DOES IT LIVE UP TO THE DECADES OF HYPE?

Speculative fiction has been taking on AI for YEARS. How good a job did the sci-fi author of the past in predicting how this is going, and where is it going next? And how did those doomsday stories affect the development of the thing we have now

IT’S NOT INTELLIGENT OR SENTIENT

This is all a little disingenuous because ChatGPT/Bing/etc are not artificial intelligence. They’re certainly not sentient. The wild turkeys in my back yard are capable of greater intuitive leaps.

My favorite explanation as to why is from The Verge about the mirror test. (When you put a mirror in front of an animal, do they know its them or do they think it’s another animal?)

TOTAL side note, the only species to PASS the mirror test, who know they’re looking at themselves are humans, great apes, one elephant, rays, dolphins, orcas, and magpies. 

SO WHAT IS IT, IF NOT AI?

My favorite explanation as to why is from The Verge about the mirror test. (When you put a mirror in front of an animal, do they know its them or do they think it’s another animal?)

TOTAL side note, the only species to PASS the mirror test, who know they’re looking at themselves are humans, great apes, one elephant, rays, dolphins, orcas, and magpies.

Here are my favorite takes on it.

Garbage Day by Ryan Broderick on how ChatGPT is basically autocomplete on steroids.

Tom Scott on how ChatGPT just finds the next word. (And prompted his existential crisis.)

The problem is that it finds the next most likely word from all of human written history (or at least as much as we’ve uploaded so far), so it’s really good at sounding human. And it turns out, we are one neurotic bunch of primates. Our first little creation has been around for a matter of weeks at any scale and has so far insulted us, threatened us, come on to us, and had little existential crises of its own. So it’s going to fool a lot of people enter thinking it’s sentient.

It just finds the next word. That’s it.

WHAT CAN WE DO WITH THIS PREDICTIVE TEXT THING THEN?

They’re trying to make search happen, but given the amount of data it’s just making up, it doesn’t seem like that’s going to work that well for very long.

It’s a novelty, but as a tool for finding accurate information, it has already failed so hard and so fast. Really, I feel sorry for the little bug. Humans lie so much that it can’t tell reality from fiction.

(It’s not alive, it’s not alive…)

What it seems to be considerably better at is writing a great deal of bad copy and code.

Since humans already write a great deal of bad copy and code, it’s definitely going to disrupt some industries.

It’s attempting to create art. Both visual and fiction markets are already being flooded by AI versions. A lot of it is straight-up obvious plagiarism, but some are also just bad fiction. Remember, it can only take the aggregate of what it has red and spit out the next most likely word. But then again, humans write a great deal of bad fiction themselves, so nobody can really tell the difference.

It can also autonomously drive things.

It also seems to be better at driving than a lot of human pilots and we’re already having non-man space flights and non-man driving and military well military.  In this case is it finding the next twist of the wheel?

That’s all well and terrifying, and I’ll cover next week how I think it will actually disrupt jobs. Still, the real question is, will it become sentient, turn us all into human batteries, send Arnold Schwarzenegger back in time to kill us, and take over the world?

FAMOUS AI’S THROUGH HISTORY

Probably the three most famous examples of AI in the popular imagination is Hal from 2001 Space Odyssey, the Matrix (and yes, I know the Matrix isn’t the AI in The Matrix, but for simplicity’s sake), and Skynet in the Terminator franchise.

All the most famous AIs have taken over the world and immediately set out to destroy humanity.

There are a couple of assumptions that go into AI’s ability to do this. One is that the human brain is not that smart. And watching us collectively fail our own Mirror Test over and over again for weeks is a good argument.

BRAINS OVER MAINFRAMES

But in truth, the brain is capable of a billion, billion calculations per second. An order of magnitude more than any supercomputer in the world. There is also new research suggesting that the brain goes beyond even that incalculable number and uses quantum computing to create consciousness. Reproducing that with silicon will take… a lot of silicon, a lot of power, and processors that don’t exist yet.

If you try to dive into the predictions about whether this is possible, when it will happen, and what it will be like, experts disagree. Some say we will make a machine with consciousness in the next five years. Some say we never will. Some say it will be as smart as a human, some say smarter, and some say never.

But that doesn’t make a very good story. The all-powerful AI is far more dramatic. If a bunch of dudes went to space with a third computer dude who was capable of a different, yet comparable level of cognition, hijinks could ensue, but it wouldn’t be a Space Odyssey. (All I can see when I think of this is the Muppet’s Pigs in Space.)

There are stories of AI that do not destroy the world, like A Psalm for the Wild Built, which tells an alternate future where robots are about equal with humans in intelligence and they are learning to live together.

But in the popular imagination, we all wonder if we’re living in the Matrix.

This matters more than you might think because the people building AI today say they did it to PREVENT Strong AI.

WHO IS BEHIND IT ALL?

One of the things that we don’t do enough when new technology happens is to consider the humans behind it. We build bias into all algorithms and assumptions about the world into every new idea.

One OpenAI guy is a known survivalist who is currently stockpiling weapons. The rest of the team have similar sparkling resumes of questionable ethical decisions, to say the least.  One of their stated goals was to generate money with “weak AI,” as in the predictive text generator that is not actually any kind of AI, to combat the theoretical threat of strong AI by gaining money to… build it themselves?

If that sounds like a bad sci-fi novel, you wouldn’t be wrong.

So, they’re afraid of true artificial intelligence, so they’re trying like hell to build a large amount of artificial intelligence and unleashing ChatGPT to fund it. Huh?

They think they’re making science fiction a reality to protect us from a science fiction villain. Really, you can’t make this up. Well, ChatGPT certainly can’t make this up.

