When you attempt to divine the road ahead -- perhaps by gazing at that liquid crystal ball glimmering on your desktop -- you may find that all the funhouse futures that reflect back to you possess the undeniable warp of science fiction. Indeed, it's already a chestnut among science journalists and newspaper columnists to point out how stuff like cloned stem cells, Mars missions, or Sony robots bring a little SF into our lives. At the same time, the very ease with which we now bandy about this notion suggests how accustomed we have become to having the throw-rugs of our mundane lives yanked from beneath our feet -- not by political revolution, say, or the tides of war, but by the incandescent acceleration of technoscientific production.
In any case, everywhere I turn I see a flickering screen of technoscientific fictions, at once optimistic, muddled, and thoroughly dystopian. Call them scenarios, or market trends, or gloom-and-doom prophecies, but futures always come with a narrative spin. Even hotshit supercomputer simulations and sophisticated war games are essentially indistinguishable from the rigorous extrapolations that characterize hard science fiction -- a genre which at this point should be expanded to include prognosticating pop science by the likes of Raymond Kurzweil and Hans Moravec, whose books are basically SF without all that bothersome narrative machinery of character and plot.
Prediction implies that the future is a single determined story whose twists and turns can be charted in advance. But this is to misunderstand our condition by imagining that the future already adheres to the kind of linear time-line we imagine the past to be. Fortunately or not, the future is neither singular nor linear. It arises in possibility space, and to live at our moment in time is to live on the Mandelbrot edge of a constantly budding field of tubulent maybes. And so we peer ahead, into swirling hurricanes called Y2K, or global warming, or Bt corn, and chart the possibility space as it emerges. Usually we stick to probabilities, because probabilities chart relatively well. We avert a lot of catastrophes this way, though I am afraid that our ability to control or even foresee the results of our actions has been greatly exaggerated. Because our collective choices help select from that space of possibilities, and because human brains are excellent at contingency plans, we are not entirely powerless. But we tune the future like butterflies, batting up distant tsunamis with frail, translucent wings.
At the end of the day, or the millennium, the problem with prediction is that prediction is a failure of the imagination (no good SF writer stakes her worth on prediction, though she may be quite pleased when the scenarios do pan out). Blinkered, literalistic, often tautological, prediction makes us forget that it's all strange weather now. Prediction tells us nothing about the inside of the future: how it will feel, how it does feel, and particularly how it feels to change in the ways that we are changing. Prediction implies that the future is something to be managed, which may be true if you have a product to sell or an epidemic to fight, but which ignores the raw and seething bloom of what we face, a bloom we might dub Complexity but which the crones and cenobites in the gone world would simply have called Mystery.
The error is to think of all these more intensely imagined futures as happening in a seperate, merely "cultural" world, while the real world of the GDP and ozone depletion trundles on in a way that only scientists and economic gurus can anticipate. As reality grows increasingly mediated, it will be increasingly dependent on algorithmic intelligence and the rhetoric of the virtual. This means that overt fictions -- to say nothing of the more complex and critical interventions of many electronic artists -- begin to interpenetrate the real in new ways, creating unprecedented mixtures and points of interventions. Our fictions, sonic and visual as well as narrative, become mediators, not just of meanings or ideologies, but of the emerging technological entities and practices that will characterize the next millennium.
from: The Posthuman Condition | Don't Look Back | Erik Davis
