We all fight over our favorite books, but I find the more interesting question to be: what are your most frequent books?

WHY DO WE RETURN TO BOOKS?

With no conscious decision, there are some books I’ve read dozens and dozens of times, and in contrast, there are some books I love so much or that are so life-changing, I know repeated exposure will never match the feeling, so I’ve never gone near them again. WHAT distinguishes them? I don’t know.

This isn’t a definitive list of the best books or anything like that, but just a peek into the weirdness and deeply personal experience of reading. I’ve covered my favorite libraries in fiction before, some other books I’ve read again and again.

BOOKS I’VE READ DOZENS OF TIMES

Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen

Mostly because I needed something slightly engaging to fall asleep to and a British accent reading Jane Austen was perfect. I can quote large chunks of this book. Like full chapters at a time by now…

Animal Dreams, Barbara Kingsolver

It’s set in New Mexico, and I was living in Europe when I was reading this on repeat. I love the message, but I mostly read it for this quintessential Western American story, so familiar to where I grew up.

Treachery in Death, JD Robb

This is one of her endless futuristic mysteries. This one focused on leadership, and I picked it up just as I jumped into management and was definitely feeling the crunch. It was so idealized and perfect that I just kept returning to it.

Ghost Mountain Shifters, Audrey Faye

This group of werewolves live collectively in the woods and the community support and healing were completely addictive during the pandemic isolation.

Starship Mage, Glynn Stewart

This is like Star Wars, only woke (in the best way), with a hero with huge integrity and a fascinating world. It’s just…entertaining. I go searching for cool new books and just find myself redownloading these when I need to turn off my brain.

BOOKS I’VE LOVED BEYOND REASON AND NEVER TOUCHED AGAIN

Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë

I read this in middle school, one of the first “adult” books I picked up, and I remember being so shocked and rocked at every turn that I knew I would never feel that shocked again and would rather have a perfect memory.

Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A Heinlein

The origin of the slang “grok,” this alien comes to earth story is one of the first Sci-Fi books I read, and the contrast between this and Dicken’s endless wordsmithing was…marked.

Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien

I think I haven’t revisited this one simply due to the size. I have a friend who can tell you what is happening on any day of our calendar year in the book, and I’ve felt so inadequate in comparison.

A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving

During the climactic scene of this book, I remember dropping the book, running out the door of my house, and about three blocks before I slowed down, it was that shocking, in the best way. And knew I could never return to it.

What are the books you’ve read a thousand times and what are the books you’ve read once? I realize this says so much more about who I was as a person and where I was than about the books.

The post What Books Do You Read Again and Again? first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.

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.

WHAT HAPPENS IF YOU DON’T HAVE ENOUGH COMPLEXITY?

I’m struck by this question whenever I can fortify myself to dip into the news (see my article about outrage addiction). We talk about the energy crisis and oil and gas and fracking. Then we talk about climate change and CO2 emissions. Then we talk about the economy and inflation. Then we talk about a childcare crisis (at least in the US). And then we talk about our crumbling infrastructure and skyrocketing debt. And we do this like we are talking about different things.

THEY ARE ALL THE SAME THING.

How are they possibly the same thing? Let me explain, and in the process, hopefully, I can pull back the curtain and reveal the wizard behind our economy, and our governments, and our art, children, health, everything on earth, really. His name is Dan. But let’s start at the beginning. 

DAN THE HYDROGEN ATOM

Once upon a time, there was a hydrogen atom named Dan who lived in the center of a star in one of the outer arms of a galaxy, in one of the outer spines in a supercluster of galaxies, which is where the address gets fuzzy, but that is surely one of the uncountable superclusters across the universe, but we can’t see that far away.

He is not long for his world, because he and three of his hydrogen friends on this particular day get squished into one helium atom, in what we call nuclear fusion. Except not all of him and his friends fit into one helium atom. There’s a little bit left.

It’s a blindingly small amount of mass. 29% of 4 hydrogen atoms are leftover, which is converted to pure energy. (Remember Einstein: E=MC² Matter is really dense energy and vice versa?) I don’t think it was ever impressed upon me just how much energy is in one little atom. In this case, the energy released could power a 60 KW light bulb for 100 years.

So the former hydrogen atom, now light and heat and movement (thermal, radiant, and kinetic energy), still named Dan, go flying out across space and unlike so many of his fellows, smacks into a planet. And unlike so many planets, this one has a layer of gas around it which traps him on the planet’s surface, never to leave it again.

