Truth is, I suspect an awful lot of science fiction that is touted as \u201ctraditional\u201d and \u201cthe way it ought to be\u201d is mostly about some white guy solving all the problems with a well-timed punch to the villain\u2019s chin.<\/p>\n
Still, there were a lot of stories from the 1950s and 60s that either focused on or mentioned amazing tech, especially computers. Now most of us are carrying around that tech in our pockets.<\/p>\n
These days, a story about a fancy new technology is more likely to show up on the business pages than in an SF\/F mag.<\/p>\n
Where we need to deal with tech in SF\/F today, particularly in near-future stuff, is how we incorporate it into our society in a reasonable way. That is, we need tech tempered by economics, sociology, history, philosophy. Inventing new things is nice, but figuring out how to live with them is crucial. <\/p>\n
Take for example the issues that keep coming up with the algorithms that underlie so much of our current technology. They\u2019re supposed to be neutral, but they rarely are. And they\u2019re being used regularly.<\/p>\n
We have predictive policing and algorithms that look at sentencing. Yet these methods are rarely transparent, often due to trade secret rules, and difficult to challenge. It\u2019s easy to see that an individual made a racist decision, but much harder to tell if an algorithm did.<\/p>\n
Facial recognition systems are over-trained on white men, making them less effective for people of color and women in general.<\/p>\n
On a more mundane note, our computer technology has been set up so that we have to adapt to the way the person who developed the program (or the algorithm they incorporated in it) wants us to do things, rather than being able to change it to the way we\u2019d like to work.<\/p>\n
I know a lot of writers who mourn the loss of Word Perfect or figure out a way to keep using it because they don\u2019t like the set up of MS-Word. That\u2019s one example.<\/p>\n
There are those who use Linux because open source gives them more control, but the control is dependent on how much you understand about systems. Most of us want something simple that we can easily understand and modify.<\/p>\n
Apple wants something so streamlined that we are tied completely to its system. I\u2019m a Mac user \u2014 no way I\u2019m going back to Windows \u2014 but I don\u2019t like being forced into their idea of the best way to do things.<\/p>\n
![\"Network](\"https:\/\/www.marthawells.com\/networkeffect250.jpg\")
<\/a>I want to understand what\u2019s going on and set things up so they work for me. Instead, I keep having to download an app or a program without having a good idea about what it really does.<\/p>\n