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Episode Three of Vex Mosaic's podcast The Bigger Picture: Future Vision was recorded live at Balticon 52. Find the link at the bottom of the post.
Host Charlie Brown leads a discussion with multiple panelists as we look into the future to help us find optimism in an overly negative world. Charlie was joined by
Mike Luoma,
Val Griswold-Ford,
Doc Coleman,
Aaron Emmel and Vex Mosaic editor-in-chief
Dave Robison.
**Note: Val makes reference to Picarto.
Here's the link.**
From the introduction:
Being at Balticon is great, isn’t it?
As I prepared my ideas for this podcast, I wandered to the lobby of the hotel to find my friends discussing the reality of artificial intelligence and all the how-tos and how-comes that would surround such a creature becoming self-aware could replicate. Or not, given the constraints of our present technology.
Anyway, ideas like chaos theory, music production, ideal minions for intelligences (the natural evolution, or so said Paul Cooley) were floated and it fit perfectly with what I want to discuss this evening.
As I cross this weekend into my 50
th year, I find it’s easy to fall into projecting a doomed future. I have lived in a period of time where children had philosophical discussions about the looming nuclear apocalypse and how they would react if they knew the bomb was coming.
And I’m afraid those conversations, finally having become irrelevant, have returned to the forefront.
The Berlin Wall has been rebuilt, metaphorically of course, between competing ideologies. The Internet, once hailed as the paragon of open society, has devolved into discrete backwaters where ideas don’t spread but multiply unto themselves. And now we must discuss exactly what truth is and how others who disagree with us question any objective veracity.
But we are not here to wallow, my friends. No, tonight we shall steer the ship towards the horizon and set full sail. Tonight we shall look toward the future and use those thoughts to drive our present.
As a college composition teacher, I have assigned Isaac Asimov’s “A Visit to The World’s Fair of 2014.” Writing in 1964, the great author posited 50 years into the future (funny how that 50 years keeps coming up) to say what we might see technology-wise.
Now, for those of you born in the Clinton-Bush years might first ask, “What’s a world fair?” That is the first thing our man got wrong.
While Asimov gets many things wrong (fusion power being prevalent, flying cars lifting off the ground through compressed air), what he does get right is fairly startling. He predicts our present world population almost to the number. While his idea of a Boston to Washington supercity of 40 million people is absurd given the logistics of providing resources, the gaps between the major populations are shrinking.
But where Asimov and many of his contemporaries always fail is the notion of space. He predicts moon colonies (of course) but does nail that unmanned missions to Mars will have happened.
But this is where we have a hard time seeing our own future. It will not take a country to build upon the Moon, it will take the entire world, cooperation amongst everybody everywhere, to make this happen. But when we can’t believe the news we read on Facebook without multiple source checks, how will we all work together to get there? Or do we even need to?
This is where we must look for the brightness of the future and now I will turn to our panelists to open the discussion and light our way along the voyage.
