The Source Weekly: 2017 January Week 1
Of Wired, Whiplash & Westworld
Scott Dadich on the Power of Science Fiction:
Science fiction has a robust history of inspiring real innovation. Submarines, robots, and cell phones were all envisioned first in novels, plays, and movies. Thinking up all sorts of different futures, embracing our fears and dreams, is part of the process of building a better tomorrow.
Ultimately, the goal of this first edition of 2017 — our first issue dedicated entirely to fiction — is to give you, the reader, something that helps you let your own mind wander. Think about what is possible, what is plausible, what is terrifying, what is hopeful.
Snippets from the Whiplash introduction:
“Learning is something you do for yourself. Education is something done to you.”
“Technology had exceeded our capacity to understand it, and not for the last time. One might reasonably anticipate the Lumiere Brothers, with worldwide fame and a burgeoning catalogue, to become fantastically rich, and instrumental to the evolution of the medium. Yet by 1900 they were done. Auguste declared that “the cinema is an invention without a future,” and the brothers devoted themselves to creating reliable technique for developing color photographs.”
“In failing to understand the significance of their own invention, the Lumieres put themselves in excellent company. Some of our most celebrated inventors, engineers, and technologists have failed to understand the potential of their own work. In fact, is history is any guide, it’s those closest to a given technology who are least likely to predict its ultimate use.”
“Ponder this for a moment. It took eight years, hundreds of filmmakers, and thousands of films before someone conceived of the new technology as anything other than a play in two dimensions. This simple innovation helped jump-start a period of experimentation and progress in the cinema. Yet it would take another twelve years before a film appeared — D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation — that a modern audience would recognize as such. Not because the technology didn’t exist, but because in the end, technologies are just tools — useless, static objects until they are animated by human ideas.”
“What seems increasingly evident is that the primary condition of the network era is not just rapid change, but constant change. In the space of a few generations, the periods of stability have grown shorter, and the disruptive shifts of new paradigms have come with greater frequency. Imminent breakthroughs in fields like genetics, artificial intelligence, manufacturing, transportation, and medicine will only accelerate this dynamic. “What if the historical pattern — disruption followed by stabilization- has itself been disrupted?” ask the authors of “The Big Shift” in another article, “The New Reality: Constant Disruption.”
ASYMMETRY: Whether you’re operating small business or running a department of a government agency or merely hold any position of responsibility inside an organization of any scale, the simple fact of asymmetry is what’s important. The point is that you can no longer assume that costs and benefits will be proportional to size. If anything, the opposite of that assumption is probably true: Today, the biggest threats to the status quo come from the smallest of places, from start-ups and rogues, breakaways and indie labs.
COMPLEXITY: The quantity, or level of, complexity is influenced by four inputs: heterogeneity, a network, interdependency, and adaptation. “Imagine these as four knobs,” says Scott E. Page, the director of the Center for the Study of Complex Systems at the University of Michigan. At one point, Page says, all these knobs were turned to zero. We lived in isolated, homogeneous communities that were lill-equipped to adapt to rapidly changing conditions, but for thousands of years this mattered little. The Roman Empire, for instance, took centuries to unravel. “We’ve cranked the volume on all these knobs to 11 in recent years,” says Page. “And we can’t begin to know what consequences of that will be.
UNCERTAINTY: For much of our history, humans’ success was directly related to the ability to create accurate forecasts. A medieval merchant didn’t know much, but if he knew there has been widespread drought in Rhineland, he could predict that his wheat might fetch the best price in that district. In an age of complexity, though, unforeseen development can change the rules of the game in the space of a few days.
The musings of Dr Robert Ford:
“An old friend once told me something that gave me great comfort. Something he read. He said Mozart, Beethoven and Chopin never died. They simply became music.”
“Wasn’t it Oppenheimer who said any man whose mistakes take 10 years to correct is quite the man? Well, mine took 35.”
“This was the very question that consumed Arnold, filled him with guilt, eventually drove him mad. The answer always seemed obvious to me. There is no threshold that makes us greater than the sum of our parts, no inflection point at which we become fully alive. We can’t define consciousness because consciousness does not exist. Humans fancy that there’s something special about the way we perceive the world, and yet we live in loops, as tight and as closed as the hosts do, seldom questioning our choices, content, for the most part, to be told what to do next.”
“You can’t play God without being acquainted with the devil.”
