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Designers - Are You Influenced By What You Read? 357

Posted by Cliff from the source-of-your-muse dept.
Silent_E asks: "A student of mine is writing a paper on how Stephenson's _The Diamond Age_ offers a good educational model for distance learning. She has been asked by publishers to justify looking at fiction as a way of talking about 'the real world.' That dialogue made me wonder whether Slashdot folks currently or recently coding or doing hardware design are, or have been, directly inspired by what they've read in Science Fiction?"
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Designers - Are You Influenced By What You Read? More

Designers - Are You Influenced By What You Read?

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  • Distance Learning (Score:4, Insightful)

    by martyn s ( 444964 ) on Monday March 24, 2003 @09:52PM (#5588001)
    I took a course that was mostly online and I found that participation and in depth discussion can be even better on IRC through text than in the classroom. That may be just my experience since I can express myself better in writing, but I think it's a great tool for education.
    • because you can follow several independent threads at once. More than one person can "have the floor" at once, and no one feels jipped because they weren't able to voice their opinion or were interrupted by someone else's opinion.

      The internet is great at stripping the physical characteristics of our world and leaving thought. Well, thought and conspiracy theories aboout evil cell phones, overbearing corporations, bribes of congress, and the like.
      • The internet is great at stripping the physical characteristics of our world and leaving thought.

        It's also very good at removing nuances in speech or facial expressions that prevent listeners from taking offense, or not understanding the joke. It may leave thought, but it may not be the thought you thought you left.

        • stupid? (Score:4, Funny)

          by SHEENmaster ( 581283 ) <travis@BOYSENutk.edu minus berry> on Monday March 24, 2003 @10:12PM (#5588125) Homepage Journal
          Did you just call my comment stupid!?

          As the greatgrandparent of this post mentioned, many of us are better at expressing emotion and nuance through the written word than through facial expressions.

          The lack of emotion involved keeps people from taking offense, and IMHO leads to less confusion. Flamewars aren't really arguments, but rather jokes.

          • Re:stupid? (Score:4, Funny)

            by plover ( 150551 ) on Monday March 24, 2003 @10:54PM (#5588398) Homepage Journal
            Flamewars aren't really arguments, but rather jokes.

            You might want to qualify that with "...but rather jokes to those who appreciate them." I know too many people who are now online (that shouldn't be, but I'm just being l33t) who cannot take a joke, and who cannot even recognize a joke when the cream pie hits them in the face.

            I got marked down on a review two years ago because the vendor I was exchanging email with could not recognize sarcasm (or at least went crying to his boss and my boss with my "immature" letter.) I had mistakenly thought that relationships with this vendor had progressed to the point where they could successfully be included in some good natured kidding. The kidding wasn't malicious, nor was it directed at a person (for performance reasons I was questioning the use of their setting the no-alignment flag on our compiled project) but this guy got all bent out of shape.

            I got my revenge, however. Last year, this same humorless fool just totally lost his cool in a conference call involving his team and my boss. My boss dropped her jaw, and came over to me to both laugh at this schmuck and apologize for marking me down. The following review was much better...

        • Geeks comunicate better through striaght forward written words. If we had social skills we wouldn't be geeks.
        • Also, it can help to prevent being distracted from someone's physical presence, whether repugnant and smelly or attractive and perfumed, to focus on ideas.

          Of course, you are still subject to being distracted by the beauty of their expression or repelled by their ignoble profanity. I guess I don't have a problem with that.

        • :P (Score:3, Funny)

          by autopr0n ( 534291 )
          It's also very good at removing nuances in speech or facial expressions that prevent listeners from taking offense, or not understanding the joke. It may leave thought, but it may not be the thought you thought you left.

          Well, thats what emoticons are for :)
      • OTOH, a proper duscussion doesn't haven't those problems.
    • I neither write nor type that fast, and it's difficult to write, listen, and digest at once. With chat you would just read and save the thread if useful.

      I've never taken a class over the internet, but it would be nice to have a record of a class and digest the information during class.
  • From 1984 [slashdot.org].

  • why just sci-fi? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by plural ( 16329 )
    Not to assume or suggest that all fiction should have a point or a message/moral to it, but all fiction has the power to inspire us or make us question reality/society/etc.

    if you take something away from a work of fiction (or film, or recording, or game) then you will be all the better for it.

    • Re:why just sci-fi? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by markogogo ( 646143 )
      Not to assume or suggest that all fiction should have a point or a message/moral to it, but all fiction has the power to inspire us or make us question reality/society/etc.

