Lots of food for thought in this interview with sff authors Ada Palmer and Ken Liu at Asterisk. Palmer’s answers in particular are of interest for me, which I suspect has a lot to do with them being informed by a historical (and historiographic) perspective that is utterly lacking in contemporary discussions of “technology”.

(If you don’t already follow my “research journal” at Worldbuilding Agency, this recent essay on David Edgerton’s The Shock of the Old unpacks that problem somewhat. Palmer’s recent doorstep of a book on the (myth of the) Renaissance is well worth the read, also—though I found its style exhausting, to the extent that I nearly gave up on it a number of times.)

Two clippings, then. First, an observation by Palmer about the framing of the “revolutionary” impact of Those Two Letters which makes a similar argument to the folk who talk about cycles or “waves” of sociotechnical change (e.g. Carlota Perez and disciples), albeit from a rather different direction:

I think we’re wrong to separate generative AI and call it a completely new revolution. I often talk to Silicon Valley people who want to ask, are we so special that we’ve had six Gutenberg revolutions in a row, 10 years apart? And I say no, we’re having one Gutenberg revolution: the computer. 

The personal computer, the internet, the cell phone, social media, and generative AI are all iterations of the same one fundamental technological change, the same way Gutenberg’s press kept having new impacts for decades through news networks, pamphlets, and eventually the newspaper. A little too much of our analysis of Silicon Valley right now is of the past five years instead of the past 20.

The amusing part is that, once you look past the superficial flash of one particular user interface—our largely uncritical response to which has, it bears noting, been primed by science fiction, and which was chosen for exactly that reason—the actual results are considerably less revolutionary than they’re being sold as, as Palmer and Liu discuss at some length.

(As I and others have been saying for a good few years now: “AI” has been made to serve as a highly marketable synonym for “with computers”. That strategy has made a small handful of terrible shit-heels extremely rich in the short term, but in the longer term it pretty much guarantees another extended period in which anyone who dares utter Those Two Words in anything other than scare quotes is going to be laughed out of every room they enter. The sooner the better, IMO.)

Second, Palmer’s argument for sf in particular as a sandbox for red-teaming sociotechnical ideas:

That’s one of the most valuable things about not just imagining a future but having a storyteller actually sit down and tell a story in it: You explore the premise in its messiness, working and not working, for the people it works for and the people it doesn’t. I hang out with a lot of people involved in fixing democracy, and they’ll have a great idea, say sortition, choosing officials by lottery instead of voting, and sortition will work perfectly. 

The reason they think so is that their sortition exists in a perfect abstract world, and they’re comparing it to American democracy, which has existed for 250 years, during which everyone has had an incentive to hack it. Of course perfect sortition looks better than imperfect voting. What a science fiction writer, or a historian, can do is show you sortition in action: working, being corrupted, working for these people and not those. Then you’re comparing the imaginary-and-flawed to the real-and-flawed, which puts them on par. That’s why science fiction is so good at helping us spot the weaknesses, the people left behind, and the “we could use this badly, guys” problems of innovations before we get to them. We don’t just depict the world, we tell a story in it, with conflicts and failures.

This is pretty much exactly how I’ve tried to pitch my fiction-for-futures work: OK, you’ve got your plausible-looking scenario; now give it to me and let me play with it until I find the people who’ve fallen through its cracks.

This is also why I refer to call such work narrative prototyping; it’s the qualitative/social-scientific equivalent of a scale model tested to destruction in an engineering lab. It’s frustrating how hard it can be to convince people to let me do this work—though it’s very slightly easier now than it was when I was doing my PhD, because there is more precedent to point to.

However, I’m increasingly leery of the argument that sf as literature should be doing that work. That’s not to say I think it shouldn’t do it, if that’s what the author is interested in doing; I just don’t want it to become the default teleology of an avowedly didactic and normative genre.

(That said, I think that particular ship sailed some time ago, as already noted.)