by John Shirley
The social cost of all this will be brutally intimidating. With seven billion people on the Earth, we have about a billion going to bed hungry right now, with billions more people coming … And it’s been observed that the poorest people on earth contribute least to climate change but will feel its hand the heaviest, since they have the fewest resources with which to adapt and respond.
The massive shifts of large populations will put unprecedented stress on infrastructure and social systems—especially food sources, water, and housing—and will doubtless result in military confrontations. A Pentagon study concluded that under pressure to find new sources of food and safe housing in harsh climate change conditions, some countries will find excuses to invade other countries.
And of course there are other environmental crises arising. It’s becoming clearer that fracking to access hydrocarbons does cause earthquakes, and we’re doing more and more fracking; this and the reduction in ice pressure on tectonic plates caused by global warming may well cause a great many more earthquakes. And don’t forget the black winds—toxic fronts of synergized pollutants capable of killing large numbers of people—quite possibly being formed in the upper atmosphere, like an aerial complement to that corresponding giant whirlpool of plastic in the Pacific Ocean. Then there’s the delightfully diverse soup of pharmaceuticals (along with other random industrial chemicals) we’re finding in aquifers and drinking water. We all know about drugs combining dangerously (“Don’t mix those two drugs, dude, bad news!”) but we’re combining hundreds of them randomly in our water. Sure, they’re somewhat diluted, but one wonders when some general, cumulative compound will develop, some drug mix of birth-control pill hormones, steroids, Prozac (one of the most common pollutants in water), antihistamines and antibiotics. What interesting collective neurological side effects might appear? The Romans had their leaded dinner plates …
Still, the biggest threat is to food and shelter. And those who have access to resources, feeling threatened, will naturally coalesce defensively against those migrating to seek better conditions. Moneyed, technologically sophisticated elements of society will tend to withdraw from the increasing pressures of the masses of disenfranchised, into the safety of walled, highly protected enclaves, which will be in effect, if not in legal status, technocratic city-states.
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A percentage of privileged technocrats may well sink into the repellently self-indulgent decadence of virtual reality retreats, where they’ll be sequestered both physically and mentally. Addiction to social media, videogames, cellphones, and the internet is now a recognized phenomenon and one that has implications for our relationship to future tech. Its addictive capacity will only increase as its experiential quality improves.
It’s strange—most of our technology is about extending our reach, but paradoxically, we’re in danger of a relationship to technology that actually cuts us off from one another. Cartoonists already caricature families who sit together talking to everyone but each other on their plethora of devices.
There’s intelligent collaboration with technology … and then there’s mindless dependence on it. A biomedical engineer has already designed an ECoG (electrocorticography) chip that does not disrupt brain tissue; instead it floats atop the blood-brain barrier, sensing the output of neurons and transmitting them to prosthetic devices, to machinery we wish to control, and so on … and some researchers expect the ECoG chip to make electronic telepathy possible.
Nanoengineers at Princeton have developed a superthin electronic skin that puckers and stretches like real skin. It can be adhered invisibly to your forehead; it could be hidden in the throat and used for subvocal communication. It can communicate with the internet, it can transmit data from your body … many of you will now be thinking of other examples of human/machine interfacing coming along, and this adds to the frisson, the anticipation of a technological “singularity” that supposedly will lead to a kind of Übermensch cyborgian elite. The fear of death that has generated most of our religious myths has also generated the myth that we can create a second machine body into which we’ll supposedly project a copy of ourselves. And—puzzlingly—this recording in a three-dimensional form is regarded as immortality. But the human essence is a whole that’s more than the sum of the parts; consciousness still remains mysterious to us, and selfhood is not a series of likes and dislikes recorded into a program.
The real singularity will be simply an unprecedented cybernetic intelligence explosion to many orders of magnitude. That, I do believe, will happen—is beginning now, accompanied by a vast increase in interactivity. But the Kurzweilian singularity that allows us to interface with machines until, in his words, “there will be no distinction between human and machine,” will not come about sustainably because the psychological and social consequences would be so dire.
People who are quadriplegic have stated that they feel less emotion than they did when they could still feel their entire bodies. The projection of the self into electronics reduces our relationship to the body, the seat of our emotions, and for several reasons that might lead to an increase in psychopathology.
And empathy may be a precious commodity in the future. Most people unconsciously cut off their empathy when they’re feeling endangered. When the population increases to eight and nine and ten billion, we may instinctively become, as a race, less empathetic—unless we actively struggle against that kind of degeneracy.
The superrich may become especially elitist and detached when they get exclusive access to rejuvenation. It’s fairly evident that some form of rejuvenation, and certainly extensive life extension, will soon be possible. It is thought that the first person to live three hundred years has recently, somewhere, been born. With a probable ability to grow new replacement organs to suit an individual’s DNA in a lab; with Sandia labs’ specialized nanoparticles that blast problematic microorganisms and cancers with precise microapplications of drugs; with methods for teasing stem cells into regeneration, regenerative drugs like sirolimus, and other innovations—we will effectively have rejuvenation, for those who can afford it.
