Future Awe

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

Let’s talk technology.

I’m generally technology optimistic, but the problem about tech is that pessimistic or optimistic, there’s so much we don’t and can’t know about how it will affect us/the future/what comes.

Take for instance the vast hand wringing and cringing that took place all over science fiction, after WWII and the atomic bomb. We were going to turn the planet into a wasteland. The consequences would be everything boiling/freezing to death. It was the end of the world as we knew it, and no one felt fine.

Granted, most of these writers were activists, pushing the blithering point of unilateral disarmament because they thought they were better red than dead and couldn’t understand why everyone didn’t agree. (Lack of fortitude is apparently one of those things that impairs your empathy.)

Now, in a way science fiction is supposed to be a way to think through the possible consequences of technology.

Okay, no, I’m not as delusional as the Social Justice Warriors. I don’t think that science fiction is some form of social work. Science fiction is first and foremost about stories and fun.

But—

But as far as it as a separate genre has a function for the reading public at large it is to train us to think through the consequences of the introduction of a new tech. This will only be frontlined in hard sf, but it’s there in all sf. It might be in the background, about how environment-cleaning bacteria ate the world, or about how making artificial humans who are better than humans and raising them as slaves is a bad idea, but it will be there. Even if the story is about one of those humans learning to play the violin. (Looks surprised. Oh, I didn’t tell you I was working on that?)

But there are other built in assumptions and extrapolating of current trends, and while, in aggregate 90% of these will be incomplete and the rest plain wrong, there’s a chance that putting it all together you can get a good picture of what the future brings. Which is why so many people who read (used to read, maybe again) golden age SF were prepared to examine the future when it came at them fast and confusing, and therefore rose to various tops of several professions.

Then something went wrong and those people who’d rather be red than dead took over, and the field devolved into a bunch of people getting in the feeble position [intentional. I found it on a list of malapropisms and think it’s appropriate here] and screaming over and over how every new tech/advance was going to kill us all/destroy everything good in us, and it’s all the fault of western society/capitalism.

I’m not saying this is universal, mind you. There are of course, still some good stories out there. But the field as a whole has fallen off a cliff, which is too bad. It’s too bad because it leads to my running into people who tell me “I used to read science fiction, but then it got boring.”

Which means (other than “they’re right”) that we aren’t thinking through the consequences of this future which is not quite like any future that was predicted. We’re not imagining all the ripples that that rock, dropped in the pond, will have, down to the furthest edges.

Take something simple – Ah! – like personal computers and the internet. How much difference can it make? Think of your life 20 years ago. Think of everything you use the net for now, from finding a phone number to this humble blog, to the community that has developed around it. See the difference? Our favorite ritual in a new city (get lost, then find your back, several times) is gone, as is trying to figure out where to buy this or that while in a town for a weekend for a con. Thank heavens for GPS. And there’s of course making dead tree books pretty close to obsolete.

And it’s just started. I’m not the only one who works mostly from home. A lot of professions are moving that way, slowed only by the inevitable inertia that’s part of human habit and custom.

So, suppose many people (if not most) work remote – how will that affect society?

Just off the top of my head, people will move where real estate is cheapest, causing massive economic dislocation. People will also be more free to change jobs because you can get a job ANYWHERE and it doesn’t involve moving. Job competition just went global.

Then there are office buildings. What happens to those? Will they be left to rot? Turned into some kind of custom community? Both?

As someone who works mostly from home and has for almost twenty years, there are other things. For instance I tend to live in walking neighborhoods because it’s the only way I see people, and I do need to see people.

What effect will a change to many people telecommuting do to the social mores and customs?

If you think through it, just that, has a never-end of options to explore.

Of course if your default position is “all this is bad, and I’m going to sit in the corner rocking and crying and lamenting how tech has destroyed the world” you’re not contributing a lot that’s useful to the discourse.

Thank heavens there’s indies for that.

The future might (ah!) or might not be queer (and brief) but it is certainly infinite and incalculable. Let your mind run free and play in it.

230 thoughts on “Future Awe”

  1. From your mouth to my Husband’s bosses’ ears! He can work remote effectively,. It makes for a cheaper contract, and he’s home, Home, HOME!!
    tl;dr: I wish he could work from home.

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    1. The biggest barrier to working at home is that without a worker sitting in front of him most bosses do not believe he will work – are at a loss how to actually evaluate his work outside whether they ‘like’ him – and don’t feel in control. Without a room full of minions how is anybody to even know they are a boss? Why some efficient fellow might get all the work done and get up and walk around a little and STEAL a few minutes for themselves and how would you ever know they had pulled one off on you?
      When I worked for the University of Akron the administrators were angered I’d read a paperback guarding a big heavy sewer cleaning machine sitting on the sidewalk waiting for the truck to come around and pick it up. They were of the mentality that as a blue collar worker I should be doing jumping jacks or something to be EARNING my pay – not just standing. It’s clear they all thought manual laborers of any skill level are scum and should be treated so. They decided to make us just leave the machine there for the truck and walk back to the shop. First the truck I would have rode on with the machine usually beat me back to the shop. Second we had three $3,000 sewer machines stolen in two months. I don’t see any cure for it short of massive public executions.

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      1. Pardon me, but what business of the Administrators was it how the head of maintenance did his job? I’m going to guess that you were standing there next to the machine because he wanted the machine watched, which, for an number of reasons, is a good thing. An unattended machine can have bad things happen, things that can get people hurt and generate big payouts. Having three machines stolen is getting off easy, but even that probably paid hell on the budget.

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      2. He does IT work. He has frequent teleconferences. They can check what he’s working on. Do you know how expensive it is to fly people in every week? Add in hotel rooms and meals. It all adds up.

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      3. My chain of command is infected with the notion that people won’t work if they aren’t in the office. As if they actually can make sure people are working even while IN the office.

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        1. There is a cure for this in some jobs; pay piecework instead of hourly. Obviously this doesn’t work for all jobs, but for those it does, it is extremely effective.

          Before I was old enough to have a drivers license I worked on a truck farm, while the owners were willing to hire any kid in the valley, and several of them would work occasionally changing irrigation, I was the only one willing to work picking vegetables with the Mexicans. The owner never specifically said this about the other local kids, but did imply it when said about the Mexicans; that whenever one showed up looking for a job and wanted to work for an hourly wage instead of piecework, they didn’t hire them, because they knew they were lazy.

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        2. Unfortunately I know exactly where your chain of command is coming from. I have in the past worked with entirely too many people who only work when someone is there looking over their shoulder.

          Personally if I have to babysit someone for them to do their job, I’d rather just do it myself. But if you are not directly in charge of the hiring and firing yourself, you are often stuck with ‘workers’ that should be fired, but since you can’t, at least you can get production out of them by treating them like a seven year old brat.

