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Mark Twain (while a stowaway on the Starship Enterprise): "Do you mean to tell me that in the 24th century, man has overcome racism, greed, and his own inhumanity to man?"
Commander Troi gazes curiously at him and responds without hesitation: "Yes."
I have always been a sci-fi fan. Almost all American sci-fi, though, is grim. "Dystopian" means the opposite of "utopian," and almost all American sci-fi is dystopian. One can see why easily enough, because most sci-fi begins with a linear projection of present trends. If pollution is worsening today, then it will be horrible by the time "Blade Runner" occurs. If shortages and suffering go on, we'll need "Hunger Games" to distract us sooner or later. If we produce more war machines, we'll need a "Terminator" to save us from them!
The amazing exception was Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek series. All the problems in Quadrant One (Earth) have already been solved, and people have to go to distant planets to find troubles to rectify. I love that, but I don't think it's likely. I don't believe in warp drive. Humanity's main future is on this planet.
Also, it has always bothered me that Roddenberry never told us how we solved all the problems on Earth. He skipped that part, except to imply that the Vulcans helped. I started trying to answer that giant question with my own sci-fi novel, Commissioner Torres, on this site.
Rather than try to describe a much-improved world, I decided to write about how improvement might come about. I don't know of any other sci-fi that makes that attempt.
My future world is not the nice-clean one of most sci-fi, dystopian or utopian. My characters are normal and conventional people who barely make it past a crisis of fascism and environmental disaster. Without the crisis, I reasoned, people would have never been moved to demand and get a shot at a better world. My main character is one of many who decides to take advantage of the opportunity to work for a better world. He makes small contributions in my first and subsequent (planned) novels.
People are integrating with our machines, and our machines are integrating with us. Headgear that can record brain waves is already invented. It's only a matter of time before those brain waves can get amplified, interpreted, and passed on to machines and to other people. We aren't far from a singularity of combined thought processes. Humans will have total recall, because they'll have immediate access to their complementary machines. Designated machines will have the subtlety of human minds, because they will be connected.
I wrote a short story about it way back in the 1960s. I guess it's somewhere in one of my file cabinets. The title is "When We All Get Together." It's the title of a hymn about how great it will be once we're dead, but, in my story, we get together by transferring our consciousness into giant computers. Today, anybody can see that coming.
I'm not afraid that machines will take over, as in so many American sci-fi pieces, because, lacking guts and groins, machines have no separate motivations. Machines will be our allies, just as they are now. Boy! I hope to live to see that!
The big question is not whether or not humanity's intellectual ability has the capacity for a gigantic leap forward. That's a certainty. The question is whether or not it will solve our problems.
It won't.
The problem with sci-fi, and with futurism, is that we depend on linear projections of current trends. In the real world, linear projections are only reliable in the short term. Small, quantitative changes give us a trend. But it's large, qualitative, non-linear changes that actually make the differences in human history.
The qualitative difference we have to achieve in order to have a future is to overcome class divisions. Throughout written history, some of our economic classes have been willing to sacrifice the interests of other economic classes to better themselves.
Take the example of war. If rich people had to fight wars, there wouldn't be any. Take pollution for example. If rich people had to live in the areas they polluted, pollution would go away. But rich people generally don't fight wars and they don't live with the consequences of the pollution they create.
Would wealthy, powerful, privileged people, totally sacrifice all democracy and human rights in order to hang on to their positions? Certainly! They always have! In America today (2015) a significant part of the upper 1% has already gone quite a bit in that direction and they are pushing harder and harder for more. Class division, in the form of the wealth gap, is at an historic high.
If the rest of us were to let it happen, we would have fascism and all its consequences in human sacrifice. We need to do more than achieve superior intelligence. We have to apply it!
I'm betting we will. That's the future.
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