Over at Terranova, Nathan Combs recently pointed to a Popular Science article suggesting that very few science fiction writers are brave enough to write about the near future:
Only a small cadre of technoprophets is attempting to extrapolate current trends and imagine what our world might look like in the next few decades. “We’re staring into a fogbank,” Stross says, “and we literally do not know where we’re going, only that we’re going there very fast.”
The Singularity — “the moment when the world is as different from today's world as this one is from the Stone Age,” as the article puts it – is approaching, and it's foreshadowed in stupendous advances in knowledge of the brain, biology, networks, and genetics. All of these things interconnect, and if you're feeling enthusiastic about all this you can lose the attention of your readers very quickly.
But stay with me, just for one more summer evening.
How close are we to a posthuman (or more-than-human) era, in which most people recognize that the line between “living” and “inanimate” objects is no longer real? Can we envision what's possible once minds can be uploaded and shared? What will social life be like when “living online” becomes real — and not just a turn of phrase?
Combs and the Terranova commentators look at these questions in light of the possibilities of virtual worlds, and whether they should be “games” (with heroic possibilities) or “simulations” (that are accessible to our current social physics minds). The policy treatment of posthuman life is even more interesting. Virtual worlds allow us to simulate these problems, and that's why State of Play II is essential.
But the imagination of writers (and law professors!) doesn't depend on what's viable in virtual worlds. How's your imagination doing? What will your world be like in twenty years? What will “unlawful surveillance” mean then? Will you know people differently? Will you feel allegiance to an online guild? Will you ever be alone? Will you be wiser? Will you live forever?
And what if the machine stops?