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      4. “Why some efficient fellow might get all the work done and get up and walk around a little and STEAL a few minutes for themselves and how would you ever know they had pulled one off on you?”

        When I joined my current employer, we could opt for a “5/4” work schedule — 5, 9-hour days one week, 4, 9-hour days the next week. Not a big deal, as most of us worked 9 hour days, anyway, and it let us have two days a month to deal with errands that required business-hours.

        Then they hired a new CIO and he nixed it. Didn’t want people “watching the clock”; expected we’d consider ourselves “always on the clock”.

        Which, let me tell you, is a heck of a pay cut.

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        1. I currently work 4, 10hr days (actually works out to 10.5 as they take 30minutes for lunch and we get 30 minute worth of breaks paid), with Fridays off.
          My best was 7, 12hr days with 7 off. We worked Monday through Sunday, rotating (the wrong way for me on our week) a 5-5, 7-7, 11-11, and a 7pm to 7am overnight. Fueled Southwest airlines, and on a bad day, with a few extra flights done, you still did less than an hour of actual physical labor, and when you did it right, it was about 10 minutes a flight max for at worse 13 flights a day … one shift had a two hour plus period with no flights scheduled, and often flights came in and needed no fual at all.
          I read a lot, played on my laptop … the other guys played on a Xbox or watched DVDs. I was listening to music, playing chess, the others playing Madden and one was napping when the owner walked and and just did a “Hey guys, how’s things today?” and didn’t bat an eye at anything going on.

          Wish I was still there, but we got bought out, and the new management was horrid, so I left (A story itself as long as this rambling reply) and moved to Texas.
          Within a year and a half they went from Number 1 in the system to bottom quarter.

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          1. I blogged about this earlier this week, most employers expect you to be there for 8 hours (or however long a shift is) without there being that much work to do. The training for that starts in school, where you must attend 8 hours, for perhaps 2-3 hours of education. In other words, our educational system is geared toward training lazy workers. :-/

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            1. Not only that but what about the office politics? Those people that still think they’re in highschool and build their social interactions around that dynamic?

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              1. See, I managed to duck most of those while I was working a ‘real job’ and since I was never in a tradtional highschool, it’s more an anthropological study subject for me than visceral. I know it’s there, though, and costs employers a lot of wasted time and money.

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                1. Lucky you.

                  Just had another thought this might be another reason to home school. They will already have the skill and no how to work from home.

                  Hmmm…

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                  1. Yes, done properly you learn how to self-motivate and self-discipline. It doesn’t work for every child, I know there are kids whose parents had to practically sit on them to get any work out of them. But I was taught from early to work on my own, with occasional checks from Mom, until my work was done. Bonus incentive for working fast, I could go out and play when finished. In a classroom, you work fast, and you’re bored until they allow you out on schedule. No incentive…

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                    2. We struggle with that with our oldest kid. It’s a culture shock. My wife has natural work ethic, and I was one of those that always wanted to learn – even if I wasn’t learning the boring and trivially easy stuff the teacher was doing. This kid only wants to play all the time, will actively avoid learning new things, and didn’t care at all when he got held back a grade for not doing the work. We had him in an online public school, and had to ride him hard to get anything turned in, then gave up and put him in regular school after we discovered that he was spending the school day on video games and porn. In public high school, it doesn’t matter so much how he spends his time, since he seems unable to fail no matter how hard he tries, because of the ludicrous safety net they give the kids.

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      5. I don’t see any cure for it short of massive public executions.

        To quote the Boondock Saints, “I’m strangely comfortable with that.”

        Well, as long as I get to pick the future dead.

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    2. several of our workforce now work from home. The main reason is we really are lacking room for everyone, and several of the people that had their own offices (plus one who was a cube dweller) and they were empty much of the time due to them being out on site or at a show etc. One guy went almost half a year without ever spending a whole work week in the office, and nearly all his time is spent either on the phone, or on the laptop, so working from home just made sense.
      I make stuff there, so no way could I work from home. I’d need a 2500 gallon tank, some pumps, and a carp load of chemicals so it’s a 19.2/18.5 mile (yes, it is shorter coming home from than going to) commute into the southern edge DFW metro for my work.

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  2. I recall all those 1980s nuclear winter EOTWAWKI novels, especially YA flavored. And now it’s energy tech is eeeevil (unless wind and solar [in a vaguely British setting. Like that’s gonna work]), discovery is eeeevil (unless the peaceful natives start it and you leave nothing but footprints and a couple members of your team who really should have known better), and the Y chromosome is eeeevil (unless he’s a dreamy mage or incubus). Blargh.

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  3. I threw away my futurist hat over a decade ago.
    I predicted that the advent of telecommuting would cause the cities to empty out. After all, who’d live in them by choice?
    Turns out, a very large percentage of the population.

    Hayek 1, Me 0

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      1. It is not an uncommon American perspective, however. I’ve met numerous people over the years with a strong preference for living as far from a city as possible, either way out in the country or in the outskirts of a small town whose center they can walk to. Then there are others I’ve met who dwell in our metropoli, who never seem to want to leave, save to fly off to foreign metropoli. Well, maybe they’d leave on an infrequent outing to view fall foliage, go on a wine tour, or spend time in a summer home in a summer community, or something like that.

        I’m ambivalent on the subject myself, with a strong liking for wilderness and cities, though I tolerate my suburban existence. Some days I fell like I’d rather live in the wilderness and visit the city, and other times I feel the opposite. What I’d really like to find is an affordable small town with a good transit connection to a big city, but that’s almost a contradiction in terms.

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        1. “an affordable small town with a good transit connection to a big city”

          There was a short period of time where I was living with my in-laws in a city of about 4,000 and taking a twenty-minute bus ride to the metropolis of 140,000. And you didn’t have to go very far to be out of town and into farm country (walkable, even.) So it can be done. Mind you, that whole area is out of whack in regards to housing prices (out of whack being in regards to local incomes), but at the time it wasn’t so bad.

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        2. Bremerton, Washington. 30,000 people and an hour’s ferry ride (or drive) from Seattle. There are plenty of residential areas within easy walking distance of the ferry terminal.

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          1. Only a city slicker would consider Bremerton a small town.

            Says the guy who considers any town larger than 3,000 a city.

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            1. A city has more than one church, and more than one bar. A town has at least one of each. A village has one or the other.

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              1. Village isn’t a term used here, a ‘spotintheroad’ has nothing but a collection of houses, your definition of a town is about right, a place that has one mercantile building, often a store with a bar along one side and a line painted on the floor with the words, “no one under 21 allowed on this side” and sometimes also where the church meets on Sunday is kind of in-between and either term may be used.

