Hieroglyph (3 page)

What if that person in the corner hadn't been able to do a Google search? It might have required weeks of library research to uncover evidence that the idea wasn't entirely new—and after a long and toilsome slog through many books, tracking down many references, some relevant, some not. When the precedent was finally unearthed, it might not have seemed like such a direct precedent after all. There might be reasons why it would be worth taking a second crack at the idea, perhaps hybridizing it with innovations from other fields. Hence the virtues of Galapagan isolation.

The counterpart to Galapagan isolation is the struggle for survival on a large continent, where firmly established ecosystems tend to blur and swamp new adaptations. Jaron Lanier, a computer scientist, composer, visual artist, and author of the book
You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto,
has some insights about the unintended consequences of the Internet—the informational equivalent of a large continent—on our ability to take risks. In the pre-Net era, managers were forced to make decisions based on what they knew to be limited information. Today, by contrast, data flows to managers in real time from countless sources that could not even be imagined a couple of generations ago, and powerful computers process, organize, and display the data in ways that are as far beyond the hand-drawn graph-paper plots of my youth as modern video games are to tic-tac-toe. In a world where decision makers are so close to being omniscient, it's easy to see risk as a quaint artifact of a primitive and dangerous past.

The illusion of eliminating uncertainty from corporate decision making is not merely a question of management style or personal preference. In the legal environment that has developed around publicly traded corporations, managers are strongly discouraged from shouldering any risks that they know about—or, in the opinion of some future jury, should have known about—even if they have a hunch that the gamble might pay off in the long run. There is no such thing as “long run” in industries driven by the next quarterly report. The possibility of some innovation making money is just that—a mere possibility that will not have time to materialize before the subpoenas from minority shareholder lawsuits begin to roll in.

Today's belief in ineluctable certainty is the true innovation killer of our age. In this environment, the best an audacious manager can do is to develop small improvements to existing systems—climbing the hill, as it were, toward a local maximum, trimming fat, eking out the occasional tiny innovation—like city planners painting bicycle lanes on the streets as a gesture toward solving our energy problems. Any strategy that involves crossing a valley—accepting short-term losses to reach a higher hill in the distance—will soon be brought to a halt by the demands of a system that celebrates short-term gains and tolerates stagnation, but condemns anything else as failure. In short, a world where big stuff can never get done.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THE EDITORS WISH TO
thank the many people who made this book and Project Hieroglyph possible. Many of the people we name here will be named again several times below because of the many roles they served in building and supporting this big idea. First, we'd like to acknowledge Neal Stephenson for founding Project Hieroglyph and President Michael Crow for bringing the Center for Science and the Imagination to life at Arizona State University (ASU).

On behalf of the Center for Science and the Imagination, we thank Kimberly de los Santos for shepherding the idea in its nascent early stages; Safwat Saleem and Joshua Gallagher for establishing Project Hieroglyph's early style; Art Lee, Jim O'Brien, and Karen Liepmann for sage counsel; and Lauren Pedersen, Elizabeth Vegh, and Wesley de la Rosa for their good humor, can-do attitudes, and the many hours they have contributed to making Project Hieroglyph and the center as creative and vibrant as they are today. We wish to specially acknowledge Jennifer Apple, volunteer editor extraordinaire; Chelsea Courtney, business operations specialist and operational wizard; Nina Miller, the tremendously creative designer and architect of the current Project Hieroglyph platform; and Joey Eschrich, a tireless and talented editor, promoter, enthusiast, manager, field marshal, ghostbuster, and majority whip for Project Hieroglyph and the center. For the launch of Project Hieroglyph we thank Jeremy Bornstein, Gary McCoy, Karen Laur, Zoe Glynn, and all those at Subutai Corporation and Brainstem Media for their hard work on the first iterations of the Hieroglyph platform, as well as Jim Karkanias, Stewart Brand, Esther Dyson, and the many others who provided key pieces of advice and support during Project Hieroglyph's early days.

