Jim Baen's Universe

What's New in The Future And You

Columns

October 2007

Written by Stephen Euin Cobb

Senator (and presidential candidate) John McCain is joined by Jack McDevitt, Eric Flint, Randal L. Schwartz, Stoney Compton, Alethea Kontis (an editor at Solaris Books and buyer for Ingram), Doctor Aubrey de Grey (a gerontologist promoting medical life extension), Uncle Timmy (founder and chairman of the SF&F convention LibertyCon) and Walt (Bananaslug) Boyes for the September and October 2007 episodes of The Future And You.

The Future And You is an award-winning audio podcast about the future which may be downloaded and enjoyed, or even copied and shared, for free. Every episode contains numerous interviews which reveal a wide variety of ideas and opinion about the future from a wide variety of people.

And as always, each episode of The Future And You contains an installment in our serialization of the hard SF novel, Bones Burnt Black; and features ten minutes of Walt Boyes (The Bananaslug) & Stoney Compton as they do their bit to let the world at large know what's in the current issue of Jim Baen's Universe Magazine.

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Topics in the October episode

Senator (and presidential candidate) John McCain manages to first pleasantly surprise and then thoroughly scare your host with his answers to your humble host’s questions.  Not questions about the war, mind you, but about federal funding of scientific research.

The senator describes his support of embryonic stem cell research, and specifies that this support is not given lightly.  He understands that the issue has split the pro-life community—a community in which the senator includes himself.  “I have prayed a lot about it,” he says, and explains that his support it not just in general terms; he’s in favor of it receiving federal funding.  He also voices support for continued federal funding of nanotechnology research.

But it’s when asked whether he favors the manned mission side of NASA or the robotic probe side that Senator John McCain says something all who favor space research need to hear.  “I think those decisions have been delayed for a long time.  We need more congressional hearings on them.  And we should understand that it’s going to be difficult, if not impossible, to fund both.  And our problem in NASA for a long time has been a failure to set priorities, and trying to fund everything.  As president, I will make those decisions and set those priorities.”  

If I understand the senator correctly, he intends to close down many of NASA’s divisions and projects, and lay off many of its scientists and engineers—a scary thought for all those who believe humanity’s vast future can not be squeezed into one claustrophobic little planet of questionable climatic stability. 

Eric Flint is highly skeptical of both nanotechnology and The Singularity; “Hooey,” he calls them both. The late Jim Baen, he recalls, also thought nanotechnology was nonsense and yet, though it seems contradictory, was a big fan of The Singularity. (Eric laughs as he explains that “the word contradictory was made for Jim Baen.”)

While Eric Flint is optimistic about the future in general, he laments what he sees as a slowing in the rate of scientific advancement during the last half century. Instead of advancement, he says, “what we get today is endless refinements of existing technology.” There was a time when we saw a parade of things that never existed before: the phonograph, the automobile, radio, TV, scuba gear, airplanes, rockets, calculators, computers; now we just keep improving the old stuff. His theory is that our modern economy is currently dominated by a small number of giant corporations; and radical scientific advancement would upset their applecart.

Eric also admits his reaction to cryonics is a bit hostile, but explains why he feels this way.

Jack McDevitt says he is not as optimistic about the future as he used to be and provides many concrete examples from his own experiences. For example, he laments that our government has stopped looking for asteroids which threaten to hit the earth—a project which would cost little and yet might easily save millions of lives. He also worries that “too many people think patriotism means following the President, no matter what.” He feels the Singularity is a real danger for our future. And on a philosophical note; he explains one of the secret little hypocrisies which we all share: “We say we want the schools to make our kids smart,” but what we really want is for them to “make our kids think like us.”

Doctor Aubrey de Grey is a gerontologist promoting medical life extension. He speaks of extending human lives, as well as nanotechnology, AI (artificial intelligence) and The Singularity. He believes that significant medical life extension can be achieved within a few decades without requiring nanotechnology, but that extending life expectancies indefinitely will require we develop a robust nanotechnology.

Having worked for a while in what’s known as “Weak AI,” he describes with some familiarity, but not a lot of confidence in its eventual success, an ongoing project which is attempting to produce something called “Friendly AI” (Strong AI which has been specifically engineered to be incapable of harming humans—apparently reminiscent of Asimov’s three laws of robotics.) He mentions that he sees no need, either practical or ethical, for Strong AI (AI with recursive self-improvement).

In nanotechnology, Doctor de Grey points out that molecular manufacturing (sometimes envisioned as smart dust or a magic box or even the infamous gray goo) can only be achieved with recursive self-replication, which we will almost surely not develop for many decades. Fortunately, biomedical uses of nanotech during the next decade or two will not require recursive self replication, and will yield many astounding benefits.