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            2. What’s the size of your town bearcat? To me less than 3k people is a wide spot in the road. I don’t think I’ve ever lived in a city of less than 10,000.

              I know that you’re probably joking but…

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              1. No, I’m not joking. I grew up about twenty miles out of a town that is now a city-sized (I still call it a town, because I recall it growing up, but any similar sized place I would consider a city, haven’t been back in several years but I’m sure it is 20K+ now).

                I only live about three miles out of town now, but that town has a sign that says population 824. The sign is at least ten years outdated, but the population is still roughly the same. There are two cities I go to, to do my grocery shopping, etc. according to Google one has a population of 23K and the other 32K. They both have sister cities on the other side of the state line which are of similar (former) and about half (latter) size, but those are the only cities within a hundred mile drive of my place that come even close to 10K.

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                1. I’m sure he’s gone now but there used to be a Political Science Professor at the University of Idaho who took years (by his own account) to discover he wasn’t communicating quite accurately in the classroom. He’d say big city meaning Tokyo or Mexico City size the students would think Boise and so on down the line to Troy when he was thinking maybe Topeka.

                  There are affordable communities (that have mostly died) with good transit connections to cities but maybe not to big – for accurate values of big – cities. Say Burlingame Kansas to Topeka Kansas and other almost purely bedroom communities. There are some nice places to live down the 285 corridor south from Denver with good park and ride connections.

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              2. Wide spot in the road, she says. I’ll show you “wide spot in the road”! Not 10 miles from where I sit right now is Rabbit Hash, Kentucky, whose population has exploded in the past 40 years, all the way up to 315!

                Yes, when I was little, the population at one point was 17.

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                  1. Whereas I can’t stand to be in the nearby suburbs, because the houses get too close together.

                    On the other hand, I prefer to be near a small city for the better level of shopping (I’m a borderline foodie, and you just can’t get a lot of ingredients I want very easily out in the country), so this area is good for me. You can go from mid-sized city, out twenty miles, and be in horse and cow country. In fact, one road near the house I’m moving to has a section where there are cows right across the street from a subdivision with $300k+ homes.

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                  1. Nah, the General Store had to fit in between them. It’s now a biker hangout, and when they come gather, they double the town population. This is the town that elected a dog mayor.

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                    1. They’ve repeatedly elected a dog as mayor, I believe. As far as I can tell, Rabbit Hash is no worse for it. Perhaps he can run for president in 2016? He’d be no worse than the present office holder.

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                    2. Mayor appears to be a lifetime election. As far as I know, they only hold a new election when the current officeholder dies. The most recent winner I saw was “Lucy Lou, The Bitch You Can Count On”

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                    4. That reminds me of a meme I saw yesterday. “Nobody could do a better job as president than Obama! (No. Literally. If nobody were president we’d be better off)” A dog for president makes sense. :)

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                    5. Hmm…

                      Obamo sure must be a fan Family Circus, because when ever he gets caught doing something it’s always nobodies fault.

                      ;-)

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                    7. According to the left I thought Bush equaled Hitler not nobody. Damn it! I wish they would make up their minds as I’m easily confused.

                      :-)

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                    8. Nobody for President, with Sumdude for Sec Def. (“What happened?” “Ida know, Officer. I was just minding my business and Sumdude came up and hit me!”)

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                  1. The road was dangerous in front of my house. There’s a gravel quarry down the road from there, and dump trucks full of gravel would come up the road at 55-65 mph several times a day. With a blind hill on one side and a blind curve on the other.

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            3. Well, this is where you run into the tyranny of population density. A small town simply cannot support a good transit link to a big city.

              And for the record I would consider Bremerton to be a small city, but there are plenty of small towns in the area. It’s just not quite as convenient to get on the ferry.

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              1. Now they can’t, because all the privately-funded transit got out-competed by government-subsidized hard-surfaced roads. A hundred years ago, you might find a couple steam railroads and one or two electric interurban railroads offering frequent service from outlying towns to the nearest city – and then after the parallel road(s) were paved you’d often have 5-20 years where the railroads continued to provide those services, plus a completing bus line or two. By 1960 the overwhelming majority of the interurban railroads were gone, the steam railroads were cutting back service, and the bus lines were largely starting to have profitability problems with more local, commuter-style operations.

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                1. Now they can’t, because all the privately-funded transit got out-competed by government-subsidized hard-surfaced roads.

                  It’s not “subsidized” when it’s applying new technology basic public good that goes back literally at least to Rome, even if it is paid for by taxes. You might as well talk about gov’t subsidized “incorporated towns” beating out farm compounds, or the police being “subsidized public rent-a-cops.” Just because a basic function of gov’t doesn’t suck as much as it use to (and a “bridge” that consists of four planks so you can leave two on each side after you drive over is pretty dang sucky) doesn’t mean it’s an unfair gov’t intrusion on the private sector.

                  Given a reasonable option, people chose to drive the road themselves, instead of being stuck with someonelses’ schedule and route.

                  The gov’t subsidized public transit does make it pretty much impossible to get private transit going, though, for anything bigger than the Airporter services.

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                    3. Oh, uh… Hahaha! You weren’t offensive. I forgot to add a smiley to show that I was just kidding around. I mean, the facts were real, but I was just goofing off. :-)

                      Lack of tone in text conversations always bites me in the butt.

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              2. Sounds about right to me, too.

                I had to go check what the actual town’s population was at home… Tourist heavy area, so a lot of the usual measures are really messed up by large influxes of money at various points of the year.

                I usually use the shorthand of “Nearest McDonalds was about an hour, and it was an hour and a half to Walmart.”
                (It’s now an hour or so, in the summer, because one of the year round tourists-and-wine places lost their fight to ban it. Because the workers at the store don’t have actual lives, and it made so much more sense for them to drive for an hour each way to be able to afford basic groceries.)

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                1. I think a reasonable definition of “small town” might be a town of such size that you could know, on sight, all the other townsfolk. And they all know you. And your family.

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                    1. Or whose grandparents weren’t.

                      Then, when I was a child our parents took us to vacation in the Adirondacks. The hamlet of Indian Lake was two roads that formed a T but it had both a church and a grocery store.

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                    2. Depends on the area; in ours it was a “born and raised” level, being California. (My great-grandparents were one of the early families.)

                      I’d guess it depends on how old the area is– if the town hasn’t been there long enough for the grandparent age folks to remember it being there, it won’t matter.

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        3. The mythos of Arcadia comes from somewhere, but there are those who don’t get it. I have read someone honestly trying to compare their charms and the only good thing he could say about the country was nice scenery.

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            1. eh, whatever your priorities, you should be able to imagine other reasons for people to like the country. Quiet, for instance. Lower prices. Less frenetic activity.

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              2. Visiting the country is nice but it wouldn’t suit me to live there. I don’t drive I flunked 4 road tests. We moved to Plano so I’d have a way to get around without driving. .

