Laughing at that Science Fiction Future!

I was in my journalism research class a few weeks ago waiting for it to start when someone mentioned the article writing robot. This classmate found it weird and slightly worrisome that a robot could write something well enough to be enjoyed by humans. This got the rest of the class asking questions about what makes good writing and what else will robots be doing? Then the teacher walked in.

He immediately came in tot he conversation. He'd seen the same article. But was he worried? That would be a big, fat NO. He was not worried. He waved his hands and he laughed it off. This wasn't some old as the hills professor either. This was a younger guy who had just earned his doctorate. He thought it was interesting. But nothing to worry about. The robot was only writing formulaic sports articles about the basic stats and outcome of the game. This wasn't really writing! He said only hacks should worry about it. And the real journalists like him would be fine. As a bonus, he won't have to worry about someone dropping that kind of work on his lap. He'll be writing real pieces. The rest of the class nodded along with him and began laughing as well. The idea that a robot could take a humans place in such creative matters! That's complete science fiction! Ha!

Instead of laughing away their worries people need to be ready to ask some serious questions. Science and technology is not getting any slower. And humanity must be ready to understand the role that these once science fiction scenarios will have on our lives.

So robots writing serious journalistic pieces is science fiction now. But so what? 

When we look at science fiction we tend to brush it off as unrealistic to expect X to happen. Specific scenarios seem implausible especially looking at writers' and futurists' track records for predictions. Specific scenarios may never happen but variations of them have, are, and will happen.

Let's look at smartphones. No one would have predicted such a technology would saturate society. But it has. And the abilities it possesses are changing the way we think and the way we interact. But how could we have anticipated this without knowing the exact scenario? We look at science fiction. We look at depictions of brain augmentation where you can pull out any answer to just about any question. Kinda like googling. Or telepathy where contact is almost instantaneous between individuals. Kind of like instant messaging. And that leads to the filter for privacy seems to be breaking away. Linda like Facebook oversharing.

Fitting the brain with hardware and a phone may not be the exact same thing but the brain augmentation scenario let's us as humans practice asking questions and thinking of our own reactions. What would we do if we had all the answers at our fingertips? How would we act differently if people could contact us almost anywhere in an instant? Questions we are asking now but could have been asking then.

Making us think is something that good science fiction does. What a good futurist does. Publishing the latest Kalibak Tor book Clones: Gangs & Such reminds me of that. It makes me realize how important science fiction is to humanity. But it gets laughed at for being over the top and almost always wrong in predicting the future. We shouldn't be thinking of these predictions as a true/false test but more as reading comprehension for us. Because it is not the future scenarios that will be tested in the end. It will be us. And instead of laughing at the future we need to seriously consider it and its variations. Who knows? It may be just a smartphone now, but how much longer until it does give us answers automatically and sends automatic telepathic updates to friends and family? Huh...?

Yeah right! Hahaha! That's never happ....Oh wait, I just remembered autocorrect and Foursquare.