Keeping it Current

When writing SF - particularly near-future SF - being able to write the setting and technology in a way so it does not look outdated in ten or twenty years and appears "current" is a real challenge. Doing it and staying true to your own vision is even harder - particularly if you think some things will stay the same. This leaves you open to being accused of lack of inventiveness or lack of understanding of technology, regardless of the fact you are being judged against standard SF tropes.

Reading some Heinlein recently, I found it almost like reading an alternate history - but set in the future. He had an excellent grasp of what technology would do, but it was pictured as an extension of existing technology. Things were still recorded on tapes and wires, and of course everything was analogue. People still smoked (I guess in the late 1950s it was impossible to imagine a world where they did not) and flying cars and taxis landed on the rooftops.

The other thing that often falls flat is money - it loses its value so quickly. As a rule of thumb basically losing half its buying value every decade (but guess what, they were getting $5k advances in 1970 - same as now - work that one out in terms of the 1970s buying power and it will knock your socks off). I was thinking that probably the best thing is to avoid the use of any term that connects with contemporary currency i.e. don't use dollars, yen or rubles. Instead use something in the line of 'credits' - but whatever make sure it cannot connect with the current value of money. At the beginning of the 20th century a millionaire was stupendously wealthy, now the average Western couple would not contemplate going into retirement with around that same value in assets, cash and investments. Millionaire from then probably translates almost as trillionaire in the now.

The other thing that bugs me writing near-future SF is that I believe certain technological elements will remain static. Take the keyboard for example. Our hands and fingers are just such an excellent way of getting data into a computer system. Not that I am saying there will not be some amazing graphical interfaces - but that there will still be keyboards in three hundred years - or at least some version of them. Interfaces, and their success, also depend on the hardwiring of the human brain. I could not write a book into a microphone to save myself - no matter how good the dictation software is. I just think better on the page - and using my fingers.

Despite my contention that keyboards or some version of them will still be around, some critiquers are determined that any SF should be 'really different' and do not see any SF featuring a current interface as being legitimate.

I tend to think, OK, we all use electric lights, but every house has a dozen candles as well, and they have been around a long time. Some things will also layer.

Can you think of any other current technology that you think might remain into the far future because of its utility? Do you agree we me on the keyboard? Or should I admit defeat and replace it with integrated brain-chips? (Grrr. Would you really want a computer in your head? How quickly would you need another surgery to replace it with the latest model? You can't leave your head with the IT guys for the week either. OK, there I go again.)

The future present

Sarah's comment about ebooks being introduced as a concept before the technology was really ready reminded me of something from my info tech degree, Lo! these many years ago (right around 2000, actually).

Disintermediation.

Okay, that's a mouthful, and one of the uglier words ever coined. But what it means is providing a service that eliminates as many layers of middleman as possible between the provider and the customer. eBay is probably the original example, with CraigsList following not far behind. These are places where people who want to sell stuff can list it for a relatively small price, with contact info and payment details, and people who want to buy stuff can find it and buy direct from the provider - who is, in the case of eBay, also providing the payment handling.

It was going to be the Next Big Thing, but ultimately it was, like ebooks, an idea that was ahead of its time.

I think that time is now, at least for ebooks and disintermediation.

The publisher started life as the only middleman. They'd arrange the assorted complexities (which are a whole lot less complex now than they used to be), and ship the finished product to bookstores or they had their own direct mail order. Then distributors moved in, because it was easier to box up large quantities and let someone else sort them out. The chain bookstores put another layer in, with buyers who knew nothing and cared less about the readers in any given area. The whole edifice is so clunky it's falling on its face.

Amazon was the first crack in the wall. Suddenly instead of having to rely on whatever your local bookstores held, if you had Internet access, you could buy anything in print, and get it shipped damn near anywhere in the world. Chain bookstores haven't adjusted to that one - and may never adjust.

DRM and all, the ebook readers are the next big break. Now, there's a device that can carry thousands of books, and doesn't cause eye strain. Sure, you want to have it inside a ziplock baggie if you're reading in the bath (this is something I don't do, because the water goes cold while I finish the book. It's the same reason I do not keep reading material in the bathroom. It's kind of disconcerting to stand up and have the seat stick to your butt), but on the whole it's nearly as convenient as a paper book.

What's actually happening here is that the pace of change is such that an age difference as small as five years becomes a massive cultural gulf - but the people who think they're in charge are trying to hold back the flood and failing miserably.

Just as an example: I predate color TV. My brother - ten years younger than me - has never seen a house without a microwave, or at least, not one he can remember. Someone born ten years after him would have grown up with CDs and personal computers. Five years after that, and Internet access is the norm, and CD burners are common. Another five years, it's broadband everywhere, DVDs and DVD burners. Five years on, smart phones are the norm. (I, Luddite that I am, have a relatively dumb cell phone. When my ancient, much loved PDA eventually dies, I'll get a smart phone and combine the functions.)

eBook readers will probably be normal for babies born sometime in the next 5 years - you buy them a reader, and all their school books live on it. It should - assuming that someone manages to step into the yawning chasm that is the disconnect between authors and readers (the entire publishing system is somewhere at the bottom of the gaping hole, at least physically. Mentally, I think most of them are somewhere near De Nial.) - be the norm to have electronic books which are not DRM and are provided by publishers whose websites include goodies like "fillable" texts - this tech is already partly out there in Adobe's fillable forms - where students can answer worksheets in the book, have them marked by their teacher via a networked system, and the entire history of the the lesson and the student's attempts to answer are there.

All it takes is someone to step up and provide a reliable source of non-DRM eBooks. And someone else with marketing skills I haven't got to promote the living shit out of it - if the service does what people want and they can find it, they'll use it.

