It’s a given: new technology is always better than old technology. And even if it were not, it’s our duty to the economy to purchase the new shiny.
Only a reactionary would object to ticket scanners merely because they are much slower than the bespectacled eye. Or object to mandatory software upgrades on the specious ground that everything they do, they do less well than the previous release.
Sure, sometimes the new thing is a bit disruptive—but isn’t a little disruption good for us all? At least that’s what the people who stand to profit from disruption tell us….
Let’s examine the contrarian position: newer isn’t always best. And let’s take our examples from science fiction, which is dedicated to exploring the new…and, sometimes inadvertently, showing that the newest thing may not work as intended.
Take the humble tramp spaceship, for example, puttering along at a reasonable 10 meters/second/second. It’s a convenient acceleration because it gives the traveller the same weight as they would have at home, while granting access to the Solar System in mere weeks. Given a little more time, tramp spaceships can even explore the near stars.
The catch: the kinetic energy of these vessels ramps up rapidly, from high to stupendously high. One of Heinlein’s torchships might reach peak velocities of single-digit percents of the speed of light, thus gaining kinetic energy roughly equal to the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Per kilogram.
A responsible crew will of course slow the ship before it approaches anything breakable. But what if you don’t have a responsible crew? What if the ship is crewed by a bunch of kamikaze psychos? Boom.
But, since the plot has to unfold within a human lifetime (usually), authors must posit high-performance ships. They don’t posit crews vetted as thoroughly as any missile silo team, however. They don’t consider the downside of super-speedy propulsion systems because those are not the stories they want to tell.
There have been exceptions. John Varley, in his Thunder and Lightning series, imagined a lone genius who handed the world such a propulsion system. A disgruntled starship crew wanted to see just how big a ding they could put in the Eastern Seaboard with a well-aimed starship… A great big ding, as it turned out.
Edward Llewellyn’s Douglas Convolution series (The Douglas Convolution, The Bright Companion, and Prelude to Chaos) imagines the development of a marvellous chemical with applications to chemotherapy, birth control, even insecticides. There was one unexpected consequence: It sterilized females whose mothers had been exposed to the chemical. The world fertility rate plummeted. Societies went extinct, or adapted in nasty ways. But hey, tangerines were cheap before everything collapsed.
A number of authors have looked at the demands of physical spaceflight and rejected it in favour of less demanding (and as far as we can tell, completely impossible) mental transference. Why send the body when you can just beam (somehow) the contents of someone’s head into a waiting body on the other end?
Robert Sheckley’s absurdist Mindswap provided one answer: you wouldn’t want to do this because mind transfer is a handy tool for the glib conman. Deliver the right line of snappy patter and you could walk away with a healthy new body, while your victim finds himself trapped in a decrepit loaner body.
Richard Morgan’s Takeshi Kovaks stories suggest even darker possibilities; give the rich the ability to gentrify poor people’s younger, healthier bodies and they will. Limit the victims to prisoners…well, who do you think owns the people who write the laws?
On a related note, high-speed communication seems to be getting ever higher speed (subject to the limits imposed by physical law). But what happens when information can be transferred from one person to another so quickly that it becomes hard or impossible to say where one person ends and another person begins? To communicate means to merge.
In Michael Swanwick’s Vacuum Flowers, the backstory is that the entire population of the Earth collapsed into the Comprise mass-mind. Only the humans far away enough from Earth that there is severe communications lag have resisted assimilation. The Comprise cannot function when time lags become too large.
Teleportation seems like it would be pretty darn handy. Step into a booth here, step out half a planet away. In John Brunner’s The Webs of Everywhere (originally published as Web of Everywhere), teleportation devices, called Skelters, proved to be easy to build and therefore impossible to regulate. It took a while for people to realize that there was a downside to making Skelter addresses as public as old-fashioned landline numbers. Consequences: epidemics, terrorism, et cetera. The human population drops to a third of its pre-Skelter level.
Matter duplication would be keen, wouldn’t it? Each sumptuous meal can become a feast for thousands; each car a fleet! As economies are not built to deal with limitless goods, the invention of matter duplication is usually followed by widespread economic and social disruption, as seen in George O. Smith’s classic “Pandora’s Millions.” But Smith’s characters were lucky, because Smith was a comparatively benevolent author. Damon Knight’s A for Anything (also published as The People Maker) pointed out that one could run off lots of copies of useful servants. If one of them rebels…hit the delete key. Lots more where he came from.