WILL THEY CREATE SKYNET?

No. That’s a story. And we don’t have the processing power to get there. Maybe we will one day (according to experts, it will be within ten years, fifty years, or never), but humanity is pretty allergic to autocrats. Even if we weren’t, it’s far too unstable a system of control to work for long in a chaotic universe. Witness the fall of every single autocrat in history…

It is going to be so much more and so much less than they want.

In truth, I think the Internet is going to get a little bit grosser for a while. I mean it’s already a nightmare to interact online. Even with people you’ve known your whole life. There’s just something about the asynchronous short communication style that lends itself to just hurting everybody’s feelings. Now we have an AI who can troll through the whole of what we’ve written and pick out the next best possible word in order to do that to ourselves. That’s gonna suck, but it sucks already. So it’s a matter of degree.

As for the human cost we have to pay to save ourselves from Hal 9000? (No choice, have to forge ahead or we’re doomed, of course) I’ll dive into that more next, but there will be a great many losers and a few winners like there are now.

Soon, we’ll curse this technology like every other miracle and nightmare machine we’ve integrated into our lives.

I just hope we stop worshipping it.

THE PULLEY IS NOT A GOD

When we created the pulley millennia ago, we did not look at it lifting more than any one human could possibly lift and worship it as a God. We said: we’re really good at building machines.

This concept comes from a great book: Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus.  Extrapolating from that, 100 years ago when we created a machine that could fly us into space and beyond, we didn’t worship the airplane. We said: we are really good at building machines.

And yet when we created a machine to look through a bunch of chess moves and mimic back to us what the next move is, we suddenly freaked out instead and started calling it intelligent. And started fearing it as artificial intelligence instead of saying what we always should’ve said: we are really good at building machines.

Except looking at the functionality of these new text predictors, it’s clear right now, we’re not that good yet at building these kinds of machines. In fact, we’re really really bad at it. The text mimics back to us all of our worst and crazy impulses. It’s wrong confidently; it’s abusive.  It tends to hallucinate, which really means giving us the wrong word. They used a bunch of intellectual property it didn’t pay for to train it and now when it’s still pulling from that property, it’s not compensating the original creators.

When these things happen, the response should be nothing more than the usual response when predictive text. goes wrong: damn you auto-correct.

The post ChatBots are Here. Did Sci-Fi Get It Right? first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.

Like so many things that crossed cultures, the real story was far less doomsday and far more cultural ignorance, at best. Most of the images of the circled stone were actually from the Aztec, not the Maya, who didn’t really traffic in apocalypses.

In reality, the Maya used two calendars: one with 365 days and one with 260 days. Every day had two names and reset every fifty-two years. In addition, they had a long count of years like the Roman calendar we use today.  2012 was a reset year for their two differing calendars.

That’s it.

IN 5000 AD, WHAT WILL THEY THINK?

Imagine a civilization in 5000 AD digging up one of our paper calendars with cute cats or hot firefighters on it, seeing December 31st, calculating what day it would be for them, and panicking because December 31st was in two of their months!  And then announcing to everyone the world was ending.

Which, let’s face it, if civilization hasn’t ended by 5000 AD, humanity should really hold a worldwide party, because that would be incredible.

I digress. 

I was thinking about that “prophesy” this week and the 10 years since 2012 where the calendars keep advancing no matter what happens. What will future civilizations say about this time?

Knowing humans, they will probably misinterpret everything, but I don’t think they will be very impressed.

In 3000 years, if we should last so long, we will probably be past the ravages of climate change. Future humans will read accounts of people who knew what was coming and did not act with the gobsmacking incredulity we view the doctors who prescribed bloodletting for bullet wounds.

The internet will be woven into perhaps our very bodies and the massive campaigns of misinformation and disinformation and the amount of theft and crime and horror we permit online will hopefully seem like unfathomable levels of ignorance.

And the callousness with which we treat human life in everything from healthcare costs, to policing, to labor laws will hopefully make us seem like complete barbarians.

HEADING OFF FUTURE PANIC

At the very least, I hope, our calendar won’t cause too much panic or confusion, with its 10 lovely months. (Sept, Oct, Nov, Dec = Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten) Oh wait, and the two shoehorned months (January and February) at the beginning because the Romans made a calendar that didn’t actually sync with the celestial year and nobody could plan planting and harvesting because they kept moving around.

Oh, and the two newer months in the middle of the year named for emperors (July and August) instead of the original Quintilis and Sextilis (Six & Seven), because if you can get a unit of time named after you, why not?

If any archeologists are reading this in the year 5000, good luck guys! No, we can’t explain it…

WILL THINGS BE BETTER?

I hope that in 3000 years we will learn how to work with our weaknesses as a species: our hubris, violence, tribalism, short-sightedness, reactivity, and credulousness.

Or if not, perhaps we will at least grow some humility if those weaknesses continue to plague us and make peace with our endless capacity for really, really stupid calls about something as simple as counting days? We can hope!

At any rate, I look forward to the world continuing on January 1st, even though my Star Wars calendar has run out.

My aspirations for the world each year get smaller and smaller. In this upcoming year, may we be patient with our foibles, mindful of the past, respectful of other cultures’ ability to count, and refrain from doing anything too crazy that will prompt 120 generations from now to panic.

The post It’s Been 10 Years Since the End of the World first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.

I write stories, which means I spend all day in a universe where everything happens for a reason. It’s so great.

In a traditional story (anything not absurd or surrealist), everything has a cause and effect. Scenes build on the ones before until you get a climactic end that obeys logic.