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      2. “As one of those who’d live in a city by choice, your perspective is UNIQUELY American.”

        Naw, I’ve heard it expressed by Canadians and also Russian immigrants. Your perspective is unfathomable to someone like myself however; the very definition of insanity.

        And this comment was interrupted by me looking out the window and having to run upstairs to look at my winter’s meat (about a 160 class whitetail) through the spotting scope. And there are people that would willingly trade that for a place where they can’t install a shooting bench at their bedroom window? Unfathomable!

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        1. I used to be able to put a shooter’s bench at my bedroom window. Then they replaced the trees with soccer fields, and I only wish I could.

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        2. How close is the nearest hospital to you? Are you in generally good health? How far is the nearest large airport? These are vital to some of us. Also some of us don’t have the time or stamina to for the upkeep of a large holding.
          To each his own.

          Personally I like suburbs because they are 1/2 way between urban and rural.

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          1. 25 miles to the hospital, and under thirty to a small commuter airport and about 40 to another commuter airport with commercial flights by Delta, Horizon, (and I believe Alaska) between the two of them you can get flights to major airports like SeaTac, Spokane, Salt Lake City, and a couple others. But Spokane airport is only a two hour drive, so it is pretty close.

            I don’t have a large holding, only twenty acres and frankly there is very little upkeep involved, I mean upkeep on house is basically the same regardless of the size of property it is plopped on, and I don’t run cows or farm my property, so there are no fences or anything to maintain. Upkeep basically consists of mowing the lawn (something I do poorly and not nearly as often as I should) and plowing the driveway in the winter. The driveway is less than a thousand feet long, and the county road is plowed, so that isn’t too big a deal. Although I just use a four wheeler with a plow, so you need to stay on it and not let the snow pile up to much, I’ve been gone at times in the winter and came home to a couple feet in the driveway, and the four wheeler just isn’t going to plow that. Now if I would quit my other thousand projects and get around to putting a clutch in and a snowplow on that old Ford with a 460 I picked up 3 cord of firewood a couple of years ago, then I would be able to plow it in comfort, in just a fraction of the time.

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                2. Good marriages require compromise, after all.

                  “Sweetheart, we need to spade the flowerbed again.”

                  “Dammit, Suzie, how many times have I told you to not kill door-to-door salesmen!”

                  “But I’m cutting back… only three so far this week!”

                  “Well, okay. But YOU have to grind up the bones this time.”

                  “Yay! I get to play with the wood chipper again!”

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        3. When I lived in Chicago, and to a lesser extent in San Francisco I could (and did) walk to the grocery store. I could go to a bar via public transit, get hammered, walk to a dinner for a early breakfast, the catch a cab home for less than 10 bucks.

          I had ready access to a wide variety of restaurants (in Chicago I counted about 14 different ethnic restaurants in a 10 block area.

          I’ve also lived in a small town in the middle of nowhere (Alice Springs, NT, AU) and while walking is usually possible, there are severe downsides.

          In Chicago I was able to get diagnosed, schedule surgery and get it done in 9 days.
          In Palo Alto I had to wait about 2 hours to get a pediatric cardiologist have a listen to my kids heart because the regular Dr. heard a murmur (everything was ok).

          In Alice I had to fly 1000 miles to get an MRI. Because of the distances and expenses second opinions were difficult. Surgery was conducted, then the day after discharge back 1000 miles home.

          An acquaintance of mine got a job where he could Telecommute. He didn’t pay attention to the hiring/layoff patterns of the company he worked for, so he wound up in the hills of North Carolina where he could have his shooting bench on his front porch. And got laid off.

          Had a heck of a time finding new work.

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    2. Who wants to live in cities? I think the answer is those who are interested in access to the goods and services that are only viable when there are great masses of people in relatively close proximity. Any place in the US, rural or urban, may support a few good restaurants, a museum, a theater, a department store, etc. But it takes a large population count and density to support having a wide selection of each. There’s a lot you can watch on TV or computer, purchase over the internet, or catch at your local theater, but it isn’t the same as being there in person, being able to look at and touch and shake the merchandise, etc.

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      1. Ayup. What folks want can differ considerably. For my wife and I, where we live (San Jose, CA) falls in the overlap of “tolerable but way too crowded” and “almost too small” for our personal taste.

        Me, I’d prefer living in the country as long as small-to-medium town is no more than 15-20 miles away and a small city with reasonable amenities is within an hour’s drive or so. This pretty well describes where I grew up, except we were closer to town (5 miles, not 15-20) and I thought it was a bit *too* close. We’re in a neighborhood of older homes, close to the edge of town (and undeveloped hills), which helps me resist the occasional feelings of claustrophobia. Just.

        My wife’s a big city girl (born and raised in Hong Kong) who thinks where we live is fine, admits there are *some* small cities (>50K or above) where she could live, but living “in the country”, unless the “country” is no more than 5 miles or so from a reasonable-sized city, isn’t something she really wants to do.

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      2. I grew up in New York City and it was great. However all during my 30’s the population pressure was getting to me.

        I adore living in suburban Dallas. The suburbs are quieter than the city. I can get to either city or country with a short drive.

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        1. It’d probably require a transponder and an automatic governor to keep its speed below some arbitrary maximum within a given range from population centers. I expect the population centers would broadcast a speed limit signal and the flying car just couldn’t exceed that speed. You’d probably also see quite a few developments in automated remote control to minimize traffic congestion in high-traffic areas. Possibly also no-fly zones around places like NYC and DC.

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          1. You’re very close to describing Class B airspace as it currently exists. The areas around the biiiiig airports (Boston Logan, LAX, DFW, Chicago, NYC) have everything except the automated remote control. Plus you have to have a minimum of a private pilot license (no students allowed).

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            1. Didn’t the FAA come up with some kind of new pilot’s license that ranks below private pilot? Something for people who just fly for fun…

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              1. Yep, the ‘Sport Pilot’ cert.

                http://www.eaa.org/en/eaa/aviation-communities-and-interests/light-sport-aircraft/getting-started-in-light-sport-aircraft-flying/become-a-sport-pilot-and-fly-light-sport-aircraft/faa-sport-pilot-rule

                Smart&Crunchy son wanted to be a pilot at one point. He’s got about five hours stick time until the price of avgas basically rendered training unaffordable for us.

