Meme Therapy

 Rosie: Apologies for the erratic blogging at the moment but Jose’s in Spain and I’m buried under a mountain of reading for my course, as well as working on a lot of really exciting statistics concerning non tariff barriers and tariff equivalents in China for an EU trade delegation in about two weeks time (I think this probably makes me a capitalist running dog). This week we asked:

What ethical dilemmas posed by future technology or social changes would you like to see explored more thoroughly in contemporary Science Fiction?

Jose: My biggest concern for the future is how we´re going to manage existential risks that are sophisticated subtle and may creep up on us quite quickly. We´ve still not responded properly as a civilization to Global Warming and we´ve had over two decades worth of warming. I doubt that Global Warming will be the last big crisis we face. I suspect that a series of existential crises are the unfortunate side effect of a massive civilization that develops progressively more advanced technology. I´m not sure which the next crises might be (we might go retro and start having to worry about nukes again) but it will be related to our technology and probably quite complicated. Our capitalist democracies don´t seem to respond to such crises, can they adapt or are we doomed to depend on 11th hour efforts.

Paolo Bacigalupi:

Frankly, I’m not very interested in the ethical dilemmas of future technology. I’m interested in the dilemmas inherent in our present-day technologies.

I’m interested in how we’re going to deliver technologies that the developed world takes for granted like electricity and heat and air-con to a growing India and China and still resolve global warming issues at the same time.

I’m interested in the conundrum of scale. A single person can do whatever they like, build whatever they like, consume whatever they like, and they don’t owe an apology to anyone for doing it. 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 billion people all doing the same? Who gets the toys and who doesn’t?

I’m interested in the ethical dilemmas inherent in upgrading to a new bit of technological wizardry. I’m interested in our so-called information society — with its deep dependence on electricity generated by coal. I’m interested in our iPods and laptops and servers that are made out of plastics and heavy metals. I’m interested in the tributary communities of the supply chains that manufacture our digital lifestyle accoutrements and that bathe in levels of pollution that we would never accept within our own borders.

What is the ethical stance for owning a laptop or an iPod? Man, that’s an ethical question about technology I’d like to see explored. An Intel plant in New Mexico consumes vast amounts of water. What happens as New Mexico’s drought deepens? Is the chip-maker that serves a global demand for faster processors more important than the community that depends on that same water source for drinking? Who gets the water? Who wins and who loses in that scenario? That’s an interesting ethical dilemma.

We’re rooted in the resources of our localities in so many ways, and sf seems to love to forget that. I’m interested in any sf that spends some time grounding itself in today, rather than pretending that tomorrow’s dilemmas are the ones to worry about.

Paolo Bacigalupi’s writing has appeared in High Country News, Salon.com, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine.

Martyn Amos:

What makes scientists fake their results, and what happens if it’s never detected? (Could make for an interesting historical “time fork” novel!)

Dr Martyn Amos is a Senior Lecturer in Computing and Mathematics at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK.

Mara Hvistendahl:

The rise of technonationalism should make differing cultural attitudes toward certain areas of research increasingly important. Genetic engineering is the obvious one here. It would be interesting to see a cloning drama that plays out along national lines, taking into account, say, South Korea’s determination to become the world leader in the area. Demographic change is another fertile area. The growing gender imbalance in Asia, the explosion of megacities in the developing world, the aging population in the West and China (which will be the first country to age before it becomes rich) – these trends will surely have a significant influence on science and technology.

Mara Hvistendahl is a Shanghai-based freelance writer and China correspondent for Seed

Hannah M. G. Shapero

One thing which I have been speculating about comes from my own experience with Internet and its cooption by the consumer society. There is much talk in science fiction especially “cyberpunk” about connecting human brains directly to computer networks and a super-Internet type of world-mind. But from what I know, this world-mind, just like the current

internet, will be taken over by spammers and intrusive commercial interests, who will not hesitate to beam spams and even more coercive, or pornographic, messages directly into the brains of those who are connected to the SuperNet. Spammers always manage to evade filters and other anti-spam measures, so I don’t see it stopping when the Net becomes part of the human central nervous system.

Many authors delight in the thought of the “Singularity” or the “Unity” when humanity is brought together in peace and harmony by some technological marvel. To me that would be dangerous and perhaps a disaster. Connecting everyone would make the commonality vulnerable to cybernetic viruses, and to other as-yet-unforeseen sinister collective forces

which might arise in a cyber-unified civilization. William Gibson has written about this in some of his books.

I also am interested in the idea of cybernetic viruses joining up with actual biological viruses, perhaps through genetic re-programming inside a humanoid being that is infected with a cyber-biological virus. What if it were possible for a plague to arise not from biological sources but from human-interfaced “wetware?”

I tend to see things in a dystopic rather than an optimistic way, unfortunately; for every Singularity there is also a black hole.

Hannah M.G. Shapero (A.K.A. Pyracantha) is an artist and illustrator with many a sci-fi book cover to here name.

