DARPA does awesome awesome stuff. Now they are funding the devlopment of a computer that will manage the battlefields of the future. This combined with advances in the area of what can only be called cybernetics not to mention laser weapons is an amazing portrait of the future. There are two problems I see arising from this: 1.) There aren’t that many people left on the planet dumb enough to engage in global war. 2.) What the hell are sci-fi authors going to write about?

It seems like science has advanced far enough that in order to write about anything interesting you are going to have to have to do some searious research into future tech.  I mean I guess the authors could just make stuff up, which is what they have been doing, but so much of previous science fiction seems to have influenced sience that many of our protected genres are largly tapped out.

Think about robots. I mean sure we don’t have rosie the robot cleaning up our house but we do have roombas doing it. Exercising a little liberty here you could say robots have been a staple of literture since ancient times. Think of golems a creature created to look like a human that had a word of power inscribed upon its brow causing it to come to life.  Now writing about robots is no longer fiction but fact. So there is a big chunk of topics sort of removed from use.  Well not really.

I personally would like to see the genre tackle the exploration of humanity and it’s interaction with technology. I suppose Asimov sort of did that already but one thing I keep thinking about is the human ability to anthropomorphize things.  Think about Alice in Wonderland all the talking animals and such. Think of people naming their roombas. There is talk of ‘robot overlords’ it seems to me though that any great battle over robots wouldn’t happen like the second renissance what would end up happnening would be humans fighting humans over the rights of robots.

The long and the short of the thing though is this. Think GIGO garbage in garbage out.  robots and computers and all the rest are programed by HUMANS. This means that they are limited by what humans can concieve.  In my experiance humans tend to be somewhat shortsited so I think we are pretty safe from robot overlords.  As far as humans fighting humans, I think that leads nicely into the point 1 above : who the hell are we going to fight?

With the state the world is currently in, it looks like in the future there won’t be anyone to fight. I hope and pray I am right but the trend appears to be one of, if not peace, at least a hightened state of appathy and self concern. The only countries we have to worry about anymore are so called developing nations, or whomever the people in charge decide we can beat up on next.  Eventually though I think things will shake down to an uneasy mostly peace. Of course once that happens fiction writers are going to be totally screwed.

I guess world peace would lead to lots of stories about fighting aliens. Of course then one day we will encounter an extra-terrerstrial race and we’ll try to kick the snot out of them because that is what science fiction has taught us. Just remember the Vulcans is all I have to say.