                I really don’t know where we’re going to be getting commercial aviation pilots from in a couple of decades. The military can only train so many, and the price of getting your basic ticket, then night, IFR, multi-engine and other certifications to even get in the door as a commercial pilot is going to make it very difficult…

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                  1. They will have to. Lufthansa and several European carriers already to that, using schools in Arizona (because of the weather and the cheaper cost). The sub-regional airlines used to be the feeder routes, but once the Feds upped hour and experience requirements, and people stopped being willing to get $12,000/year (minus uniform and training costs) in exchange for a chance at getting a slot at a major’s commuter, the system burped. Every time I go renew my flight instructor license, I get people trying to hire me for the bigger charter planes or the airlines, and ten years ago when I was still flying a lot and stayed instrument current, they wouldn’t give me the time of day. That smacks of serious desperation.

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                    1. You don’t need any pilot’s license to pilot a Part 103 ultralight, which in the US are single seat, very low powered, very light weight, very limited range aircraft. That being said, some of the Light Sport Aircraft that a Sport Pilot’s license allow you to fly look a heck of a lot like ultralights, just more fuel and more power, so a bit faster. As someone else noted, they can be more than single seat, you can only fly in the daytime, and they are limited to a certain speed and max weight.

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              2. Sport pilot. You are limited to daylight (IIRC) VFR, no more than four seats, in a plane below a certain weight and power limit.

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          2. Well, if memory serves planes already have a speed limit of 250 knots when they are flying below 10,000 feet. And there’s been an ADIZ around DC since 2003. So….not much difference then. ;)

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        2. Given the way most people drive, tear huge chunks out of buildings and the landscape.

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            1. Not really–otherwise we’d have a LOT fewer accidents after almost 5 generations of drivers.

              Also there’s a lot of people in those buildings who aren’t doing anything but being there. Darwin might select *against* the sorts of people who have jobs in cities.

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      4. To heck with museums and theaters. The reason I resist moving further out from the current city is very simple: ambulance transport time to nearest good hospital. That’s the kind of lesson you learn the hard way, and don’t forget.

        Calmer Half would love to live the ideal Alaskan way – a space big enough you can walk about your back porch starkers, or have a gun range in the back yard, and your neighbors would neither know nor care.

        Every time he starts making “wouldn’t it be nice?” noises, though, I respond with commute time to my Day Job, and trump if needed by gently reminding him of the big zipper mark on his chest. I’m not terribly fond of people en masse, but I’m terribly fond of his continued existence.

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        1. That’s the Golden Hour tyranny – you get about an hour to get medical treatment when you really need it, else your survival rate drops off a cliff. That’s why the medical helicopter operators fulfill such an important niche in more rural areas, getting very ill folks to hospitals much faster, and also why access and proximity to resources like Trauma Centers are a major point to consider when evaluating places to live.

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          1. And coming from a family with severe heart issues, yeah…. I vote rural.
            Given my innate lung issues from having been an extreme preemie, I’d get an apartment IN National Jewish, if I could.

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  4. What’s sad about how SF has changed is that many of the Bright New Worlds were interlocked with the Progressive Idea that “with the proper management” we can build those “Bright New Worlds”.

    Now the Liberal/Progressive writers can’t imagine any Bright New Worlds in the future.

    In the past, the Progressive writers told us that “together we’ll build those worlds” but now the Progressive writers tell us (in a way) that “we’re better off dead before the future comes”.

    While the old Progressive writers imagined an utopia that could never come about, the new Progressives seem to like dystopias.

    We had reasons to read the old Progressive writers’ stories but no sane person IMO would read about dystopias.

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    1. I own just about everything William Gibson has written and it is rather dystopic (is that a word?) and I enjoyed it. I hate to say until I joined this blog I never realized the correlation between the “We’re All Doomed!” sci-fi writers and their politics. Yeah, I’m good like that.

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      2. If I recall correctly, Gibson considered himself a raving optimist because we hadn’t blown ourselves to smithereens.

        I haven’t read his newer stuff but I’ve heard nothing but praise for everything after Pattern Recognition.

        > >

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    2. that’s why I’m writing light and fluffy and optimistic stuff. Where people get handed the short end of the stick, figure out how to turn it into a shovel, then get the stick broken into tiny scraps and burned in a massive meteor strike… so they make a scoop loader out of bailing wire and chewing gum (and a couple of hundred thousand comets) to get what they were thinking they’d have originally. Plus a little extra, because they were bored waiting for things to cook.

      (Not quite the plot of one of my stories, but close.)

      Then there was the one about pest control on Jupiter…

      And the Squirrels of D-Day…

      A friend said it reminded him of Analog’s stories in the early ’60s. Which was quite encouraging, that was EXACTLY the feel I was going for.

      Hell with moaning about the darkness. I’ve got a generator and a stack of LED bulbs, might as well start stringing them up!

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  5. A thought on the work from home bit. Google, of all places, mandated that their employees come in to the office on a regular basis (I don’t remember if it was daily or a number of times a week, alas I do not have the article to hand) because they discovered at the wild and crazy ideas that came out of face to face sessions were measurably more usable measurably more often than the ones from the remote sessions. There may be a future niche for face to face meetings. Who knows, the measure of business status may be meeting personally not remotely. Now I must ponder this for my martian story.

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    1. And of course I forget to follow. Don’t mind me, I’ll be under my rock… it’s a very gneiss rock, so don’t take it for granite and treat it like schist.

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      1. This reminds me of a mnemonic device some friends came up with for GE101 “Beware of gneiss dykes with good cleavage.”

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        1. Note: this is Heather, still figuring out the WordPress app on my phone.

          Yes, geology comes with a huge volume of off color, usually accidental puns. Seismic survey crew mightily offended a bank clerk when the vibrator operator went to cash his pay check (days before electronic banking and direct deposit) and told the girl his job title. She was sure they were doing it on purpose when his supervisor introduced himself as the Party Chief. (these are still the actual titles I believe)

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          3. Party Chief is still the standard title used by survey crews. Some of the new age surveyors are now calling the Chain Man the Rod Man, and I did have to choke down a laugh when a woman (early fifties) working for another survey outfit introduced herself to me as ‘the Rod Girl’.
            And if you have ever been around any of the older equipment (or surveyors that have used it) you are no doubt familiar with the standard term for a Staff Compass. You can get some really startled looks from a landowner when you unthinkingly explain why a pipe that has long been set at their property corner is a foot and half from where it is supposed to be, by saying, “Well, that ain’t to bad for runnin’ a Stiff Dick.” :)

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            1. :) I did some stream survey work (for a landscape architecture/ fluvial geomorphology course) and got to learn a lot of unofficial-official terminology. None of the four females in the class turned a hair.

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        2. So THAT’S where the department chair at Flat State got that shirt. I also like one I saw at an airport: Ski Kansas! The Humbolt Fault: An Orogeny Waiting to Happen.

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    2. I think that there is a definite social element to creative work. It pays to be near others doing the same sort of stuff. That goes for companies as well as people.

