Comments on: Nanotech, terraforming, geoengineering – facts and fictions entangled.

By: sophiacollins

sophiacollins — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 16:48:01 +0000

Ooo, I thought of another example of terraforming in sci-fi – Dune. I’m sure I’ve read that Herbert consciously wrote about ecological themes, and wanted to prompt people to think about the far long-term consequences of things.

By: jonturney

jonturney — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 15:01:00 +0000

not off topic! – the thing I’ve written has a section on robots, too (with quotes from Winfield). This little bit about geo-engineering is here because it is one of the pieces of unfinished business in a small study which leaves much out that could be developed further… [All research grants gratefully received ]

By: sophiacollins

sophiacollins — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 14:40:42 +0000

Another example of sci-fi influencing public attitudes (and perhaps science research) is robotics. I saw a talk by Alan Winfield (a robotics Prof at UWE) where he was saying that people are often disappointed by his robots, because they are expecting at least C3PO. Robots in fiction are far more advanced than the robots we can actually build.

A problem that arises from this (in his view) is that policy-makers, and all the people making decisions about weaponized drones, have an unrealistic idea of how clever robots are. They don’t realise how inaccurate they are, or the potential dangers, and blithely OK their use in combat.

One thing I find interesting about robots in fiction is the way they are used to explore our definitions of human – do intelligent robots have rights? Can they love? Will they rebel and kill us all? Fiction allows us to explore the ethical questions AI and robotics throw up, way ahead of us needing to deal with them in practice.

But as fictional robots are so divorced from robot reality (and we can see some of the same themes in Frankenstein, Golem legends, etc), perhaps this isn’t really to do with robots at all. Maybe robots are just a modern-day place-holder for a non-human person, and/or humans ‘usurping god’ and creating life.

I’ve rather gone off-topic re geoengineering…

By: Hilary sutcliffe

Hilary sutcliffe — Fri, 27 Jul 2012 09:25:37 +0000

Ideas?!

By: jonturney

jonturney — Thu, 26 Jul 2012 18:24:31 +0000

hmm, maybe inherently isn’t the right word. Need something which speaks to the moving boundary. In fact, now I think of it, the inherently science-fictional are maybe the ones which are *not* realisable, ever. The others are fictional projections which can become real, but can only be described in fictional mode at a particular time. Which would be best described as…?

By: (@)

(@) — Thu, 26 Jul 2012 17:49:45 +0000

Intrigued by your idea that inherently SFnal concepts have to be achievable in principle but not practice. Do we not by inspection live among them? Isn’t one of the interesting things about say space travel that when it became real it didn’t stop being SFnal too?