He worries that unanticipated technological innovations will periodically become widely available without our having the time needed to think about their ramifications, and that this will cause terrible instability within our civilization.

Predicting the approach of the Singularity, he feels, is far less certain than predicting the coming developments in medical longevity.

Alethea Kontis is a fantasy editor for Solaris Books in the UK and a buyer for Ingram as well as a writer of short fiction. Within fiction, she sees a lot of blending of the genres, and describes a variety of cross fertilizations. Horror, for example, seems to be working its way into every genre; along with SF&F going into mainstream and vise versa. She also sees many writers worrying about being pigeonholed. “Everyone wants to be in the literary or mainstream rather than any one genre.”

She feels that the SF&F short story market is moving more strongly online with several professional level magazines becoming increasingly popular. And people who read online tend to gravitate to the shorter of the short stories, she says. Thus, even though electrons are cheap, this is putting pressure on the magazines and writers to provide readers with stories that are shorter and more tightly written.

Outside of writing, Alethea has noticed that her friends, like herself, rarely watch TV anymore. Instead, they watch DVDs or download shows off the internet. Her worry is that this will limit the creation of quality TV shows since the advertising money has even now started to dry up.

As always, each episode of The Future And You contains another installment in our serialization of the Hard SF novel, Bones Burnt Black; and features ten minutes of Walt Boyes (The Bananaslug) & Stoney Compton as they do their bit to let the world at large know what's in the current issue of Jim Baen's Universe Magazine.

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Topics in the September episode

Jack McDevitt, author of the Nebula Award winning novel Seeker, as well as thirteen other novels, has made a career out of imagining our future. Here he describes what he anticipates and wishes for our future, as well as what he fears.

Doctor Aubrey de Grey explains that if you can cause a mouse to live an unnaturally long life you can win a huge cash prize. Inspired by the now famous space-commercializing "X-Prize," The Methuselah Mouse Prize is just as real but is designed to popularize and promote innovative medical research in Life Extension. Doctor de Grey of the Methuselah Foundation—who is both a gerontologist and a transhumanist—speaks of this and other aspects of medical life extension.

Randal L. Schwartz: What would you do if you were unjustly arrested on felony charges as a computer hacker? Randal L. Schwartz knows what he would do since this actually happened to him.

Uncle Timmy: In his twenty years of running a science fiction convention, Uncle Timmy (the founder and chairman of LibertyCon) has spent quality time with some of speculative fiction's greatest visionaries. In this candid interview Uncle Timmy reveals memories and anecdotes from behind those many scenes.

And as always, each episode of The Future And You contains another installment in our serialization of the Hard SF novel, Bones Burnt Black; and features ten minutes of Walt Boyes (The Bananaslug) & Stoney Compton as they let the world know what's in the current issue of Jim Baen's Universe Magazine.

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News Items in the September and October issues

Dragon*Con

Peggy Gregory (my photographer/assistant/sister) and I attended Dragon*Con in Atlanta over the Labor Day Weekend. We were accompanied by my girlfriend Veronica and her daughter Whitney who turned eighteen during the trip.

While there I spoke on panels, did a book signing, got some nice interviews for my show, renewed old friendships, made a few new friendships, chatted with Eric Estrada, and embarrassed myself by greeting Jody Lynn Nye’s husband Bill Fawcett with a hardy, “Hi, Bob.”

Despite the flub, my little group and I had a nice time. We enjoyed the art show, dealer room and walk of fame; we joined the audience for a taping of an episode of “The Radio Adventures of Doctor Floyd” and saw hundreds of people in wonderfully handmade costumes, including countless scantily clad women in bikini armor, cheerleading outfits and belly dancing regalia.

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Your host is now a Contributing Editor

As many of you know, for almost a year now I've been a columnist for Jim Baen's Universe Magazine. I've found this both enjoyable and fulfilling.

I am pleased to announce that a few weeks ago (on August 18, 2007) my name was added to the staff page on the Jim Baen's Universe Magazine website and I was promoted to "Contributing Editor."

I'm proud to see my name included with the rest of the magazine's staff. Not just because it provides me with a nifty new brag, but because it makes me feel more a part of the JBU team.

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Email from Listeners

I receive many emails from listeners each month. Sometimes the listeners just want to tell me they enjoy the show, but sometimes they have ideas, opinions, theories or facts that they wish to contribute. Here are some recent emails.