      For sure. I think that's one of the reasons that authors (and other creators of fiction) do what they do - to put something out that rattles the brain.

      if you take something away from a work of fiction (or film, or recording, or game) then you will be all the better for it.

      To add to that, why else would you delve into a work of fiction

    • Because SF and mainstream have different purposes (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Ungrounded Lightning ( 62228 ) on Monday March 24, 2003 @11:31PM (#5588576) Journal
      Not to assume or suggest that all fiction should have a point or a message/moral to it, but all fiction has the power to inspire us or make us question reality/society/etc.

      if you take something away from a work of fiction (or film, or recording, or game) then you will be all the better for it.

      Not necessarily. It depends a lot on what you take away from it.

      If you take, for instance, the idea that Jews are subhuman and need to be exterminated, or blacks ditto and properly should be slaves, are you "the better for it"? The NAZIs would have thought so for the first case, the KKK for the second, wouldn't they?

      Mainstream fiction is an art form directed at the masses by their masters (i.e. the art school establishment). The central message is that, no matter how bad things are, if you try to improve them (especially if you break the rules doing so), you will make them worse. So be a good little domestic animals. Obey your masters, don't break down the fence, and go quitely to the shearing and the slaughter.

      (Classic) SF, on the other hand, is (mostly) by and for the people who design the tech and make it run. SF offers a rich toolset for speculating about both current situations and potential future changes - and for disconnecting them from the immediate problem so the reader can think about the core issues without biases from the current political situation or technical paradigm. The central message is that, by the application of intelligence and effort, you can make things better both for yourself and humanity at large. (It also includes the cautionary tale: If you break it THIS way you CAN'T fix it afterward, so apply your intelligence and effort up front, while it can still do some good.) It teaches the mindset that builds technologies and civilizations.

      And of course that's why both SF in particular, and fiction in general, are held in contempt by the arts school types - which include historians, sociaologists, political scientists, and the like. Of COURSE you "can't" have a "valid" thought about the future based on fiction - THEIR fiction - because it's defeatist propaganda rather than valid speculation. (And SF doesn't obey their rules - when it's true to its own, so it is suppressed as "escapist trash" which must not be validated as a "serious" art form and thus must not be viewed by anyone "sophisticated".)

      Notice that, even in the "golden age", there were a few authors and stories that obeyed the mainstream fiction rather than the SF rules. (_The Machine Stops_ springs to mind, as does virtually everything by Bradbury.) And (surprise!) only these stories and others like them are considered "valid" by arts types. (Of course they were pushed on the inmates of classrooms as examples of what SF is about, making the experience massively unpleasant and giving most of them an aversion to the whole art form.)

      (I won't attempt to do modern SF justice, beyond mentioning that it includes both classic SF ruleset stories and stories from a number of other artforms, all lumped under one category. But thank GHOD the "new wave" has broken on the shore and sunk back into the depths. B-) )

      But SF, in the classic sense, is EXACTLY the art form where the authors bring up real-world issues and speculate about possible outcomes, alternatives and their effects, and how to improve the human condition. They engage their readers in the sort of thinking that both inspries them and trains them to problem-solve and strive to bring about constructive change.

      So of COURSE at least THIS kind of fiction is a vaild way to "talk about the real world". That's what it's FOR!
      • I'd consider William Gibson the most important living SF writer. I would not consider his intent to have anything to do with inspiring intelligence, the direction of technology, civilization, etc.

        When SF is good (and it is often bad: the geek equivalent of a romance novel), it illustrates the present. Stranger in a Strange Land, for example, gives totally unique insight into human nature. That is its (way over-generalized) goal. Every Gibson novel is a perfect snap shot of the time it was written.

        Also, there is no need whatsoever to malign "arts school types." First of all, you are focusing on a contrast that isn't there. Tell me what genres Pattern Recognition and Vineland belong to. Second, over the course of my college career, four different professors either referred to or recommended Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. Two were in comp sci, one was in Middle Eastern studies, and one was in photography. If you think non-geeks naturally have some sort of antipathy towards SF, you're wrong.