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    3. The new CEO of Yahoo! caught some flak for instituting a similar policy, following from the same information. Lots of the employees really wanted to stay home. :)

      I think creative tech fields are a bit of an exception, though. There’s vast swathes of work that does not require (and would not benefit from) creative collaboration.

      The next significant sociological questions become: what is the value of social interaction for the company; what significance does corporate culture have in these telecommutable fields?

      I’ve pictured a planned community designed around a small central office campus (think suburban elementary school) where multiple companies can rent office space for their workers in the immediate neighborhood. No need to commute extensively, just walk/bike over to the local building and check into your office and telecommute.

      Proprietary information questions, etc. need to be addressed. But — something of a riff on the artist co-op warehouse.

      Since I’ve seen working environments where people in the same building do all their communication electronically, the hurdles seem small.

      By the by: Geologist humor. Funny-funny.

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      1. If your workforce is global or the project is, working remote is a good thing. You can use people in different timezones to provide round the clock availability. At this point does it matter whether the Aussies are all in an office in Sydney or scattered about the place.

        I would absolutely prefer having my husband at home nights and weekends. a smart phone is a strong enough leash. The one downside to working remotely, is if you are remote and everyone else is onsite, it’s very easy to fall out of the loop.

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    4. Google has a weird culture, with various views on what really drives it. There is a widely held view among technical folks on the outside looking in, with a lot evidence from first person contacts on the inside, that Google is basically a glossy sweatshop that cleverly exploits the fact that the young folks they preferentially hire don’t have much of a life, so they give them free very nice food, free dry cleaning, free t-shirts, and $6K towards a Prius, and work them straight to burn-out.

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  6. I work in an office that is about two miles from my house. Twice a week 60% of my team works from home. On those days if something goes wrong, forget it until tomorrow because getting people to focus on some problem that isn’t theirs is rather difficult when you can’t park yourself in their cube. As a result, I’m not a huge fan of work from home. Granted, when I was working on a contract in the Springs and was working from home, I loved it. :)

    On a different note, what happens when there is an energy/data interruption in the future? Or someone finds a way to hold your data stream hostage? Or when only the super rich can afford decent band width after a large segment of the population goes global/work from home? And how do we prepare our kids for careers in this future?

    Regardless, I’m still waiting for my flying car.

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    1. Flying cars always struck me as a bad idea. For one thing, I’m a poor driver when I only have control over 2 dimensions. For another, can you imagine the Mongolian Clusterfuck that givernments could make out of three dimensional traffic direction?

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            1. I have seen a roundabout that was properly designed.

              http://binged.it/Wlpc6U

              That is a full sized military jet in the middle– can’t remember if it was an F-16 or what– and note that there are bypasses for people who are going to take the first exit, or simply have too large of a load. There’s also two full sized lanes at all points.

              Can take even wide loads, and I’ve never seen traffic backed up there unless the gate was shut.

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                1. Look, mister, until you’ve seen what happens to roundabouts in Lisbon…
                  instead of the two lanes there should be, there are five, and no one is going to let you over and…

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                2. If you’re paying attention to your driving and learn the rules they’re fine. If you’re focused on anything else you shouldn’t be behind the wheel.

                  While that’s a good idea, one should never design a system that assumes all the bits are working properly all of the time.

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                3. Most of the ones over here look more like this:
                  http://binged.it/1oOOReH

                  This is on a major road, which trucks regularly travel and have traveled for at least 45 years. (That’s how long my mom can remember visiting various places along the road; this traffic circle is less than five years old.)

                  It is literally impossible for a truck to drive on it and NOT have his wheels go off of one side, or sometimes both.

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        2. You do realize the design theory behind roundabouts, don’t you? Annoyed drivers are more alert.

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        1. That’s one area where my libertarian tendencies collide with my personal experience. As much noise as the airlines and big cargo companies make about privatizing ATC, with all sorts of fees and restrictions in order to “relieve congestion” i.e. keep private, corporate, and charter planes out of the way, I’d rather have the feds keep things open for everyone, within reason (skill and equipment requirements for certain very busy airports like DFW and O’Hare, for example). The US has so much more private (non-airline) aviation than the rest of the world that every idea that I’ve seen thus far based on European management systems goes “splat” unless you eliminate personal and corporate aircraft from the mix. And the privatization of aviation weather has not been a happy experience, as of the last time I used Flight Service.

          I guess I’m a hypocrite when it comes to aviation – “get the government out . . . of everything else.” *rueful grin*

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    2. With my company, not allowing work-from-home without special permission is simply silly. All our managers, except for one person from HR, are several hundred miles away. So your scenario of parking yourself in someone’s cube is not happening. Yet we get things done just fine.

      I postulate you need a change of some sort, though whether it’s a change in management style, or personnel, I couldn’t say.

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      1. It’s probably a personnel thing. When people are home they are heads down coding and they don’t want people to interrupt them so the ignore emails and are terse on IM. Harder to do that face to face. I’m sure it would be an issue if people weren’t getting their work done but they are. It is mainly getting info from an expert when their OoO.

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        1. It’s a matter of establishing priorities.

          On of the issues with Dev-Oops is that Dev guys sometimes have trouble getting the fact that occasionally they will have their zen focus blown because they’re now also doing ops work, and that means interruptions.

          Just like I have to be nice and not call my cow-okers fascist f*king wankers, they’ve got to be professional and put down the interesting stuff and do the boring work.

          And yeah, today I’m working from home, working with one guy in the office here, one guy who works from home all the time in Illinois, and the rest of the team back in VA.

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  7. Telecommuting is an interesting one. Our company had pretty much everyone working from home (we had no money for an office and anyway we were pretty geographically dispersed) and it worked. BUT since we have now got an office and are less geographically dispersed working IN the office has proven to be more productive in many ways.

    Everything is a trade off and IMO teleworking is like so many other things in modern life. It’s great that you are able to do something that you used not to be able to do, that doesn’t mean everyone should do it all the time.

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  8. The biggest problem I find in working from home is a) distractions (phone, visitors, facebook, etc) and lack of stimuli.
    I can filter out the first, by working in my bedroom/study/computer room, but then the second arises. It’s BORING in there, door shut, phone off.

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  9. Last year, I lent my father my copy of Resnick and McDevitt’s “The Cassandra Project ” because I thought he might enjoy it. When he got done reading, he said something along the lines of your “I used to read science fiction, but then it got boring.” He described how he’d read a lot of science fictions when he was younger. Then, sometime in the mid 1970’s, he thought it largely turned to crap, and he stopped reading in the genre.

    Personally, I think it is a combination of the reds (as you mentioned above) and the New Age impacting the field. Certainly, there seems to be little from that time period that I’ve read and enjoyed. My high school library had a good quantity of sci-fi, and what I enjoyed mostly came from before the early 70’s or after early 80’s. There were some exceptions, like the later Heinlein stuff, some of Pournelle, Niven, early Drake, etc. but by and large it seems like there was a desert of bad “science fiction” with only a few scattered oases of goodness.