A real-life example: I got into book reviewing just about the time ubiquitous cell phones became a thing. Watching mystery writers grapple with the fact that a myriad of stock plots no longer worked if the characters could just reach into their pockets for a phone was quite entertaining. Of course, the downsides of ubiquitous cell phones had been predicted as early as—I bet you all think I am going to mention that scene in Space Cadet where the lead puts his phone in his suitcase to avoid unwanted calls, don’t you?—1919, in this visionary article. Not that it stopped anyone from creating the devices. Which is reassuring, because it means that no matter how many warnings SF authors provide about unintended consequences of technology, we’ll always have to deal with the side effects of tomorrow’s new shinies.
Originally published in May 2019.
In the words of Wikipedia editor TexasAndroid, prolific book reviewer and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll is of “questionable notability.” His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews and Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis). He is surprisingly flammable.
Not SF, but Joe Abercrombie’s latest (A Little Hatred), DEFINITELY highlights the downside of “new” tech.
I hate to tell you this, but it’s not the lead in Space Cadet who packs away his portable phone–it’s his buddy Tex.
Cue the reference to Douglas Addams and the Babelfish.
Kiln People by David Brin seems to explore that same idea space as Damon Knight’s novel. I believe that one is nominally a murder mystery but explores some of the societal side effects if you had relatively widespread “people duplication.”
Oh man, those DAW covers bring me back to Saturday afternoons spent cross-legged on the library floors! I have always wanted to re-visit these Llewellyn books but for some reason I thought they were by L. Neil Smith and couldn’t match my memories of the covers to anything Smith wrote…
@2, That’s right. Matt makes the mistake of keeping his phone on him.
That killed Willis’ otherwise excellent Doomsday Book for me, since so much of the plot relied on somewhat advanced tech without even an answering machine in sight. Worst thing was finding out that it was published in ’92, not ’72, a time by which I had a cellphone as my primary phone and answering machines / pagers were still everywhere.
Mira Grant’s(Seanan McGuire) Feed posits a world where we’ve cured cancer AND the common cold. Too bad that the combination of cures brings on the zombie apocalypse…
@2/@6: Quite right – Matt hangs up using the excuse that he was in a crowd (and presumably that being on a phone in a crowd would be rude); Tex says he put his phone in his bag so he’d have an excuse not to answer it at all.
Brian Aldiss’s The Primal Urge springs to mind here – the new tech in question being the Emotional Register, which fits neatly on the forehead and lights up pink when the wearer is experiencing sexual attraction. Repressed British people plus automated emotional honesty – what could possibly go wrong?
Hal Clement’s “Uncommon Sense”*, along with Swanwick’s Vacuum Flowers both came up with the problems of physics-aware telepathy (Clement noted that our brains have their own communications paths internally, so telepathy wouldn’t be the universal translator that authors like after all). I had come up with similar notions, and was bummed that both authors had beaten me to it, before I was born in Clement’s case.
Maybe the technology was too overwhelming for your essay, but I always think of Williamson’s “With Folded Hands” and The Humanoids when an AI-style tech is mooted as The Solution to your problem.
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* If I have the wrong title, I apologize.
@9, pity we don’t think using a phone in crowds is rude…🤨
Silverberg’s “Ringing the Changes” also explored personality swapping.
I don’t know if it was Damon Knight’s book or someone else’s, but I read one with duplication technology when I was a young teen. The part where it lost me was that duplicates were slaves without legal rights–even if they were duplicates of the extremely powerful.
So, duplicates of privileged people who know all the secrets of the privileged people (PINs, passwords, where the bodies are buried) and have had all the training of the privileged people and and who are indistinguishable from the privileged and who have no social conditioning to accept being slaves? Like, you’ve just duplicated Napoleon? Or turned the Spartan 300 into a few thousand? What happens when you face an army full of people who know exactly how everyone on your side thinks and who can increase their numbers infinitely, but any duplicates you make have every reason to join the other side? And, if the originals join the other side, no one can tell they aren’t duplicates, so desertion is practically risk free.
I really hope that wasn’t Damon Knight’s book, because that plot hole still bothers me years later.
@14 In Knight;s A for Anything most if not all duplicated people were slaves, but the masters carefully only duplicated people who were already slaves, or at least in a position to be enslaved. If ther was a rule automatically making any duplicate a slave, i don’t recall it — i read the book many years ago. In any case the ability to freely duplicate just about anything, making a local warlord independent of any wider society, was if anything more important to the plot than the duplication of people, as I recall it.
I read AfA at about the same time as Knight’s Hell’s Pavement. I liked both, but significantly preferred the latter — the post collapse society in AfA seemed too much a return to a feudal model under conditions that would not be likely to create that pattern, I thought.