The future is already here, I'm just trying to aggregate it.

Read more fiction.

I used to read a lot of non-fiction, especially business books. In fact I’m still on a few publishers lists for receiving advanced copies of business books. But I find myself reading more science fiction, and I’m really enjoying the genre some call progressive or speculative science fiction. This genre also seems to cover cyberpunk, and dystopian genres (I could be wrong here on the genus and families of fiction types, but I think this one of those things that isn’t generally agreed on). 

Non-fiction can tell you what happened, or at best take a guess at what is happening, but fiction tells you what could be. Even when non-fiction tries to explain what’s happening and what is yet to come, they’re still really just telling you about the past. And conversely, even when science fiction is trying to write about the past (like with steampunk) they’re still telling you about the future. 

Non-fiction is about how we reacted to something. Science fiction is about how we would react to something. And even though there are a lot of exceptions and I still read my share of great non-fiction, for me, understanding how people react to change (which is the core of what sci-fi is about) is far more valuable that someone trying to explain to me what already happened. 

Fiction and the future of tech are so interconnected as to make you wonder if there really is any difference.  I went to Google to interview some of the people who are working on its search engine. And what I heard floored me. “The Star Trek computer is not just a metaphor that we use to explain to others what we’re building,” Singhal told me. “It is the ideal that we’re aiming to build—the ideal version done realistically.” He added that the search team does refer to Star Trek internally when they’re discussing how to improve the search engine. “It comes up often,” Singhal said. “For instance, we might say, ‘Captain Kirk never pulled out a keyboard to ask a question.’ So in that way it becomes one of the design principles—we see that because the Star Trek computer actively relies on speech, if we want to do that we need to work to push the barrier of speech recognition and machine understanding.” (via Google has a single towering obsession: It wants to build the Star Trek computer. - Slate Magazine)

Fiction and the future of tech are so interconnected as to make you wonder if there really is any difference. 

I went to Google to interview some of the people who are working on its search engine. And what I heard floored me. “The Star Trek computer is not just a metaphor that we use to explain to others what we’re building,” Singhal told me. “It is the ideal that we’re aiming to build—the ideal version done realistically.” He added that the search team does refer to Star Trek internally when they’re discussing how to improve the search engine. “It comes up often,” Singhal said. “For instance, we might say, ‘Captain Kirk never pulled out a keyboard to ask a question.’ So in that way it becomes one of the design principles—we see that because the Star Trek computer actively relies on speech, if we want to do that we need to work to push the barrier of speech recognition and machine understanding.”

(via Google has a single towering obsession: It wants to build the Star Trek computer. - Slate Magazine)

Brilliant. You really should check out Tim’s collection of short stories, Paintwork. 

(via tim maughan books » Paintwork – the movie)

Science fiction isn’t just thinking about the world out there. It’s also thinking about how that world might be—a particularly important exercise for those who are oppressed, because if they’re going to change the world we live in, they—and all of us—have to be able to think about a world that works differently.

Samuel Delaney (via likestepsonthemoon)

(via stoweboyd)

“On this day 49 years ago, the Doctor first appeared on TV screens across the UK. 10 regenerations and nearly 800 episodes later and Doctor Who remains the longest running and most successful sci-fi TV show in the world!” (via BBC - Blogs - Doctor Who - Happy Anniversary, Doctor!)

“On this day 49 years ago, the Doctor first appeared on TV screens across the UK. 10 regenerations and nearly 800 episodes later and Doctor Who remains the longest running and most successful sci-fi TV show in the world!”

(via BBC - Blogs - Doctor Who - Happy Anniversary, Doctor!)