THE MAGIC OF PHOTOSYNTHESIS

Dan continues his journey and runs smack dab into a little kale plant, which takes a few molecules of carbon from the water it drinks and another hydrogen molecule from the soil it eats. That hydrogen atom is an old cousin of Dan’s from a very, very long time ago and a galaxy far away, but they don’t really have time to connect because the kale releases the free oxygen into the atmosphere that used to be stuck to the carbon, and uses Dan to bind these three together (energy, hydrogen, and carbon), creating a teeny tiny glucose molecule.

And then a little human girl named Danielle, ironically enough, pulls the kale plant from her garden and reluctantly eats it in a salad her mother makes.

THE MAGIC OF DIGESTION

The glucose molecule containing Dan gets absorbed into Danielle’s intestine and wings around her bloodstream. (We won’t go into what happens to the rest of the kale plant.) That little glucose molecule finally reaches Danielle’s bicep, where in a very complicated reaction involving multiple intermediary steps I won’t go into without completely blowing the word count of this note, the glucose is ripped apart.

Dan is bound up in the cell, and the soil and water Dan rode in on go back into the bloodstream, and the carbon at least goes out of the lungs as carbon dioxide.  (Really FASCINATING side note, if Dan had gotten bound up in a fat cell, instead of a muscle cell, he would just sit there for a while until called back into the bloodstream to get used. Which means we lose weight by breathing. Seriously. And literally.)

But Dan ended up in a bicep and Danielle happens to be in the middle of a violin recital by the time this is all over, so very quickly, that muscle gets the message to move it and contract repeatedly as she saws out a passable rendition of twinkle twinkle little star (using a very teeny tiny bit of a star to do it, whom she does not know is named Dan.)

Dan relinquishes his job of holding an ATP molecule together (what became of him when the glucose broke down) in the mitochondria and becomes the heat/movement/kinetic energy again, in this case, to move a violin bow and heat Danielle’s bicep. In short, converting energy to music, which is not an equation you’ll find in your physics textbook, but what else is it made of?!

WHAT HAPPENS TO DAN FROM THERE?

Some of him went off in the auditorium as sound waves. Some as heat released from Danielle’s skin. Some as the movement of air stirred up by the movement of her arm. He dances around the atmosphere with the rest of the solar energy and maybe one day to escape to go flinging into space until he gets suctioned up by a black hole or another bit of gravity to start the dance all over again.

He could eventually find himself back as potential energy again. Remember, energy is not created or destroyed, it just moves around.

The long and short of it is, we are all just dirt and sunshine and ocean.

And every spec of heat, light, movement, and life on earth came from the sun. (With a couple of minor nuclear exceptions.)

How is this useful? (if you’re not creating alien species for a novel or trying to pass a high school biology exam?)

Like it or not, there are a couple of really big collective decisions we need to make as a species (well, ideally about 200 years ago) but soon is the next best option. Losing track of the fact that our entire planet, life, and economy is about sunlight obfuscates those decisions.

The only reason we exist is sunlight and the atmosphere that traps it here. We forget that at our peril.

The post How to Make Music & Babies with Sunshine first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.

This is one way an author can world-build a totally new civilization: you take one variable like the energy supply, change it, and see how it might affect everything from the morning coffee to marriage customs to the global economy.

But lest you think our problems would be solved with enough energy (without the downsides of torching the world), I don’t think it’s going to be that simple…

WE’VE HAD ENOUGH FOR OVER A CENTURY

According to some sources, we’ve had enough energy to feed, house, clothe, and care for every human on earth since about 1870. Yes, it came with the downside of torching the world, and no, we haven’t actually done that with our munificent bounty, but not enough energy is not our problem and hasn’t been for a while.

The problem and opportunity, and challenge, are what we build with that energy. The true constraint is taking that raw energy and building complexity with it.

WE’RE ONE OF THE ONLY PLACES IN THE UNIVERSE THIS CAN HAPPEN!

Most energy stays in its simplest form and gets flung out into space by the stars. Occasionally, endless energy will collect and squeeze together into an impossibly small space until it’s too dense to even comprehend, and you get a black hole. And very occasionally, you get a little chunk of rock that builds a layer of gas around itself where the energy hitting the surface and leaving the atmosphere is close to even. Basically, where entropy doesn’t win for a couple hundred million years.