        Grandparent post didn't say that we should look away from SF, just that we should look everywhere. He's right. Note, when he says "all fiction" he does not say "mainstream fiction". Is The Hobbit SF? Does it inspire /. readers? I'd even call it "mainstream".
      • Ahem...I think it's worth pointing out that what you say is true for only some SF literature. Truly, a lot of the works from Gibson, Stephenson, Herbert, Clarke, etc. have been the kinds of work that have shaped minds, but the works of these writers exist surrounded by a deluge of SF adventure tripe. To paraphrase the forward of an HP Lovecraft anthology I own, it's as if, at some point, all the pulp western writers started replacing Lazy X Ranch with Planet X...six-shooters with laser pistols. I shy awa

  • Definitely (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 24, 2003 @09:54PM (#5588014)
    My boss has definitely been influenced by the world of literature. Most of the things he promises people are straight from science fiction although the schedules are more of a pure fantasy.

    • Re:Definitely (Score:2, Interesting)

      by davebarz ( 546161 )

      Actually, I wrote a paper on this very topic in the field of robotics last year. Basically, the evidence I found is that although science fiction occasionally inspires people to enter a certain field, it rarely influences actual design, at least directly through the designer. But, in so far as sci-fi influences public's expectations, which drive the market, it does have an effect on the macro-direction of research.

  • TOP SEKRET PROJECT (Score:3, Funny)

    by windlord ( 253984 ) on Monday March 24, 2003 @09:55PM (#5588025)
    Hush.... I am currently working on a big project called... The METAVERSE.

  • Sure, I'm influenced by science fiction, (Score:5, Funny)

    by Mordant ( 138460 ) on Monday March 24, 2003 @09:59PM (#5588045)
    I make decisions every day based upon what I read on Slashdot!
    • I'm trying to figure out what the "works cited" reference for Slashdot would be:

      Taco, Cmdr., Editor. "Are You Influenced By What You Read?" Slashdot News Site. Discussion, 3/24/2003. Read at +2, Newest First, show URL sites enabled. Funny comments adjusted down 4 points.

      --RJ

  • The real world... (Score:5, Funny)

    by (H)elix1 ( 231155 ) <slashdot.helix@nOSPaM.gmail.com> on Monday March 24, 2003 @10:00PM (#5588054) Homepage Journal
    I know one guy who claimed he was trying to decipher a morris code message from the HDD activity light but claimed it only worked if you used nasty font contrasts and coded in perl or something... We suspected drugs, but you would never see this kind of behavior in fiction. (grin)

  • Oh my yes. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Art Popp ( 29075 ) on Monday March 24, 2003 @10:02PM (#5588066)
    Whether it was building my first mock-phaser with "real flashing LED" or building the "Ultra-Sonic motion Sensing Alarm System" that I used to hear when my sister was getting into my room, there can be little doubt that Alan Dean Foster did more to inspire my love of technology than all the teachers in my highschool. Even today when I'm ohming out the different connections in my microwave to modify it so my CueCat sets the cooking time based on the barcode, it isn't because I can't turn the knob and press the button. It's because it's one step closer to a Replicator.

    In a more practical mode, there is a great deal in software that is done by ignoring, "what will get the job done today" and paying attention to "what will bring me closer to an ultimate solution." This way of thinking is essential to good design and I can't think of a better way to inspire it than to give the designer several examples of near ideal systems, and the consequences that come from them.

    • In a more practical mode, there is a great deal in software that is done by ignoring, "what will get the job done today" and paying attention to "what will bring me closer to an ultimate solution."

      In your pursuit of the "big picture", don't forget: It's still just a picture, and not the only one at that. In fact, "ignoring the problems of today" is a great way to write some truly useless software, or design some truly useless junk.

      give the designer several examples of near ideal systems

      "examples" o
      • let me guess, you don't need to learn programming methodology, you can just 'pick it up' as you go?

        Inspiration comes from inside. Something that drives you, motivates you, and puts a smile on your face.

        here is a list of people who "ignored the problems of the day"

        Philo Farnsworth
        Orville Wright
        Wilber Wright
        Doug Engelbart
        Steve Jobs
        Woz

        These are a tiny few who leap to mind.
        if the original poster inspration leads him to put a cuecat on his microwave, then the fact that you or I find that a waste of time is i

  • better question (Score:2, Insightful)

    by sniggly ( 216454 )
    A better question would be "who can deny having been (directly) influenced..." since literature is part of the makeup of who we are there is no way to deny it.
  • I'd say SF provides the bulk of it's inspiration the same way the real world does. By demonstrating how *not* to do something, and inviting an inventive mind to find a better way.

    I've had a few ideas I might try to implement someday inspired by books I've read, but for the most part I think SciFi is just a conduit to get people thinking about their own neat ideas, and general concepts. Most actual tech in scifi is either far-future pie in the sky stuff and incredibly huge projects or, more often these da

  • Absolutely (Score:5, Insightful)

    by SamMichaels ( 213605 ) on Monday March 24, 2003 @10:13PM (#5588133)
    Imagination is what drives fiction...