Let’s be honest. Rejuvenation is sure to be a tremendously expensive process, and it’s possible that the only the superrich will regenerate. Some of you younger people, now in your twenties, may in seventy-five years be tottering around, quite ancient, and see a youthful Paris Hilton still walking around. Or you may see Dominique Strauss-Kahn, looking younger than he looks right now! Do we want Dominique Strauss-Kahn chasing hotel maids in the year 2095? He’ll catch a lot more of them! There are some very good wealthy people in the world, who are showing that they care—I know that—but there is a tendency for many of the superwealthy to be fairly awful, spoiled personalities. We see, hear, and read about them constantly; examples are unavoidable. But we can avoid that fate by making laws that restrict rejuvenation to people who deserve it. You’ll get points for art, for science, for good works; add them up and then get rejuvenated.
Every technology and every wrinkle of a technology has a dark side. Automated aircraft are supposed to be safer—but the airline industry lately has suffered from what an FAA committee called “automation addiction.” Pilots use automated systems for all but a few minutes of the flight—takeoff and landing. They simply program navigation into computers rather than using their hands to fly the plane. And when something goes wrong, they haven’t got the skills to deal with it anymore.
Mastery of technology must include acknowledgement of its dark side. Mastery of technology means acceptance of limitations. Limitations have value: for example, limiting the amount of electricity sent through a power line to what that line can safely carry means electrical flow isn’t lost.
A machine that pollutes is only partly invented. And a lot of the time we rush into technology so quickly that we don’t realize it’s going to pollute. It was recently discovered, for example, that every time a garment made from polyester and acrylic fibers is washed, it releases thousands of microplastic fibers that
end up fouling coastal environments throughout the globe. No one expected that. No one had thought that form of manufacture through.
Not all biotech innovation will lead to delightful results. People have been enthusiastically breeding dogs of every variety for some time. It’s thought that genetic engineering will enable us to create a species of dogs that can talk. Is that a good thing? I love dogs but you may not want your dog to be saying, “Feed me now, I’m hungry, what’s in your pocket, what’s that smell on your shoes, can we go outside and defecate, and by the way I hate the cat” when you get home from a long day’s work.
In a lab in Glasgow, UK, one man is intent on proving that metal-based life is possible. He has managed to build cell-like bubbles from metal molecules and has given them life-like properties. He thinks he will be able to get them to evolve into fully inorganic self-replicating entities. “I am 100 percent positive that we can get evolution to work outside organic biology,” claims this researcher. If he’s right, we could breed the next form of technology.
And it’s a little worrisome when you consider that researchers in Seoul, South Korea, and in Bristol, England, have developed plans for something they’re calling an ecobot—using the Venus Flytrap as a model. The ecobot is a robot that eats. It will be able to ingest flesh and turn it into fuel. Combine the ecobot with the evolving inorganic self-replicating entities planned by the scientist at the University of Glasgow … and feel a long slow chill at the thought.
It’s time for a philosophy of technology—one that acknowledges its dark side and thinks proactively about the consequences of new technology so that negative consequences can be prepared for. Technology needs to evolve a conscience.
The Real Singularity will offer us some great advances—including a redefinition of what money is, and how it will flow, propelled by a computerized awareness of every significant financial transaction. Paper money will be obsolete and thus money will be thoroughly trackable. As things stand now, finance is treated like meteorology. Its mysterious ebbs and flows are predicted rather like the way weather is: people forecast recessions and bubbles. The new computing power will make it possible to track almost every movement of monetary units in the world and will bring a complete rethinking of not only economic probability but also the use of money.
Money is purely conceptual, but we act as if it’s got a life of its own. We forget that it is a creation of humanity and it can be made to serve humanity as a whole. When that system is enabled there will never have to be another recession. The connectivity that put the Eurozone at risk from the Greek economic meltdown can also protect it—if we incorporate complexity theory and computer modeling. Or so we’re told by Len Fisher, a physicist at the University of Bristol. “Cascades of failure may be controlled by changing the nature and strength of the links between various parts of the networks,” says Fisher. I envision a computer that would have access to a pool of funds that it would use to prevent crises.
But yes—there will be catastrophe between here and there. I believe that catastrophe will spur social transformation. We’ll have astounding technological advancement against a backdrop of grievous social inequity and quite possibly increasing barbarity, for a period, until we are forced by waves of crises to come to terms with the consequences of developing a civilization blindly. Wars, plagues, radical separation of privileges, famines due to climate change and other environmental consequences, will force humanity to accept Buckminster Fuller’s “Spaceship Earth” concept as very real.
In short, we will be forced by the dire situation we find ourselves in, to stop whining about world government. Only world government—one committed to human rights (including the rights of women, which are integral to population control) and environmental justice—can deal with these kinds of international crises. World government will not mean anyone gives up their culture, except the bits that reject human rights; it will not be a great gray conformity; there will still be at least as much national sovereignty, for most issues, as states in Europe have in the EU. And remember that the EU, a fuzzy foreshadowing of world government, is in a very early stage. It’s having problems, and that was inevitable—it’s still evolving! But it does have the right idea. Toward the end of the twenty-first century the world will move toward a framework of consensus on some basic rules regarding population growth, the environment, and access to technology. Empowering Third World people with education and technology will give them a step toward the resources and coping ability they’ll need to survive.