And if you wait long enough,  weird things start to happen! Like eventually that energy self-organizes and starts breathing.

And if nothing happens to destabilize this exceptional little pocket of complexity in millions upon millions upon millions of years, it starts becoming aware of its own existence. And then it starts having existential crises, dancing on its toes, blowing into sheep’s bladder to create an instrument that can be heard two miles away, chasing balls in circles, and building other things of even more beauty and complexity.

WHEN THERE IS ENOUGH COMPLEXITY

It’s amazing. The vast majority of the universe is enjoying ever-increasing entropy: more and more chaos and less and less order until everything is far-flung and dark.  We’re one tiny little planetary exception to that rule where energy has been able to complexify for millions of years.

Which is why adding to our available energy is not going to solve all our problems.  We don’t need a bunch of energy; we need to turn that raw power into more complexity.

HOW DO WE DO THAT?

On a physiological level, we eat food, digest the food, and take the energy and the dirt and build ourselves. But even without any excess, most of our lives are spent just maintaining our own complexity. Just keeping a bit of complex intelligent life breathing takes enormous energy and work.

But some of us are extremely lucky to have a little bit extra. When we don’t have to just survive, we have kids. We write books. We build businesses. We make music. We build our bodies and see who can be the strongest and fastest. We play games.

It’s my favorite thing about humans: all the crazy complex beauty and fun we can create out of sunlight.

I think a lot about what it actually takes to do this. Yes, it takes the power that we get from food, which came from the sun via the plants we eat (or the animals that ate the plants that we eat). It also takes the stability of the ozone layer, the climate, and no giant asteroids to maintain the homeostasis that makes complexity building possible.

What else?

TIME

Growing a human takes time. Digesting food and turning it into muscle takes time. Putting one word after another on paper takes time. Teaching a kid the nuances of manners (and spoons, the alphabet, Russian disinformation campaigns, and every other insanely complicated skill we’re expected to master) takes time.  Yes, you can speed it up with an influx of more energy, but only to a certain point. Things take the time they take.

SKILL

Skill is really just neurons that can fire in a particular pattern at the right time. There’s a reason humans are capable of more complex feats of engineering than a turkey. We can shove more skills into our brains. That process also takes time and energy.

EFFORT

There’s a myth in our society that the more skill, time, and money you have, the better you should feel about life. And there’s some truth to that. Things get easier, but that’s because of the complexity you’ve already built. Building new skills, houses, books, and humans is hard and stays hard no matter how long you do it. 

We are literally patterning chaos and that is ridiculously hard to do.

CHAOS

We have less chaos here with energy constantly entering the system, but the number is not zero, and can’t ever be.  The whole of evolution came from random mutations. Chance, luck, disaster, and problems are vital to building complexity. They are two sides of the same coin, constantly melting into one another. This is the part where I say that a life you can predict would be boring. I don’t know about that. We could do with some more boring, but I will say that it won’t be very complex.

What else? Seriously?

What does it take to create something new? Because I don’t think we’re very good at it yet, nor do we understand it that well. We’re currently engaged in the madness of ever-expanding energy, even as the consequences of that are completely screwing up the air quality as we use our filters for fuel.

We need a new way to look at what we’re doing here when we can’t accumulate great excesses of stored sunlight. I actually think we’ll be better for it because then we can focus on the time, effort, and skill to manage the energy and build so many more fun things!

The post We’ve Had Enough Energy Since 1870. What Have We Done With it? first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.

Well, maybe. Someday.

It’s important to note that sustaining a tiny sun on earth may never be possible; though we said that about the energy! At the very least, this solution is decades and decades away.

If it ever happens, what does it mean? Let’s do a little world-building, shall we?

One of the most fun and important steps of writing speculative fiction is, well, speculating. Change a variable in your made-up world and play out all of the implications on money, religion, gender, power all of it.

Variable: We now get energy from fusion, not from ancient dead plants.

What does a world like that look like?

POWER INDUSTRY

I feel like this would be the least changed, ironically, since it doesn’t fundamentally change electricity. We already have the grid. We even have real estate for power plants. We just hook our existing cables to a different source. (Which, hey, we don’t have to wait to do! The same is true of all green energy too! Yay!)

TRANSPORTATION

What if you could go anywhere you wanted for the price of a car or plane? It puts a whole new spin on globalization, borders, fiancé visas, and moving for work. People will get a whole lot more mobile with a whole lot less fuss.