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  10. Big push for telecommuting 8 or 10 years ago in my shop. A lot of the ladies were all for it until we told them that anyone with preschool children would have to show proof of daycare or full time babysitter. Once that became clear most backed off.
    We also found that some of the best interactions occurred around the coffee pot of a morning, or through casual encounters in the hallways. A fairly senior manager went so far at to term his philosophy as management by wandering around.
    Then too, there is a definite culture in middle management of needing the control of seeing your people in front of you. I never found it so, but then I always detested the manager role, and got out from under such as quickly as possible.

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    1. Depends on the temperament. My husband works more at home. the hard part is getting him to stop. Working at home requires “self starter” and productive interactions with co-workers over the net takes learning.
      I suspect it will be different for our kids, who LIVE online.

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      1. In a book about introverts, the author made a point about how open-source projects were driven by collaboration and how some companies had decided that meant open-office plans (to encourage collaboration!) because of that missed an essential point: the open-source developers collaborated, but did so BETWEEN episodes of intense focus. The “collaborative” office plans make that intense focus difficult, so they were actually missing out on half the process.

        But, then, being forced into a “team space” nearly drove me enough around the bend to cost me my job, so I’m biased.

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  11. Well as a technophile/phobe. I have a slightly different view than most. I think good new tech is the bomb. I think tech for the sake of tech is idiotic. Why on gods green earth does anyone need a digital internet capable toaster? Or lets talk about real tech I see in the field all the time. Autoclaves used to consist of a pressure chamber, a submarine type hatch, an inlet steam valve and an outlet steam valve. The fancy ones had a pressure gauge and a thermometer. You closed the hatch, opened the release valve, let steam in to clear the chamber, closed the release valve, then you went and did other things while the time you calculated passed and your material was sterile. You then turned off the steam in, released the contained pressure, opened the door and were done. Very reliable system, needed plumber level repairs every 2-20 years. New autoclaves have a button you push to open them, a touch screen menu to select the cycle you wish. And operate much like a dishwasher. Average time between skilled technician repairs? 9 months

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      2. It’s not so much the ease of use, it’s the expense someone is willing to go to in order to get good quality. Back when the first style was the only type there was, you expected to pay more to get good quality so it would last longer, because the difference in price wasn’t large enough to matter in the short term. Now, with the electronic ones, (probably – I don’t really know, but this is the way other electronics are) the good quality ones cost at least twice as much, and most administrators don’t do well at calculating lifetime service costs.

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    2. Why on gods green earth does anyone need a digital internet capable toaster?

      So the Machines can kill you with a bagel when they take over.

      (Or we can freak out when the toaster asks: “Does this unit have a soul?”)

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      3. Or we can freak out when the toaster asks: “Does this unit have a soul?”

        Eh, if it was programmed to ask, no; if it wants an answer, yes. The facilities necessary to want an answer are those of a soul.

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  12. At my previous employer, there were only 2 times I was allowed to work from home – when I some how contracted pink eye and when I had a looming deadline that could not be missed. Both times I was able to accomplish more in 6 hours at home than I was during the 60 hours I was in the office during a normal week. That was even with the frequent “you will pet me right now” visits from the 20lbs Maine Coon.

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    2. Meh. Even the most demanding pet cannot compete with co-workers who MUST BE ATTENDED TO IMMEDIATELY!!!

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  13. In my writing I predicted non-statistical fusion generators using nano – accelerators. Turns out that is being pursued. I also predicted laptops with fold out multiple screens. They went on sale before I could even publish. There were a couple others but I forget. Large fields of technology are hard to predict but incremental improvements are obvious.

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  14. I make low tech objects {swords, occasionally knives and daggers} on higher tech machines {rough most of the parts on CNC machinery}. However, I’ve also had a lot to do with folks recreating lost arts. Forging knife blades and tools, for instance.

    Over the last thirty years there’s been a lot of interest in bringing back old skills. Leatherwork, bow making, even making steel.

    As a kid growing up, there was a lot of do it yourself stuff. Working on cars, and later remodeling houses, etc……..

    The thing I see about modern tech is a lot of this stuff is going away. You don’t find near as many young people interested in getting their hands dirty.

    I could go on about this……. but my thought on all of the high tech goodies and how dependent we area getting on them, makes us less able to survive a massive catastrophe. Something like several of the earth’s super volcanoes deciding to fill the air with ash at the same time, or massive earth movement, or, you know, something that would trash civilization as we know it.

    Not to be a negative nellie or anything, but sooner or later the earth will have another big upheaval.

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    1. This will be true whenever technology advances. It’s inevitable. The majority of the population does not have the free time to be conversant in two distinct tech levels unless one of ’em is a hobby.

      A certain degree of backward compatibility is useful and practical to achieve and maintain, but the ability to run a civilization post-massive upheaval? And do it on significantly outdated tech? Nope.

      Fortunately, the probability that an event large enough to strip enough layers off of the tech base that people can’t figure most of the important stuff leaves enough people around for a significant civilization is low.

      Which is not to say tech failure wouldn’t kill lots of people. We live fairly close to the bleeding edge in some things.

      But there’ll be enough folks standing around to bury the bodies and work out the solutions.

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    2. I suspect many folks here would agree that tech is neat, tech that works is even better, but that there’s still a lot of value to having lower tech skills (metal-smithing, leather work, hand sewing and other “domestic” necessities, car repair, animal care and basic critter and human first aid, and so on).

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  15. Just off the top of my head, people will move where real estate is cheapest, causing massive economic dislocation.

    Which means a lot will go rural.

    About half of which will promptly start throwing a fit because they have no bleeping clue what culture they just walked into, and relate to all animals as pets. (No idea what portion of that half will be cured by exposure.)

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    1. Probably end up with more places like Wyoming and Montana, where realtors hand out pages of “this is what you are getting into” warnings when they show houses in the mountains and rural areas.

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      1. Wouldn’t want to live too far from my doctors and hospitals I have a number of chronic medical conditions.

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      2. Unfortunately yes, a lot more places like large portions of Montana, where the Californians move into their ‘dream home’ and immediately want to change everything to make it just like where they came from.

        I have no clue why Texans would possibly think it was a good idea to invite Californians and New Yorkers to move there. As someone who grew up on the Westside (West of the Cascade Mountains) where the Californians have successfully invaded and conquered, I can tell you from experience that INVITING them is sheer idiocy.

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        1. Texas had a similar problem back in the late 1970s – yearly 1980s that led to bumper stickers saying “[Heart} NYC? Take I-35N”. I’d kinda like to see the businesses come but the cultural-Californians to stay in the Golden State.

