by Rucker, Rudy
Disgruntled scribes sometimes fantasize about a utopian marketplace in which the naturally arising inverse power law distribution would be forcibly replaced by a linear distribution, that is, a sales schedule that lies along a smoothly sloping line instead of taking the form of the present bent curve that starts at an impudently high peak and then swoops down to dawdle along the horizontal axis.
But there’s no obvious way that the authors’ sales curve could be changed. Certainly there’s no hope of having some governing group try and force a different distribution. After all, people make their own choices as to what books to read. Society is a parallel computation, and some aspects of it are beyond control.
The inverse-power-law aspects of income distribution are particularly disturbing. Thus the second-wealthiest person in a society might own half as much as the richest, with the tenth richest person possessing only a tenth as much, and—out on in the burbs—the thousandth richest person is making only one thousandth as much as the person on the top.
Putting the same phenomenon a little more starkly, while a company’s chief executive officer might earn a hundred million dollars a year, a software engineer at the same company might earn only a hundred thousand dollars a year, that is, a thousandth as much. And a worker in one of the company’s overseas assembly plants might earn only ten thousand dollars a year—a ten-thousandth as much as the top exec.
Power law distributions can also be found in the opening weekend grosses of movies, in the number of hits that web pages get, and in the audience shares for TV shows. Is there some reason why the top ranks do so overly well, and the bottom ranks seem so unfairly penalized?
The short answer is no—there’s no real reason. There need by no conspiracy to skew the rewards. Galling as it seems, inverse power law distributions are a fundamental natural law about the behavior of systems. They’re ubiquitous.
Inverse power laws aren’t limited to societies—they also dominate the statistics of the natural world. The tenth smallest lake is likely to be a tenth as large as the biggest one, the hundredth largest tree in a forest may be a hundredth as big as the largest tree, the thousandth largest stone on a beach is a thousandth the size of the largest one.
Whether or not we like them, inverse power laws are as inevitable as turbulence, entropy, or the law of gravity. This said, we can somewhat moderate them them in our social context, and it would be too despairing to say we have no control whatsoever over the disparities between our rich and our poor.
But the basic structures of inverse power law curves will never go away. We can rail at an inverse power law if we like—or we can accept it, perhaps hoping to bend the harsh law towards not so steep a swoop.
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Note on “Edge Questions”
Written 2006, 2007, 2010, 2011, 2012.
Appeared on the Edge website and in various anthologies edited by John Brockman.
In 2004, hoping for a better-than-usual advance for my tome on the philosophy of computer science, The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul, I engaged the prominent science-book agent John Brockman. Brockman sent my proposal to about thirty publishers, but in the end, we ended up selling the book for a mid-range advance to my editor friend John Oakes, then at Avalon Publishing. Oakes had already who’d already published several of my books when he had his own company, Four Walls Eight Windows. Ironically, Oakes had wanted to buy the book before I even got involved with Brockman. Oh well!
But it was fun getting to know the colorful and abrasive Brockman, a quintessential New Yorker. John has a sort of scam where every year he sends out an annual question to his past and present clients—a truly star-studded list of the digerati. We obediently send John our answers, craving the slight publicity bump of appearing on his popular Edge site. And then he turns around and sells an anthology of our answers to a publisher without paying his contributors at all. And we ink-stained wretches are grateful to see our names in print, among such illustrious company. Why not. It’s only a few hundred words, and it’s fun making up wild answers to the Big Questions.
New Futures in SF
Ideas and Stories
Living art forms change—think of painting or popular music or literary novels or even TV sit-coms. SF people are always sad to see the most recent “Golden Age” slip away, but it’s sadder still to keep doing the same thing. Inevitably the old material goes stale and the fire gutters down. It’s still possible to write novels about androids and spaceships and uploading your brain. And, by the same token, it’s still possible to write a doo-wop song or paint an abstract expressionist painting. But old forms become stiff and mannered, and working with them is a bit quixotic. Why not some new kinds of SF novel? This is, after all, the twenty-first century.
It’s sometimes hard to grasp that the physics and sociology of earlier SF are only things that past writers made up. The received ideas of SF are unlikely to apply to any actual future. There’s absolutely no reason why we can’t change the rules and dream up fresh futures of our own. We’re not duty-bound to copy what our predecessors did.
I’m going to talk about some fresh areas to mine for ideas. Note that having ideas is one thing, and turning them into stories is another. You need two separate things for a story: first of all, the SF idea or gimmick and, second of all, an underlying issue that the gimmick solves.
I’m of the transreal school of SF writing, so when I’m forming my ideas for an SF tale, I always look into my own life for the issues. That is, given an SF trope, I work to make the idea into a fresh and true metaphor for some immediate real-life concern of mine.
A cautionary note. By “real-life concern” I do not mean the doom-and-gloom that the official media are forever pushing on us. The news, in my opinion, is mind-control, motivated by incredibly narrow and self-serving interests. For years I’ve had a theory that commercial news, advertising, and mass entertainment are working in concert. All three of them promote fear and belligerence. Why? If you’re afraid, it’s easier for the politicians and the plutocrats to manipulate you. If you’re belligerent, you can be provoked into attacking whatever rebellious groups the politicians and plutocrats want to stamp out. And if you’re fearful and belligerent, you’re willing to hand over a large cut of your income to the warmongers who are “defending” you from their fellow warmongers in other lands.
