The sci-fi legends who shaped today's tech

Posted on 20 Nov 2009 at 16:17

Computing owes an even greater debt to Asimov’s contemporary, Arthur C Clarke. In his work on the 1968 film and novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, Clarke created HAL, the model for all future dedicated, logical, mildly psychotic AI. In creating HAL, Clarke and director Stanley Kubrick sought guidance from Marvin Minsky, co-founder of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT. In turn, the film would inspire a new generation of engineers and designers, including a young Rodney Brooks, who would go on to be director of that same institution.

In the book HAL’s Legacy: 2001’s Computer as Dream and Reality, Brooks describes the movie as “a revelation, because I grew up in a place without a lot of technology and I was really interested in AI and then to see that movie, it told me that there were other people in the world with the same sort of weird ideas that I had.” For Brooks, “the film really inspired me and pushed me to push my whole life towards Artificial Intelligence”.

Clarke also influenced the man who would go on to create the World Wide Web. In a 1997 interview with Time magazine, Tim Berners-Lee mentions a youthful fascination with Clarke’s 1964 short story Dial F for Frankenstein, where computers networked together pass a critical threshold and learn to think autonomously. In the interview, Berners-Lee makes it clear that he doesn’t see the web as the fulfilment of Clarke’s prophecy, but he does see it as having emergent properties with the potential to transform society – and 12 years later, he’s been proven right.

Virtual reality and viruses

Science fiction hasn’t only stimulated the beneficial side of computing. The origins of hacking and viruses can also be traced back to the pages of a novel.

British author John Brunner’s 1975 novel The Shockwave Rider is a fantastically prescient work, describing large-scale networks, phreaking, hacking and genetic engineering long before such things entered the mainstream consciousness. Not surprisingly, the book is widely acknowledged as an influential text for the nascent hacker movement. However, it was The Shockwave Rider’s description of a self-replicating program that could propagate across a network, destroying all bonds of secrecy, that had unintended results.

In the Amazon.com listing for the book, you’ll find one Carnegie Mellon University alumni mention that it was “an unofficial but necessary part of our education” to locate and read a copy

In 1982, John F Shoch and John A Hupp, researchers at Xerox PARC, created their own real-world equivalent: a small program designed to identify idle CPU cycles on the network, but which rapidly grew beyond its creators’ original intentions. Brunner had called his program a “worm”, and Shoch and Hupp borrowed the term for their subsequent research paper in honour of the book that inspired them.

Vernor Vinge’s 1981 novella True Names was, if anything, even more prophetic than The Shockwave Rider, describing immersive worlds and aspects of internet culture and the geek mentality that seem eerily familiar today. Again, True Names was influential on the hacker culture. In the Amazon.com listing for the book, you’ll find one Carnegie Mellon University alumni mention that it was “an unofficial but necessary part of our education” to locate and read a copy.

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User comments

They probably have run out of steam - they being the authors of yesterday - we're now waiting for the new authors to set the scene no matter how radical or bizarre their ideas will be - as long as they entertain and use a bit of magical hardware in some new innovative (or not) way. But I do hope that they will remain brave no matter how ridiculous their ideas seem today or for that matter tomorrow ;)

By nicomo on 20 Nov 2009

There are no multitouch displays in Minority Report. He never touches them.

By bogus39 on 22 Nov 2009

Problem with sci fi

Sf is full of fantastic ideas and has some excellent writers, though it's fair to say that readers of sf are looked down upon by the literary establishment. More on this here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2009/jan
/28/science-fiction-genre

Generally though, sf has moved on, predicting another gadget is not riveting stuff, so you get people like Greg Egan looking at harder stuff, like the fundamental laws of physics and using that to provide drama. (He does it well, unlikely as that sounds).

If you wanted a taste of modern sf (which declares itself as such), then you could by any one of a number of end-of-year short sf compendiums, or you could subscribe to the like of Interzone or Locus.

By RichardFletcher on 22 Nov 2009

true history of viruses

Pleasant to see someone finally copping to what many have known for decades, indeed, for a lifetime.

But they get some stuff wrong. I note especially:
"However, it was The Shockwave Rider’s description of a self-replicating program that could propagate across a network, destroying all bonds of secrecy, that had unintended results."

Huh? I predicted computer viruses in 1969, published it in a short story in 1970 ("The Scarred Man" in VENTURE) AND also propagated the first virus on the DARPA net.

I sent a memo announcing this and at a meeting, the DARPA folk at Livermore said, sure, you can do that--but why would anyone else? The story describes exactly why (calling them viruses, and predicting software to block them, the first called Vaccine).

The rest of this description, of the 1982 CPU counter, is also far off the mark.

By GregoryBenford on 25 Nov 2009

FICTION HAS SEEN THE TECH FUTURE

_The Wrist-Radio/CellPhone
in Dick Tracey comic.
_The networks and database
of Orwell's 1884.
Any more ?
+++++

By denlile on 26 Nov 2009

Bullshit

Was this article originally intended for Viz. It's just a series half assed ideas that vaguely fit a model of old sci-fi new technology. I'm currently not aware of any all knowing AI and certainly not one that fit's into a handset that exists outside of time and space.

By dodge1963 on 2 Dec 2009

Yes I agree. I think the main reason is that technology briefly caught up with SF and today's tech wizards are pushing blue sky thinking way ahead of what's possible (quantum computing, nanabots, robotics, flying robots etcetc). With string theory and quantum physics people are already theorising about things being in two places at once, multiple universes, particles having an unlimited number of states.
The problem is that these guys are way ahead of the SF writers.
But don't worry - SF writers WILL catch up and move ahead. Technology has just caught them by surprise that's all.
Dave

By zzdave on 3 Dec 2009

Here's A Challenge

Go to http://www.worldlifesite.com, get that sci-fi and read it all the way through. Then post here on whether or not you think the sci-fi in that first installment doesn't allow for an imagination to ponder on the possiblities of future technologies.

By YouRJoking on 28 Dec 2009

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