The Big Idea: Jason Sanford
Posted on September 23, 2021 Posted by John Scalzi 4 Comments
Fantasy and science fiction are often considered two sides of the same coin, but Jason Sanford has another theory about both, and in today’s Big Idea, he shares that hypothesis with you, and why it’s important for his novel Plague Birds.
JASON SANFORD:
Is fantasy the end result of all science fiction?
I’m not talking about the marketing categories separating those two genres, both of which I deeply love. Instead, I’m talking about how people approach our world’s advanced technologies even as these technologies change who we are as humans. I’m talking about the anti-science attitudes that are spreading across our world using the very tools resulting from our understanding of science.
It is impossible to separate humanity from our tools and technology. Our species has been shaped by our tools for countless generations. Fire, stone tools, agriculture, written and printed language, metal smithing — these are merely a few of the tools and technologies that altered humanity to massive degrees. And some of these tools were used by humans for incredibly long periods of time. For example, various species of humans used Acheulean stone hand tools with relatively few changes for well over a million years.
And just as these earlier technologies helped shape who we are as humans, today’s technologies will do the same.
I’ve long been fascinated by Arthur C. Clarke’s third law, which says that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” While Clarke’s law is frequently used to discuss possible futuristic technologies such as the teleporters of Star Trek fame, the law actually has greater relevance in how we approach the impact of current technologies on our lives.
I fear we’ve reached a point in our history where technologies have outpaced humanity’s desire to understand them. Many people in our world don’t seem to understand or care about the science behind how the touch screen on their smartphones works, how blockchain technology enables bitcoins, or how algorithms decide what they see on social media. Yet these are merely three of a number of technologies that are now reshaping our lives.
All of these technologies started out as science fiction, but they may as well be fantasy — may as well be magic per Clarke’s third law — based on how many people today approach them. If the technologies powering our modern world were actually based on magic instead of science, I suspect far too many people wouldn’t care as long as their cell phones and other gizmos worked.
This returns me to my thought experiment that perhaps fantasy is the end result of all science fiction. By this I mean that even though people accept the advanced technologies and tools reshaping our world, they approach these technologies as if they were some type of magic instead of actual science. As if the science behind these technologies is merely opinion, or wrong belief, or fake news that can be argued against.
This results in two problems for humanity. One, it makes it more difficult for people to understand how new and emerging technologies might deeply change our societies and lives. Second, this lack of understanding also appears to be spawning an anti-science attitude around the world, a belief that it doesn’t matter how science actually works or what the results presented in scientific studies actually say. That the science behind our modern world can be ignored or discarded if you simply disagree with it.
You see this attitude in how many people are refusing to get the life-saving COVID vaccines because they don’t trust the science behind them (even though they also believe an unproven horse dewormer is an effective treatment). All of this is happening despite humans knowing about and practicing forms of vaccination for centuries and the science around vaccines being extremely solid and relatively easy to understand.
You also see this anti-science attitude in how the severe threat of global warming is ignored or discounted by far too many people, merely because what needs to be done to save our planet may not be politically expedient to them.
In my writings I’ve continually explored the conflict presented when people are surrounded by advanced technologies yet don’t attempt to truly understand them. This is also the big idea around my novel Plague Birds, which is set in a science fiction world where artificial intelligence and genetic manipulation are not understood by most people even as that world’s societies resulted from those very technologies.
While Plague Birds is science fiction, it reads like fantasy and is weird and dark because I fear that’s the future we’re rushing toward.
I don’t know what the answer is to people not understanding the technologies reshaping our lives. Obviously education is part of it, especially science education. But I’ve also seen engineers and physicians and other highly educated people who fail to understand the technologies around us, or who practice science with one hand and discount it with the other. After all, just because you understand one aspect of something doesn’t mean you understand everything.
Perhaps there is no single answer. Perhaps all we can do is try to be humble. To accept that none of us understands everything. To listen to others but also remember the vital difference between sharing opinions and facts. To remember that just because we can do something doesn’t mean we should.
And most importantly, we need to always remember that the science behind the technologies shaping our lives doesn’t care if we fail to understand it. But we may end up caring a lot about what our lack of understanding science eventually does to both humanity and our world.
Plague Birds: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s|Apex Books
Visit Jason’s site. Follow the author on Twitter.
So, one of the very worrying things this article reminded me of is how 1 in 8 nurses are still not vaccinated, even though they know Covid is real and have been trained in medicine. When what you have seen with your own eyes is less important than what your team tells you to believe it makes me fear for the future.
A lot of technology isn’t very accessible.
Sometimes that’s for safety reasons, or to make it easy to use.
But sometimes it’s so big companies can make a profit off deliberately short-lived devices. Or so they can do whatever they want without people asking awkward questions.
For example, if people knew how much private info is collected by apps to sell ads, they might not use those apps.
I dimly recall as a boy that when something newly invented was advertised, the principle behind it would be explained.
This was back when, although society was affluent, people were still poor enough to want to know the benefits of what they were buying. Today even things like cars can be sold with a bit of magical dazzle dazzle that tells nothing about the actual car.
By the 1980’s, when I asked university student newspaper photographers how their self focusing cameras worked they at least knew it was from infra red, (would non students know?) but they didn’t know whether it was from a pulse or from triangulation.
Perhaps the number of people who believe in social media, over the science reported by normal media, is an amazing wakeup call to what we have been in denial about. Like how our grandparents were amazed at how many men could not meet the army standards, like how a cosmetic company’s research showed how amazingly uninformed folks were about sex.
And like how the housewife next door, during a summer of tornadoes back in the 1980’s, pounded the table and said, “Those dam astronauts!” Obviously she thought that space shuttles were the cause, like Europeans in 1916 thinking cannon fire caused the rain in WWI.
Seannibal
Found this
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20579678/
for all the Covidiots who are taking ivermectin… at horse and cattle strength. Because the antivaxxer nurses aren’t actually the dumbest people out there. Although it may solve the problem of their offspring being just as stupid, since they won’t be personally having a next generation.
I mean, what is the rationale there? “I will literally try anything as long as it doesn’t actually work”? Because the same idiots who are taking ivermectin are now also doing onions–eating them, hanging them around the house (?? because Covid 19 is somehow a vampire?!), gargling with betadine (again, huh?)
Sean Crawford
Why would anyone who made it out of high school believe that their camera infrared works on triangulation. A camera is a singular point. Triangulation needs a minimum of 3 points… ? Also, when actually using the camera, how did they manage to not see the flicker of the IR on to the actual field of view?
Yes, I really loved my Canon EOS 3. Especially the eye controlled focus. So handy.
It’s worth noting that the current generation not only doesn’t know how current technology works, they largely have no clue as to how old technology works either. Not entirely their fault, considering that most people skitter out of high school with the last science class taken being the 7th grade bio class. Because most high schools don’t demand that their graduates take higher math or science classes. And then they move on to college, which largely won’t teach them any of this stuff either, unless they major in a STEM field.