So never mind the daily news. To hell with it. Be here now. It’s time to run your own life, and to awaken from the fever dream we call history—if only for a few hours. It’s Independence Day!
Come to think of it, I’d like to write a science fiction story about the notion that news stories are the hive-mind’s nightmares or, putting it more strongly, that news stories are an insane society’s hallucinations. But I’d need a nice SF gimmick to make a story out of it. As I said before, you need two things: the SF gimmick plus the transreal meaning. Here I’ve got the meaning but not the gimmick. But I can think of a gimmick pretty easily. Suppose that some individual is somehow taken over by the hive mind and he or she is the control-freak paranoiac behind news—but I’ll stop there and save the further details for my next story, I need something to write about this week.
Anyway, the point I was making is that I like for my stories to speak to a concern or an issue that troubles me personally—rather than to some pumped-up mind-control worries that the media are promulgating.
So what are the concerns that interest me? The things I notice in daily life. Looking around with an SF eye, I’m always wondering how it would be if some aspect of life were exaggerated just a bit more. Just today, I was thinking that, to save money, young couples might start having “reality weddings.” You can buy a ticket to attend their wedding and their reception, or for a smaller fee you can watch the festivities over a video feed. And if you’re in the patron’s circle, a fragment of your DNA is blended into the genes of the young couple’s first child so that you’re a kind of grandparent. And this line of though speaks to me because these days I’m interested in
being a grandparent.
There’s a number of more general concerns that have been with me for years. I’m doomed to die, and I wonder if that’s really the end. I have dreams every night, what do they mean? My thoughts aren’t really like a page of writing at all—they’re blotches and rhythms and associations—and is there any way to truly describe one’s real mental life? I want to go back to my youth, is there a way? What are the differences between being a child, an adult, and an old person? What is eating all about? Can I talk to my cells? What would it be like to be an ant or, even better, an ant colony? These are a few of the issues that happen to matter to me—but of course other writers will have very different issues of their own. Part of the trick is to make your own quirky concerns seem universal enough to interest others.
Let me make another general point before I get into some specific ideas for new futures. It is in fact very unusual to come up with a truly new idea. No matter how outré an SF or fantasy concept you dream up, more often that not you find out that someone used it in an obscure pulp-magazine story of the 1950s or, which hurts even more, on a TV show or even in a comic.
Beginning SF writers sometimes imagine that writing a story or novel is all about having the idea. I’ve had amateurs send me emails like, “I’m not a writer, but I have an idea for an SF novel. We’ll meet for coffee, I’ll tell you the idea, you’ll write the novel, and we’ll split the money fifty-fifty.”
As I said above, as well as the idea, you need the meaning—and more. You have to embody the idea into a social situation with characters that the reader will care about. The idea has to in some way solve a problem that has an emotional resonance to it. The characters have to grow and change. Generally you want to have a love interest in there. And you need what I call eyeball kicks, that is, some interesting things to visualize and think about. And so on. You need the idea, the meaning, the scene, the characters, and the plot as well. And, oh yeah, you need a literary style, so the sentences are evocative, clear, fun to read, and have a nice rhythm.
It is true that you need the idea, yes. But turning the idea into a story is really the bulk of the work. I don’t worry too much about people “stealing” any ideas that I mention on my blog or in talks like this. Even if you and I were to start with exactly the same idea, our stories would end up being very different.
I’m glad to be giving this talk, as just now I’m between novels and I don’t have an specific idea for my next one. One thing that makes the process a little harder for a seasoned writer is that, after a certain number of stories and novels, you’ve already written about most of the ideas that have obsessed you from early on.
In my case, this means that I’ve written about an infinitely large world, about a four-dimensional world, about flying jellyfish, about a giant ass from the fourth dimension (I was combining a few interests there), about robots who evolve, about robots made of soft plastic, about aliens who travel as cosmic ray particles, about UFOs that can travel into the future, about shrinking down to sizes below the tiniest elementary particles, about growing to sizes larger than the galaxy, about a biotech world in which there are no machines at all, about going to meet the intelligent vortex-beings who lurk within a glowing star, about the afterworld, about parasitic mind-controlling slugs who ride on people’s backs, about flying like Superman, about exploring the interior of the Hollow Earth, about a global swarm of virtual ants who destroy all TV, about a device that turns plain air into whatever object you want, about travelling to a parallel universe, and about a future in which every object in the world comes to life.
What’s left? Well, let’s see if I can come up with something today. And in the process, I may also be recycling some of those road-tested ideas I just listed. After all, it’s not a crime to use the same idea twice.