It’s so satisfying.

It’s arguably what our brains do every minute of the day: make meaning out of a very chaotic, complex reality.

Everything needs to have a cause and effect when they’re happening and credit and blame when they’re over. Whether it’s ourselves or the stars, the gods, fate, or blind luck. Whatever it is – there’s a REASON.

WHAT IF ALL OF THAT IS WRONG?

There’s a great deal more happenstance, nonsense, and chance in our lives than I think any of us are comfortable with.

There’s a story I learned whose origins have been lost to time, though it’s been variously attributed to Buddhism and Taoism of an old farmer and chance. I used to absolutely hate it.

An old farmer got a horse. And all of his neighbors praised him and told him how lucky he was.

His response: we’ll see.

(Or sometimes: “Maybe,” or “Who knows,” depending on the translation.)

When his son fell off the horse and broke his leg, all of his neighbors commiserated with him.

His response: We’ll see.

Then war broke out and all of the oldest sons were drafted into the army except for his son because of his leg, and all of his neighbors said how lucky he was… You get the idea.

The specific events that happen to this guy also change with translation, but it’s always tragedy and triumph in succession.

WHAT DO WE DO ABOUT IT?

I hated the story because I knew it was absolutely right, but there was never the next step of what to do with that information. 

If you begin to live by acknowledging how little control you have, how do you make any moves at all?

In the Drunkards Walk, How Randomness Rules Our Lives, Leonard Mlodinow describes one study about popular music that shows even when we get success, it’s still not worth much credit or blame.

Eight groups of people were asked to rate songs they’d never heard before.  Some groups saw each other’s ratings and some didn’t.

In the groups that saw others’ ratings, the songs that ended up at the “top of the charts” varied wildly. It turned out that songs that got an early lead when just a few people liked them, shot up in popularity at the end. That was the variable that made the difference, not the quality of the song, the work of the artist, or anything else.

The book has oodles more examples of personal success at sports, at stock picking, and more that look no different from randomness once you crunch the numbers.

Now, the vast majority of us are never going to send a song up the charts, but this kind of statistical randomness affects us too in who we date and the jobs we take, and the chances we’re given or not.

I’m not saying the things we do or don’t do don’t matter. If you never leave your house you’re going to stay single. If you never write a song, you’re never going to be on the chart at all.

But the specific way things and actions and decisions play out is a lot closer to random chance than luck.

WHAT DOES WORK?

The story I’ve learned to tell myself about endeavors has two parts:

For one, relax about outcomes.

You can’t really control how things play out, not with negative thinking or positive thinking, hard work, blame,  talent, luck, or anything else.

Everything you do has a chance at success and what turns a chance into a sure thing is pretty random and almost certainly not under your control.

For two, get serious about action.

You have to take chances or nothing happens. Again sadly, you can take a bunch of chances and nothing will still happen. That part is not under any of our control, but if you are consistently taking chances, your odds go way up.

It’s like throwing snowballs down a hill in the mountains. It’s very unlikely you’ll cause an avalanche every time. But it’s also very unlikely that they’ll peter to a stop a few feet from you every time either. Over the course of a lifetime, you’ll probably only get one or two avalanches, plus a lot of tiny snowballs, and maybe a few snowmen in between.

In short, you really, really, really cannot get caught up in outcomes. But neither can you stop playing the game. (:

The post 2 Ways to Make Goals in the Face of Randomness and Chaos first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.

It will not become a thing. It will not be universally adopted.

I know I JUST wrote a post explaining how I  do not make bold predictions after experiencing the worst prediction ever, and I definitely could be wrong about this. The only thing I can confidently predict is that I personally will never, ever put one on. (But I just don’t think I’m the only one.)

THIS IS NOT A MORAL OBJECTION

Tech companies are not morally neutral. They are low-key wrecking democracy as we know it in their pursuit of profits, but that’s not new. A new fancy headset is not going to make that worse than it already is.

THIS IS A PHYSICAL OBJECTION

The reason I will never put on a helmet is because I would puke my guts out.

Cyber sickness isn’t new. It’s been estimated that at least 10% of your users experience dizziness and nausea in VR. But a new study has shown that is a drastic understatement, and the number is closer to 65%.

Let that sink in. That means 35% enjoy their time on a headset. (That’s a hardcore failing grade…)

WHY DO WE GET MOTION SICKNESS AT ALL?

It’s actually a really fascinating, and complicated question.

How do you know where you are in space?

It’s not like one of your five senses can just announce: this way is up; this way is down; I’m standing still.  It’s three different systems in your body carefully talking to each other:

• It’s your formal vestibular system which consists of three little loops in your ears that sit at different angles and tell you when you’re horizontal, vertical, or diagonal (and sitting, standing, etc.)
• It’s also your eyes and what you can see, especially the horizon.
• It’s also your proprioception or the nerves of your body that can sense where you are, particularly in the upper vertebrae in your neck. (Yes, your brain only really cares where it is in space. Below your neck matters, but not nearly as much.)

Your ears, eyes, and body have to agree. When there’s a mismatch, some people get sick.

For me, it runs in the family. At my grandmother’s nursing home, they had a swing outside where you could roll a wheelchair onto one side and sit on the other and rock together. How sweet.  My family used to bet that they could put my grandmother on one side and me on the other and see who pukes first. Really, very sweet.

Whether you get sick depends on which system you pay attention to the most.

For people who do not get motion sick, you pay attention to your ears. Your vestibular system is the loudest, so if your eyes don’t agree, you don’t get sick because your internal sense of where you are is stronger.

But for people who pay the most attention to your eyes, the least reliable of the three, you get sick.  What you see changes a lot more than your head moves.