As editors we also wish to acknowledge the wit, warmth, and unflagging support of Jennifer Brehl and the entire team at HarperCollins, as well as Michele Mortimer and the charming Liz Darhansoff, of Darhansoff and Verril Literary Agents, who acted as agent for the project, negotiating the complex contract on behalf of ASU.

Ed Finn would like to thank all those at ASU who have made the center's existence not merely possible but a thrilling adventure for their support, their good advice, and their intellectual generosity, especially those who might grant him tenure one day. He'd especially like to thank Michael Crow for letting him just make stuff up and then try it as a job description and Kimberly de los Santos for hiring someone who is, by many objective measures, pretty weird. He is eternally grateful to Anna and Nora for giving him new reasons for optimism every single day.

Kathryn Cramer thanks Neal Stephenson and Ed Finn for the opportunity to work on
Hieroglyph
, Edward Cornell for his support and encouragement, Gregory Benford for conversation and advice, and David Hartwell for suggesting to Neal Stephenson that she might be right for this project.

INTRODUCTION:
A BLUEPRINT FOR BETTER DREAMS

Ed Finn and Kathryn Cramer

WELCOME TO PROJECT HIEROGLYPH,
founded by Neal Stephenson and produced by Arizona State University's Center for Science and the Imagination. Our purpose here is to rekindle grand technological ambitions through the power of storytelling. Audacious projects like the Great Pyramids, the Hoover Dam, or a moon landing didn't just happen by accident. Someone had to imagine them and create a narrative that brought that vision to life for others. They are dreams that became real not because they were easy, but because they were hard. The editors firmly believe that if we want to create a better future, we need to start with better dreams. Big dreams—infectious, inclusive, optimistic dreams—are the vital first step to catalyzing real change in the world. As it turns out, sometimes that dreamer is a writer of fiction, often science fiction.

It all started in 2011. Neal Stephenson was on a panel called Future Tense with ASU's president, Michael Crow. Stephenson had recently published “Innovation Starvation,” his preface to this volume, and onstage he was talking about how dystopian our visions of the future are, and how we seem to have lost sight of our ability to think and do “big stuff”: the Apollo program, national infrastructure projects, and the microchip, for example. Crow responded that maybe it's the science fiction writers who are letting us down by failing to conjure up grand, ambitious futures that will inspire us to get out there and make them real. The two began to discuss how we might get science fiction writers actively involved in shaping the future in a persistent, organized way.

That conversation launched both the Center for Science and the Imagination and Project Hieroglyph, two initiatives with a shared goal: get people thinking creatively and ambitiously about the future. We see this mission as having two interlocking halves. First, we need to share a broader sense of agency about the future. It's not something people in white coats are cooking up in a lab somewhere. Whether we consciously accept it or not, we are all making choices that shape the future we are creating together. Second, we need to become more comfortable with the tools we have for envisioning that future. The university is a particularly good place to see that imagination is the key to moving forward in every discipline, even though the language of professionalism in many of them forbids or discourages unorthodox thinking. So it is our hope that the center, founded and directed by Ed Finn, becomes a vehicle for radical thought experiments, odd conversations, and mind-blowing prototypes and, most important, a venue in which anyone can take intellectual risks.

If the center is the mission control system, Project Hieroglyph is the spacecraft: our first effort to explore the ragged edge of human knowledge and potential. Stephenson assembled a small group of fellow writers interested in taking on the challenge. He also recruited Kathryn Cramer, who has edited
Year's Best Science Fiction
annuals for a decade and who has expertise in hard science fiction. She joined Finn as coeditor and together, we broadened the group to the mix of writers in the current volume. We sought a diverse group with a mix of stylistic, political, and technological viewpoints, including several celebrated science fiction authors who have been writing this kind of technically grounded, optimistic, near-future fiction for years. Project Hieroglyph also leverages an incredible network of people ranging from undergraduates to leading technologists, scientists, and visionaries who are ready to think seriously, and boldly, about the futures we want to realize.

