Kelly and Zach Weinersmith’s Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That’ll Improve and/or Ruin Everything
is an exceptional science book: it concerns itself with ten(ish) coming
technologies that hold enormous, potentially world-changing promise
(and peril), and it delves into each of those subjects with admirable
depth, including all the caveats and unknowns, and still keeps the excitement intact.
The thing is that emerging technologies are messy. For example, CRISPR
isn’t really a “gene editing” tool (not in the way that, say, Potatoshop
is an “image-editing” tool), and the things it’ll let us do are weird
and complicated and there’s going to be some amazing twists and turns
long before CRISPR is being used to do the kinds of things that are easy
to describe to people who don’t know much about genetics or molecular
biology (like me, say).
But at the same time, CRISPR isn’t boring. It’s unlikely to
fizzle out into a giant nothingburger. Whatever happens to CRISPR, in
twenty or thirty years, we’ll probably look back and say things like
“Holy moly, the world’s sure changed since CRISPR came along!”
There’s a way of talking about science that goes “CRISPR IS AMAZING AND
WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING TOMORROW!” and another one that goes, “Well,
actually, you’ll find that it’s more complicated than that, ahem ahem,”
and is so concerned with the evils of “hype” that it turns everything it
touches into a boring pile of caveats and footnotes that makes it seem
like nothing much at all.
Together, they have a writing style that carves a third way that is
neither breathless and sloppy nor dull and overly complicated. They
cover a ton of ground: “Topics covered include cheap access to
space, asteroid mining, fusion power, programmable matter (woah, yeah
this is mind blowing), robotic construction, augmented reality,
synthetic biology (I knew absolutely nothing in the section, I read it
three times), precision medicine, bioprinting and brain-computer
interfaces. Then there is a section of topics that were considered and
rejected.”
In each chapter, the Weinersmiths deliver an enormous amount of detail,
interviewing wide-ranging panels of experts (these technologies tend to
cross lots of disciplines) and they’re scrupulous about pointing out the
limits of the technology and its application, but it’s always a
balance, and never a countersink, to the intrinsic excitement of these
amazing tools and ideas that are emerging from labs today.
It helps, of course, that they’re both very funny and that the material is greatly enlivened by Zach Weinersmith’s cartoons.
The technologies the Weinersmiths give such excellent treatment to are
nearly here. New applications for them show up in the news every day.
Between the press-releases and the puritanical, nothing-to-see-here
explainers is Soonish, an essential guide that refuses to be a killjoy or a cheerleader.
“All imagined futures lacking recognition of anthropogenic climate change will increasingly seem absurdly shortsighted. Virtually the entire genre will be seen to have utterly missed the single most important thing we were doing with technology.” -William Gibson
man scientists really sound like the kind of people who should set normative social conventions huh
Listen but if you lived that close to the South Pole and eternal darkness was a legitimate thing you experienced fall through winter you’d go a little nuts too
Y'all just mad cause antarctic scientists fuck more than you
I’ve spent time in Chile at the ALMA observatory which is kinda isolated in the desert and let me say there was mad fuckin. Scientists fuck man.
Scientists fuck and will continue to fuck until we stop them.
Go far enough north and you get the same effect. Depression because of the lack of sunlight is also a thing
New fanfic trope: we met during six months of darkness at the Antarctica station