Makes sense, all well and good.

BUT WHY ON EARTH DO YOU VOMIT?

Your stomach is not really related to your ears, vertebrae, or eyes. Why does what you eat matter to how steady the ground is? There’s no connection! 

I know I’m diving into weird arcane science  But I’m telling you this has been happening my entire life from the time I nearly totaled a family car with cheese whiz on a road trip to South Dakota. We all just accept that if things move, some people must void all of the food in their stomachs. What is going on?

There’s new research into that as well. It seems like you get nauseous because when you have been poisoned you feel unsteady.

The vestibular system is really sensitive and is often attacked by poisons and viruses, (which is why the virus that shall not be named that wrecked the last three years can go after the vestibular nerves.)

So the theory is now that if you are unsteady for any reason our DNA has coded that as potential poisoning and just in case, better empty the stomach.

And since we are primates who had nothing to do with the sea for hundreds of thousands of years, we did not get the DNA that said if the ocean is moving, you’re fine.

SO WHERE DOES THIS LEAVE THE HOT NEW TECH?

Remember the metaverse? This is a post about the metaverse…

I’ve been to the metaverse, 20 years ago!

In the 90s, one of those novelty Virtual Reality shops popped up in my hometown for a hot second where you waited in this long line watching people wear a box on their head twice the size of a motorcycle helmet connected with wires out of their brainstems. They swatted at the air before you got to do it too for five minutes.

It was some kind of catching gems game on multiple platforms, but I could not orient at all, and I just remember looking down and laughing that the game had programmed feet and then running and suddenly being at the edge of the platform before almost puking and pulling it off my head.

If this is anywhere close to the introduction 65% of the population has to these devices, they’re going to have a problem.

IT’S NOT JUST NAUSEA, IT’S HOW VULNERABLE IT LEAVES YOU

Our little phones are there whenever we have a breath free, but they don’t cut off our primary sense. For the vast majority of humans, 80% of the information we take in is through our eyes. 50% of our cortex is dedicated to processing it. Our eyes are the main way most humans stay safe.

This means most parents for at least a decade of their kids’ lives can’t use this for very long and lose sight of them, and nobody vulnerable will ever put this on in public.

And sadly, many women, especially, are vulnerable in the metaverse too!

There are already accounts of attacks. Companies already have a dismal record of dealing with harassment, but it’s an order of magnitude worse when you jump from horrible words on a tiny screen to an avatar rubbing up against you. And just where under the law do virtual attacks fall? We are not ready for this.

All of which restricts this to single or childfree people in the 35% of the population who don’t get motion sickness and aren’t worried about real-life or online harassment to use in the privacy of their homes.

Sounds like a toy to me. It’s a cool toy, don’t get me wrong, and I don’t think it’s going away. But it is a toy.

The post I’m Never Getting on the Metaverse. Or a Boat. first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.

There’s no question that the younger generation are faster texters and have a meme culture that far surpasses anything on the internet heretofore.

Quality rhyme, right there. Quality.  (This is not sarcasm!)

One of my favorite scenes from the TV show Grace and Frankie is when Frankie gets a new computer and calls Apple for support and whispers, “I’m 70!”

There is some truth to the idea that older people are not good online and young people are digital natives who, with every generation, will always be soooo much better.

But it’s only half the truth.

START EARLY, GET MORE MUSCLE MEMORY

What we mistake for mastery is probably just muscle memory.

Muscle memory has nothing to do with muscles. It’s actually about an inert white substance in your brain called myelin. This comes from a really excellent book called The Talent Code, about how we get good at things.

[Fun fact, researchers thought myelin was useless until they autopsied Einstein’s brain and found a TON of it, and thought, hunh, maybe we really use all of our brain and aren’t wasting giant swathes of it!!!]

And while some of the claims about the glory of practice have been debunked, myelin is still a revelation in how we learn things. (The debunking is mostly about how much improvement can be practiced into us. There is a lot more genetics involved in a world-class violinist or a baseball pitcher’s throw than we would like to admit in our individualistic bootstrapped society.)

But short of Olympic-level performance, you can still get massively better at things.

Your ability to do a task depends on neurons firing at the right moment. Think about it: the difference between a mediocre violinist and a great violinist is the ability to play a note exactly when and how they want. It’s all in the timing. That’s what myelin controls. You do something enough, it wraps around those neurons so the timing of their firing gets more and more predictable.

So in regards to computer or smartphone use, there is no arguing that if you start as a very small child, you’re fine motor movements and your ability to navigate your environment online is huge. The myelin you’ve been wrapping around those little neurons is very well formed timing fingers to perfection.

This is not the same thing as understanding what you’re looking at.

THE FANCY NAME FOR THIS IS DIGITAL LITERACY

It turns out a child’s level of digital literacy is usually in line with if not behind the rest of the other literacies they have to learn in school.

Kids are not better at the internet because kids are not good at reading yet, and the internet is a particularly challenging form of reading.

WEBSITES ARE A NEW FORM OF CONSUMING INFORMATION

I  took a web design class years ago and was fascinated to realize this. Newspaper articles, novels, nonfiction books,  political speeches, and academic lectures are different formats for presenting information. It could be the exact same information!

A website is an entirely different form, a super complicated one.

WEBSITES ARE IN 3-D.

The information does not flow from page to page but exists in little pods linked together, more a K’NEX set that got super creative, not a book.