Carolyne Hill

The question implies a lack of thoroughness in contemporary science fiction, but I’m not going to bite. [aww, no fair -ed] I’ll speak of what interests me, without implying that dilemmas aren’t being explored sufficiently.

For me, ethical dilemmas involve balancing the needs and desires of various individuals or groups. And almost anything can cause a dilemma. But recent social trends that create dilemmas for me as a citizen of the United States are the povertizing of the U.S. middle class, the increasing belligerence of the United States on the global stage, and the widening class gap between the rich and the rest of us living on Earth. How can we respond—not just ethically, but effectively—to decrease poverty, violence, and class inequity?

I’m also interested in plague: how to (or whether to) prevent or manage an outbreak, how to distribute resources, how to handle the economic and social consequences, and how the survivors deal with the traumatic aftereffects. Questions about the overuse of antibiotics, the potential risks of nanotechnological plague weighed against the benefits of biological nanotech, the role of viruses and massive die-off in evolution, concerns about human overpopulation . . . how do we weigh all these factors to make ethical decisions when we don’t have all the data?

And speaking of data: the inundation of data or the lack of data in daily life also creates dilemmas that concern me. Having accurate facts and information helps a person make informed decisions, but the media stream—both the corporate media and the people’s media such as YouTube and wikis—have become increasingly data-clogged and overwhelming, making it difficult for an individual to distinguish between the accurate and the inaccurate (however we choose to define those terms). But being confined to a backwater apart from the full media stream seems equally deleterious: people who lack money or time to spend on pursuing the data, or who live in undeveloped areas without access to the Internet, or whose access is limited by censors or other filters—are equally at a disadvantage. How do we ethically balance the needs of people, governments, and the data’s own “need” to be free? And how do we deal with the media stream’s comcomitant quickening of experience, shortening of attention span, and preference for multitasking versus intent and lingering focus: all this may help people learn to make decisions quickly, but are those decisions ethical? Do teachers have a role to play in all this? As a teacher, I wonder. Where do my desires to pontificate against oppression or in favor of ethics begin to oppress my students?

Not surprisingly, many of these ethical dilemmas find their way into my own novels, and I enjoy seeing the same dilemmas explored in the works of others.

Carolyn Hill is a science fiction novelist who teaches writing and public speaking at the University of California, Berkeley where she received her doctorate.

 This is a bit unusual but I’m actually doing a normal blog post today. Please bear with me, this feels a bit strange. I’m reacting in large part to a ball that’s being kicked around today, largely by Lou Anders who is Getting Medieval on Reality’s Ass (and just to show you how incestous the SF blogosphere is that post title is an excerpt of something Paul McCauley said in one of our Brain Parades. In the second parter he poses the question (again originaly raised by someone else in this case Paul Cornell)

“Where is our Casablanca? That is, an extremely populist work of extremely high quality.”

There’s a simple answer to that of course Star Trek and Star Wars. Both of which are now dead franchises but which served as excellent points into the genre for many people for decades. I imagine a lot of people might scoff at that, after all Star Wars it might be argued isnt’ really Science Fiction (which I disagree with but that’s beside the point). There’s been a lot of concern about the relative decline of Science Fiction book sales in the face of the genre’s rising popular appeal in other media. There’s headscratching over this seeming incongruity. If Science Fiction is dominating film, television and computer games shouldn’t it be rising in popularity in the dead tree format?

No, I suspect the opposite may very well be true.

I’ve got a funny corollary I want to bring up here and that is paper and pencil role playing games vs. computer role playing games. Back in the early to mid 90s I was a roleplaying game publisher. I remember getting into a debate back in a designer emailing list back then arguing the position that computer roleplaying games could never replace paper and pencil roleplaying games, the social element was missing for starters as much of the opportunity for improvisation, etc. The two really were apples and oranges in my view, the oranges would never replace the apples because they were in essence fundamentally different. In fact the popularity of the computer based roleplaying games might bring more people into the paper and pencil market.

I now realize I was dead wrong. World of Warcraft doesn’t let you do all the things that you can do in a paper and pencil roleplaying session but it fulfills a lot of the functions that most people want out of a roleplaying experience most of the time. And while there might be people who drift from World of Warcraft to playing Dungeons and Dragons there are certainly are many more people drifting in the opposite direction. There will always be paper and pencil roleplaying die hards, we even have people playing Dungeon and Dragons in Second Life now but we’ve clearly entered an era when roleplaying games are primarily about computers.

We all have a limited amount of time and money to spend on entertainment. If people are watching spending more and more time watching Science Fiction television and playing Science Fiction computer games they may be doing so at the expense of reading a Science Fiction novel.

We may just have to resign ourselves to the fact that Science Fiction is now primarily about visual media and that such popularity won’t necessarily translate and possibly work against its popularity in dead tree media. That doesn’t mean that Science Fiction books are on the way out or even in trouble but it’s a mistake to think that the hot market in oranges is a good thing for the sale of apples.