I believe we’ll achieve a collective progressive consciousness as a result of the revelatory shocks we’ll endure in the next fifty years. We’ll learn we can’t treat Spaceship Earth as a party cruise ship.
Thank you. Any questions?
“PRO IS FOR PROFESSIONAL”
JOHN SHIRLEY INTERVIEWED BY TERRY BISSON
You’re tough to pigeonhole, John. You are celebrated as a postmodernist in McCaffrey’s Storming the Reality Studio, but you are generally published as a genre writer. Is there a contradiction? Or is this a postmodernist disguise?
I never felt like a postmodernist in the philosophical sense, but I can appreciate its forward-looking sensibility and its relativism. I believe in having a moral and ethical compass, but I’m down on dogmatism.
I’m a genre writer partly because I make my living as a writer, and that’s where the market was for a guy like me when I started. Also, science fiction seemed to me to be in line with the surrealism I admired in art. The genre has its appeal—it provides a kind of literary computer program, where you can model alternative societies and various social futures, and see what might work and what might break down, and what the unintended consequences of trends might be. And it seemed to be a place for outsiders to find a role—and it was. Look, they even took Terry Bisson in! And, for example, Alice Sheldon …
William Gibson felt like an outsider too. He once said in an interview (paraphrasing here) that if a weird cat like Shirley can find a niche there, so can I. So some genres are places for outsiders to find a home. And where else can you get paid to create bizarre imagery?
But I’m an outsider within genre writing too. I am. And of course I like to pretend to transcend genre, to be sui generis …
How did you get started as a writer? Was there a breakthrough moment or book that made it real?
I published in the alternative press at first, around 1970, so that helped. But really it was the Clarion writer’s workshop. I was accepted to that and had a small windfall that made it possible to pay for it. I was bottled up at Clarion with the likes of Ursula Le Guin, Harlan Ellison, Frank Herbert, Avram Davidson, Terry Carr, Robert Silverberg. I was there with Gus Hasford, who went on to write The Short-Timers [the novel that was the basis for the film Full Metal Jacket], and Vonda McIntyre, Lisa Tuttle, Art Cover—a group of talent-charged people.
I was barely civilized at the time. Ellison jeered at the reek of my dorm room. I took acid there one day. But still—I got a great deal out of the basic Clarion experience. Especially criticism—the criticism I received was golden.
My first pro publication was in a Clarion anthology. Carr and Silverberg went on to accept stories by me for their anthologies. Damon Knight’s Milford West workshops in Eugene were a great help. He and Kate Wilhelm taught us—Joe Haldeman and Gene Wolfe were students, with me, back then! They taught me to read my own writing as a reader would and that helped mature my prose, which was necessary because it was often, well, premature, as it were.
I think of cyberpunk as SF plus noir (or vice versa). How would you describe it? After all, you were there.
Your description is not far from mine. And I always quote Gibson: “The street has its own uses for things.” People on the street, or the poor, the underclasses, can appropriate technology and use it against the power structure; use it to challenge the status quo. Look what happened in the Arab Spring. Look what Anonymous does, or WikiLeaks. It’s not all good. But it’s all cyberpunk.
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sp; “Dystopian” seems a rather gentle euphemism for the worlds you create. Have you ever written a utopian novel or story?
I sometimes take things in a metaphysical direction—I prefer that term to “spiritual.” I’m influenced by Aldous Huxley, who did that so well in Time Must Have a Stop, and The Perennial Philosophy. In those metaphysical explorations we find doorways “out” of the worst of the human dilemma; or a transcendence of it—a right relationship to our condition. Right congruence.
Usually even my darkest novels, like Everything Is Broken or Demons, have a resolution where things are at least improved; where there’s hope, a direction to go in. But getting there can be hell.
The Other End is a novel of alternative apocalypse, where I make up the Judgment Day I’d like to see. It’s a Judgment Day without an angry God, but there’s still … something. And that’s a kind of utopian vision, I guess.
The idea of city personified animates your classic City Come A-Walkin’. Fritz Leiber had a different take on the same theme (and same city) in Our Lady of Darkness. Was the old German an influence?
I don’t think I read Our Lady of Darkness, but another Germanic fellow (he was Swiss) was an influence: Carl Jung. City Come A-Walkin’ is a bit influenced by Jung’s ideas of the collective unconscious, but mostly influenced by my stays in San Francisco at an impressionable time, and by the music and lyrical content of Patti Smith. I simply perceived cities that way—each had its own mind. City as a kind of organism. City Come A-Walkin’ was also influenced by my involvement in progressive, edgy, prepunk rock ’n’ roll. I was trying to capture that feel, that energy, that pulse.
I have always tried to fuse things, to bring contrasting art forms into some kind of creative unity. It seems contradictory to fuse storytelling with surrealism (hence someone had to make up the term “magic realism”)—real surrealism shouldn’t be rational enough to have the internal logic of a story. But I have tried, anyway, and succeeded at times, or so I am told. J.G. Ballard of course did it in novels like The Crystal World. He has always been an inspiration.