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Shawn McCarthy
Canada
Winnipeg
Manitoba
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In a luncheon talk last year, Gibson spoke about his Pattern Recognition / Spook Country / Zero History books and his take on society's digestion of what really ought to be huge news. I've truncated his post for space and not dancing on copyright, and the full source is here. Aside from talking about the headspace he was in while writing his Futuristic Sprawl & Bridge trilogies, he does the best job here of capturing the apathy we have for the emerging future as it actually unfolds. What it really highlights to me is how unaware we will be caught by the application of the next big thing (the next combustion engine or electricity or clone or remote warfare), when the next paradigm shift finally slaps us in the face.
Quote: Say it’s midway through the final year of the first decade of the 21st Century. Say that, last week, two things happened: scientists in China announced successful quantum teleportation over a distance of ten miles, while other scientists, in Maryland, announced the creation of an artificial, self-replicating genome. ...
In quantum teleportation, information may be conveyed across a distance without resorting to a signal in any traditional sense. It’s the word "teleportation", used seriously, in a headline. "No kidding," I said to myself, "teleportation." A slight amazement.
The synthetic genome, arguably artificial life, was somehow less amazing. The sort of thing one feels might already have been achieved, somehow. Triggering the "Oh, yeah" module. "Artificial life? Oh, yeah." ...
Alvin Toffler warned us about Future Shock, but is this Future Fatigue? For the past decade or so, the only critics of science fiction I pay any attention to have been slyly declaring that the Future is over. ...
The Future, capital-F, be it crystalline city on the hill or radioactive post-nuclear wasteland, is gone. Ahead of us, there is merely…more stuff. Events. Some tending to the crystalline, some to the wasteland-y. Stuff: the mixed bag of the quotidian.
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Marshall Miller
United States
Medford
Massachusetts
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I seem to remember a recent article about a poll showing that many people could not discern between real science/tech and science fiction. Its ok, there's too much to know already...
[edit] Here it is...
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Shawn McCarthy
Canada
Winnipeg
Manitoba
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Ha, wow! That sounds like a list of (North) Americans' silly beliefs, good to know it's not an isolated thing.
For what it's worth, jetpacks and hoverboards are almost real, as are things like exo-skeletons. And we have cutting lazers almost as strong as lightsabers which could be turned into a beam if you allowed for a good mirror at the end of the blade.
But teleportation and Men-in-Black mind zappers? 
Edit: I missed the best one - belief that they can see gravity.
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Marshall Miller
United States
Medford
Massachusetts
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Don't get me wrong, we're on our way to very blunt forms of "mind zappers" but its hardly a commercial product or common procedure.
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Korvettenkapitän Jasper Aurelius van der Meer
United States
Atlanta
Georgia
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Mease19 wrote: Don't get me wrong, we're on our way to very blunt forms of "mind zappers" but its hardly a commercial product or common procedure.
As Citizen Marshall serves as a living demonstration of the efficacy of the MindZap brain wipe tool...
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Shanya Almafeta
United States
Kansas City
Missouri
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The next big paradigm shift is that we are now immune to paradigm shifts.
Every time something new might approach that edge, the odds are very good that you already know someone who knows how to break that 'paradigm-shifting' idea down into the key blocks to make it easy and accessable. If it doesn't immediately affect you right away, that dramatically increases the odds of the idea becoming easy to understand and utilize by the time it lands on your doorstep.
Gibson has it wrong - we're not terrified or bored; it may not interest us or it may excite us, but either way, the future is easy.
shawnssica wrote: And we have cutting lazers almost as strong as lightsabers which could be turned into a beam if you allowed for a good mirror at the end of the blade.
The Beam Katanas from No More Heroes. The real challenge is diffusing all the energy from the beam without heating up the grip so much that it becomes too hot to hold - or explodes, taking out the wielder's hand with it.
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I love Gibson's work, and I agree with many of his ideas. But I'm not entirely convinced that is is something unique to our times.
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Shawn McCarthy
Canada
Winnipeg
Manitoba
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Tangent:
Almafeta wrote: The Beam Katanas from No More Heroes. The real challenge is diffusing all the energy from the beam without heating up the grip so much that it becomes too hot to hold - or explodes, taking out the wielder's hand with it.
Charging the katana is No More Heroes (the first Wii game I played) made me blush.
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