The Amazing Century: 1926-2026: Technology Will Always Go Wrong – and it Doesn’t Matter

Ezri Carlebach:

Part Three: Technology will always go wrong and it doesn’t matter – as long as you’ve read enough science fiction.

In Part One of this three-part series we looked at the roots of modern SF in Hugo Gernsback’s 1926 launch of Amazing Stories. In Part Two we met the leaders of two current organizations driving innovation through applied imagination. To round things off, we’re going to ask the obvious question – if we’re so smart, if our technology is so advanced, if progress in the past century has been so amazing, how come things can still be so bad?

First of all, as pioneering environmental designer William McDonough points out, “it’s taken us 5,000 years to put wheels on our luggage. We’re not that smart”. And if we think ‘artificial intelligence’ is a game changer, we’d do well to recall the words of SF writer Stanislaw Lem. “The problem with AI,” he warned some 50 years ago, “is not the intelligence of the machines, but the stupidity of the people who build them”. 

The same quandary applies to every piece of tech ever made, from the wheel to the drone. 

And yet… NASA’s Artemis programme aims to take humans back to the moon next year, and from there to Mars. Space hotels may soon open for the well-off who fancy a vacation somewhere really different, says an article in Scientific American. Quantum computing is set to become an $850 billion industry within the next 15 years, according to investment banker and financial educator Felix Prehn. Are you ready for what will happen to your business when your computers run exponentially faster than today’s best machines? And are you keeping an eye on the big battle between Elon Musk and Sam Altman? No, not the cranky court case about whether OpenAI was or wasn’t meant to be a charity, but the race to perfect human-computer implants. You know, chips in the brain. Soon, perhaps, you will access a quantum AI directly from your thoughts in your hotel on the moon. 

What could possibly go wrong?

Now, where did I put that crystal ball…

It would be great if we could really know what’s going to happen next. Humans have tried many methods, from consulting oracles and reading tea leaves to gazing into crystal balls and, of course, turning to science fiction. Frankly, the latter option stands the best chance of succeeding. However, as Isaac Asimov – creator of the Three Laws of Robotics – told a fan convention back in 1968, predicting the future with SF would likely take longer than any of us have. “If you take all of science fiction and ‘smush’ it together and stir well,” he said, “and set it down in the hot sun and wait for something to rise to the top, that top is likely to be pretty accurate prediction.” 

Grasping “all of science fiction” was a tall order in 1968, but considering the vast amount published since, it’s obviously not a realistic proposition. 

And yet… there are many instances of science fiction stories predicting, and even creating major technological advances. In the 19th century, Jules Verne combined literary talent with a deep interest in science and technology to produce stories about submarines, trips to the moon, even nuclear weapons. Early in the 20th century, Robert Goddard invented the liquid fuel used by every rocket that has ever taken off from planet Earth, after reading H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds. Martin Cooper, creator of the first mobile phone, said he wanted to make something like the communicator devices seen in TV’s Star Trek. Philip K. Dick, author of the story from which the movie Bladerunner was adapted (among many others), predicted ChatGPT with alarming accuracy in his 1964 novel The Penultimate Truth. 

It’s not only the gadgets and gizmos that SF writers have seen coming. Norman Spinrad’s Agent of Chaos, published in 1967, featured a rebel leader named Boris Johnson, whose mission is taking back control of Earth’s destiny from a bureaucratic intergalactic regime called the Hegemony. “Boris Johnson was quite willing to babble on,” Spinrad tells us, “and did so at every opportunity – but the man was a fool.”

Or take John Sladek’s 1974 short story, ‘The Great Wall of Mexico’. Set in a slightly near future from the time it was written, the story features a businessman with no political experience becoming President of the US. His main electoral plank is a promise to build a wall on the border with Mexico, to keep out the ‘drug dealers’ and ‘rapists’. But an FBI investigation reveals the wall to be a real estate scam designed to enrich the President’s family. The story was intended as satire. It doesn’t feel like that now. 

The future is dead, long live the future

The point here is the future is not the point. Apart from anything else, there is never just one possible future but many. It’s what we do in the present that matters, if what we’re looking for is a way of shaping the future into something… better. Whatever that means, in this complex and increasingly fragmented world. 

The value of science fiction is that it can help us, through imaginative work, to become aware of possibilities. Many SF writers would add a caveat – the possibilities are not always good. Stories like The War of the Worlds, The Penultimate Truth and all the rest serve to show us what another SF author, Stephen Baxter, calls “a skewed mirror, revealing with remarkable clarity the technological, social and moral fractures of our day”.

We need both the skewed mirror and the clarity to make better decisions – so that we don’t look back from a tragically dystopian future and wish we’d read more science fiction. Which, in a way, was what happened to H.G. Wells, despite his extraordinary output of science fiction ideas, from time travel and alien invasion to moon landings and genetic experiments giving animals the ability to speak. He died in 1946, having witnessed the rise and defeat of Nazism and the dropping of atomic bombs on human populations. His final work, published in 1945, was a reflective essay called Mind at the End of its Tether, in which he offers an assessment of what he’d tried to say in his many previous books. It includes an unambiguous prophecy concerning the fate of the human species – which he dubs ‘Lord of Creation’ – if it strives for ever greater heights of technological dominance without an equivalent level of moral and social responsibility:

The planet spins, climate changes, so that the old overgrown Lord of Creation is no longer in harmony with his surroundings. Go he must.

So long, and thanks for all the fish

Eagle-eyed readers of this series will recall the reference to my old friend John Helmer, back in Part One. Spookily, since that piece was published John invited me to co-host a podcast with him. ‘The Tech Imaginarium: How science fiction made the modern world’ launched 26 May on all the usual platforms. OK, it’s not that spooky, but it’s a lot of fun and, who knows, might be useful for getting to grips with the tech-saturated times we live in. 

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My thanks to Mike Klein for allowing me the space to put forward these ideas on Strategic. Live long and prosper.

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Ezri Carlebach is a double-bass player and consultant on all things sf. After a career of more than 30 years in publishing, marketing, public relations and corporate communications, Ezri is writing a series of graphic novels set in Brighton and Orkney.