    Imagination is also what drives invention...
  • I have a feeling that there is a silent minority of /. who actually reads things other than SF.

    My current list:
    A 100 Years of Japanese Film, Donald Richie
    Play it as it Lays, Joan Didion
    Dead Souls, Nikolai Gogol

    The first is self-explanatory. The second is a minimalist post-modern classic dealing with late 1960's Hollywood's wasted class (and reference for Bret Easton Ellis' Less than Zero). And the last is a tragio-comedy tale of late Czarist Russia.

    Hell, maybe I'm alone. And not to defecate on SF (
    • There was no suggestion that people did read for "a singular focus on technology". The
      question was simply: have Slashdot readers been "directly inspired by what they've read in
      Science Fiction?".

      You could have just posted "No".

      ...and there is no such thing as a "post-modern classic".
      • You could have just posted "No".
        Fine. I thought this was a discussion not a poll... but I'll keep that in mind.
        ...and there is no such thing as a "post-modern classic".
        Touche'. I guess if I would have said that Goethe writing was romantic I would have blown all my credibility. Well I better just delete that submission I had planned to the Atlantic.
        • Touche'. I guess if I would have said that Goethe writing was romantic...

          You may as well have, it would have been equally off-topic.

  • Science fiction can skew one's view of reality (Score:5, Insightful)

    by electromaggot ( 597134 ) on Monday March 24, 2003 @10:18PM (#5588161)
    I do virtual reality research with head-mounted displays. I mean real-world applications stuff. I can't tell you how many times I've heard people say, "You're wasting your time - the real way to do it is with direct neural connections to the optic nerve" (a la Gibson, et al) or even worse, "Just wait until they have holodecks!" These people aren't in touch with reality and IMO, their vocal view do more harm than good. Neural implants into something as enormously complex as the human visual system are way off (and imagine the problems we'll have in getting there - something goes wrong and you go blind)! The reality is that we first have to master the visual "interface" we have right now: the eye and the light entering it.

    ...and as for holodecks... They look great on TV, but the real-world implications of that Star Trek pipe dream are almost laughable. Pure fantasy that's even farther off (if not infinitely far off).

    • Re:Science fiction can skew one's view of reality (Score:5, Insightful)

      by plover ( 150551 ) on Monday March 24, 2003 @10:41PM (#5588317) Homepage Journal
      Oh, sure, holodecks are fantasy and nobody's denying it (other than your marketing department and your customers... :-) But the point I think it makes is "there's the unattainable holy-grail-goal, now see how much closer we get to it today."

      Have a second look at the holo-photo-movie-things in the movie "The Minority Report". The movie is set 50 years into the future instead of 500. I thought those holo-movies were very well portrayed. It looked like they showed three dimensional motion, but it was kind of crappy video, and looked good only when viewed from the appropriate angle. You might consider them to be about a tenth of the way to a holodeck.

      As to your comment regarding direct neural input, I saw a Scientific American article from about ten years ago where they had achieved direct visual cortex stimulation hooked to a camera. The subject was able to "see" lightbulbs carefully arranged in the shape of spots of a die. There is current research being done on interfacing silicon directly to the end of the optic nerve for people whose eyes have been destroyed by trauma. Cybernetic eyes (a la Gibson's Zeiss-Ikons) may not be ready this year, but this decade may bring an implant that could feed in low-res video to the otherwise blind.

      These sci-fi ideas are not necessarily tomorrow's products. They might be next decade's products, or they may never happen. But they certainly influence those of us who know of them, and do give us both short and long term goals. I wouldn't slam my customers for sharing the vision.

      • Good points. Especially about someone who's already blind, who would have nothing to lose (in theory).

        If any of that's driven by software, however, it's going to have to be reliable. [Insert obligitory Windows-crash-BSoD-direct-to-neural-implant comment here.]

        I didn't mean to imply that I'm not inspired by authors like Gibson or Stephenson... just that some people seem to think that kind of stuff is right around the corner (like flying cars). Sci-fi should inspire us, but too many people assume tha
    • Did you see this post [slashdot.org] from yesterday? I was very impressed and surprised at how well neural inputs work today.

