Although this collection is called “SFF Thought Starters”, most of the posts are SF-relevant. Here’s one that could prompt ideas for fantasy, though. 

Because we’re so aware of how much easier travel is in the modern era than in the past, we tend to overcorrect and think that trade over long distances used to be basically impossible in ancient times. Not at all; the Silk Road connected the Far East to the Middle East, and pigments made from lapis lazuli (at the time only obtainable from Afghanistan) were used in the Irish Book of Kells. Indonesia has legends about “Iskander” (Alexander the Great), and spices traveled from Southeast Asia to the courts of medieval Europe. There’s growing, though so far not conclusive, evidence of Roman, as well as Viking, landings in North America, and it’s pretty well accepted, I think, that Chinese explorers reached what’s now California. 

It seems there was also an “amber road” connecting ancient Scandinavia with Egypt – long before Viking mercenaries made their way down the great rivers to fight for the Byzantine Empire. 

http://io9.gizmodo.com/beads-found-in-ancient-danish-graves-match-glass-made-f-1669942793

An interesting proposal, and as vertical urban farms and other such advances become commonplace, probably a realistic one.

As a point of reference, New Zealand already has about 25% of its land area in national parks and other protected natural areas, and this is in a country where agriculture is traditionally one of the largest industries.

Originally shared by David Brin

In Half Earth, E. O. Wilson suggests that humans set aside roughly 50 percent of the planet as a sort of permanent preserve, undisturbed by man. I portrayed this happening in the future… and it will… once we get past these crises and use asteroids to get rich…

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/01/science/e-o-wilson-half-earth-biodiversity.html?action=click&contentCollection=science&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=7&pgtype=sectionfront&_r=0

The intersection of neuroscience and the legal system. 

1. “My brain made me do it” as a criminal defense. Tends to backfire, as juries don’t want to release people into society who claim they can’t control their violent tendencies. 

2. Lie detection via neuroimaging. Current methods are not high-resolution enough to make this useful, even if you could be certain that a lie looked the same in everyone’s brain. (Besides which, eyewitnesses often sincerely believe something that isn’t true.) However, we can get basic data about people’s subjective responses to what they see, which has some degree of connection to behaviour, and we can tell to some degree what they are looking at.

3. The neurocompatibility of legal systems: to what extent does the legal system understand mental illness? Rehabilitation? Individual differences? Conflict resolution? The way the system is set up focuses on criminal law, but most people are more concerned with family, employment and community issues, which are very different in terms of how the problems get resolved. 

4. Can we decrease bias in the legal system? What distorts jurors’ ability to make good judgments? Are there ways of instructing jurors to decrease their bias against people who they see as unlike them?

5. Courtroom design: natural light, calm colours, the judge not elevated – this can lead to less escalation of conflict. (But not usually a budget priority.)

6. What legal protections exist for freedom of thought or mental privacy? Currently, the technology can’t realistically “read” thoughts, and a suspect can’t be forced into a position of involuntarily confessing, but if these things exist in future, we need corresponding legal protections. 

7. Will there be better ways in future to evaluate things like fitness to testify or fitness to be a custodial parent? 

8. It’s probably only a matter of time before portable, real-time language decoders are widespread (able to read the activation of your language centres and pick up your unspoken thoughts). The convenience factor of these will mean that people will trade privacy for that convenience. Prototype is at least 10 years away (and it may turn out not to be possible at all). Could also read nonverbal feelings that we don’t necessarily have conscious access to. Will all of this become evidence in court?

9. There is work going on about inserting memories into the brain as well as extracting things. It would be invasive, and harder to achieve than reading them, and potentially physically dangerous. However, there are other (non-mechanical) ways to implant false memories. 

10. It’s potentially possible to determine whether someone is actually feeling the pain they claim; it’s also potentially possible to assess their susceptibility to addiction. 

11. Neurological studies have been done on how judges make their decisions. There are arguments for using machine judges instead for some applications (such as dispute resolution), to decrease bias. 

