Lessons Learned from Science Fiction and Futurists

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Contents 1 Group Members 2 Question 3 Text 4 Area 5 Case Studies 6 Past Predictions 7 Early Premature Inventions 8 Creation of the Web 9 Mock up and Prototypes 10 And the future? 11 Methodologies 12 Conclusion 13 Slides

Group Members

Dominic DiFranzo
Benjamin Heitmann
Betty Purwandari

Question

What can we learn from Science Fiction authors and futurologists about making good predictions?

Text

Due to the social element of the web we can't just use physical law/properties of the system to predict future actions, (i.e. chem, physics) we need to use different methodologies from economics/futurology to help us predict the future actions/trends/possibilities

Area

Existing predictions of scifi authors and futurologists and inventors, like HG Wells, William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, Bruce Sterling, Vannevar Bush, Minority Report

Case Studies

• Collect examples of predictions from these areas:
  • pure Science fiction, (created for entertainment)
  • futurologists (created predictions for clients or governments)
  • inventors, who had ideas which they could not implement at their time (mock-up, prototypes)
• Our connection to web science, is that after giving general examples to illustrate the impact of scifi ideas (e.g. atomic bomb from HG Wells, cyberspace from Gibson, Avatar from Neal Stephenson, Cyberpunk in general)
• But we will focus on predictions which are relevant to Web Science in the sense that they are about connections and communications.
• Find enablers and factors which are common to successful predictions, and inhibiting factors which are common to failed predictions.
• What identifies self fulfilling predictions?
• If you look at past predictions, can you judge the likelihood of current predictions?
• Maybe make some predictions.

Past Predictions

"Radium engines" in the 1930s were the stuff of science fiction, such as was being written at the time by Edgar Rice Burroughs. H.G. Wells included air-dropped "atomic bombs" in his 1914 novel The World Set Free. Though Wells' "atomic bombs" bore little resemblance to actual nuclear weapons—they were simply regular bombs that never stopped exploding—Leó Szilárd later commented that this story influenced his later research into this subject.

Early Premature Inventions

In 1945 Dr Vannevar Bush invented a theoretical machine called the memory extender (memex). It used associative linking enabling humans to store and retrieve information. The memex was a brilliant idea, but it could not be implemented at that time due to the lack of supporting technologies, such as electronics and computing [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6].

Bush's idea inspired Ted Nelson in 1965 to coin the term hypertext. He tried to implement the system, which was called Xanadu. Again, there was no sufficient technical support to make it real [7].

Creation of the Web

Later in March 1989 Tim Bernes-Lee, a frustrated software consultant at MIT, quoted Ted Nelson's paper in his blueprint for the World Wide Web Information Management: a Proposal. It took more than a year until the World Wide Web was fully developed and demonstrated for the first time on Christmas Day 1990 by Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau [8].

Mock up and Prototypes

Apple's knowledge navigator is a concept described by former Apple Computer CEO John Sculley in his 1987 book, Odyssey. It describes a device that can access a large networked database of hypertext information, and use software agents to assist searching for information. You can see a video of it being used here [9]

Mozilla Lab's Aurora is a new browser interface concept that explores new ways people could interact with the Web in the future based on projected technological trends and real-world scenarios.

And the future?

Now we enjoy to be continuously online, to broadcast what we think, what we feel to Twitter or Facebook, to keep in touch with others through the Web of social networking. We love the sensation, we get addicted, which may lead us to be "lifecasters," "livecasters" or "social cyborgs"[10] [11]. Suprisingly a vision towards A Cyborg Manifesto has been written by Donna Haraway back in 1991.

Does the technology support it? In 2002 Steven Spielberg made Minority Report, where for some extent Tom Cruise became a cyborg.

Later in 2009 MIT Media Lab launches a promising prototype of the Sixth Sense. With the increasing passion to live as livecasters and advancement of the technologies, social cyborgs turn to be more possible to happen.

Methodologies

We find some forecasting methodologies used by a multi-disciplinary field of futurology. We investigate how feasible to apply them in Web Science.

• Social Network Analysis

When social network on the Web is depicted into a graph, it can be used to predict what is likely to happen to network. One argument says that an unbalanced graph tends to change into a balanced one. A group of 3 people (A, B, and C) where A and B have a positive relationship, B and C have a positive relationship, but C and A have a negative relationship is an unbalanced cycle. The possibility will be B only has a good relationship with A, and both A and B have a negative relationship with C. More advanced analysis must be explored to analyse more complex social network representing Web users [12] [13] .

Conclusion

• Undertand the Web users, their passion, ecosystem, and trend.
• Time of crisis may trigger more innovation than time of stability, e.g. TBL's fustration at CERN.
• Keep dreaming: some people are very good at it. They can envisage the future, travel with quantum leap in their imagination.
• Work together, collaborate to make the dreams come true.
• Be aware of the impact. Methodologies can be useful tools to predict.
• Do our best to anticipate the impact.

Slides

Lessons Learned from Science Fiction and Futurists