Interesting Comment on My Last Blog Entry About Predicting the Fu - Entering the Networked World. DON'T PANIC!

Dave Harding, a techie acquaintance who runs the GnuJersey.org site, posted a good comment on my last blog entry about technology predictions. I am posting here so people getting my blog via various feeds are alerted to the interesting comments.

Among other things Dave noted was David Brin's ideas, such as ones mentioned in his book Earth, becoming reflected in real life. In response to my comment about the ease predicting things about 50 years in the year, Dave Harding mentioned Brin's afterword to Earth:

"Half-century predictions [are] among the most difficult speculative novels to write. In order to depict a near-term future, say five or ten years ahead, a writer need only take the present world an exaggerate some current trend for dramatic effect. At the other end, portraying societies many centuries from now, the job is relatively easy also. (Anything goes, so long as you make it vaguely plausible.) But five decades is just short enough a span to require a sense of *familiarity*, and yet far enough away to demand countless surprises, as well. You must make it seem believable that many people who are walking around at this very moment would also exist in that future time, and find conditions -- if not commonplace -- then at least normal.''

Brin, by the way is addressing prediction in "speculative novels", not mere predictions.

Brin's comments about the difference of ease in writing about the distant future compared to depicting a relatively near future reminds me of an insight made by a Japanese painter several centuries ago: "Dragons and demons are easy to paint; dogs and horses are difficult." Nobody really can authoritatively say what a dragon or a demon looks like. The artist can paint whatever fantastic image and nobody can judge it from experience. But everybody knows what a dog or a horse look like can judge the painting from their experience.

When writing a "speculative novel" or, even just a short story, the prediction has to work in the setting and with the plot and characters, not just stand by itself as the prediction could in an interview or a non-fiction article.

Brin is very good at taking several possible social & tech changes and make them fit well in his futures. These predictive possibilities aren't forced but appear to both have shaped the future's history and to have been products of that history.

J.D. Abolins