Elizabeth Bear - Future Visions - Original Science Fiction Inspired by Microsoft

I took advantage of Sophia’s presence by handing her my glitter-dusted jacket, slightly pungent from sweat. (Hey, those lights are hot.)

“Hang it over there, please?” I indicated the cupboard that served as my wardrobe closet. Sophia held the garment gingerly by the collar, clearly pondering whether to let it fall, then shrugged and tiptoed for a hanger. Diminutive, and thanks to her last name some wiseacres called her “the hobbit.” But no one in her presence. Who wanted to live.

My shirt went into a laundry hamper, to be dealt with by the Tuscany Hotel staff. Hey, this may not be the Strip, but my name drew enough customers to merit some amenities. While toweling off, I asked Dr. Van Took, “How’d you like the show?”

“Didn’t pay much attention,” she admitted. Or was that a brag? Sophia had a pretty good poker face. During the performance I glimpsed her at the comp table, sipping occasionally from a grapefruit juice while tapping the rim of her specs—the latest model from Anson Aiware. Even from the stage I could tell that images flickered along the inner surfaces. She must have been grunting, clicking, scrolling, and deciding the fate of nations the whole time I was levitating Teresa, or catching a bullet with my teeth.

Or doing my mentalist routine, guessing which cards had been chosen by five randomly selected guests, all by reading giveaway tells : The dilating iris. A cheek tremor. A nervous grin. Or the clenched, flat expression of a college kid absolutely determined not to show a thing—and thus revealing everything.

Ah, well. Van Took had uses for a stage magician, but entertainment never entered into it.

“So what’s the scam?” I asked. “Another perpetual motion machine? Cold fusion? A vacuum energy propulsion system?”

Those were the big three—perennial favorites—though others had been climbing lately: SETI “signals” and water desalinization miracles and microbiota guaranteed to cure your bowels of all that ails ’em. Along with a dozen other skilled illusionists, I served on a Skeptics Society alert squad to help investigate such claims, separating auspicious assertions from deceptive ones. Because it turns out that scientists and engineers aren’t very good at penetrating hoaxes.

We stage magicians know the tricks, though. Well, most of them. Ways to deliver power without wires, to make things fizz or bubble or rise without any visible means of support. They say it takes a thief to catch one. Anyway, it helps pay the bills, off-season. And Mom and Dad seemed a bit more proud of me when I mentioned this sideline. As if I was a kind of private eye. Or something else respectable.

“None of that, this time.” Sophia shook her head.

I admit feeling some disappointment. Those tech-hoax gigs are cool, hanging around top science types and showing them whatever trick was afoot—or mistake, since some of the cold fusion guys are actually sincere, just way too eager and prone to fooling themselves. Then there are those rare occasions when the strange new thing actually turns out to be…but I’m drifting off-topic.

“What? No warp drive?” I asked. “Or teleport—”

Holding up a hand, Sophia scotched my hopes.

“No, this job is all about prediction. ”

I blinked, my facial expression as readable as any mark’s.

“Again?”

Sophia shrugged. “They do keep trying.”

Perhaps the simplest example of reality mining is the analysis of automobile traffic congestion by using the global positioning system (GPS) data collected from the mobile telephones carried by the automobile drivers. These data provide minute-by-minute updates on traffic flow, allowing for more accurate predictions of driving time. Congestion patterns can be predicted days in advance, and traffic jams detected hours before they become serious…

—Alex Pentland, Reality Mining of Mobile Communications: Toward a New Deal on Data (2008)

It’s said to be embedded in our prefrontal lobes, twin nubs above the eyes that let us think about the future. Somehow, a bunch of clever apes fell into the habit of fantasizing about what might happen next…

…if I enter that thicket…

…if we refuse the other tribe’s ultimatum…

…if I propose this idea at today’s meeting…

…or wear this outfit…

…or declare this new rule…

…or try to run that yellow light…

Einstein called it the gedankenexperiment , or thought experiment. We’re good at telling ourselves stories about what lies ahead. And certainly the habit does help, a bit, exposing obvious errors to avoid…

…though only up to a point. Anticipation all too easily becomes hallucination, envisioning, and then expecting what we want to happen. That’s fine in a novel, film, or stage show. But it’s a damn poor way for leaders to make policy.

Hey, I just explained the saga of endlessly repeated blunders called “history.” Nonetheless, we do keep trying. Tea leaves and priestly pronouncements gave way to primly mechanistic war games—which convinced Czar Nicholas and Kaiser Wilhelm to charge ahead, destroying both empires.

War games transformed into scenario-based planning. (So now you had a decision tree of diverse ways to be wrong!) Then clever mathematical models fought each other for relevance—a darwinnowing that did help to expose this or that danger, but almost never pointed to solutions.

Are your models flawed? Add more variables! Or more data… big data sets . Humongous ones. Gather and collate everything!

And feed it to AI…but what kind of AI? There are so many, all disappointingly far from omniscient, all just as confused as the rest of us when they try their hand at prophecy. Especially the “quants” who would get rich exploiting market models—preying on those who are just one step behind—then wreck their own trading house by pressing the wagers too far. Just like a Vegas gambler, so sure that his winning streak is something ordained to last forever.

Always lurking like a chiding ghost is the shade of Hari Seldon, Isaac Asimov’s fictional “psychohistorian,” who made prediction look so easy on the pages of a 1940s wish-fantasy novel. The archetype seer whose models of civilization—the rise or fall of whole empires—might finally reduce all irksome human chaos and variability to cool numbers and equations. How many economists, sociologists, politicians, and/or psychopaths started out by lifting their gaze from a Foundation book, staring ahead, and murmuring: “Hey, I could do that!” Paul Krugman. Osama bin Laden. Milton Friedman, Shoko Asahara, Carl Sagan, Newt Gingrich…. The sheer range of nerdy Asimovians, from brilliant to crazy but all drawn to the same dream, would be amazing if it weren’t frightening.

But, heck, why not blame Karl Marx, whose followers felt so sure they sussed the driving forces of humanity? Or believers in the greatest (if heretical) acolyte of Marx—Ayn Rand—whose seductive incantations followed all the master’s patterns to reach opposite conclusions.

And so, “laws of sociology” grew less fashionable. Simulations improved only glacially, while choking on tsunamis of Big Data. At which point the powers of the world—desperate for guidance—rediscovered Adam Smith.

Maximize the number of participants! If individual models and modelers can fool themselves, then make them compete with one another in a marketplace of ideas. Utilize the same competitive forces that propel evolution—the most creative force in the universe! The same driver as markets. As science.