by beth, a reader of ObWi who asked to post this
Not only was Arthur C. Clarke a superb science-fiction author, he was also a highly respected public intellectual who contributed greatly to the conceptual development of much of the technology that we’ve come to rely upon in our daily lives.
Clarke will probably be best remembered by the public at large for 2001: A Space Odyssey. Clarke penned both the script for Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 film, and the eponymous novel, at the exact same time. It largely redefined the way we think of progress, technology, and humanity’s moral imperatives in producing these things in such a way as to advance the potentially of our species.
Life not only informs art, but it also has a tendency to imitate it. With science-fiction especially, the line can become fluid. Technology has taken its inspiration from the natural world, as well as the worlds created in the minds of imaginative science-fiction writers and directors. Igor Sikorsky, the inventor of the helicopter, drew his inspiration from the Jules Verne novel Clipper of the Clouds. Known to quote Verne, he would often say, “Anything that one man can imagine, another man can make real.”
Congruous with this philosophy, there are a number of technological innovations that can be traced back to the mind of Arthur C. Clarke. Perhaps most notably, Clarke spoke of the advent of the personal computer two decades before it became a reality, predicting the Internet in the same interview without missing a beat.
The Internet and PC: While Mark Twain introduced the idea of a “Telectroscope” – a system of phones created to share information across a worldwide network – in his short 1904 story “From the London Times”, it was Clarke who saw that idea into the 21st century. In the above interview with Australian television in 1974, Clarke flaunted his knack for foreseeing the future, telling the journalist (his young son also present) that before the year 2001 they would both have their own personal computing consoles. Clarke says that for the boy, the computer will be much like the telephone, and he will eventually take it for granted and utilize it unthinkingly. The reporter also asked Clarke if he thought we would become too dependent on our computers. While he acknowledged the possibility, he was optimistic that these machines would do more to connect us to one another while simultaneously freeing us from the tethers of a normal routine. With a computer, he says in the interview, man no longer has to commute to work in an office. He can also find “all the information he needs for his everyday life: his bank statements, his theater reservations, all the information you need over the course of living in a complex modern society.”
Innovations in Medicine: In an interview with the BBC, Clarke went on the record about his ideas for the future of medicine. Saying that soon “we may have brain surgeons in Edinburgh operating on patients in New Zealand” he was envisioning the future of remote surgery. We have the ideas and technology to allow any skill, he said, to be made possible independent of distance. Today, surgeries carried out by doctors in remote locations are not routine, but they are most certainly possible.
Skype and iPads: In 2001: A Space Odyssey, Clarke’s prescience outdid itself, revealing numerous inventions that were truly ahead of their time. Star Wars creator George Lucas and Alien’s Ridley Scott both agreed that this film was the “ultimate” in science fiction. Using video conferencing booths that are ostensibly precursors to today’s Skype, astronauts communicate with people outside the spacecraft. A tech tool nearly identical to the iPad is used, and the in-flight entertainment on the shuttle, embedded into the headrests, gave viewers a peek into the future of travel. Funnily enough, in 2011 Samsung cited this scene as additional proof that their Galaxy tablet did not violate Apple’s design patent, and 2001’s prop constituted prior art for that iPad-related design patent.
Earth Satellite: With his characteristically lucid precision, Clarke published an article in Wireless World in 1945 titled “Extra-Terrestrial Relays: Can Rocket Stations Give World-Wide Radio Coverage?” In this article, he posited that communications around the world would one day be possible using a network of three geostationary satellites. It was the first publicly articulated vision of the technology that has revolutionized television, radio, and Internet communications. In 1963 NASA finally tested Clarke’s concept, successfully launching both geosynchronous and geostationary satellites almost twenty years after he initially predicted them.
Dive into any of Clarke’s works and be amazed by his prescience and scientific acumen – perhaps you too will be inspired by the mind of this great sci-fi writer and futurist.
Favorite short stories:
"The Nine Billion Names of God"
"The Star"
Favorite non-typical Clarke
_Tales_From_The_White_Hart_
Favorite tropes:
Seldon crisis
"Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent"
Posted by: joel hanes | October 24, 2014 at 09:24 PM
Wouldn't both of those tropes be Asimov's Foundation trilogy rather than Clarke?
Posted by: wj | October 24, 2014 at 09:50 PM
I am covered in shame.
Posted by: joel hanes | October 24, 2014 at 10:45 PM
If that's the worst mistake you've made this week, you are having an exceptionally good week! ;-)
Posted by: wj | October 24, 2014 at 11:40 PM
I am still surprised by how vividly I remember so many Arthur Clarke stories -- including the two Joel mentions as well as the Osmotic Bomb from the White Hart stories, and Rendezvous with Rama, which was one of the first stories that helped me understand how big the galaxy is, in both spatial and temporal terms.
Posted by: JakeB | October 25, 2014 at 01:31 AM
I am covered in shame.