ECONOMICS

Here, things start to get more fun. Our insanely complex economy obscures the fact that money is energy and energy is oil. The whole of our economy would shift completely if we switched to a different fuel source. This is where fusion and green energy start to diverge because oil is old sunlight and solar is new sunlight, so there are still recognizable constraints on both.

But when we make our own sun?

Power gets cheaper, so that is one bill shrunk immediately. Food gets way cheaper. (Do you know how much oil it takes to deliver a pineapple to your average grocery store?) Building things gets way cheaper. Which means everyone everywhere gets a lot more disposable income.

This is so hard to imagine because right now, the excess is getting funneled up to a few individuals and why would it be any different with fusion?

But that is deceptive because we don’t have endless energy. In fact, energy is getting more and more expensive. Digging up oil is more expensive; rich countries have already exploited all the poor countries, and there are no new frontiers to vacuum up for money. So now we’re cannibalizing ourselves and hollowing out the middle class and pushing the poverty line down to continue the merry-go-round a little longer. But what happens when that squeeze lets up and there’s just always more energy? They can hoard as much as they want, and for the cost of a power plant, there’s more where that came from?

LABOR

If living expenses become a fraction of your salary, current monopolies become harder to maintain. The labor market gets tighter. The robot revolution takes on even more importance. Job perks become insanely more important. And work weeks would get shorter, which I know is something that has been predicted for decades, but instead, we’re all killing ourselves by enriching billionaires. But if there was no limit to energy, even billionaires can have their cake and eat it too.

ART

Everyone will have a lot more time, which means amateur art will experience a renaissance.

All of these are relatively small changes at the personal level. Professional art and sports will also improve like we can’t possibly imagine. Why? Because more people can participate, and more people will have the resources to devote to full-time study. Right now, pursuing professional athletics is a game of desperation, luck, and sacrifice. What if all those variables were two clicks easier? Even a slight change in how easy it is dramatically changes who wins.

POLITICS

The global order as we know it would be over completely. It would take a few decades, but the Middle East would fade from importance as their main export becomes useless. Oh don’t worry, we’d still compete for resources like precious metals and raw materials, but the pinch points would shift around the globe.

The talking points at home would also shift as everyone gets a little bit less desperate. What would be the selling point then in a political campaign? Perhaps the culture wars become even more important?

HEALTH

Healthcare is one of the most resource-intensive industries we have. It just takes a lot of money to keep people well. So what happens when you glut the system with energy? Hopefully, again, less desperation. More access. More resources to put towards research. More positions funded. And yes, probably more 21st-century diseases as food becomes more ubiquitous and we can get more for less, so staying active becomes even more of a choice.

MILITARY

Oh, the wars we can wage with endless energy. The weapons we can dream up. Even the fusion plants themselves can be major targets. But also, hopefully, the fewer wars we’ll feel we need to wage. We’ve waged purely ideological wars, but the majority have been over resources and if everyone has more, you take those off the table. [She says, naively. I mean, optimistically…]

TECHNOLOGY

Tech of all sorts will accelerate rapidly. Building complex machines takes a great deal of energy. If that suddenly got cheap, AI computing suddenly looks totally doable. Cloud storage that currently has to be built on literal rivers to keep them cool becomes much more feasible. New players can have access to more, more informally, to invent things much more quickly.

SPACE

Getting off the planet also becomes ridiculously easy when you strap yourself to a tiny sun. As does mitigating the inhospitableness. It’s hard for humans not to live on earth. Which means we start becoming a true space-faring civilization. Though, that literally means our little solar system. I think we forget how big the galaxy is. We’re not going that far.

ENVIRONMENTALISM

Getting off oil has been the rallying cry of the green movement for decades. Plus cleaning up climate change will take a truly insane amount of energy. I think we turn more and more to technology and geoengineering to fix it instead of behavior change, and we deal with a host of unintended consequences. I mean, we’ll still be the short-sighted, reactive species we are now. Free energy won’t change our ability to screw up our main safe haven, but at least we won’t be actively setting more of it on fire anymore.

EDUCATION

This is another resource-intensive project that will hopefully get easier and more ubiquitous every decade, especially worldwide. Raising kids in general takes an insane amount of energy.

INTENSITY

The last way to think about this is not what exactly is changing but how much. There is a plausible scenario where a new energy source plugs into our existing extractive capitalism. Billionaires become trillionaires, and the world order pretty much stays the same.