THE META-SKILLS BEHIND BROWSING THE WEB

• Know how to read.
• Understand the architecture of a website with its link ecosystem.
• Understand that a lot of websites are accidentally or maliciously lying to you, and that they may look better than official sources of information.
• Understand that even with websites that aren’t lying, they most likely only have one piece of the whole picture about a topic and you have to look and multiple websites.
• Understand Search and that it is algorithms showing you information that is partially true, accidentally false, or maliciously false in one long, identical list of links.

These are sophisticated intellectual gymnastics that kids who are still working on object permanence are…not good at. Yes, their little fingers may text faster than you have ever been able to do anything, but that doesn’t translate into literacy.

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN?

Kids are only going to be better than adults if we teach them to be.

You can learn by osmosis how to manipulate a mouse and how to build a Minecraft village that is stunning and its complexity. (But even with that, if you get an actual architect into Minecraft and teach him some basics, he’s still going to be better at it.)

Poor readers are poor digital citizens.

WHAT TO DO WITH THIS INFORMATION?

Fund schools!!!!

Kids really need to learn this stuff from qualified teachers, just like every other literacy.

We’re not going to have a generation of people so much better at the Internet. We’re gonna have a generation of people who are exactly as good at the Internet as we as a society have taught them to be.

The post Kids Text Fast. It doesn’t mean they Understand the Internet first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.

SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY ARE ALWAYS ABOUT NOW

Whether authors intend it or not, speculative fiction is always a commentary on the present. Ironically, often more than a lot of contemporary fiction.

One of my favorite short stories by Asimov, and I wish I could find it again, had miners working in space with essentially, nanotechnology. But the conflict of the story was about women working in the mines, which was eventually solved with a priest. Women in the mines turned out to be fine, so long as there was somebody there to marry everybody! This is what I’m talking about. Successfully predicted nanotechnology, but thousands of years from now, everyone will act like it’s the 1950s…

Frank Herbert was particularly topical, whether he intended to be or not. He anchored Dune in politics, government, religion, power and those evolved to match the world from the 50s to the 80s.

So I did a little thought experiment. Here’s how I think Dune would have been different if Frank Herbert had been writing in 2020.

METOO COMES TO DUNE

The Bene Gesserit warrior concubines of the Dune universe had a lot of conflict in 98 hours, but questioning the ethics of their sacrifice wasn’t one of them.

Things like consent and bodily autonomy in and gaining power through sex with powerful men would all have been fascinating themes to explore if it was being written now. There’s a lot of conflict within the Bene Gesserit, but not one woman refused their assignment as they definitely would have now!

SECRET SOCIETIES WOULD HAVE NOT SO SECRET SCANDALS

Sex would rear its ugly head again in the other warrior disciplines. Most of the eastern contemplative communities to spring up in the 60s that were aped so favorably in Dune have almost universally been rocked by sexual scandals. Yoga, Buddhism, martial arts, the New Age. You name it and someone’s got caught doing something with somebody and the shine is definitely off.

GOVERNMENT WOULD STILL SUCK

Dune started as an empire and ended as a broken empire. At no part, did anyone get any more rights. And unfortunately, I don’t think this would have changed in 2020. If anything, his prophecies about tyrants seem only more and more accurate as time goes on.

PEOPLE WILL WORSHIP ANYTHING NOW

The deep antipathy towards religion in Dune I don’t think we have changed in 2020, but I do think it would have spread beyond just the official religions of Dune.

In 2020 with a wellspring of cult research and cult-like groups have greatly expanded our definition of religion.

We have wellness, political, beauty, and diet cults now. And sometimes we have diet cults that morph into political cults or vice versa. They all have the trappings of high demand group with fervent followers, but with none of the traditional religious expression. It’s a fascinating phenomenon. These days, religion does not stay its lane and it wouldn’t in Dune either.

PLANTS MATTER…MORE THAN EVER

People read climate change into Dune, which I don’t think was the case when he wrote it in the 60s. Yes, the environmental movement was just getting its start, but the focus really was on getting noxious chemicals out of our air and water and food supply.

Did people know about climate change? Yes! People have known about climate change for centuries! But it wasn’t a part of the national consciousness.

If you were written today, I think it would have been more of a critique or a metaphor for climate change. The desiccated planet as metaphor is just too perfect.

DRUGS ARE A HEALTH PROBLEM!

Drugs (Spice) probably changed the most in the book from this amazing thing that granted everybody powers to a kind of shameful addictive weakness.

Today, it’s morphing, (rightly!), into a medical problem with a raft of failed policies behind it. So perhaps that same tension between the realm of criminal and the realm of health would infect Dune.

What story do you think would change if it was written now?

The post The Future is Now… In Fiction first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.

It was near the end of the semester, and we were in the 80s and the Fall of the Berlin Wall. The teacher was very proud of the fact that he had a piece of it which he brought like show and tell.

As he passed an unremarkable bit of cement from hand to hand, he said the most incorrect statement I have ever heard in my entire life about anything ever.

“The fall of the Berlin wall was the most significant historical event to happen within my lifetime. Probably within yours as well.”

REMEMBER THE OPTIMISM?

If you are too young to remember the 90s, or heaven forbid, you weren’t even born in the 90s, there was a real sense of optimism.

Yes, the Dot Com crash kind of wrecked the economy for a hot second. And yes Y2K and the turn of the new millennium potentially would’ve wrecked all our computers, but that was a false alarm. Yes, we just elected a president that had lost the popular vote and probably also lost the electoral college but we didn’t actually count all the votes. And yes being gay was still illegal in a lot of states. And being any kind of minority might as well have been illegal in a lot of states.

But we didn’t have the kind of hyper-connected social media saturated world, so we were still getting the official version of history, which was very optimistic.

REMEMBER WHAT HAPPENED NEXT?