But props for the Hari Seldon shout out.
(The acceptable face of Marxism ?)
Posted by: Nigel | October 25, 2014 at 05:08 AM
Rendezvous with Rama, what a wonderful reminiscence. Thanks for mentioning it. I tend toward Foundation and the Future History Stories, LeGuin and even Andre Norton because I love the concept of familiars. Clarkes works often come as an afterthought, but I love the reminder. And, even more than Seldon, Lazarus Long is an incredibly quotable character.
Posted by: Marty | October 25, 2014 at 08:17 AM
Yes, Heinlein's characters get quoted quite often.
Posted by: Slartibartfast | October 25, 2014 at 08:26 AM
This had me googling some stuff about 2001 that may be of interest
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/goings-on/clarke-kubrick-and-ligeti-a-tale
According to this, Martin Balsam was originally the voice of HAL.
I was struck by the Ridley Scott film, Prometheus, and how much the synthetic David sounded like HAL. This is an interesting take on HAL's orientation
Posted by: liberal japonicus | October 25, 2014 at 09:52 AM
Sadly, Kevin Drum at Mother Jones, has been diagnosed with multiple myeloma:
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2014/10/friday-cancer-blogging-24-october-2014
Posted by: Countme-In | October 25, 2014 at 11:24 AM
Hari Seldon ... The acceptable face of Marxism ?
Marx was good at diagnosing the ills of capitalism visible to him; he was truly awful at prediction on all time scales.
Are there any Marxists any more, any where in the world, who truly believe that history has laws like physics, and that dialectic takes a predictable course? I suspect not. Such a belief would be hard to hold, in the face of the complete failure of theory to predict outcomes. (When will the similar failure of US supply-side economic predictions [hello, Kansas!] similarly discourage it's quasi-religious adherents?)
Seldon's "laws" of psychohistory seem to me like Star Trek's warp drive: necessary to the plot, and unlikely ever to exist.
Back to Clarke: I mostly read his stuff back in the earliest sixties, a decade before Kubrick made 2001 out of "The Sentinel", and before the first _Rama_ was published. _A_Fall_Of_Moondust_, _Prelude_To_Space_, _The_Sands_of_Mars_, _Islands_In_The_Sky_, _Childhood's_End_. (I was buying cheap paperbacks off the drugstore rack with money from my paper route, and we were on our way to the moon, but hadn't gotten there yet.)
Other favorite SF from those days : Clifford Simak's stuff, Wyndham's Triffids, Sturgeon's _More_Than_Human_.
Posted by: joel hanes | October 25, 2014 at 03:30 PM
Asimov's and Heinlein's characters are quotable. But for good stories it is hard to beat James Schmitz. Demon Breed and the other Hub stories are hard to top.
Posted by: wj | October 25, 2014 at 06:05 PM
Much love for the Scmitz reference
Posted by: firefall | October 26, 2014 at 01:45 AM
joel hanes,
in your question: I do, in fact, believe that Seldon's laws are possible. Human beings react, statistically taken, in preditable ways to external stimuli. The problem is to find out all these laws and to measure reliably the initial state.
Classical economics, which was the ground that Marxism built on, is a failure because it is a too simple model. Men are not rational, and even when they are rational in a wider sense, they are not economically rational.
Non-classical economics, whose most vocal proponent is Paul Krugman, have done a lot to account for human irrationality.
Posted by: Lurker | October 27, 2014 at 02:18 PM
I think that, like weather and turbulence, the course of large-scale human interaction will prove to be impossible to predict even with very good information about initial conditions.
And the "external stimuli" are another problem. What kind of science could have made the detailed prediction that in late 2013 a child exposed to blood from a hammerhead bat would become infected with Ebola? And yet large consequences have flowed from that incident.
Obligatory relevant SF :
"A Sound Of Thunder", Ray Bradbury
http://www.lasalle.edu/~didio/courses/hon462/hon462_assets/sound_of_thunder.htm
Posted by: joel hanes | October 27, 2014 at 03:02 PM
joel,
I am familiar with the problems of chaotic systems. It is beyond doubt that any model of human society would have chaotic properties. Yet, chaotic systems are not unpredictable. They have typically a number of attractors that have large probabilities. Even if we cannot predict what an individual human does, it is well wihin bounds of possibility to estimate a rate of infections of African children from new strains of Ebola and to introduce this into a larger model.
In fact, this behaviour of chaotic systems was even known to Isaac Asimov whose speculation on psychohistory envisioned exactly a model like that. This is not surprising: Asimov was a competent physicist.