Live Brains
I suppose I need to mention the Singularity at least once—even though it’s become, in my opinion, a stale and media-driven tope. The basic idea is that computers will continue to gain in speed and memory capacity. And we hope somehow to develop really good software to take advantage of the improved hardware. The Singulatarian dream is that, before long, then software will start writing even better software on its own, and then—shazam—the machines will be smarter than people.
And if you buy vitamins from Ray Kurzweil’s web page, you may live long enough for the wise and kindly nanomachines of the coming-real-soon future to clean all the gunk out of your veins! And then you might live long enough so that your brain can be sliced and diced for your mind to be copied onto a computer so you’re immortal!
Mind copied into a computer so you’re immortal—hmmm, where I have I heard that idea before? Oh, right, that’s from my 1981 novel, Software. “Ya’ll ever ate any live brains?” asks one of my robot-employed mind-harvesters. I recall my cyberpunk pal John Shirley screaming this phrase out the window of a car at a con in Austin around 1982. “Ya’ll ever ate any live brains?”
Actually, it’s more interesting to think about intelligence augmentation than about artificial intelligence. That is, what are some ways in which people might become noticeably smarter? I’m not so interested in brute-force approaches like shoving in more memory tissues or internalizing direct links to world wide web. The cool, SFictional thing would be if there were some in-retrospect-rather-obvious mental trick that we haven’t yet exploited.
Such tricks do exist. Think of how our effective intelligence improved with the advent of speech and of writing. In the mathematical realm, our ability to calculate got exponentially better when we started using positional notation. It would be cool if there some cute mental trick that would make us much brighter.
One of the dreams of AI is that there may yet be some trick like this that we can use to make our machines really smart. The only path towards AI at present is to more or less beat to death the problems of AI by using faster computers with every-larger data-bases. You set up a kind of neural network and train it and evolve it a little bit—not that anything like worldwide biological evolutions is practical in our little labs. But what if there was some clear and simple insight, some big aha?
When Everything Is Alive
Following the trail blazed by Charles Stross in Accelerando, I prefer to think out past the so-called Singularity. I wrote a pair of novels set in this zone: Postsingular and Hylozoic.
One of the ideas I was working with here is a fairly simple one: computer chips will go away. We don’t use little gears in our watches like they did fifty years ago, and I think it’s reasonable to expect that today’s chips will become outmoded, too.
What replaces them? I have two layers of speculations.
Biotech is likely to be the preeminent science of the 21st century, and we’ve really only scratched the surface with our SF. We’ve had some novels about plagues and about chimerical mixes of various species. But there’s so much more to explore. I like the idea of a person who becomes a disease that other people catch. And I like the idea of replacing every machine in existence by a biogadget—I wrote about this in Frek and the Elixir. But that was just a start.
My first speculation about future computers is that we’ll start using biotech to grow our computer hardware. A cuttlefish skin can display an amazing range of colors, updating the images at startling speeds. So why not a rectangle of tweaked cuttlefish skin for your display? And we can give our biogadget an embedded nervous system to take care of the computing chores. And how about input devices? Just wriggling your fingers should be enough if the biogadget pays attention. I don’t understand why we don’t already have this input technology.
Kicking it a notch further, it might be nice to have a wireless connection of some kind connected to your brain. I don’t think any reasonable person wants any kind of chip or biogadget implant. But I’ve often written about a soft slug-like device called an uvvy which sits on the back of your neck and picks up on the electromagnetic fields of your brain.
The uvvy is a symbol for the smart phone. In thi
s vein, there’s a certain amount of SF material in the notion of people walking around staring at tiny handheld screens all day long. Peering at the world through their cellphones so as to see the augmented reality overlays. I’ve written about this before as “stunglasses,” but now that it’s really happening, there’s fresh observations to take into account.
My second idea about computers of the future has to with quantum computation. Atoms and molecules are always doing quantum computations, even when they’re just sitting around. These computations are in fact rich enough to emulate anything that an ordinary computer could do. If we can just get the hang of how to do it, we can start having computers that are chairs, rocks, air currents, glasses of water, candle flames—whatever.
Once we get this working, we’re ready for what I describe in my novel Hylozoic. Everything can be conscious and alive. Most of you won’t be familiar with the world “hylozoism.” It’s a real dictionary word that means, “the doctrine that physical objects are alive.”
I’d like to see a lot more SF about worlds where everything is alive. R. Crumb once drew a great comic where a guy’s cheeseburger starts talking to him. Why not? Lots of things talk these days, although thus far they don’t say anything interesting. But what if they did? It’s easy enough to layer on enough computer science to bring these fantasies into SF.
One cute idea that I touched on in Hylozoic is worth using again. If we view any bit of matter as carrying out a quantum computation, then what if something like a computer virus infects matter, perhaps changing the laws of physics to make our world more congenial to some other kinds of beings? Or what if you yourself dose your surroundings simply to make them more vibrant, more cartoony, more congenial. Instead of your getting high, your house gets high!
Magic Doors
As a boy, I learned about magic doors from the Narnia books and from Heinlein’s Tunnel In The Sky. I’ve always loved the idea of portals to other worlds. Looking at them through modern eyes, we can see the magic doors as being a bit like hyperlinks on the web.