    • Holodecks will never be (Score:4, Interesting)

      by John Jorsett ( 171560 ) on Monday March 24, 2003 @11:44PM (#5588634)
      I always thought the concept of a holodeck was a silly waste of space on a starship. I think the reality will be more along the lines of lying on your bunk in your quarters and hooking your nervous system up to a computer. The computer would simulate any reality you wanted, and you could be joined by your fellow crew members just like participating in a big online game of Quake. For that matter, that's probably what being on duty would be as well, for most crewmembers. All the stuff a holodeck has to do to simulate a larger space, water, fake humans, etc. is a whole lot of trouble you don't need if you can just input it directly to your senses.

  • A worldwide computer network (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Beryllium Sphere(tm) ( 193358 ) on Monday March 24, 2003 @10:21PM (#5588176) Journal
    is an idea that goes back to John Brunner and 1970's Vernor Vinge.

    Science fiction and engineering live in a cycle of mutual inspiration. Heinlein read about Goddard. The Apollo engineers grew up reading Heinlein. Then Heinlein got to reap the benefits -- he testified to Congress about looking around at the medical technology that saved his life after the stroke and recognizing all the space program spinoffs in it.

    Miguel Alcubierre's paper about faster-than-light travel in general relativity was inspired by warp drives.

  • Actually, this is a fantastic point. I am quite influenced by what I read and therefore don't read much at all (slashdot and tech related material excluded)

    Too many interesting fiction writers have a lot to say and it easily gets me off my current track spending time thinking about what they propose. I'd rather spend my time thinking about interesting solutions to work and tech problems as opposed to being diverted by fiction that bears no relevence to solving problems in my daily life.

    So in short, yes.

    • Borges and the Chinese Room (Score:5, Interesting)

      by obtuse ( 79208 ) on Monday March 24, 2003 @11:43PM (#5588632) Journal
      There is a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, The Libary of Babel, and it is a great illustration of an information theoretical point.

      You're familiar with the idea that an infinite number of monkeys & typewriters would eventually compose the works of Shakespeare?

      The Library of Babel contains every possible book of a certain length. The story is written from the point of view of a librarian in this library. This librarian has never seen a book of any meaning or interest, and has never met anyone who has. There are rumors, because the librarians have deduced that the library appears to have all possible books.

      Finding the meaningful works in the huge search space will be much harder than composing them again intentionally, in fact humanly impossible unless you're starting from a very near point in the first place.

      Extra credit question: See why an index or card catalog of the books would be of no real help?

      Now, are you familiar with Searle's Chinese room experiment in AI? This is a room where you submit statements in Chinese and receive answers through a window. Supposedly the person inside doesn't understand Chinese at all, but only uses some set of rules to process the papers coming through the window. This set of rules allows him to compose an answer, possibly even passing a Turing test.

      Does the system understand Chinese? Critics of AI would say not.

      To me Borges' story illustrates a flaw with the Chinese room experiment itself. A sufficiently complex system can't be emulated without some kind of understanding.

      It was a glorious feeling finding this for myself in Borges. I look at AI differently because of this story. I'm not coding AI, so maybe you aren't really interested in my opinion.

      Extra credit answer: Any catalog or index that was sufficiently specific to be helpful would have to contain the needed information, and make reference to the library itself unneccessary. There is no Shakespeare finding algorithm that is perfectly accurate and doesn't already contain Shakespeare. See also pigeonhole problem.
      • You're familiar with the idea that an infinite number of monkeys & typewriters would eventually compose the works of Shakespeare?

        Yeah, some butt puppet decided it was a valid theory and has left my team with implementing a Pandora's box of software in the real world.

        Beware, monkeys... I know where your office is....

        <comical snarly face here>

      • Your "illustration" stating that a sufficiently complex system can't be emulated without some kind of understanding simply begs the question. It sits upon the foundation of it's own presumption.
        Arguing the Chinese room is like arguing the truth value of the statement "I am lying". It contains a self referential loop (the definition of semantics) that evades logical analysis.

        The extra credit problem is flawed: using data compression it is possible to build an algorithm that does not "already contain shake
        • This library also contains every possible variation of Shakespeare and the card catalog only identifies individual volumes. It does not know which is the "correct" Shakespeare, as it treats all volumes as works of equal *merit,* even those composed entirely at random.

          A compression algorithm does not work because each volume has to be *read* to evaluate the merit of its content even though each one may well be clearly labeled and cataloged.

          You see an apparent flaw because a *particular* volume that you kno
      • That infinte monkeys thing you mentioned has had me thinking over the past several years.

        To cut a long explanation short, what I've come up with is the following

        "Even though the universe is infinite, just because anything can happen does not mean that it will." - Alex Zavatone.