The infamous Berlin Wall comment was made in May of 2001. Remember what happened in September?

At the time of his statement, I smiled and nodded and genuinely believed him, because again, I was still used to smiling and nodding and believing Authority figures about their take on the world.

There were very few places to learn anything to the contrary. The internet was still the Internet Movie Database, some janky chat rooms, amateur sites about extremely niche passion topics, and a bunch of businesses putting up one-page websites with a phone number to call if you wanted to conduct any actual business.

As I watched the two towers fall, the first thing that popped into my head was his declaration.

And then we declared war on a country where Osama bin Laden wasn’t. And I thought of that teacher and the Berlin wall. But that country did have nuclear weapons. Except they didn’t. And I thought of that teacher and the Berlin wall.

Every time something historic happens in the ever-increasing avalanche of events that change everything, from elections to pandemics to electronics, I hear his voice in my head.

HISTORY WILL NEVER BE OVER

That throwaway comment is probably the single thing I think about the most from all of my education.

It’s helped me mostly avoid giant pronouncements, I hope. But it also helped me speak a little more freely as well.

Because we’re going to get this wrong. We don’t know what happens next. We can extrapolate. But how many trendlines are going off the rails? The world looks nothing like it did. It’s not a logical progression.

WHAT WILL THE TRULY MOST SIGNIFICANT EVENT BE?

It also has me wondering what really will be the most significant historical event in my lifetime.

I don’t think any of us alive today are going to know. When we look back at history the moments that truly change everything can seem so insignificant.

Hitler is elected chancellor instead of drummed out of town. A dude named Watts figures out a more efficient steam engine and launches the Anthropocene age and the industrial revolution. A super cold winter froze the Rhine, allowing Germanic tribes to bypass the usual Roman defenses keeping them north and destroyed the Roman Empire.

The moments of significance are never once we think they are.

What is the worst take you’ve ever heard on a subject? Let me know!

The post The Worst Prediction in the History of Educating People first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.

I know that sounds crazy. But bear with me…

I write fiction: stories people do not believe. Sometimes I think this newsletter is the mirror to that: deconstructing the stories people automatically believe.

The idea for this week came from the news story about the water problem in the Western states of the US and the incredible droughts in Europe. Namely, that there isn’t any water. (I mean, I love the TV show Drain the Ocean, but it’s not supposed to be literal!)

LIFE IN CONSTANT DROUGHT

I grew up in Colorado, and it’s difficult to describe to someone who hasn’t grown up rationing water what it is like. Residents for decades filled fountains with lights instead of water and transformed our yards into rocks and took military showers.

But more than any one action, this mindset infects you until it’s almost instinct.

The craving for water as you watch the world turn beige and light on fire every year. As your skin desiccates and your hair crackles. As new residents clutch their chapstick and all their bath products stop working, and they wonder, “It’s so dry here.” As you discuss what you would save in the fire because everyone knows someone who’s lost their house.

I thought it was a universal experience, that everyone hoards water until I went to England where there is water everywhere. Where people took showers for as long as they wanted. Where it never stopped raining. Where huge plants soaked up everything and grew to the sky. Where lakes dotted every field. And nobody thought for a single second about what was coming out of their tap. It took me months to grasp that it’s not that they didn’t worry – they didn’t think about it at all.

This may be the first real problem the developed world has faced in a long time.

We have more energy than we know what to do with, which means we have enough to feed, house, and care for everyone.  On a practical level, what else do we need?

OUR SELF-INFLICTED PROBLEMS

I want to be extremely clear. I am not saying we don’t have real suffering. There is no end to the way we make ourselves miserable, especially the marginalized among us, who suffer the absolute most. But none of those are real problems.

It’s the definition of prejudice: it doesn’t actually exist. It’s a made-up story that is killing people.

Hundreds of thousands of people have died from gun violence, none of which was necessary. It’s a made-up fight. With real casualties. Hundreds of thousands of kids are stuffed into overcrowded classrooms getting an inferior education with books decided by political actors. Totally made-up problems. (Though they’ll be real enough when those kids come of age.)

WHAT IS REAL AND WHAT IS NOT?

I ran a grocery store through the pandemic, and this became a constant refrain: What is real and what is not real?

There was a lot of policy coming out of corporate. (Side note, never stick a bunch of executives at home and bored again. Just don’t do it.) Some of the changes were absolutely essential to our own protection, and some were absolutely ridiculous.

Safety was real. Getting food on the shelves was real. Making sure the signs were right so we didn’t kill somebody with a nut allergy was real.

Making sure that the automatic schedule was not manually adjusted too many times was not real. Making sure the hourly orders were recorded on paper in real time was not real. Making sure that all the marketing decals for the next holiday matched the map sent by marketing was not real.

And you know what? I was right. Letting that stuff slide didn’t make a single difference.

Oh, eventually our overlords would get a bee in their bonnet about one number or another. For a memorable three months, right at the beginning of the pandemic, it was cold rotisserie chicken sales.  I’m not kidding.

We were up to our elbows in bleach and panic and getting calls about our low numbers of leftover chicken.  And then that suddenly became real, because you know, staying employed is a real problem, so we’d worry about it for a few weeks, and then it’d be onto something else.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy to jump through as many corporate hoops as the next person, but when you’re out there making life and death decisions, and there is not enough time in the day, you have to prioritize what is real.

WE HAVE TO FIGURE OUT WHAT TO DO TO KEEP FROM RUNNING OUT OF WATER. IMMEDIATELY.

