Comments on: History of the Future, Spring 2006

By: Chris Segal

Chris Segal — Fri, 03 Feb 2006 17:05:43 +0000

Tim-

I keep forgetting to check your blog, and I should really swing by Swarthmore some time to say hi, but I just wanted to repeat again what a great class this is, and what an amazing introduction to Swarthmore it was in the fall of 2001.

Also, I thought I should remind you that you *still* owe us ’05ers a showing of Star Trek. Don’t disappoint this semester!

Also, hi Ben.

By: Arisian

Arisian — Thu, 02 Feb 2006 21:31:00 +0000

As one of the lucky few who was in this class the last time around, I wanted to say (again) that I absolutely loved it. If you’re still looking for readings, I mannaged to get my hands on the entire Galactic Patrol series by E.E. “Doc” Smith recently. I’d previously read a few of them as ancient, disintigrating paperbacks in Cordwainer, but I’ve been reminded of just how fascinating they are, both as an example of futurism, and also as the work that lead to practically every spaceship-based SF TV show and movie made in the last 30 years. It’s fascinating comparing some of the old Tom Swift books (which I read a great many of in my youth) to Smith’s works; they were written about the same period, and have a similar feel to their narratives, but the Smith books have a scope that makes Appleton’s books seem tiny and unimportant. I have no idea whether or not you could get your hands on copies of the Smith books, but if you can, “Galactic Patrol” would be a fun addition to the sylabus. It’s a pretty quick read, and a lot of fun. For anyone who hasn’t read these books (and can get their hands on them), the entire series is highly entertaining as well as historically fascinating for anyone who likes reading FTL science fiction. If you want more information on them, there’s some on my website: http://arisia.no-ip.org/arisia.html

By: Neel Krishnaswami

Neel Krishnaswami — Sat, 21 Jan 2006 22:24:50 +0000

Yow, I just took a look at Lanier and he’s using a line of argument I know to be completely wrong. He’s deploying a really ancient trope of the writing about software called “the software crisis”. Whenever you see someone deploy it, you know there’s going to be an argument of roughly the following form:

“Programmers are pushing conventional techniques to their limits to produce barely-working systems consisting of N lines of code. There are many problems that will become critical in the near term, which will require programs of size 10*N lines of code. Ergo, we face a crisis in the field of software — in the very near future we won’t be able to solve the problems that need solving. Our only hope is to adopt this bundle X of techniques I advocate, which will save the day.”

The trouble with this argument is that it has persisted, unchanged, for the past forty years, since the mid-1960s. The only thing that changes are the techniques X, and the number N, which keeps growing as the impossible limit keeps getting passed. What really happens is that we have an infinite menu of problems that need solving, and as soon as a new technique is invented, it gets used to increase the complexity of the problems we can solve, right up to the limits of what the new technique can manage. So no matter what techniques we have available, it always looks like our techniques are about to collapse under their own weight.

I have no doubt that in a hundred years, the super-AIs beloved of Ray Kurzweil and Hans Moravec will be complaining about how software is doomed because they can’t write programs of a trillion lines of code.

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Sun, 15 Jan 2006 17:17:10 +0000

Thanks for that, Simon. In a way the whole class instructs them that the idea is overblown: for anyone who wants to take futurists too seriously, this class should be a huge splash of cold water in the face. What I find interesting about the “singularity”, however, is that it’s spurred a whole new swarm of whiggishly optimistic futurism after the postmodern burn-out of the kind of expert futurism that pops up in the Bell anthology. I’ll add the Lanier to the list of writings that the second paper can focus on, thanks.

By: Simon Shoedecker

Simon Shoedecker — Sun, 15 Jan 2006 06:38:16 +0000

I hope, if you're going to direct your students towards the theory of the "singularity," that you will also point them in the direction of "One Half of a Manifesto" by Jaron Lanier, an argument that the likelihood of such an event is vastly overblown, and held with a form of religious faith that ignores reality.

By: Laura

Laura — Sat, 14 Jan 2006 01:43:20 +0000

I wanna take this class. Looks really cool.

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Fri, 13 Jan 2006 22:41:37 +0000

I talk about Kern some in the introductory lecture and it’s one of the books that can be picked for the second paper assignment. My feeling was that the book might be a bit of a challenge in terms of the referential terrain that he traverses–this class is for first-year students. I may take the Jameson off for the same reason. The first time I taught the class, I was really pleased that the argument for a changing experience of temporality and the emergence of a very particular concept of the future came rather naturally out of the primary materials rather than as an interpretation forced on the students “from above”.

By: Dan

Dan — Fri, 13 Jan 2006 19:25:58 +0000

This is a great class. Really great. The kind of class I wish I’d done.

Why not Kern’s Culture of Time and Space? Or do you want to focus on primary sources for more recent (well, compared to Medieval Europe) sources.

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Fri, 13 Jan 2006 02:57:36 +0000

Thanks, I’d seen it a while back, but hadn’t thought of it (oddly) in the context of the course. The students do write a paper where I give each of them a futurist work of some kind that they have to fit within this intellectual history; I have Gibson’s Neuromancer on the list. In some ways this would be a more clever choice.

By: Chris Clarke

Chris Clarke — Fri, 13 Jan 2006 01:53:13 +0000

Ah, I see that page is formatted oddly, and the story “Fragments of a Hologram Rose” is tacked on at the end, the title added as if it were the continuation of the last paragraph of The Gernsback Continuum.