On the opposite end: if everyone truly, madly, deeply has enough energy to live and to move, the concept of a nation-state as we know it dissolves and we become a truly globalized society where you can be employed anywhere by anyone and the world looks NOTHING like it does today.

WHAT’S YOUR GUESS?

Is this what’s Going To Happen? Some of it, yes, and some of it, no. That’s the difference between telling a story and trying to foretell the future. These are just some of the different ways to think about how changing things change other things.

Do you agree? Disagree? It’s within the realm of possibility that this could happen. Okay, very far from now and still more unlikely than likely, but it’s within the realm of possibility!

Is it the start of a grand utopia on earth?

No, we’re far too competitive, violent, and short-sighted ever to achieve that. But will life get just a little bit easier? Absolutely. When you have enough energy, you get more time and have to spend less of it surviving, which makes it just a little more pleasant.

Everyone will hopefully be just a little less tired and a little less desperate. Tourism, arts, entertainment, and sports will loom larger in people’s imagination as the basics get cheaper. Global society will develop as moving becomes easy. The geopolitical order will shift completely and rearrange around the new mineral and raw material bottlenecks, not oil. And we’ll find ways to muck up the climate some other way and compete and kill each other for new reasons.

The post How to World Build a New Future with Endless Energy 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.

“Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.” ― Frank Herbert, Dune

I listened on audiobook to all of the Dune books written by Frank Herbert. (There are over 30 now completed by his son Brian after his death, but I had to draw a line in the sand somewhere!)

WHAT DID I LEARN? WHAT DID I NOTICE? WAS IT WORTH IT?

WARNING: SPOILERS FOLLOW

Herbert started the first book, Dune, in 1959 (published in ’65) and published the last book Chapterhouse: Dune, in 1985. Those were pretty important decades in our history, and the change from the unrest and idealism of the 60s to the stability and disillusionment of the 80s drenches the text.

WHO WAS FRANK?

During my English major, we always debated how much of the author you could really find in a work of fiction. And whether it was useful or appropriate to play a game of Author Gotcha as literary critique.

So now I’m going to do just that…

Because this was by far my most shocking takeaway. Dune, like Lord of the Rings, is historical fiction now.

This old article from NK Jemison has the best take on Lord of the Rings, I think. Tolkien was progressive for his time, which matters! But given that he was a man of his time, he still seems pretty racist to us.

Which to me means: don’t cancel Tolkien or his work based on today’s morality. But definitely cancel anyone wanting to use Tolkien’s morality today. In other words: more fantasy characters for everyone!

Like Tolkien, Herbert’s beliefs and morals and those of the original readers are so changed from now that they are becoming inscrutable.

He was officially conservative in life, but his death was over 20 years ago, and his birth was over 100 years ago, and that kind of conservative doesn’t exist anymore. And we’re so much more than our political party, but it’s a useful shorthand for a drastically different worldview.

The morals of these made-up people and the critiques of government, ecology, religion, sex, gender, and sexuality else do not feel current anymore. Not any less genius or fun to read or important in the canon of Science Fiction! But they are a social commentary on a world that’s gone. And it’s completely fascinating.

HOW IT STARTED: 1959

MASTERY OF MIND AND BODY = MASTERY OF THE WORLD. AT FIRST.

The fifties and sixties saw an explosion of hippies and Eastern practices become The Way to deal with the suffering of modern life. It’s very much apparent in the first few books how deeply that interested Herbert.

One of the central myths: we can train ourselves out of our weaknesses. That’s the joy of fiction, in Dune, they succeed!

His Mentats (human computers) train their minds. Sardaukar, Fremen, Fish Speakers, and other warriors train their bodies. And Bene Gesserit (warrior concubines) do all of the above (mind, body, and especially, sex.) You see what I mean about the ’60s?

GOVERNMENT SUCKS

All of these were basically monkish disciplines to get better and overcome the horrors and slovenliness of the fat bureaucrats through personal asceticism at a time with inflation and stagnation and unrest were sweeping the world.

The fight between the slovenly, enslaving aristocrats and the noble Atreides is the main plot of the first books.

