The future has less power than expected. From the beginnings of the industrial revolution up to the first oil crisis, new energy sources were discovered, exploited, and scaled up. Space travel requires insanely high power levels, and it was assumed back in the 1950s that those were coming.
They weren't. In the last 50 years, there have been no new power sources.
We're still mostly on oil, coal, natural gas, and hydropower. Even solar cells and atomic power are now more than 50 years old. The existing technologies have improved, but there are no new ones.
That's why we don't have heated streets for snow melting, as seen in Disney's "The Magic Highway" (1958). We don't have much space travel because chemical rockets hit the power limits of chemistry around 45 years ago.
If controlled fusion is ever cracked, and it's not too expensive, we may see some of the older futuristic ideas back.
So from just your comment, my take is different - essentially, nuclear power was demonized, mismanaged and ignored. We have the technology to have an abundance of terrestrial power to do most things if we'd only embrace nuclear power.
Look at Philae - because it didn't contain a fission source, it's stuck without the capability to replenish it's power source. What would have happened if we weren't scared to death of nuclear power?
I've had this argument many times with my left-leaning friends. People who are worried about pollution or climate change should be demanding that we switch over to nuclear power as quickly as possible.
Sometimes I wonder if technical advances have outstripped our collective ability to deal with them. Specialization is required to make progress, but it means that nobody really understands the choices we have when it comes to technology. And although it's possible for specialists to design, build and operate something like a nuclear power plant, actually doing that requires the broader public to understand and support it.
Nuclear power being demonized is one problem, another problem is that it is simply very hard to do in a distributed manner without getting into a proliferation nightmare.
So embracing nuclear power is a bit harder than it may seem from a technological point of view. Also, since we can currently only use fission, shielding will always lead to nuclear power being almost exclusively used for heavy stationary projects or at best something that floats such as a very large nuclear powered boat. In those cases the weight isn't a huge factor.
I think proliferation comes under "mismanagement".
This in the sense that rather than opting for a different fuel and matching reactor for the civilian use, the civilian plants were in essence scaled up military submarine reactors running on the very same stuff that went boom.
Basically the idea seemed to be to use civilian uses to amplify military capacity. End result was a mixing of roles that one is hard pressed to untangle.
Any West Wing fan will recognize the futurist's "whine" as attributed to Leo McGarry, the president's chief of staff:
Leo McGarry: My generation never got the future it was promised...
Thirty-five years later, cars, air travel is exactly
the same. We don't even have the Concorde anymore.
Technology stopped.
Josh Lyman: The personal computer...?
Leo McGarry: A more efficient delivery system for gossip
and pornography? Where's my jet pack, my colonies on the
Moon?
You got your tricorder and your communicator -- both in one box no less! (And smaller and wizzier than they were originally imagined!) You can even get a phaser if you really want one:
And we're making pretty good progress on the holodeck. Sure, we're still waiting for warp drive and the transporter, but still we're batting over 500. That's not too shabby.
I'm sure he's right, while there's only one O'Neill colony. But I can't help thinking that after a couple centuries of exponential growth, when there are millions of them, that it will be a boon for human freedom.
I'm not convinced that such extensive surveillance will be necessary for safety purposes. Detectors for explosives, and security around critical points like airlocks, is likely to be sufficient.
I would worry about relying only on specific countermeasures like explosive detection. You can only build detectors like that for attack's that you can imagine; it's always possible someone is a bit more clever and comes up with a unique/lateral attack.
With extensive surveillance and AI good enough to interpret body-language with a high-degree of accuracy, you could have a very general detector; as long as the person knows they are being malicious, I bet it'll generally show up in his/her body-language.
Which of course opens up the possibility of having patsy's who don't know they are carrying a bomb or what-not and so have normal body language, so specific and general detection mechanisms are probably going to be needed...
The worst threats aren't deliberate attacks: when you get thousands of people living somewhere, there will be screw-ups, misunderstandings, and just plain reckless behaviour.
We're used to living in a (relatively) fault-tolerant environment, where if I damage my home's plumbing it will, at worst, damage my neighbours apartments -- it won't kill them instantly by letting all the air out!
Apartment buildings have a pretty bad failure mode when someone leaves the gas stove lit and they go for a holiday or if there is a leak and bad ventilation.
All it takes is for the gas to be temporarily shut down or for the owners to be gone long enough not to notice before a sizable amount of gas has pooled and a few days later boom.
In Romania they make this extra easy by exporting the interface to shut down the gas to just outside of the apartment door. (This is not the fire-crew shut-off valve, simply one that the gas company can seal off if you don't pay your bills without opening the door to your apartment.)
Fortunately most gas gear has a shut-off for that scenario but stoves do not and a couple of explosions per year due to gas leaks and left open gas taps result.
If you're worried about a major hull breach there aren't that many ways to go about it. Aside from that, you could pretty much make the same argument about any city on Earth, but I don't think many of us are in favor of ubiquitous surveillance on that account.
This. If you've never been on the Oasis of the Seas (or her sister ship, the Allure) it's worth checking out. Not nearly as dystopian as the article imagines.
