The Forbidden Planet International Blog Log

One of my favourite (and consistently inventive) science fiction authors, Charlie Stross, was in a discussion with Nobel economics laureate Paul Krugman at the weekend’s Worldcon, Anticipation in Montreal. As Cory notes on Boing Boing its a pretty good match as Charlie has often touched on possible future forms of economics in his SF (on which note Orbit recently published a great collection of his short fiction, Wireless); the discussion is now up as an MP3 to download and the transcript (by Edwin Steussy) is here. I thought this segment particularly put me in mind of Brian Fies recent Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow (reviewed here by Richard):

“Krugman: What I kind of expected. Let me show my age here. What you came out believing if you went to the New York’s World Fair in 1964 was that we were going to have this enormously enhanced mastery of the physical universe. That we were going to have undersea cities and supersonic transports everywhere. And there hasn’t been that kind of dramatic change. It’s not just that airplanes are no faster. My favorite test, which shows something about me, is the kitchen. If you walked into a kitchen from the 1950’s it would look a little pokey, but you’d know what to do. It wouldn’t be that difficult. If someone from the 1950’s walked into a kitchen from 1909 they’d be pretty unhappy – they might just be able to manage. If someone from 1909 went to one from 1859, you would actually be hopeless. The big change was really between 1840 and the 1920’s, in terms of what the physical nature of modern life is like. There’s been nothing like that since. So we can do fancy information searches in a way that no one envisioned 30 years ago – as one of my colleagues at the Times, Gail Collins, likes to say all the time where are the flying cars?

(Brian Fies open-mouthed amazement at the World’s Fair in Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow)

Stross: Yeah, where is my food pill, where are my jetpacks. Actually, flying cars are really bad idea, if I can just go off on a tangent. Your flying car is great, what about your neighbors flying car when his 15 year old son gets into it and tries to impress his girlfriend in it. Normal cars have a simple failure mode; they stop moving, hopefully at the side of a road. Flying cars, if they have a failure mode, they stop moving and then they move very rapidly straight down.

Krugman: But the robot driver for the car? It’s the other thing that’s supposed to be around by now, and it’s not. It’s even on the information side.

Stross: Partly, there are obstacles to getting some of these technologies out. I think that what has been happening rather than progress continuing and accelerating in a visible direction that everybody’s expected from 1960, we’ve seen immense progress in other directions and the effects are not immediately obvious because they take time to sink in. Faster transport brings its own side effects, most of them would have been fairly immediately obvious to anybody if you told them how it would work. It’s not a great cognitive leap from aeroplanes capable of carrying loads to bombers. It’s a hell of a leap from idea of getting a cheap camera chip and adding it to a mobile phone and coming up with a phenomenon of “Happy Slapping”. I don’t know if everyone knows what Happy Slapping is, it isn’t Slapping, and it isn’t Happy, but its where kids basically find some random stranger beat them up while one of their friends videos it with their camera and then upload it to YouTube. As social phenomenon go, that’s not one you can predict from the input technology. That’s a second order effect. We’re still seeing the second order effects emerge from the information technology, and as for biotechnology, that’s barely off the starting blocks. …. Where was I going with that one …. hold this thought for a moment.

Krugman: That’s the thing about technology – you never know where it’s going to lead.”