12. Prediction and profiling may be possible using neurological methods. This includes determining how likely a convicted criminal is to reoffend, or determining who is a psychopath. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaTbISZPlMQ&feature=share

Smart streetlights, space sharing, vertical urban farms: these are only three of the innovations that will transform city life in the next few years. 

http://www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/10/top-10-urban-innovations-of-2015/

Platforms like AirBnB or Uber sit somewhere between a traditional firm and a marketplace. They’re a new model of economic activity, and we’ll see a lot more of them in the future. There’s a lot of potential to equalize and democratize entrepreneurship and spread value more widely. 

There’s also a blurring between the platform and regulation – things that used to be government-regulated (like taxis and hotels) now have standards set by the platform. This brings both risks and opportunities, but it boils down to the market setting its own standards. This is partly because the platforms operate globally, under many different legal jurisdictions. The platform (which is under a kind of scrutiny that, in a pre-Internet age, companies were not under – this isn’t a point made in the video) must make choices that maintain its reputation among users and providers, or risk losing business. 

Reputation for individuals is also a key element of these platforms, but reputation is platform-specific (so Cory Doctorow’s “whuffie” looks unlikely). 

This change also involves a move from “ownership” to “membership”, and to “crowd-based capitalism”. Collaboration between the platforms, between the members, and between the providers and users is the key to creating value.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pFRIlgEdl0&feature=share

Interesting. 

“Business is now waking up to the reality that if we carry on using the natural resources of the world unsustainably, they’ll quite simply run out. With a burgeoning population, more people are living in poverty than ever before, inequalities are increasing in many parts of the world and unemployment rates are at frightening levels.

“Civil Society alone cannot solve the tasks at hand and many governments are unwilling or unable to act. While there are myriad reasons we’ve arrived at this juncture, much of the blame rests with the principles and practices of ‘business as usual’.

“These are not the outcomes we envisioned as we grew our companies; this is not the dream that inspired us. And the overwhelming conclusion we’ve reached is that businesses have been a major contributor to the problems and we, as business leaders, have the responsibility of creating sustainable solutions.

“If we leverage the many positives of business – the spirit of enterprise, innovation and entrepreneurship that has helped realise improvements in quality of life and enabled technological and scientific progress – we can create an unprecedented era of sustainable, inclusive prosperity for all.”

http://bteam.org/about/

DARPA are funding a project to improve brain-computer interfaces to a useful level.

Originally shared by Winchell Chung

http://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2015-01-19

The Fourth Industrial Revolution, discussed by: 

– Zachary Bookman, Chief Executive Officer, OpenGov, USA

– Paul Kagame, President of the Republic of Rwanda

– Anand Mahindra, Chairman and Managing Director, Mahindra & Mahindra, India

– Satya Nadella, Chief Executive Officer, Microsoft Corporation, USA

– Sheryl Sandberg, Chief Operating Officer and Member of the Board,

Facebook, USA

Moderated by:

Andrew R. Sorkin, Columnist, New York Times, USA

Quick background: the first industrial revolution is the one we all know (steam-powered machinery and manufacturing, from the 1780s). The second came with mass production techniques and electrification, starting around 1870. The third, around 1970, involved electronics, IT and automation, and the fourth involves greater integration and merging of the digital, physical, and human worlds (so-called cyberphysical systems). 

I’ve watched a few of these Davos 2016 videos now, and I’m seeing common themes:

– overall optimism that the opportunities of new technology outweigh the threats;

– a warning that there are still significant threats (not least from the pace of change), and we need to think about them and deal with them intelligently; 

– an awareness that we, as societies, have to choose whether everyone will get access to the benefits, rather than confining them to the already-well-off (on which Anand Mahindra’s comment is, “To raise the quality of life is the biggest business opportunity going”);

– the potential for a great contribution from those who currently don’t have that access (including women);

– the important role of government policy in creating an environment for innovation and then reflecting society’s consensus in its direction of the outcomes;

– how government will become more connected to its citizens and more transparent;  

– how, at the same time as old jobs disappear, new ones are created by technological advances (non-tech jobs as well);

– how vital it is to retain a human connection and human values while using (morally neutral) technology, and how being connected to one another with empathy can improve the overall tone and condition of society at large. 

