From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Thu Jun 27 2002 - 03:26:54 MDT
On Wed, Jun 26, 2002 at 01:30:05PM -0700, Hal Finney wrote:
> Overall I thought the movie pandered a little too much to popular
> preconceptions about "the future". Roadways in the sky, personal
> jetpacks, flying vehicles; people expect these but they don't fit that
> well into the overall milieu, which was in other respects more like
> 15-25 years in the future rather than 50.
Note that these are "acceptable" aspects of the future - nanotech,
biotech, AI and other stuff we like to discuss is not part of the
set that people can accept with just a little suspension of disbelief.
Maybe it is because they are something fairly easily understandable,
which fits in with ideas of a society not terribly unlike our own. The
other stuff requires you to think about the future as a system, imagine
multiple uses and interactions, complex consequences that often make our
kind of society unlikely. Hard stuff.
I am reading _The Invincible_ by Stanislaw Lem right now. In a way it is
a collision between a human civilization based on traditional sf tech -
starships, cryonics, forcefields and antimatter weapons - and something
else, which is more akin to some of "our" stuff. It was written in
*1964*.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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