The UK is now in solitary confinement and can avoid the consequences of the Brexit vote by wearing VR headsets all the time.
The jumping off point is this other guy, Snow, who wrote an article suggesting that prison reform could be accomplished by putting every prisoner in solitary and giving them Virtual Reality headsets.
Every time I think I've heard the dumbest idea possible, a new one comes along.
The UK is now in solitary confinement and can avoid the consequences of the Brexit vote by wearing VR headsets all the time.
As someone whose Oculus Rift is supposedly shipping soon, this is quite tempting.
Perhaps we could put the prisoners in solitary with virtual headsets, catheters and IV nutrition, or maybe stomach tubes, plus some kind of bed that automatically moves their limbs around. We'd need low-level medical staff to deal with various bodily effluvia, put food in the tubes and sponge the prisoners down every so often, but we'd probably save tremendously on staff in general. Also, opportunistic infections and blood clots and so on would probably carry off a percentage of the population, leading to further savings.
Maybe we could build all the prisons in the UK after the coming real estate collapse!
This is such typical liberal BS. My tax dollars going to provide awesome virtual reality technology for fuckin' criminals.
4: That's in the criticized piece, but of course it's Soylent, piped in centrally.
But...but...I was assured that if we just send laptops to the kids in Somalia, that country's problems will be magically solved because everyone will be running their own internet startup.
Are telling me I've been misled?
Every time I think I've heard the dumbest idea possible, a new one comes along.
The title of the linked piece is, "The worst thing I read this year, and what it taught me... or Can we design sociotechnical systems that don't suck?"
As HG says, it ends up being a really good essay on a big subkect.
Many hard problems require you to step back and consider whether you're solving the right problem. If your solution only mitigates the symptoms of a deeper problem, you may be calcifying that problem and making it harder to change.
*cough*obamacare*cough*
6: Really? Really?
I am really bearish on humanity right now, as in I'd like bears to eat everyone.
The best way to accomplish that would be to require hikers to scatter food for bears as they go and for all sleeping bags to be coated in bacon grease.
11: Nah, if you coat the sleeping bags with grease, they'll pop right out of the bear's big hug. Or, at least that's how it would work in a slapstick world!
The post-script on Shane Snow's article is finely tuned to be maddening. Everyone who disagrees with him is being politically correct, they clearly didn't even read it, it was just a "thought experiment" and he never actually meant it, we have to do something and this is something...I'm glad I read Zuckerman's post before Snow's so I was prepared.
What's so hilarious about the Snow article is that it's basically Uber for prisons - the problem with prisons is that workers at prisons make too much money, so how can we fix that? By putting prisoners in VR, of course!
The other thing is that he obviously thinks he's being so liberal and generous, giving all these people wonderful VR and Soylent, but because he knows fuck-all about prisons, he is actually creating a system that is far more coercive on virtually every level than actual prisons.
It's like he's decided he's going to reenact all that stuff in Foucault about the development of institutions - kind of amazing to see in miniature in real life, actually.
It's difficult not to envision the prisoners as being reduced to meat nodes in an ideal network - unfortunate that one has to have the meat nodes to organize all the cool technology and the echoing halls patrolled by the food delivery dude, perhaps someday we can even automate the prisoners.
Just some kind of bare life thing going on there.
But again what's so interesting is that he gets to this without appearing to have read any philosophy - he's just naturally deducing this stuff from the logic of capital. It would be kind of cool in a novel.
The Snow article reminds me of some stuff by Scott Adams, but I think he's a little more open, or at least more obvious, about trolling his own blog. Snow seems genuinely hurt that people haven't acknowledged that putting all prisoners in solitary confinement and giving them VR headsets is a brilliant idea.
An obviously counterproductive attempt to address a social problem with fancy technology? That's five years in the iso-cubes, punk!
I'm going to assume that 6 is a joke, and work to never learn otherwise.
If I'm ever stuck in solitary, fuck yes I want a VR headset.
I'M A DATA COWBOY
BET YOU WEREN'T READY FOR THAT
But they better give me the Vive so I can use all my steam games, I dont want to be stuck using the fricken Rift store.