Randal L. Schwartz (who has appeared in several episodes) wrote:

-QUOTE-

After listening to my bit about the singularity, I realize that I have a better model now, and actually some concession to your point of view.

Science processes are roughly:

() Theorize based on existing knowledge

() Synthesize a new experiment to expand the knowledge

() Perform the experiment

() Observe its results

() Analyze the results for conformance/deviance with existing knowledge

() Repeat

Of these, having ultra cheap thinking can help all but the "perform the experiment". However, "perform the experiment" is what I called the "gating factor" since without ultracheap resources, would require a prioritization of resources from other human activities.

For example, in gene research, although we have huge amounts of data that having cheap thinking about that data might help with theorize and synthesize, it won't help with performing the experiment... we still have to create a critter, let it grow up, and then see if our gene splicing worked as we predicted.

But there is a place where cheap thinking can help narrow the experimentation: protein folding. "Folding-at-home" is a demonstration that the bottleneck for that is computing, not experiments.

And I'm sure there are a few others; but unfortunately, not many. :)

-UNQUOTE-

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Barry Hayworth is a professional statistician in Brisbane, Australia. He wrote a very long email describing the trends he sees. Here is a long contiguous segment from his email:

-QUOTE-

For many years I worked with a commercial market research company, these days I work for a government statistical agency in the state of Queensland, which performs survey research to inform social policy. My professional life has a lot to do with how to draw good and representative samples of people and businesses for surveys. This mostly means telephone surveying, creating lists of phone numbers at random to target the people we want. For the last twenty years or so this has been the mainstay of the Market Research industry, being quick, easy and accurate - almost everyone has a telephone, electronic telephone directories have been readily available to draw samples from, and computer systems were available to allow results to be entered directly into the computer by the telephone interviewer.

However, the golden age of telephone surveys is coming to an end. Several trends are conspiring to make this more difficult. First, there is the technology. The stereotypical house, with one phone connected by landline, is starting to decline. As more and more people have mobile phones, households which have only mobile phones and no landline are starting to become more common. These sorts of households are hard to survey, as random phone samples are generally generated only for landlines (here in Australia landlines and mobile numbers use different prefixes, so there is no confusion between the two - I believe that the US is different in that regard). To make life harder, mobile phones are much less likely to be listed in the phone book - a landline will be listed by default, but a mobile won't be. Even if we did generate a random list of mobile numbers we would have no idea where they were located. This makes life hard if we're trying to survey people in a particular city, or even a state. This is a worry, because mobile-only households tend to be younger people or those who have moved recently, and leaving them out has the danger to bias our surveys towards people who are older and more conservative.

Another rather worrying trend for the survey industry is the difficulty in getting directory listings. For many years (starting in the late 80s) it was possible to buy a CD ROM with the full contents of the Australian white pages directory, which could be exported and manipulated at will - simple, cheap and up-to-date. Because Australia is a relatively small country, the whole directory would fit on a single CD. These CDs did not come from the official government telecom Telstra, but from small startup companies which had the directories scanned or data entered, then prepared the CDs. Even when we didn't draw a sample directly from phone book, these listings were invaluable for working out what phone number ranges were in use – in Australia (and I assume elsewhere) there are vastly more phone number allocated to the different telcos than are actually in use.

The problem is that Telstra (now partially privatized and flexing its commercial muscles) has recently put a stop to this. Through a series of court cases, they managed to convince the courts that they hold copyright over the telephone directory, and that organizations which repackaged it on CD ROM were in violation of this copyright. Oddly it was the copyright argument which was used, rather than (say) privacy (as the CD ROM directories allowed reverse searching of phone numbers). The result of this, for the likes of us, is that we need to find some other comprehensive source of phone numbers for our surveys, or risk results that don't properly represent the people we are trying to measure. We're looking into a few possibilities, but so far haven't come up with anything.

A third problem for surveys is competition from telemarketers. Very few people enjoy being telemarketed, the problem for the likes of us is that the prevalence of telemarketers has eroded people's goodwill towards unexpected phone calls - they are much more likely to hang up before we get a chance to say what we are doing (what we call a "Phone Slam"). Recently, a national Do Not Call Register has been set up such that it is illegal for a telemarketer to call someone on the register. This has been well received - to date, there are 1.5 million numbers on the list, which isn't bad for a population of 20 million. Whether we'll see response rates increase is another matter, though.

Anyway, thanks again for the podcast - I've been really enjoying it.

Barry Haworth.

-UNQUOTE-

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Learn More

You can learn more about The Future And You here, or here or even here.

Or learn more about its host here or here.

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