This is the text of my keynote speech at the 34th Chaos Communication Congress in Leipzig, December As a working science fiction novelist, I take a professional interest in how we get predictions about the future wrong, and why, so that I can avoid repeating the same mistakes. Science fiction is written by people embedded within a society with expectations and political assumptions that bias us towards looking at the shiny surface of new technologies rather than asking how human beings will use them, and to taking narratives of progress at face value rather than asking what hidden agenda they serve.
In this talk, author Charles Stross will give a rambling, discursive, and angry tour of what went wrong with the 21st century, why we didn't see it coming, where we can expect it to go next, and a few suggestions for what to do about it if we don't like it.
Good morning. I'm Charlie Stross, and it's my job to tell lies for money. Or rather, I write science fiction, much of it about our near future, which has in recent years become ridiculously hard to predict.
Our species, Homo Sapiens Sapiens, is roughly three hundred thousand years old. Recent discoveries pushed back the date of our earliest remains that far, we may be even older. For all but the last three centuries of that span, predicting the future was easy: natural disasters aside, everyday life in fifty years time would resemble everyday life fifty years ago.
Let that sink in for a moment: for Then something happened, and the future began to change, increasingly rapidly, until we get to the present day when things are moving so fast that it's barely possible to anticipate trends from month to month. As an eminent computer scientist once remarked, computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about building telescopes.