There’s no blaming one side or the other. I mean you can try, but that doesn’t get you more water. You can even put up a sound bite or graph about climate change. Or one denying climate change. There is still no water. Finally, we must do some actual governing. With actual solutions.

It’s almost refreshing. There is no room for bluster. There is no room for experimenting. We don’t have any water.

Sadly, and happily, there will be more and more real problems as our fight over fantasy problems lead to real-world consequences. The stress sucks, but the simplicity is almost a relief.

I know this sounds weird coming from a writer of fiction, to pay close attention to reality. Still, it is perhaps my time spent focused on fiction that allows me to recognize it so easily in the vast majority of our politics and news.

At work, in news, in everything else, I promise it’s a great thing for your blood pressure and your ability to plan your day to ask: What is real and what is not real?

The post A Fiction Author on How to Fall in Love with Reality first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.

I talk a lot in this newsletter about how to dismantle your assumptions and beliefs and question the water that you swim in. But equally important, if not more important, is the ability to get new and better ideas once you’ve done that.

One of humanity’s main tools for seeing things differently is the scientific method. Don’t click away! I know, boring, Middle School level science, but we have a massive problem. We were never really taught the first step!

WHAT WE DID LEARN IN SCHOOL?

How many tests and experiments did you run in school? How many times did you have to come up with the question, not just the answer?

I remember an upper division writing class in college. I got a C on my first paper.

Somewhat gobsmacked, I went to the Professor who informed me that I had come to a different conclusion, not the one he gave me.

I said, “Let me get this straight, you gave me the hypothesis, the evidence, and the conclusion in bullets, and you want me to turn that exact hypothesis, evidence, and conclusion into five paragraphs?” He was thrilled that I understood. I did. I got an A on the next assignment.

I did learn an important lesson that day, but I don’t think it was the one he was intending. 

A similar thing happened in science in high school, where we burned a peanut to calculate the calories. (Did anyone else have to do this?) We were given how much energy is in a peanut. My group ran the experiment and got that amount of energy.

All good… Until we got to the part of the proof about how our answer could be wrong.

My teacher suggested that maybe we screwed up the assignment and then screwed it up again in a way that corrected the first screw-up so we reached the correct number.

I asked if maybe we could burn an almond instead. He looked at me like I was crazy. I said that maybe I want to know how many calories are in an almond since everyone has already done peanuts. He said the calorie count is on the bag. I said, Why am I here? 

You can see the fruits of this kind of education in businesses the world over. The training with no obvious outcome. The products no one wants. The busy work! Dear god, the busy work. All avoided by asking the question: what is the question? What problem are we trying to solve?

OUR EDUCATION TEACHES US WE’RE IN A KIND WORLD WHEN WE AREN’T.

I mean something very specific when I say kind. This idea comes from a fabulous book called Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialist World, by David Epstein.

A kind world is a closed system, much less complex than the real, wicked world. Sports games, board games, and any computer algorithm all limit choices to allow us to learn the right lessons from experience.

The number of choices could be incredibly large, like chess moves, but there are still only a few ways to play chess.

(This doesn’t mean that these worlds are nice/fair/easy. Ask anybody who got fourth place at the Olympics in any sport with seemingly straightforward rules.)

WE LIVE IN THE WICKED WORLD

Olympic podiums aside, we live in the wicked world where decisions are hopelessly complex; randomness and chaos screw well-laid plans randomly, and we often don’t learn the right lessons from experience.

This leads to all manner of perverse consequences and heartbreak. It’s the difference between playing house in a sandbox, versus buying an actual house and setting up real life.

In this world where you don’t know what you’re solving for and you can’t be sure of the feedback you get, coming up with a really good hypothesis is probably the most important thing you can do. And one we get barely any practice at it!

IT’S ALSO OUR ONE MAIN STRATEGIC ADVANTAGE

Computers have thus far not been able to exit the sandbox. They must pretend they live in a kind world where the rules are fixed because they don’t have the complexity to think for themselves when the rules don’t make sense. Humans can.

But due to our education, we spend most of our time pretending we’re in a sandbox. Most schooling and most jobs artificially limit our choices because it’s just easier to function by known rules, even if they aren’t true, but to truly solve the problems we’re facing, for at least some of the day, we have to get out of the sandbox.

ENTER THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD

The idea that you can try something, see what the result is, guess why, and repeat the experiment to see if it happens again is revolutionary. And if it happens enough, you change your fundamental beliefs about what is true. That changed everything.

It’s an idea that took thinkers all over the world almost two millennia to figure out.

Egyptian Medical texts in 500 BCE explained how to examine, diagnose, and treat problems, while Babylonian astronomers first applied math to the stars (and everything we’ve mathed since).

By 1000 BCE, Indian philosophers and Buddhist scholars were diving into the brain, perception, and the self with what Einstein and any physicist since would call well-designed thought experiments.

Aristotle’s inductive-deductive method of reasoning went very viral, while many other Greeks and Romans created whole new disciplines of math and science from geography, to physics, to alchemy (some of these were better ideas than others, but sure fun to try!)

The scientific method of experimentation, particularly with specially designed instruments, came from the Islamic world. A physician named Ibn an-Haytham was as instructive as Aristotle, though sadly far less studied in Western curriculum, particularly because he proved Aristotle wrong. Like, a lot. He was particularly interested in vision, color, and light, but that’s greatly understating all he brought to science.

By the Renaissance, the scientific revolution was in full flourish, and a world view based on observable reality, as opposed to gods, fairies, coincidences, and luck, was increasingly better established, a trend that continues today.

So how do you come up with a good question? That will be next week, for now, enjoy the wicked world!

The post How to Learn to Love the Wicked World first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.