In Dune, power doesn’t just corrupt, it makes you fat. (And sometimes a pedophile…)

RELIGION SUCKS MORE

All throughout the books, there’s a deep antipathy towards religion. The concubines seed worlds with Messiah narratives so that later any disciple who needs to can “fulfill” a prophecy they themselves have foretold in order to be treated well. The later books are basically the evolution of Atreides from Messiah to Tyrant. And over and over again priests and prophets get mowed down for their faith.

Believing in anything except your own physical and mental discipline is a really, really bad idea in Dune.

PLANTS MATTER

How do you get oxygen on a world without plants? (Answer: you can’t, they just live deep below the desert!) It was genius at a time right after Rachel Carsen’s Silent Spring launched the modern environmental movement. The evolution of Dune from desert to water was, and very much in line with the ’70s environmental consciousness.

ESPECIALLY IF YOU SMOKE THE PLANTS

This first book obviously was also very concerned with Spice and the supernatural powers that drugs give you, which are, again, huge themes of the time!

HOW IT ENDED: 1985

Fast forward to the last book, published 25 years later, and though it’s about the same universe, the stakes change completely.

MASTERY FADES IN FAVOR OF POWER

The warrior monks continue to have supernatural powers. Still, we spend most of the time watching them jockey for political power as they use their mastery to maintain their positions. And the horrors of personal power just… go away. The main bad guys of the first book die out in favor of the supposed good guys acting A LOT like them.

This is justified because if they didn’t, all of humanity would perish. PERISH, I tell you! A journey we took as a world, not just in Dune.

PLANTS DON’T MATTER ANYMORE

(Especially big spoiler alert!)

The books end with Dune destroyed and a worm on a new planet making new spice. Which is… kind of the thing they were all trying and failing to do for most of human history and the central problem of the first books? Dune has a monopoly on spice that controls everything about the universe. And it’s suddenly done! How? I don’t know. They just do it. Ecology clearly faded from importance.

BUT IMMIGRANTS DO MATTER!

The ecology is all but ignored in favor of a panic about immigrants who have the warrior monk’s power, but none of their integrity, and so are wrecking everything as they come in from the scattering of humanity speaking a weird form of Spanish and are evil because… Yeah, that’s also never clear. And also indicative of the times.

DRUGS ARE BAD NOW

Spice’s evolution is fascinating! It’s necessary for interstellar travel, but they figure that out with the technology they used to hate more than anything. But it’s suddenly better than spice! People still use it, but hide their glowing blue eyes and become ashamed of their addiction. Sound like the ’80s?

GOVERNMENT AND RELIGION STILL SUCK

Governments get more and more corrupt and religion gets more and more gullible as the books go on. This is one thing that doesn’t change throughout all the books.

“Liberal bigots are the ones who trouble me most. I distrust the extremes. Scratch a conservative and you find someone who prefers the past over any future. Scratch a liberal and find a closet aristocrat.”  ― Frank Herbert, God Emperor of Dune

HOW IT’S GOING

THINGS I LOVED

I appreciate how the success of the book allowed him to really play as the series went on. The first novel was a fairly standard hero’s journey welded onto a Shakespearean family tragedy. By the last book, the story had taken fifty different turns exploring sex, youth, history, cloning, space travel, and so much more. 

I also loved that for all its epic scale, it stayed intimate on a few characters, still focused around an Atreides. And I also loved on the timescale that went on for thousands and thousands of years. It was clear he had a lot of fun imagining the implications of a Messiah figure ten or twenty generations down the line.

THINGS I COULD HAVE DONE WITHOUT

The central message, if there is such a thing, is that if you do not control humanity, humanity will die out. Even though, it seems to me, through the control, all of the fun parts of humanity have died out in the process, what exactly is worth saving at the end of the process?

That and the outdated gender roles and homophobia and stereotyping and the dominance and illiberalism were surprising. I feel like people see the hippie stand-ins in the first book and take them for radicals, but they are completely not. At all.

But again, that became more swallowable as I related to this as historical fiction. Important not in spite of those flaws but because of them. 

WAS IT WORTH IT?

I enjoyed them all. The world is fascinating.  The characters were bizarre and relatable. Race relations and gender relations were hard to stomach sometimes and were bloody brilliant at other times. This is seminal science fiction. It’s an important part of our canon and it’s also an amazing snapshot of this moment in time in our culture change from the 50s to the 80s. Dune is historical fiction now. Who would have thought?

So yes, 98 hours later – more than worth it.

The post Do Judge Authors by Their Time? Dune, Tolkien, and Outrage first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.