        Something to think about.
      • This librarian has never seen a book of any meaning or interest

        You know, that's exactly how I feel when I throw a query at google... 20 million results, but 19.9 million of those are random hits on content, but not context. Like your bonus question, the index of a nearly infinite set of data is itself nearly infinite, which makes the searching in the index as tedious as searching the data directly.

        In a way, our modern Internet is the "Tower of Babel" ... have you ever tried to look up Historical Quotes
      • I like your points, but don't think this argument invalidates the Chinese Room example.

        Yes, an initial level of understanding is necessary to create the Chinese room. Searle argues that the *Chinese room* does not necessarily have this understanding (while the creator does).

        That is, the Chinese room can act intelligently, but does not necessarily have intelligence. Likewise, an adder in hardware does not understand addition, although it adds. An odometer does not understand counting, although it counts.

        I

  • evolutionary programming (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Undaar ( 210056 ) on Monday March 24, 2003 @10:30PM (#5588239) Homepage
    When I was in second year of university (and getting into programming in C), I read Robert J. Sawyer's "The Terminal Experiment". There's a section of the novel where he discusses a simple evolutionary algorithm that allows the computer to find a string starting with a random sequence of characters. I remember putting the book down and thinking, "I could write that!" So I did. It was really fun, and it opened me up to a new way of coding and thinking about algorithms.

    If I book inspires you to write code you would have never written otherwise, go with it!

  • I think it's common to think of sci-fi as a sort of garbage fiction, like romances, or cheezy mysteries. Sometimes it's perfectly valid to do so.

    On the other hand, here are a whole group of intelligent and imaginative people streching their minds to try and encompass a possible future growing from modern conditions. Trying to imagine future tech, and things people could need in the future.

    The Diamond Age is possibly the best book ever written regarding the possible outcomes of a successful nanotechnolo

  • Or at least, to me it is. Reallife tech always follows fiction. Reason being that something must be thought of before it can be implemented.
    And where do we get our ideas from? Fiction. It must be dreamt before it can be built.

    Look at this for an eerily on-the-mark description of the desktop computer: an article called "As we may think", by Vannever Bush in a 1945 piece in the ATLANTIC MONTHLY. Look to Jules Verne, Gibson.
    And you know what? Those aren't predictions. They're thoughts, which others have read,

  • The danger in using Sci-Fi as a guide (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rufusdufus ( 450462 ) on Monday March 24, 2003 @10:38PM (#5588293)
    I was once paid to basically build "sci-fi" technology in order to demonstrate new research technologies.

    My experience has been that sci-fi inspired technology rarely 'works' as dramatized on TV. What I mean by 'works' is that even with a perfect system [as simulated by Wizard of Oz experiements], humans will not be impressed by, nor even tolerate, those technolgies.

    Here is an example of sci-fi meets reality.

    One system we built was similar to the house in "Minority Report". You could talk to the lights and query the room about various information, that sort of thing. In the end, the idea was hopelessly misguided.

    The reasons this particular demo sucks is because of cognitive load, cognitive dissonance, and limited human bandwidth. Cognitive load means your brain has to think more to get a task done; cognitive dissonance means your brain is uncomfortable doing the task, and bandwidth means mainly that human speech is slow.

    For example, a "lights on" command requires concious thought in order to get lights, and some linguistic processing. The alternative light switch technology is less so, even automatic [you might notice this when the power goes out you still hit switches]. Also, humans are pre-programmed to talk to humans, talking to the wall is an unpleasant experience for most people. Finally, speech is really quite slow. Flicking a light switch is much faster than saying the words.

    The point is that the dramatization of this technology is done in the imagination with all factors tuned optimally for dramatic effect; but the reality falls short of the fantasy. Real world factors not taken into account by the imagination destroys the appeal of the technology.

    So what is a better model for driving innovation than the fantasy scenarios of fiction? Quite simply, it is the time tested process of real-world problem solving. Find a problem, look for a solution [as contrasted to find a technology look for a use]!

    • One system we built was similar to the house in "Minority Report". You could talk to the lights and query the room about various information, that sort of thing. In the end, the idea was hopelessly misguided.

      Actually, the idea as you give it is not misguided so much as misapplied, and that is not the doing of any Sci-Fi reading/watching.

      For example, a "lights on" command requires concious thought in order to get lights, and some linguistic processing. The alternative light switch technology is l

    • Re:The danger in using Sci-Fi as a guide (Score:5, Insightful)

      by roystgnr ( 4015 ) <roy&stogners,org> on Tuesday March 25, 2003 @03:09AM (#5589432) Homepage
      For example, a "lights on" command requires conscious thought in order to get lights, and some linguistic processing. The alternative light switch technology is less so, even automatic [you might notice this when the power goes out you still hit switches].