Posted by: Lurker | October 27, 2014 at 03:40 PM
Part of the problem with models to "predict human behavior" stems from a widespread lack of understanding of statistics. People think that, if a prediction isn't 100% accurate every time, the whole basis theory must be not just imperfect but wrong. That's why they are so caustic when, for example, an election race in which a model says a candidate has a 66% chance of winning, sees the candidate with 1 chance in 3 actually win. Not realizing that, if a model said 2 chances in 3, but that candidate always won, the model would be even more seriously flawed. Even though its prediction was, to the ignorant, "more accurate."
Agreed that you cannot predict with any certainty what an individual human being will do. But you can (and we routinely do today) predict what portion of a population will react in a particular way in response to specific stimuli. that, after all, is what advertising and politics are all about. Both, admittedly, are still more art than science in most cases. But they still work on the basis of "If I do X, I can get a lot of people to do Y."
Nor can you predict specific black-swan-type phenomena -- kind of by definition. But you can roughly estimate, based on past evidence, how often such a phenomena will typically occur. And make reasonable estimates of what masses of human beings will do in response to specific kinds of stimuli. So you can incorporate into your model things like "how will people react to a new plague, or the possibility of one" (however you want to define "plague").
It is perhaps noteworthy that two of the features of Asimov's psychohistory projections were that a) it was seriously weakened when it tried to calculate what specific individuals would do. And b) its calculations could get disrupted by a black swan (the Mule). Which indicates that it still had serious weaknesses overall -- hence the on-going work of the Second Foundation to refine the model.
Posted by: wj | October 27, 2014 at 04:00 PM
Agreed that you cannot predict with any certainty what an individual human being will do.
Show me any individual human being and I predict (with 100% certainty) there was a birth and there will be a death.
The stuff in between? Who the f*ck knows.
Posted by: bobbyp | October 27, 2014 at 10:15 PM
there was a birth and there will be a death.
Um. And taxes ?
It had to be said.
Posted by: joel hanes | October 28, 2014 at 02:43 AM
I seem to recall some years back someone asked a prominent science fiction writer (or was it Carl Sagan?): "What do you think is the life expectancy of a child born today?" To which the answer was: "I'm afraid it may be infinite."
So taxes are a safe prediction. But death may be a less safe one. At least at some point.
Posted by: wj | October 28, 2014 at 12:01 PM
Under "it had to be said" one should also add, for believers, the possibility of religious exemption(s) to the "100% certainty" of death. The fact that no one on ObWi has hitherto pointed this out is more an expression of our demographic or collective mindset than a guarantee of universally accepted truth.
Posted by: dr ngo | October 28, 2014 at 01:03 PM
I must disagree, Dr. All believers that I know of accept the fact of death; they just don't believe that death=extinction of the person.
Posted by: JakeB | October 28, 2014 at 04:22 PM
As an unbeliever, I was amused by this question posed by the mathematician John Allen Paulos in his book Innumeracy:
--TPPosted by: Tony P. | October 28, 2014 at 05:10 PM
JakeB: I know many believers whose creed includes the "translation" into heaven (without death) of Enoch and Elijah in the Old Testament and the future "rapture" of believers when Christ returns: "Then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with Him in the clouds . . ." In such a faith, death is NOT 100% certain. I'm not sure if there are equivalent beliefs in Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam, but I suspect there might be. Never Say Never.
Posted by: dr ngo | October 28, 2014 at 06:27 PM
Nevar!!
You're right, I totes forgot about the Rapture.
As it happens, I recall Sam Harris using the fusiform gyrus (may possibly be the wrong brain structure, as I read End of Faith more than 10 years ago) as an example of why the whole idea of being with your loved ones in heaven didn't make sense: you can't recognize faces without a functioning fusiform gyrus, so how can you, as a spirit being, recognize one bit of heavenly ectoplasm as being different from the next? But if you were bodily translated, you escape all those problems.
Posted by: JakeB | October 29, 2014 at 01:20 AM
Yes, but the Rapture only takes people directly into Heaven that are alive at the time. Those people who are dead and in the ground are, obviously and trivially, dead.
Elijah ascended directly as kind of a reward for services rendered. I think it's kind of unreasonable to suppose that for me, that will happen. I tend not to take much as a given, in terms of transition to the afterlife.
Even Jesus died. He had to. People who count on not dying are...well...perhaps self-assuring to an excess.
Obviously I am a Christian. I just try to be humble about it, for one because that's part of being a Christian: that you are saved through no doing of your own.
Posted by: Slartibartfast | October 29, 2014 at 10:13 AM
Muslims would object to the claim that Jesus died (as did (do?) some heretic Christian groups). According to them it was either a dummy or an identical twin that got nailed to the cross while the real Jesus got spared that fate.
For Biblical literalists there have to be some immortals around since Jesus claimed that some alive at the time of his resurrection would 'not taste death' before his second coming. Since most people believe that the second coming has not yet taken place and the resurrection is now almost two millenia ago, some guys must be quite old by now. I assume HE was not just referring to the Eternal Jew ;-)
Posted by: Hartmut | October 30, 2014 at 01:28 AM