This comment too, is negative and a bit of a drag. It's a very hard trap to avoid. Try harder! (cue meta meta comment...). I have to really force myself to see the positive side of how all this technology that we have is being used. The tools we have built to exchange information are being used to track us both by industry and governments, the software development environments are getting more and more complex and frankly ridiculous (compatibility testing for well over 25 browsers in order to make sure your documents can be read by others in the way you intended?), coffeemakers and printers with DRM and so on.
But then I remind myself to look at:
- wikipedia
- the Khan Academy (though they've started spamming!)
- Google search (you can keep the rest)
- Open Access journals
- Linux
And a whole raft of good stuff and I feel better again.
I think the trick here is _cautious optimism_. Yes, bunch of things suck really badly, and there is serious danger lurking on the horizon.
But we're also increasing the power of the individual to rise above all sorts of problems with pervasive learning and commerce opportunities. You help a billion people live ten years longer and receive a decent education? You've done probably more good than allowing some western countries to become police states.
It's all relative. As an artist, I find it much more important to keep finding flaws in my work and improving, but I can't do that to the extent of missing out on smelling the roses.
Dystopia has always been a glorious part of our culture, in the UK and in Europe more generally. From Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, through HG Wells, Joseph Conrad (the Machine Stops), Orwell, JG Ballard, not to mention Pink Floyd, Chris Morris and When the Wind Blows.
We love it, the discordance between what might have been and the plastic shittiness of what is, and we hate that Hollywood happy ending bollocks where everyone is going to live for even and ever and everything will be quite super.
An antidote to dystopian futures, Kevin Kelly's "A Desirable-Future Haiku: The coming hundred years, in one hundred words". On the chance that desirable futures ARE possible, we need to imagine them.
Either it is the Scottish weather, or it is his way of dealing with a serious case of tech burnout, from being in the thick of the 90s Internet boom in UK.
(Although I have a soft spot for Elon Musk's projects: both Tesla and SpaceX seem poised to go the distance, and they're both potentially huge game-changers in their respective fields.)
It's a hard trap to avoid. I suffer from the same and I notice many other people that are still active and getting older have this too. (For instance, Richard Dawkins).
I attribute this to a very simple thing: We had these youthful dreams and we realize that we are probably not going to be around to see them realized.
I'm a little unclear on the point of this article. Is it that the future is here, but it's way different from you thought it would be, or that universal surveillance is universal?
Wow. You've managed to generalize across 300 million people in one go. Congratulations, that has to be a record.
If you're aware that your stereotypes are just stereotypes could you try a little harder next time? Nothing worse than being aware of the failings of your arguments but using them anyway.
I did NOT generalize across 300 million people. That is precisely what I did NOT do. I am not sure if you misread, or you just don't understand what I said.
Your comment is not only wrong, it's rude. I'm disappointed and a bit alarmed.
I'm getting tired of this hateful bashing here on HN. I'm really sorry to see it from the old guard. You've been here a long time, so have I.
"They've actually made wearing a tracking tag a rewarding experience. Of course it's entirely voluntary, keeping count of entrants and exits can be justified as a safety measure, and it saves you from having to carry cash around in your swimsuit ... but, but, tagging...After you stop spluttering with indignation, you realize that it's an inevitable part of this package..."
I am still waiting for this experience, where I realize that humans must be tagged and tracked like animals. So far it hasn't come.
We've taken combat-trained soliders -- many times with live weapons -- and put them on airplanes and flown them around the world. Nobody needed tagging. We've had random groups of strangers thrown into lifeboats after various maritime disasters. Nobody needed tagging. We have all kinds of examples where one bad individual might cause great harm to others, yet taqgging was not an answer.
The only reason we're talking about tagging now is because the tech is here. It's convenient -- and much easier than trying to figure out how to have a civil society. Screw getting governments more responsive: just treat all of the citizens as potential criminals.
The Panopticon is not the answer, for ludicrously simple reasons that any half-educated person should be able to ascertain.
In NL they replaced a perfectly good system for train tickets based on paper with an electronic one that is failure prone but allows the operators to track the movements of half the population.
It's fascinating to me the power of the spirit of an age. Lord of the Rings was in all its explicit elements a novel pining for agrarian feudalism. Yet in spite of this it could not help but be progressive. Were it written in the climate of today's never ending 70s tape loop, the moral would be that Frodo should never have left The Shire to begin with.
He's using it as a tool to think about the implications of space colonies - with the major point being that he believes that space colonies must implement some level of high fidelity individual tracking and monitoring for security purposes / that people would likely accept that loss of privacy for various reasons.
To a certain extent. Did you see patio11's recent article talking about how his bank manager knew when he was dating and considered this part of his job, his landlord kicked him out when he quit his job, your company will arrange housing and marriage interviews for you?
They weren't. In the last 50 years, there have been no new power sources. We're still mostly on oil, coal, natural gas, and hydropower. Even solar cells and atomic power are now more than 50 years old. The existing technologies have improved, but there are no new ones.
That's why we don't have heated streets for snow melting, as seen in Disney's "The Magic Highway" (1958). We don't have much space travel because chemical rockets hit the power limits of chemistry around 45 years ago.
If controlled fusion is ever cracked, and it's not too expensive, we may see some of the older futuristic ideas back.