I grew up reading science fiction but it didn’t prepare me for the reality of the future, when it arrived. SciFi predicted space travel but it turns out that space travel is for robots, not humans. The people on the Space Station are not accomplishing anything. The Chinese space station was struck by orbital debris last week and now their three taikonauts are stranded: their return capsule was damaged. Mainstream media declines to give any coverage to the Chinese space program except when it fucks up–that’s why we’re hearing about the orbital debris damage.
SciFi predicted computers would remain giant, in compliance with the quote by IBM’s president in 1943: “I think there’s a world market for maybe five computers.” Instead every person in the world has a computer in their pocket.
I don’t know what scifi predicts today. I haven’t looked at any new scifi in many years. “SciFi” now means movies and TV shows about magic. I think the last science fiction book I read was RAINBOW’S END by Vernor Vinge. It won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2007. Amazon tells me I bought it on June 6, 2011. It’s about an Alzheimers’ patient who wakes up in hospital and has been cured. He doesn’t know what happened in the 20 years since his memory failed.
The story is about his re-adjusting to the world after he’s cured. He goes back to high school. The ending is unsatisfactory–he gets embroiled in some faction-versus-faction battle and one side wins, the end.
It’s now an alternate-worlds novel because it takes place in 2025.
The Hugo Awards are now a woke-fest of Mary Sue girlbosses. The market is dominated by sword-and-sorcery pastiches.
1020am
Meanwhile, I don’t know what to do and neither does anybody else. Nobody knows what the economy is going to do. The stock market is a giant bubble supported by the churn between Nvidia and the AI purveyors signing big contracts with each other and using the contracts as collateral for further indebtedness. Everybody is building multi-billion-dollar server farms to run their AI companies.
One upcoming problem will be the rapid obsolescence of the server technology. Moore’s Law is still in effect: before the loan is paid off, the billion dollar’s worth of servers will have a resale value of ten cents. Lots of people are predicting the AI bubble is going to crash. Price/earnings ratios are catastrophically high, and not just in AI.
The server farms use enormous amounts of electricity and the liberal hatred of electricity is running into a crunch. Wind and solar power will never generate enough juice to keep the grid going. The mainstream media has not been making an issue out of the new nuclear power plants under construction. The first new nuke plant this century went into operation in 2023, and another in 2024 at Plant Vogtle, Georgia. Several more are under construction or in planning.