While this network includes scientists and engineers working on very real stuff, our brand of imagination does not reject or edge away from its origins in science fiction. Rather we embrace the power of what science and technology writer Clive Thompson calls the “last great literature of ideas” to open new doors, to ask difficult questions, and to inspire. A good science fiction story can share an iconic vision with millions of people. Isaac Asimov's robots, Robert Heinlein's rocket ships, and William Gibson's cyberspace shaped not just real technologies but the whole cultural frame around them. Such science fiction stories created a kind of indelible symbol, a hieroglyphic imprint that has endured in popular imagination. This variety and range of approaches is crucial to breaking the mold of the status quo future and exploring the full spectrum of possibility for our species in the next few generations.

To explore those possibilities, Project Hieroglyph connects writers with scientists and engineers so they can identify compelling new “moonshot ideas.” A moonshot idea is the intersection of a huge problem, a radical solution, and a breakthrough discovery that makes the solution possible now or in the near future. Our challenge to the Hieroglyph community is to develop ideas that could be realized within one professional lifetime and implement technologies that exist today or will exist in the near future. No magic wands, hyperspace drives, or galaxies far, far away—just big ideas about how the world could be very different with a few small adjustments.

The project's home at the center puts the resources of a world-class, ambitiously experimental research university behind our work. While it is not new for science fiction writers to consult scientists—and a number of science fiction writers are themselves scientists—this is the first time that we know of that a university has aggressively recruited its faculty members to further the project of visionary science fiction.

Writers, researchers, and others are talking online, in person, and on the phone, creating a rich feedback loop between science and storytelling. The living, beating heart of Project Hieroglyph is this extended community, and the set of conversations, brainstorms, and debates that shaped the stories in this book.

Science fiction has always been an idea-driven literature that inspires people to become scientists and engineers. And a major part of the job of being a science fiction writer is coming up with ideas good enough, or entertaining enough, to allow for the willing suspension of disbelief, inviting a group of readers in to share the dream. Our key task as editors has been to cultivate stories that would take this further, shepherding ecosystems of interest and innovation around radical ideas. We hope that framing these challenges in an exciting, accessible way will spark some real solutions.

One of the pleasures in this project has been to see several of our science fictions preempted by real research, such as funding for moon printers (NASA and the European Space Agency) and plans for the use of commercial drones (Amazon, among others). Additionally, the collaborations involved in the creation of these stories have launched new avenues of research: for example, Stephenson's Tall Tower raises research questions about wind patterns and electrical activity in the upper atmosphere. In years to come, we aim to continue troubling the boundary between fiction and serious research by seed funding scientific investigations, recruiting more collaborators to the Project Hieroglyph community, and refining our hybrid process for prototyping dreams.

In a traditional anthology, we'd spend a few paragraphs summarizing the general run of stories in the book. Instead we suggest you browse the author notes, commentary, and further reading we have curated for each story on the Project Hieroglyph site (hieroglyph.asu.edu). There you will discover the collaborations, conversations, and technical research authors conducted to create their stories. The problems they tackle range from standbys like interstellar travel to more earthly challenges such as climate change and social justice. (What happens when we treat social injustice not as a symptom of technological innovation, but rather ask how social structures themselves could be radically improved?) In many of these thought experiments, some form of empathy is a key element to the solution of large-scale technological problems. Fiction is a sandbox not just for the future, but for understanding one another. Big problems can be solved only when we work together.

These stories are not the end of our project, but the beginning. This is a sketchbook for the future, with ideas we hope will leap off the page and into real life. This collection of thought experiments, pointed questions, and napkin proofs is backed by research in fields from neuroscience to robotics, from behavioral science to structural engineering. We hope this volume reflects our ambitions. Following the trails blazed here back to the Project Hieroglyph site will lead you to new ideas, technical research, interviews, illustrations, and vibrant discussions. And better dreams.