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          1. Alway thought it would make a great caveat to the “Keep Austin Weird” would be to have it followed by “As to Keep the rest of the State Sane.”

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    2. I’d say 100% of those who attempt to befriend a rattlesnake or copperhead aren’t going to want to repeat the experience… if they survive in the first place.

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      1. Be fair, you’re more likely to die from the anti-venom with the rattler.

        And it’s the “cute” things like deer that will do the most harm. (Ever seen someone try to cuddle a man-sized goat?)

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  16. Biggest problem with an office going work from home: the styles are different.

    If you work 9 to 5, and your job is based on that, not so good; if your work is based on “this, this and this need to be done”– then it’ll work.

    See also, my mom’s observation: Cows Don’t Care It’s Christmas. (They still need to eat.)

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    1. “See also, my mom’s observation: Cows Don’t Care It’s Christmas.”

      Yes they do, that is why they always get out/tear down the fence/the bull gets is testicles wrapped in barb wire, etc. on Christmas morning, not the day after.

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      3. They don’t care about semester and final exams either. “Cows got out” was an excused absence in jr. high and high school.

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          1. That’s easy — it is about that time when they wake, feeling the need to relieve themselves they wander around looking for a magazine …

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    2. I’ve worked from home with my help desk job. It’s doable. Perks: I don’t have to drive to downtown Houston to work, and I can have my personal computer up and running surfing the net or with a game running in between calls.

      It does get annoying when it gets busy, though.

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      1. Help Desk seems like it would be perfect for work from home–you can be supervised, because it’s all audio. And a lot of the trouble in those offices is from other people, IIRC.

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        1. The only problem with helpdesk from home is that you can’t mute your phone and ask someone else if you bump up against a problem you don’t know the answer to. Of course, even that can be arranged to some extent, and you can have chat windows open all over the place.

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        2. Back in college one of my friend’s moved into an apartment complex where the middle aged woman across the way spent the day walking around talking on a Madonna-esque phone headset. (This was the early 80’s.) She eventually found out that the woman was working for a phone sex company. That would be a odd stay at home job.

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  17. David Brin had some interesting stuff around tech development and impact on society in Existence, especially in the AR and personal tech areas. Personally, I think with the advent of easy to use, difficult to repair mobile devices, we are rapidly headed back into “magic box” territory for the majority of the population. They don’t care how or why it works, as long as it does. Massive education failure.

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    1. Yes this!

      Another point. 90% of the texh is made in Southeast Asia. The supply line goes down what we have will be it, and most of it is only designed to last a couple of years.

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  18. I’ve learned a great deal about how technology from non-SF sources. Watching old episodes of Mission: Impossible and more recent stuff like 24 demonstrates how much cellphones have changed how action heroes get information.

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      1. Imagine if it were the ’70s: “Our computers are working on it Jack, we should have the information in a few hours. We’ll send it to you by teletype . . .”

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  19. “they were better red than dead” When I was in the U.S. Navy station in Groton, CT. we had answer to that sentiment “24 tubes, 24 mushrooms cloud, it’s Miller time.

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    1. Thank God you guys were there! I was living in NYC at the time. It in the top 5 targets in the country.

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    1. Good Luck to him and here’s hoping that either he has a benign diagnosis or a quick and complete recovery!

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  21. A while back I noticed an irritating cliche of convention panels about future technology. The panelists would go into all the gee-whiz possibilities of 3D printing, human cloning, private space launch, Alcubierre drives, whatever and so on . . .

    . . . and then invariably someone in the audience raises his (almost always his) hand and asks “Won’t rich people just keep this technology for themselves and use it to oppress people?”

    You know, the way rich people drive around in their horseless carriages while the rest of us peons ride bicycles, or the way they communicate via their “inter-net” while the rest of us still use the post, or the way they light their houses with expensive electricity while we have to make do with whale oil.

    Where does this idea come from? It’s so ubiquitous I can’t help thinking there must be some source for it, but I can’t tell what that source is. Can anybody tell me?

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    2. Bill Whittle had a video about how, in general, technology comes to poor people about 10 years after rich people. Sometimes later, sometimes sooner, but usually about 10 years. Whether it’s refrigerators, computers, televisions, or air conditioning.

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      1. You know, that’s not a bad thing. Let them run into all the “first of it’s kind” bugs, work through the next couple of iterations, and then by the time everyone else gets it, it works better.

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      1. Yep. Same place we get all those rumors of super-efficient engines that the oil and automotive companies (worldwide presumably) have bought up and suppressed. Just magical thinking by people who don’t understand economic incentives.

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  22. All that talk about technology ending the world makes me want to reread Cat’s Cradle.

    It’s been about 25 years, so I wonder what my take would be on it this time around.

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  23. From the title of this post and it’s first sentence –
    “Future Awe”
    “Let’s talk technology.”
    the comments went into a different direction then I thought they would.
    Something like Fusion Reactors. Giant Rockets, Growing Organs, Starships, Terraforming Venus will change the world,
    Personally, the “I’m can work from home” just doesn’t match the sense of awe and wonder I was expecting.
    But admittedly, familiarity breeds contempt.
    Technological civilization is amazing.
    You carry in your pocket several orders of magnitude more computing power than existed in the entire world in the 1960’s in order to throw birds at pigs.
    You can take a few small pills for a few days to heal a wound that would have resulted in death or amputation a century ago. The same pills can also be used to dry up a child’s sniffles.
    A journey to the other side of the world that would have taken over a year to travel three hundred years ago you can now take in about a day to attend a Hello Kitty cosplay conference.
    A Roman Emperor in his chariot can be left in the dust by a Yugo.
    But I still want a Starhip.

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      2. I’m holding out for a GMO dragon. The newspaper had coupons for Precious Dragon brand chow yesterday, and a buy two-get-one-free on hatchling litter (store brand, but you go through it so fast I don’t see a reason to get the high-dollar stuff).

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        1. A dragon would eat too much, and I don’t even want to think about it’s litter-box!

          A fire-lizard would work though, especially if it was an insectivore…

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          2. We’ve got a couple meat-packing plants that offer offal cheap, and organ meats are great, especially for younger, still-growing dragons. And there’s always a rancher or two interested in culling problem animals. Feral hogs? Free for the taking.

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  24. I was going to write “huh?”, but reading the comment you’re responding to clarified what you meant. Not sure what he’d have to do to have thrown out a Starhip…nor even what a Starhip is for…unless it’s a problem for Clarke’s Starchild when he gets to be a few million years old?

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    1. Huh, the above was supposed to be a reply to Josh A. Kruschke, but apparently I fell out of the tree:-(.

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    2. I don’t need a starhip, but I’d be awfully interested to see the sales literature and user reviews on a starknee, and a starshoulder, thank you…

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