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World Building is Fun (Part 1: Internal Personal Technologies)

5/30/2015

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This is the first of a series (hence the "part one") of various elements within the different worlds I've created, am working on, or will be working on. Like Tolkien and his Silmarillion, creating a solid mythology or technological hierarchy is crucial for a believable world in which your characters live. 

So let's get to it. 

Today's episode is about the development and acceptance of technological components within the body, a huge "ick factor" for a lot of people today, and a hurdle many people can't imaging getting over. 
History of Internal Personal Technology (IPT)

IPT began in the mid 2000's.

Body artists and Trans-humanists pushed the limits of this concept by inserting magnets, RFID chips, and other simple chip sets coated with sterile medical grade plastics into the sub-dermal layers of their skin in order to “feel” electromagnetic fields or gain access to wireless key entries with the wave of a hand.

It was exciting and edgy for this tiny fraction of society, but the majority of the populous remained skeptical, even creeped out by the concept. This perception continued for several additional years until the year 2021. This was the year the medical technology firm Heliomedic commercially released a refined gastrointestinal filtration system intended to help individuals with Inflammatory Bowel Disease called the HX-1 (Heliomedic Extraction System version 1.) The system was profoundly reliable, scalable, and above all, inexpensive.

The FDA trials before the release had created a media storm over the product. Not only did it do what it advertised, those who tested the HX-1 system reported increased vitality and multiple regenerative side-effects. It was touted as the technological fountain of youth.

History's first commercially viable IPT device was a screaming success. Within the first three years, every US health insurance company included the HX line of internal filters in their top tier coverage as a preventative care measure. After only five years and a handful of refinements, over fifty percent of movie stars, politicians and any random millionaire had undergone the outpatient procedure.

Public opinion had changed. A machine brought into one's body was no longer aberrant, it was the norm.

So by the year 2029, when Dr. Shannon Baker, a professor of neuroscience from Caltech, lead a cross-disciplinary team to develop, then patent, the first addition coil, it was greeted with an enthusiastic reception. An elegant device which could wrap around any of the cerebral nerve bundles and intercept, record, or augment the signal passing through.

Finally, the ability to view files without enhanced contacts, listen to music or conversations without ear plants, even smell across the nextnet without clunky atomizers. All delivered by a simple out-patient procedure... and a lot of money.
Future history. Fun, right?
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My Obsession with the Technological Singularity

5/25/2015

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In my approach to writing science fiction (or any fiction for that matter), I love the process of world building: the act of sorting out the basic rules of a story, the laws of magic or the progression of tech, putting them all in their place, and then figuring out where it leads. I know that sounds miserable to some, but for me it's tremendous fun.

In science fiction, there is a tendency to glom onto one advancement or other, then extrapolate the implications to a final conclusion. But if you try to actually take everything into account, and predict where we'll be in a hundred years, modern writers inevitably run into the brick wall of the singularity.

Depending on who you ask, the Singularity will happen within next ten years (no it won't), fifty years (a bit more likely), or two hundred years (only if we plateau soon). And then most people will simply say, "The what-now?"

To put it simply, the Technological Singularity was first proposed by mathematician John von Neumann in 1958 as the event where machines become smart enough to improve themselves at an exponential rate, creating an intelligence explosion that changes the face of humanity. It's called the Singularity, because like a physical singularity (a black hole) all of the rules as we know them fall apart.

That said, the idea has evolved somewhat over the last 60 years. Ray Kurzweil has helped both popularize and expand the concept into being a more holistic event where humanity will transcend into a new kind of being. 

This of course has it's detractors, and has to led quite a few scientists calling it the "Futurist's new religion."

However, one of the most convincing pieces of evidence is one like this: 
Picture
You can find a silly number of graphs like this one online, but they all show basically the same thing. We are advancing at an exponential rate.

That aside, I think one of my favorite personal anecdotal pieces of evidence was from shortly after I'd written Shakespeare's Choice, in which I predicted the Singularity would take place in 2054. I'd presented the story to two of my research biologist friends, and afterwards, the one looked at me and said, "I don't buy it. It isn't going to happen anytime soon, because science has to be preformed by scientists. It takes long hours and years of patience to make a discovery, and this is just too fast."

We agreed to disagree, but no more than six months later, I listened to a science podcast in which a different researcher was discussing his findings. His team had found a protein that did something or other, and was statistically significant in performing in some kind of biological process. The actual discovery wasn't what made me smile. It was the fact that they had made the discovery by a new process in DNA sequencing that allowed them to analyze over forty thousands samples of their protein within the same amount of time it had taken them to analyze only one sample the year before.

What my friend failed to take into account was the multidisciplinary nature of the world we're moving toward. 

And it'll only move faster.

I'm obsessed about the Technological Singularity, because I couldn't write a believable Science Fiction world with out it.  
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First sentence of the first paragraph

5/23/2015

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Right...

One day in, and I think I like this social media thing even less. 

But I have to imagine its like everything else, you don't know what you don't know. And that's not at all like saying "it is what it is," because "it is what it is," is thoroughly redundant. Where as "you don't know what you don't know," can be broken down to literally mean, "being unaware of the extent of the absence of information you currently lack." It means you don't know what questions to ask about what topics. It means, as you delve face first into a new challenge, unless luck is a serious bed-buddy, you are not going to get it right the first time.

Hopefully, unlike plumbing which I still hate with a passion, social media will get easier.

As it is, I'll try to find some juicy science fact for my next post.
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The Start of a New Chapter

5/22/2015

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Hi. 

For being a fan of science, science fiction, gadgets, (almost all things electrical, for that matter) and that I Love to write, I find it somewhat hilarious that I'm one of the most resistant people I know toward becoming a part of social media. 

But this is what it means to be a writer today. One must embrace the medium and engage in the never ending slog of self promotion, and that means making a presence in as many ways possible. It's a fact that I've spent years resenting, but here I go.

So far, I don't think I'm doing right. Bitching at the world isn't really the point of a blog... Okay, maybe that is the point for most people, but my overall intent for this one is to be a place to put out ideas about scientific discovery, human interaction and ingenuity, geeky shit, and stuff that makes me smile or laugh, And I promise, I'll try to keep the vitriol to a minimum.

So, for everyone out there. Welcome to my very own blog.


... I still don't think I'm doing it right.
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    Nathan's Mindspace

    This is the page about stuff I'm working on, tidbits that caught my interest, or just random blathering about nothing at all.

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