Something new: the idea that smart villages can be the future, rather than more and more migration to cities. This is something I’ve been thinking about for a while, and it’s going to make its way into some future fiction, in all likelihood.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtXfzd53wRQ&feature=share

A very distinguished panel (three professors, the chairman of a space resources company, and the president of Estonia) discuss the big coming changes in technology and what that will mean for society in the next decade and a half. 

Among the predictions: 

– genome editing for disease prevention and human enhancement (big ethical issues: Do we only modify the genes of people who are already born, or also embryos? Do we just select from existing genes, or make deliberate changes? Do parents make these choices, or the government? Do we change how we treat people based on what we know about their genome?)

– cheap and reliable space travel for the extraction of resources

– greater insight into our own selves: the functioning of our individual bodies, our bacterial symbiotes, and the activity of our brains

– digital transformation in business and beyond

– “cognitive assistants” (basically AI PAs)

AI is divided into “narrow” and “general”. General AI (that thinks at an equal or greater level than a human) is decades away – and an authentic threat to human life – but “narrow” AI has a lot of promise to improve human life in the shorter term. (However, there are still the concerns about hacking.)

All of these advances can be seen as software/data problems in some sense, and therefore all of them raise issues about privacy, security and data ownership. If we have more reliance on data, then hackers changing it will have a high impact, such as in health or autonomous vehicles – but if governments try to put the brakes on technological advancement, they risk falling behind, or not solving immediate, solvable issues because of fears of more extreme uses or edge cases. Law in general tends to lag behind technology, and this is a problem – technologists don’t understand the social and legal implications, and lawmakers don’t understand technology. There’s a case for engaging more widely within society to solve these problems. We will need to be more explicit about implicit decisions we have been making.

There’s no built-in guarantee that these advances will benefit people in general rather than the elite. That’s something that needs to come via policy rather than out of the technology itself.

On the upside, we have the opportunity to increase transparency, which fights corruption and improves quality of life for society in general. 

There are definite risks (and bad things will inevitably happen), but there are also great opportunities, and the likelihood is that, if done thoughtfully, changes to technology (matched with good policy) will improve our lives. The key thing is: what do we want as a society? And can we adapt successfully to the changes that are coming, as individuals and nations?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i19zr_nisKk&feature=share

Jobs that are likely to go away in the next 10-20 years: the kind of routine industrial and administrative jobs that our current education system has traditionally been geared towards. 

Skills that are likely to still be in demand: caring for others, communicating with others, creativity – all of which our current education system is bad at teaching, but all of which can be taught as skills. 

In the longer term, more and more jobs will disappear, and we may end up in a scenario where income and work have to be decoupled. In the short term, the need is to structure the economy so that people are supported in transitioning from one type of employment to another (rather than try to “protect the past from the future” and prevent industries from changing – which is impractical). This may involve increasing the flexibility of work. Some people prefer greater flexibility to higher income.

There are societal choices to be made, though, to shift from the automation process benefiting a small sector of society rather than the whole of society (as is largely the case at the moment). Having some degree of security (social safety net) increases the likelihood that people will take the risk to be entrepreneurial. Current incentives reward businesses for not employing people (with less complicated and lower taxes); this needs to change.

There are also plenty of opportunities for automation and technology to make existing work easier and more valuable. 

There are known negative effects of loss of employment in a society or community, but some of the speakers here argue that those partly stem from the fact that employment is considered the norm; that if there was a shift of perspective, they might be mitigated. Sharing out the available work more evenly, so that people get more leisure but there is still high employment, is another approach. Obviously, this only works well if everyone is still getting a livable income. 

Bottom line: technology will continue to disrupt the world of work, but it’s our choice what that disruption looks like. We can (collectively) choose that the benefits are distributed throughout society, if we want to.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnNs2MYVQoE&feature=share