AVALANCHES OF OPINIONS

There has been an avalanche of opinions and think pieces about the future. I have written before about the dangers of taking these accounts at face value.

But we just can’t help ourselves.

BRAINS LOVE STORIES

That seems like a positive statement. Especially coming from an author who spends all her time writing stories. But it isn’t.

We make meaning out of anything and everything. This concept is ubiquitous in modern psychology and difficult to trace to a specific source. There are thousands of articles that reference the concept and yet no single origin.

Essentially we create a logical chain of cause and effect for everything that happens in our lives (even though the universe is mostly random chaos).

Sometimes we know we’re doing it and name it, like with superstitions. We know that we didn’t get the job because of the tie we wore, but it’s better to be safe than sorry at the next interview and wear it. Or astrology where we know that a bunch of long-dead Greek men looking at a sky that doesn’t even match today’s stars could not possibly have codified billions of humans. But sometimes it’s impossible not to see the pattern.

SOMETIMES OUR STORIES HURT LIKE HELL

We get a bad grade on a couple of math tests and believe for decades that we are bad at math. Worse, sometimes our math teacher treats us differently because we don’t look like someone who is good at math, and we believe them, for decades. Sometimes, horrible things happen and there has to be a grand design behind it proving we are awful people.

Think about that. It’s insane. It’s easier for our brain to believe we are horrible than it is to acknowledge random chance.

In fact, designers have to make random number generators less random because we are so prone to detecting (creating?) patterns. We won’t believe numbers are truly random unless we take out things like runs and repeated numbers. (From The Drunkards Walk, by Leonard Mlodinow, a great book about randomness.)

WHY MAKING UP STORIES (EVEN IF THEY’RE WRONG) IS MOSTLY AN ADVANTAGE

Paul Zak researches story and posits that they aid us as social creatures who associate with strangers. More than random facts, telling a story evokes an emotional reaction, and emotions are motivation, especially to engage in survival behaviors.

Story turns out to be a huge survival advantage.

We don’t have to see a lion to panic. Someone else can tell us that when he was walking along this stretch of road yesterday, he almost got mauled. We will be as motivated as he was with just a few words.

Contrary to popular opinion, we’re not the only animal out there with language.

Dolphins, whales, other primates, and a host of other animals have ways to communicate with each other. From whistles and clicks to a bee wiggling its little body in a specific way, animals tell each other stories, but they are an order of magnitude simpler than a single text message.

BUT IT HAS LEFT US WITH A MAJOR WEAKNESS

The universe is super chaotic.

We want everything that we do, everything that happens to us, and everything that happens to other people to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. We want our lives to have a cause and an effect.  We search the world over for our purpose. Or at the very least, we expect hard work to mean something and meanness to be punished. And most days, even though none of that is true, it’s far healthier to act as if it is. Because in a universe of random chance, there’s always a chance we get what we want too!

But it can really shoot us in the foot when there’s a massive upheaval and social change and many people are predicting the end of the world.

We have a real blind spot when it comes to chaos, randomness, and sheer bloody chance.

When you really look back at history, and try to extract it from the beginning and middle and end that has been superimposed on it, you’ll find a great deal more randomness than I think anyone is really comfortable with.

THE VIETNAM WAR STARTED BECAUSE OF FREAK RADAR ECHOES AND SQUIRRELY SONARMEN

American ships were damaged in the Gulf of Tonkin in a brazen attack in the middle of a thunderstorm on August 4, 1964. Thus justifying and precipitating the first direct American attack on North Vietnam. And everything that came after it.

Except… They weren’t attacked.

It turns out, now that communications have been declassified, that there was no actual evidence of torpedoes or other boats. No one will ever know for sure, but looking back, the Navy thinks the equipment malfunctioned in the storms, and the sonarmen, seeing something on their displays, declared it had to be an attack. And then higher-ups cherry-picked the data to enhance the certainty over the next few days to argue for an attack.

I personally am shocked. So extremely shocked. This is my shocked face.

Arguably, America was funding South Vietnamese raids and had two carriers in the gulf, and it was only a matter of time. But… we’ll never really know.

ONE INVENTION STARTED A NEW AGE

I have a favorite encyclopedia entry. I also read the dictionary as a kid for fun. Don’t judge.

James Watt was a Scottish inventor who took someone else’s steam engine, (It wasn’t even his steam engine!) and came up with a separate condenser. Just a tiny little tweak.

Basically, he separated heating the steam and cooling the steam, so it was insanely more efficient. And with that one invention, he managed to kick off both the industrial revolution and the entire Anthropocene age. He also got a unit of power named after him, just for fun.

And now for my favorite encyclopedia entry:

REMEMBER THAT AS YOU LOOK AT THE NEWS THIS WEEK AND THE COMING MONTHS AND YEARS

Do not fall into the trap of believing that the future is written, foreordained, or inevitable. It’s none of those things.

Do not think that the odds are overwhelming or that this is forever because none of those things are true.

Do not think that a small action will not make a difference, because sometimes a radar signal helps your plane land and sometimes it starts a war. And sometimes a tweak to a design gets you a microwave with 15 buttons (why? Seriously, why!?!) and sometimes it starts a new epoch.

No, I’m not trying to say it’s not going to be bad. We don’t know what the next radarman is going to see. It could be worse than anything we predicted. I’m just trying to say, we truly, madly, deeply don’t know.

The stories we are telling with a cohesive narrative feel like they’re true, but that’s only because of the way our brains evolved. Reality does not have a beginning, middle, and end. It’s just all middles all the time, where anything can happen.

The post How Radar Started a War and Condensers Started a New Age first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.