有意思或者有用的话,请和他人分享。请注意本时间轴的出版是基于知识共享许可的,所以你可以在未询问情况下将其用于商业目的或者制作不同版本。但是如果使用时能链接回我们的初始版本,我们将感激不尽。
至于每条线上有什么,这里是清单:
绿色技术 当下
廉价太阳能聚集器
绝缘气凝胶建筑
振动能量采集
社区电网
能回应指令的家用电器
LED路灯
电网规模贮存
家庭电厂(冷热电联供系统)
智能仪表
藻类生质燃料
绿色技术 很有可能
超级电容车
消费者即时定价
100%淘汰白炽灯
氢的人工光合作用
合成飞机燃料
周围的射频能量采集
束能量用于生态监测和军事无人机
大规模的碳捕捉和碳贮存
摩天大楼上的透明(有机)太阳能电池
生物可降解电池
自主车辆专用车道
电动车辆路上感应充电
超市合成肉
绿色技术 有可能
行波反应堆
燃料电池驱动的轻型客机
无人机运送比萨
商业海洋热能转换
微型风能水能收集建筑外墙
汽车波转子发动机
钍反应堆
给海洋施以铁质肥料
用3D打印技术生产的适用于垂直农业的土壤
高速人行道
昆虫汉堡食物车
超回路大众运输系统
用托卡马克核聚变发电
卫星束太空太阳能
生物技术 当下
DNA时间确认机构
基因疗法
合成有机物
对于先天性疾病进行基因测试
入侵身体以增强感官
用3D打印技术生产的骨科植入物
商业宠物克隆
源于作物的朔料
基于基因的主动医学介入
为制药培育人源化的动物
生物技术 很有可能
预防性抗生素禁止用于动物
个性化的微生物疗法
无处不在的生物感应
非源于动物的皮革
非处方基因测试
对帕金森氏综合征进行干细胞治疗
用3D打印技术生产的生物纳米支架
人类器官克隆
为个人数据存储嵌入射频识别技术
发现最后的抗生素
生物技术 有可能
用纳米纤维制造人造肌肉
基于DNA的数据贮存
微生物感应的食品包装
引入转基因蚊子以消除疟疾
人类基因工程合法化
纹身电路(人体上的视频纹身)
克隆人类
合成有机物所带来流行病
数字技术 当下
移动电话数量超过人口 (情况转变则不属于这一类?)
生活记录
加密货币
连接到网络的牙刷
现实增强眼镜
预防犯罪算法
NFC指甲
可扫描条码的墓碑
能面部识别的中央摄像头
阿凡达女友
用于游戏的大脑-计算机基本界面
跨洲机器人手术
数字技术 很有可能
实时语言翻译
量子计算机用于解密
分析内衣
AI用于全科医生手术
无辅助机器人手术
物联网超过500亿个设备
能读唇语的中央摄像头
网络攻击导致整个城市范围内断电
不用电池的无线沟通
自主电子出租车车队
实体信用卡过时
触觉学衣服
情绪感知器
昆虫大小的侦查机器人
全息数据存储
AI用于无人机-无人机战斗
太阳耀斑消除GPS网络
数字技术 可能
侵入已经植入的神经设备
城市禁止人类驾驶员
预测战争的算法
商业飞机由智能手机劫持
战事与游戏合并
机器人数量超过人类
物联网超过1万亿个设备
终身阿凡达助手
记录人类从出生到死亡整个生命
家用冰箱感知保质期
完全自主的战场机器人
量子电脑用于材料设计
纳米技术 当下
用于衣物的抗病毒纳米粒子
化妆品和遮光剂中的纳米粒子
朔料打印的电子电路
量子点电视
癌症成像和治疗的纳米粒子
用于培育人体部位干细胞的支架
蛋白质结晶的模板
自我修复的漆点和表面
用于合成神经元和合成神经植入物的纳米管
消费者电子产品中的甲醇燃料电池
纳米技术 很有可能
人工电磁材料天线
可碾压的屏幕和设备
纳米技术 可能
实验室演示人工电磁材料隐身
旋光仪使计算接近光速
室温超导体
量子点夜视窗
自主数据密集
生态系统单层石墨超级电容自我复制
IBM用动画原子做成动画片
全朔料的晶体管
下一代超轻型合成材料
每比特数据有100个原子密集
神经技术 当下
耳蜗植入
大脑指纹用于法庭
益智药用于医学或休闲使用
由思维控制的假肢
活跃大脑区域的神经成像
神经技术 很有可能
思维控制的轮椅
手机对眼球移动追踪
解码意向的算法
适应性电子助手避免信息超负荷
人工视网膜植入
不会宿醉的酒精替代品
神经技术 可能
侵入植入的神经设备
大脑-电脑界面广泛补充了键盘使用
空中旅行者大脑指纹常规
通过fMRI对梦成像和记录
沟通设备广泛嵌入到人体
基本想法的人工神经编写
用大脑假体提升或消除记忆
终结痴呆

设计开发
设计大体上基于我之前2010年后趋势和技术时间轴做的 (需要PDF版本请点击这里)。第一个草图是在厨房桌子上用铅笔在A3白纸上画的,之后不断改进了好多版(记得大约是十二版)。圆圈最初是用厨房盘子和大碗画的,彩色的线最初是用荧光笔和我孩子们的马克笔混合创作的。专业设计之前的最终版本画在了A3绘图纸上,使各要点契合并连接好。设计的功劳也属于劳伦斯·怀特利(Lawrence Whitely),特别感谢帝国理工大学的科林(Kereen)。

关于未来的更新,我们已经在考虑动画版以及积极和消极版本(乌托邦版和非乌托邦版)。如果关于图表的未来更新版本,您觉得哪些事该/不该出现在图表上(或是看到一些愚蠢的错误,请务必告之我们)。

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