Making decisions on the basis of technology that hasn’t happened yet
2007-09-16 by julianmorrison
Nick Szabo over at Unenumerated proposes a means to differentiate science fiction from imminent technology. In essence: require that if the exact form of the technology can’t be defined, then at least the experiments needed to resolve its unknowns can be defined. (For example, SENS meets this criterion.)
Personally I’d say this is a start, but a little narrow in scope. So, I’d suggest the following two generalizations:
- Allow that technology may be imminent at the n‘th remove. First remove being the definition of imminent technology linked above, second remove being dependent upon the existence of a first remove technology, and so on.
- Define the idea of improvement velocity (IV). If this is high, an imminent technology can be expected to very quickly become a proven fact. For example, the IV of computer technology in the 1950s through 1970s was immense. It would have been reasonable to treat the highly speculative as expected. If anything, their SF of the time underestimated the improvements that happened.
Combine the two, and you get something like a meaningful definition. Improvement Velocity means: for a velocity of n, it’s reasonable to treat technologies at n‘th remove as imminent. So for example, todays computer tech IV has fallen to something like 2 (it’s reasonable to consider the consequences of 16+ multi-core to be imminent).