What ethical dilemmas posed by future technology or social changes would you like to see explored more thoroughly in contemporary Science Fiction?

I’ve got a lot of things I want to say on this one (so its a good thing it’s a two parter). And its especially apt since I just watched the first two episodes of Battlestar Galactica’s 3rd season. That’s one show that isn’t afraid to tackle contemporary political issues and put them on their head in a SFnal setting. Quite gutsy stuff for American Science Fiction television which in my opinion has been been extraordinarily timid for the past 30 years. However I’m digressing, that isn’t really what this Brain Parade is about.

One thing I’d like to see explored is the question of what happens to a democracy when its population splinters into various consensual realities and the role technology might play in that splintering. We’re already starting to see that now to a certain extent with self selecting media. There may have even been an Orwellian attempt to define Mark Foley (for the benefit of our non US readers he’s an American politician in mucho caca) as a Democrat.

How long before people can use technological tools to create their own sense of community with its own take on reality entirely? And what happens to a democracy when it has a population that may inhabit the same geography but which resides in seperate but parallel fantasy worlds? Methinks it’s a recipe for disaster but perhaps with a bit of ingenuity it might just work out in a weird sort of way. Wether its a good idea or not is besides the point because I think it’s a direction we’re already accelerating towards.

Joe Miller:

I think SF is doing a good job of extrapolating the trends most likely to result in ethical dilemmas and social changes. I’d like

to see more serious consideration of the tension between the demands of individual liberty and the necessity of combating terrorism. These are hard issues. I have suggested that one solution to Fermi’s famous paradox is that most civilizations simply do not survive a technology which puts weapons of mass destruction in the hands of individual lunatics. Vinge’s Rainbows End is a good meditation on this point. Another thing I would like to see in SF is better characterization of what scientists actually do and have to undergo in order to actually pursue a scientific career. We have a few people like Benford and Bear who appreciate this but a true “fiction of science” is still largely lacking.

Dr. Joseph Miller is Director of Pharmacology and Associate Professor of Research, Department of Cell and Neurobiology, at the Keck School of Medicine at USC.

James Bow:

The issue of cloning is coming closer to us every day, and this is going to raise questions over the nature of identity and whether or not humans have souls..

Already in children’s literature we have Lesley Choyce’s “Deconstructing Dylan” and Jenny Nimmo’s “Milo’s Wolves” which tell the story of a young clone struggling to find his identity. These are the first stabs that I’ve seen in response to Dolly the sheep and the general sense that human cloning is just around the corner.

James Bow is a writer, journalist and web designer.

Tony Ballantyne:

Ethical dilemmas? Maybe it’s my background, but I wonder about children. How are they different from adults and what rights and responsibilities do they really have? How far do they have a right to education and how far will we enforce this, particularly in troubled areas of the world? But supposing we do guarantee education for all; do people then have the right to be ignorant? Do we insist that they learn for example science, religion, arts, physical fitness, or do we allow them to pick and choose?

Tony Ballantyne is a British SF author

Mark Stachiew:

When it comes to ethical dilemmas posed by future technology, I think that science fiction writers have left few stones unturned. There aren’t many topics that haven’t already been explored ad nauseum. Genre writers have been exploring ethical debates for a long time. The only difference is that the future they imagined has arrived and we have to face the dilemmas they wrote about.

For example, I’m interested in stories about the conflict between human and machine intelligences. Karel Kopek wrote about the subject way back in the 20s in RUR. It was one of Isaac Asimov’s favourite subjects and it continues to fascinate readers and writers today, possibly more so now because the possibility of fiction becoming fact seems more possible than ever.

The ethics of cloning and gene therapy are also interesting. Can we breed subhumans to use for cheap labour or replacement body parts? Again, the idea is hardly knew. Aldous Huxley wrote about it in Brave New World, but it seems like the brave new world is almost here.

Mark Stachiew is a long-time science fiction fan who collects obscure science fiction tidbits for his blog, The Website at the End of the Universe.

Daryl Gregory:

The ethical dilemmas I’m interested in aren’t in the future, and come straight from my experience as a white, male, straight, American hypocrite. How do I reconcile spending so much money on my own kids (saxophone lessons, soccer shoes, Magic the Gathering cards) when children in the third-world (or down the street) go hungry? Why am I sitting here sipping this incredibly expensive beer (Arrogant Bastard Ale from San Diego, made more delicious by irony) while there are Habitat for Humanity houses to build? Shouldn’t I quit my job to spend full time opposing a government that defends using torture and won’t allow gay people to marry? If the system is corrupt, shouldn’t I run for office?

Science fiction doesn’t often show real people struggling with these issues, but some of the best fiction in the genre — like Geoff Ryman’s Air: Have Not Have — prove that it can be done, and beautifully.

Daryl Gregory writes Science Fiction