The Harbingers of Paradigm Shift

Yes, it's another post about ebooks. No, it's not the same path we've trodden before - this time is something new, I promise. I'm not going to talk about what should be happening with ebooks or publishing, but instead what ebooks represent.

They and their parallels in the entertainment industry are the very tiny tip of a new paradigm, one humanity is utterly unprepared for. It's going to be a wild ride.

Here's the thing - until very recently, there was not one single resource that was completely unlimited. Nothing. There might be a huge amount of solar energy reaching the Earth, but at any given time, that amount is finite. More to the point, the amount of it we can convert to usable energy is even more limited. Everything we eat is finite - plants grow, but once you harvest part of it, there is no more until the plant has grown more or until you've grown a new plant from seed. A cow (or any other milk animal) can hold only so much milk at any given time. A chook lays a finite number of eggs. If you eat the animal, you can't get more until you get another animal - and if you eat all of them, too bad. There will never be more. Well, unless you get hold of some extant DNA and then make clones of your extinct animal.

We're intimately familiar with scarcity. Everything in every human society is built on scarcity - the idea that all things are finite. Supply and demand reflect this: if there is a low supply and a high demand, prices go up. Where the supply is much greater than the demand, absent intervention prices will fall. Most people understand this at a level that's almost instinctive, probably because until maybe a hundred, 150 years ago in the West, and still now, a scarcity in staple foods (a famine) meant the difference between living or dying.

There are two basic, interlocking rules of supply and demand in a world of scarcity. First, the greater the supply, the lower the cost. Breathing and sunlight cost so little energy they might as well be free - and breathable air and sunshine are both, while finite, sufficiently well-supplied we haven't managed to run out yet. Food is rather more difficult to come by, and costs us in money and energy expended (ultimately money can be considered to represent energy expended, via a number of abstractions I'm not going to go into - well, apart to point out that we wouldn't have so many figures of speech relating to hard-earned money, working for something and so forth, if that abstraction didn't exist). Second, the more effort required to get something, or the more difficult it is to create, the lower the supply and hence the higher the cost. Live concerts are both rare and represent a one-off combination of artist, music and venue, so are much more expensive than a recording of the same music by the same artist. Silk, as the product of a relatively rare animal with an extremely limited diet, and requiring careful treatment and processing, is far more expensive than nylon, which can be mass-produced for much less effort and expense per square foot of cloth.

ebooks and their cousins MP3s overturn these rules. Now after the initial creation there is a genuinely unlimited supply. Our understanding of supply and demand says that this should mean they cost us very little, if not nothing. However, the cost to the creators is quite significant - an author might spend months writing a novel, then the manuscript must be proof-read and edited. A band creating a music track will need to first write the music (not exactly a trivial exercise), then hire studio space and/or high-quality recording gear, and often spend much more time mixing and editing tracks than was spent recording them in the first place. Not surprisingly, those who front these costs expect to be paid for their investment. Also no surprise, they'd like their costs repaid as soon as possible - which is at least in part the motivation for what seem to readers and listeners to be artificially high prices. I should note that I'm talking about electronic-only items here, not items released in hardcopy and electronic formats. There's a reasonable argument that the electronic copy there is a bonus item.

Just to complicate things, since most of the places distributing electronic media are corporate groups rather than individuals, there are rules relating to how long a loss can be carried for tax purposes (as a general rule, you can only consider it a loss in the year you spend the money), and what the accounting is supposed to look like. Putting something up for sale for almost nothing because you'll keep getting money from it forever gives accountants hives. As for what the tax people think, it's best not to go there.

So, we have our unlimited supply ebooks and music tracks out there breaking the supply and demand laws. As soon as you put the infinity symbol into any of the standard economic equations, you get nonsense. You can't calculate your running costs as a proportion of expected profit when you don't have any meaningful way to calculate expected profit, and worse, you can't calculate expected distribution because once someone buys they could make as many copies as they want and give them away. Guess where the much-loathed notion of DRM came from? It's ultimately an attempt to impose some kind of limit on supply so that normal business models work. After all, with electronic media, the concept of a limited edition is meaningless.

The DRM arguments, the Amazon vs Macmillan mess, the Google Books settlement - they're all problems arising from our inability to deal with abundance. And it's only going to get worse.

There are already 3D printers that are capable of reproducing everything needed to replace themselves. Right now the open source RepRap model is pretty limited in what it can do, but the tech is improving, fast. It's not going to be long before they can output almost anything from an input of almost anything, and do it fast. Quite possibly it will be available in our lifetimes - and you can build one of these for a relatively low cost. How long will it be before we can create an entire house worth of 'hard' furnishings with one of these things? How long before they can make cushions? Fabric? Food? Water? Breathable air?

When this happens (and it's not a case of 'if', it's 'when'), what allows those who create stuff to make a living? For that matter, what constitutes a living in this environment? Artists, authors, musicians, designers... the people who produce something new from what wasn't there before, they'll have a place. People being people, there'll always be leaders, or would-be leaders. Services will remain popular - but when you can effortlessly reproduce money, what value will it have? If everyone can produce the "stuff" they need and want, what will have value?

This is the big paradigm shift - and in a sense, a true singularity, in that we're not capable of understanding or imagining what life will be like afterwards. I personally find it incredibly difficult to imagine a world where most of the necessities of life are available in unlimited supply. I've focused instead on the relatively few things that do have limitations.

What books - if any - have you read that deal with this in a way that makes sense? And what do you think will happen when most goods have an effectively unlimited supply?

(p.s. The Darth Vader mask was made on a RepRap - I imagine that after polishing and painting it would look quite impressive)