I'M IN THE WRONG THREAD
POMPATESS OF LOVE - OUT!
It would be kind of cool in a novel.
I was just thinking about how dated the cyberpunk* vision of the future -- very much of the late 80s, early 90s -- and that it now evokes a nostalgic feeling for me**. But you point out that the mindsets and trends that that cyberpunk was foregrounding are still quite relevant, they just have different trappings.
* There are probably newer flavors of cyberpunk, of course.
* As 16 demonstrates.
Posterity will have to recreate unfogged's daily progress by weaving together threads using the time stamp.
Comparing the relatively early-ish cyberpunk stuff with how things are now makes me wonder about the extent to which we can predict where technology-in-society will go by looking at science fiction trends. I don't think there's much reason to think that science fiction novelists/writers are prescient in a way other people aren't. But it does kind of seem like the people who drive a lot of cutting edge technology (and how the more basic research and technology stuff ends up filtering down to what products end up on the market or succeed or whatever) are the same ones who grew up reading those novels and being excited by them.
I don't know what kind of lag time would be involved in that effect. It probably changes a lot too based on how old people have to be with different technologies. But a lot of the stuff people are trying really hard to make work right now looks to me like the stuff that was in the contemporary science fiction stuff I read as a more impressionable younger person. (And not necessarily the earlier stuff or the science fiction that came later.)
14: That's particularly ironic to me, since I lost an hour yesterday to the excellent Mother Jones article about becoming a prison guard. CCA prison guard story. He got paid a whole $9/hour.... something tells me that our Uber solution is not going to get us the savings we need.
26: Argh don't steal things out of my posting queue, bro.
Obviously haven't read the article because this is Morozov the Clutcher of Kittens, but on 25, I don't think most SF authors are actually trying to predict the future; they're trying to tell good stories and/or make points about the present.
The Soylent article was nuts but it was based on the question "how can we make prison less unpleasant?". Current policy does not even ask that question.
Gully Foyle was in a VR and solitary prison. Drove him crazier.
29: you were talking about how prescient they are and concluding not very; I don't think they're trying.
32: In re science fiction, it depends on the science fiction and it depends on what you mean by "predict". Some science fiction writers attempt to predict and some don't; some writers "predicts" in parts of their books and not in others. In Ender's Game, for instance, Card was pretty clearly drawing on his background in, like, computer stuff to predict certain aspects of the use of the internet, the desks that the kids have, etc. Presumably he wasn't trying to predict that hive aliens are going to attack the earth.
John Brunner (who was a member of CND and in fact wrote "Can You Hear The H-Bomb's Thunder") was a major near-future SF writer who attempted prediction and was pretty good at it in a general way - read Stand On Zanzibar and The Sheep Look Up for predictions of a tremendous number of environmental problems.
Neal Stephenson is pretty obviously a predictor. On many a depressing day I find myself thinking of Snowcrash and how horrible it is that a mediocre misogynist like Stephenson should have gotten so much of the texture of the present right.
Gwynneth Jones's novel Life is an interesting, near future predictive novel about the professional classes.
I mean, if you literally mean "predict" like "I think the stock market will fall catastrophically in 2020 and we will elect Sarah Palin president" or "Apple will invent an iPod that can be wired to the brain", then no, that's not what SF generally does. But a significant number of SF writers write near-future extrapolation that they take pretty seriously.
I think MHPH's argument isn't about science fiction authors predicting the future, it's about whether people, having read science fiction, try to create things that will make the future look like stuff they read in science fiction. So predicting future trends from science fiction in these terms isn't about "did the authors get it right?" but "did stuff the science fiction authors wrote about get created later, and was that stuff inspired by that fiction?"
34: that bit of MHPH's argument is definitely right. And it's been happening for ages; as well as the space programme, the development of both the tank and the United Nations were inspired by science fiction. (Harry Truman was inspired by SF poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson's vision of a world federal government in "Locksley Hall"; he carried the relevant passage in his wallet).