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.