      That's right: the behavior we have been using to turn lights on since childhood comes more naturally to us than a behavior we have never used to turn lights on. I'll bet people would get used to saying "lights on" automatically after a few weeks of doing it, though. You make it sound like "people associate switches with lights" is a biological rule.

      Flicking a light switch is much faster than saying the words.

      Is it? What if you're lying in bed reading and want to turn the lights off before you go to sleep? This is a situation I've been in literally thousands of times, and getting up to go across the room when you're half asleep is definitely slower than speaking would be. It's not like there aren't low-tech solutions to problems like that, too (My bed sits underneath a light switch right now), but just because you don't see a use for a new technology doesn't mean there isn't one. Ten years ago I couldn't participate in a discussion like this with people across the country. I would never have conceived of that fact as being a "problem", but it's still nice to have a "solution" to it anyway.
  • Oh wait. Reading this article made me post. Never mind.
  • or any Stephen King for that matter. I really loved the scene in the movie were the techies were using computer imaging to digitally change faces on the combatants and remove 'undesirable' images of blood and gore from the combat... Techniques that are now in common use throughout Hollywood despite being science fiction in the movie.

  • I remember hearing that there are lots of engineers who were initially inspired by the work of Mr. Mongomery Scott [lapam.mo.it].
    • It would be hard to deny the source of inspiration for when I did research in antimatter storage. I didn't quite get warp drive, but at least I was able to store a little bit in a bucket sized container. FYI: The best antimatter storage technology today (small scale, not including particle accelerators...) contains enough antimatter to heat a drop of water by 1/20 degree centigrade, a little short of a city destroying explosion.

  • Isaac Asimov, the prolific and much-loved sci-fi author, coined the term "robotics" and wrote numerous books and short stories about robots (including "Bicentennial Man" and "I, Robot".) Most readers can recire his "Three Laws of Robotics" by heart. He is often credited by real-world scientists and roboticists for inspiring them to enter this field.

    However, it's interesting to note that from a technical perspective, Asimov's predictions turned out to be mostly wrong, and his ideas have no practical value

    • As with most science fiction authors, his major contribution was to get people excited about the potential of technology, rather than provide useful instructions on how to get there.

      I disagree. Asimov was an extremely prolific science writer, and taught millions through his non-fiction books.
    • FYI: Not Asimov; Karel Capek coined "Robot".

      Rossum's Universal Robots was a 3 act play, published in 1920, and first performed in 1921.

      Czechoslovakian playwrite Capek invented the word "robot", which he derived from the Czech word for forced labor.

      -- Terry
  • There are many works that talked about facial recognition, iris scanning, other bio-metric identification systes, global communications networks, electroninc spying, and other techs long before they became reality. all of these things rely on hardware and software.

    Inovation is driven by imagination. Some of the best "imaginers" are fiction writers. If nothing else works of fiction can point to a result while letting some engineer solve the practical problems to "get there from here."

    some of these tech
  • I believe science fiction is the jump board for new ideas. I consider myself an intergrater, in that I assimiliate ideas and try to make something new. I get a ton of ideas from watching "corny" scifi shows and movies. I think this has been true for hundreads of years too. Some people say that can never be done, and then there are the few that make it so!

  • how about philosophy? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by kpharmer ( 452893 ) on Monday March 24, 2003 @11:16PM (#5588510)
    While recently designing cataloging software I gained far more insights from philosophers than computer scientists.

    I started with Aristotle's hierarchies and then moved to Wittgenstein's concepts of "things are what they are used for". The Wittgenstein concepts inspired overlapping categories that allowed us to easily relate musical videos to musical cds - without short-cuts or duplicate sub-categorization. The net result was a great improvement in usability.

    The funny thing is that most of the developers with a liberal arts background immediately grasped what we were doing. And most of the formally-trained engineers broke out in cold sweats when we spoke of how limited hierarchies were, and how we really wanted weighted networks.
  • Yes - I've seen several movies featuring strong AI. I've pursued this goal and *mmph GAAGH*

    We have assumed control.
  • We all tend to look at the world through the lens of our own experience. It maybe a vicarious experience, but sci-fi is still an experience that widens ones perspective.

