An Intelligent Future?

I’ve talked before (in fact it seems all I can talk about lately) about how risky it is writing fiction set in the future simply because of the phenomenon that the future, when we finally get there, is seldom much like we imagined it years or decades before.

I’m in my 50s as I write these words, and as a kid I fully expected to be going on holidays to the moon by the time I was in my late 20s, when the turn of the century came. Not only did that not happen, we’re now a quarter of the way through the next century and our only chance to get humanity to space en masse is a conspiracy-spouting MAGA twat whose vast wealth gives him a hermetically sealed bubble where nobody dares (or can) call out his idiocy, god complex and bullshit.

But I’m in good company. As I’ve said before almost none of the great sci fi writers of the postwar era got the late 20th century spot on because nobody accounted for the existence of the internet.

But the post above was intended as a bit of a metaphor. In talking about the number of authors who failed to account for the layer of digital information that would one day change the way we do everything, I was drawing a parallel about what I myself had done when I set the date of the Sydney Harbour Bridge’s collapse in October 2019, the rebuilding taking place until November 2020.

As we now know, some poor schmuck in a Chinese seafood market ate bat soup in December 2019 and nothing whatsoever happened in the world for the next 12 months except enough Zoom calls and Netflix bingeing to send global internet usage up between 40-100 percent, much less a major city construction project.

But something else has recently bubbled to the top of our collective consciousness, and while it isn’t as big or impactful as the internet (yet), many people believe it’s going to have the biggest economic and social impact since the internet itself, and that’s artificial intelligence.

Through some osmosis or luck, and despite being set mostly in 2037, I don’t talk about the internet much in Falling except in vague terms. Everybody uses it, but in the story I tried very consciously to make it a tool characters use in an overarching sense rather than talk directly about an ecosystem of brand names, apps and formats of doing things. Even while writing it I knew today’s hottest new tech is tomorrow’s magnetic tape reels or Myspace. So that was easy to get away with.

COVID now feels like a glaring hole in an otherwise polished tale, but that’s another story that thus far remains in the Too Hard basket.

But artificial intelligence is something else. Can I get away with not talking about it in Falling if it can be considered historically/futuristically accurate? Every time I think of another scene or technology in the story where AI would have a massive impact I cringe. And that goes for stuff it can do right now, let alone in 2037.

Designing the new bridge after the old one falls down? Easy. Disentangling the neural and nervous impulses from Dale’s brain into the brace reconnecting his spine to send messages down to his lower body, giving him mobility again? A snap. Combing through case studies of other paranormal phenomena to look for common elements and cross reference them with town plans or architectural designs, fault lines, electrical or water easements in order to come up with a hypothesis? Connecting dots across wide datasets like that is what AI was built for.

There are even several scenes depicting characters using computers to work through video or measurement data captured at various points in the story, and after re-reading them, almost all of them are obsolete even now – in 2037 they’ll be quite frankly ridiculous.

Just like the advent of the mobile phone has rendered so many classic horror movie narrative tropes redundant when you can just call the cops from anywhere (and spawned a whole new arms race for plausible reasons why characters can’t get a signal), any depiction of a character working through a complex system with a lot of moving parts by reading, searching online or doing a lot of calculations manually is just as anachronistic now.

All this but we still can’t take holidays on the moon. How can sci-fi authors whose stock in trade is predicting the future possibly keep up and get it right?!?