    I work as a software tester, a task I seem fair well suited for, and which I fair well enjoy. Perhaps it is because in my case I get to occupy some strange in-between world, where I get to do a lot of coding myself (I write programs that run, test, and torture other programs).

    I remember reading Jurassic Park, and the programming flaw d

  • Heinlein's philosophies got me (Score:3, Interesting)

    by John Jorsett ( 171560 ) on Monday March 24, 2003 @11:48PM (#5588652)
    A lot of my political attitudes and general philosophies of life come directly from Robert A. Heinlein. I read every book he wrote before I was out of Junior High (aka Middle School to you present day squirts) and they sort of seeped in.
  • Well just to address the issue if designers are ever influenced by what the see/read - I have one word for you: ANIME!
  • I'll admit, I've taken inspiration from science fiction I've read. Mainly Stephen Baxter. And you know what it's inspired me to do? Write science fiction of my own. I've written many short stories and I'm working on getting one published.

    I'm also looking at a career in astronomy/space exploration. Face it, without science fiction, NASA would die out in a generation. Science fiction is great in so many ways, and it's just sad that so many people dismiss it out of hand as trash.

  • Perhaps. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Fiery ( 21015 ) <rsoderberg@gmail.com> on Tuesday March 25, 2003 @12:48AM (#5588948) Homepage
    I've been trying to study the directions in technology required to make a book such as this happen.

    I'm not interested in teaching english as much as math, though. If I could tell my thin electronic math book to open to the "integrals" chapter and show me my class notes from last week, I'd be set.

    Voice recognition isn't infeasible.

    Do answers in the textbook, upload them to the teacher for electronic annotation; return the annotations to the student's textbook, they correct their work -- and the answer -- and the teacher approves the problem.

    I can map out technological ways to build this, thanks to watching Slashdot for a couple years.

    Given time, or an unexpected infusion of money, I'll be able to make something like this happen.

    Is there somewhere I can contribute my help? I don't have the driving force myself to tear this problem apart and build it, yet.

    I've many more, but not the time to index them here; requests via email, or look, in time, to a project I haven't yet described that tracks these :)
  • It is obviously impossible to claim that there is no influence, but I don't think technological development is particularly guided by fiction. In part because succesful technology is much more visible than unsuccesful technology and succesful technology must be both possible. So feasability or possibility is a very strong guide.

    I suspect fiction is very good at supplying vocabulary for naming technology once it is instantiated, but on the whole the ideas come from almost entirely different directions to t

  • Arthur C. Clarke (Score:3, Interesting)

    by thesilverbail ( 593897 ) on Tuesday March 25, 2003 @01:42AM (#5589177) Homepage
    I'm surprised no-one has mentioned Arthur C. Clarke and the geosynchronous satellite. Yessir, it was Clarke who proposed the idea of a satellite rotating in the equatorial plane with the same angular velocity of the earth so that it always remains above the same spot on the Earth's surface. Ok, so it was in a scientific paper and not a story, but still I'm sure he originally thought of it as a plot for one of his stories.
    You can see his article here. [lsi.usp.br]

  • All science fiction is about social commentary (Score:5, Insightful)

    by tlambert ( 566799 ) on Tuesday March 25, 2003 @02:33AM (#5589332)
    All science fiction is about social commentary, if it is intended seriously at all.

    And yes, we used to watch Science Fiction movies for product ideas, at IBM. Pick a movie, go in the conference room for the Thursday night brainstorming session, and then write down everything you see that you think you can implement, and everything that comes to mind as a result of that. Then everyone reads their list, making no comments, and people write down what they think of as a result of hearing the lists read.

    Quite effective, actually.

    -- Terry

  • The Anglosphere (Score:3, Interesting)

    by de la mettrie ( 27199 ) on Tuesday March 25, 2003 @03:08AM (#5589427)
    A recent example of SciFi influencing (predicting?) world polity is the concept of Anglosphere [pattern.com] , coined by Neal Stephenson in The Diamond Age. It refers to a "natural", cultural-political unity amongst Anglo-saxon countries. As the war against Iraq appears to illustrate this concept, the phrase [wordspy.com] has come into widespread use [matthewyglesias.com], serving as the title of a recent book [nybooks.com] apparently intended to rally Britons against the EU.

  • I use ... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Florian Weimer ( 88405 ) <fw@deneb.enyo.de> on Tuesday March 25, 2003 @05:26AM (#5589789) Homepage
    ... Bach's polyphonic works for inspiration when I design programs.

    My colleagues are horrified. Have you ever tried to change a couple of notes in a Bach fugue, and preserve the integrity of the whole work?

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