This article from Ars Technica talks about the personally-identifying information available in large corporate databases, the efforts these corporations make to conceal identities when they do share their (incredibly valuable) datasets to researchers, and the ineffectiveness of those efforts.
The article ends with a call-to-arms for legislation to handle these things, and preserve privacy, which seems to me like a strange cap on an article all about the futility of such efforts. People cling to that old idea, though.
Anyway, the part I find most fascinating (and the real focus of the article) is the remarkably simple process of correlating readily available information from vastly different datasets to create a useful connection. That's fundamental to Hathor, but for my novels I posited an imaginary, universal database architecture to make it happen. Turns out you can match spreadsheets against text lists and get the same effect today. That's impressive.
Showing posts with label Gods Tomorrow. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gods Tomorrow. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
Monday, July 27, 2009
Further Reading: Ghost Targets
Via Digg, just read this article from the New York Times concerning the terrifying future of AI.
What threw me is the focus on lost jobs to robots. I can certainly understand an individual worrying about losing his job (especially if he's old, and it's a highly specialized job, and that's all he knows how to do), but what's the point of a society doing so?
This is something I've thought about a lot for the Ghost Targets series. In the books, I make casual reference to the twenty-hour work week, but the direction of the series is toward less and less, and that seems to me like the direction of the future, anyway. We develop better and better technology so that we can get more results from less effort. Ultimately, that should mean more and more free time. Ultimately, that should mean lives of leisure for most of the populace.
I realize that the people who lose jobs to robots won't be the CEOs and magnates of industry, but the poor and the scrabbling. Actually, that's been going on for most of a century now. I assume the concern of the scientists in this article is that it'll reach up into the middle class, too. But let's say that happens, let's say a significant portion of the lower and middle class are unemployed now, because their efforts aren't needed to make the things the corporations want to sell....
Those corporations still have to sell the things. With the help of computers they can make the things for cheaper (else why fire the people?), and the now the people in aggregate have less money to spend, so the things can and must cost less. You divide what work people are needed for across a much larger pool of available employees, and so the time-worked-per-person-per-day drops. You can inflate currency so people get paid the same for a twenty-hour work week, or you can drop prices of goods so that all these people getting paid half wages can still afford to buy them. Either way, people are working half as much and enjoying the exact same standard of living.
We did this already, when we went from an agrarian society to an industrialized one, and then (to a lesser extent) when our production went from manufacturing- to service-based. Employ machines to increase leisure. It's why we made plows, it's why we made assembly lines, and it's why we made the assembly language. When I'm sitting at home and write a Python script to rename a bunch of computer files for me (a boring task) so that I can spend that time playing a video game, that's the point of it. We'll do that on a large scale, and next thing you know half of the world is entertainers, and the other half is audience, and everything else is an afterthought.
What threw me is the focus on lost jobs to robots. I can certainly understand an individual worrying about losing his job (especially if he's old, and it's a highly specialized job, and that's all he knows how to do), but what's the point of a society doing so?
This is something I've thought about a lot for the Ghost Targets series. In the books, I make casual reference to the twenty-hour work week, but the direction of the series is toward less and less, and that seems to me like the direction of the future, anyway. We develop better and better technology so that we can get more results from less effort. Ultimately, that should mean more and more free time. Ultimately, that should mean lives of leisure for most of the populace.
I realize that the people who lose jobs to robots won't be the CEOs and magnates of industry, but the poor and the scrabbling. Actually, that's been going on for most of a century now. I assume the concern of the scientists in this article is that it'll reach up into the middle class, too. But let's say that happens, let's say a significant portion of the lower and middle class are unemployed now, because their efforts aren't needed to make the things the corporations want to sell....
Those corporations still have to sell the things. With the help of computers they can make the things for cheaper (else why fire the people?), and the now the people in aggregate have less money to spend, so the things can and must cost less. You divide what work people are needed for across a much larger pool of available employees, and so the time-worked-per-person-per-day drops. You can inflate currency so people get paid the same for a twenty-hour work week, or you can drop prices of goods so that all these people getting paid half wages can still afford to buy them. Either way, people are working half as much and enjoying the exact same standard of living.
We did this already, when we went from an agrarian society to an industrialized one, and then (to a lesser extent) when our production went from manufacturing- to service-based. Employ machines to increase leisure. It's why we made plows, it's why we made assembly lines, and it's why we made the assembly language. When I'm sitting at home and write a Python script to rename a bunch of computer files for me (a boring task) so that I can spend that time playing a video game, that's the point of it. We'll do that on a large scale, and next thing you know half of the world is entertainers, and the other half is audience, and everything else is an afterthought.
Thursday, July 9, 2009
Further Reading: Gods Tomorrow
Yesterday I submitted Gods Tomorrow with this as its introductory description of the book:
Gods Tomorrow is a 60,000-word sci-fi thriller set in a near-future where people have traded the concept of privacy for the convenience of total information awareness. It's like 1984, but happy.Then today I was reading through Courtney's old blog posts and came across a link to this article, which puts forth the argument that justifies my "but happy." I recommend it. Especially for D--.
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Further Reading: Gods Tomorrow
This is the transcript of a keynote speech in which an IT guy gives his prediction of the near future.
He's got handhelds (and, essentially, Hathor) fully functional by 2030, and really doesn't consider that a very significant thing. He also throws some funky glasses into the mix, which might make their way into my novels, but probably not.
I've known all along that people shouldn't have to look at their handhelds to get visual data, but there's no way to describe everybody walking around with visors that sounds cool to people who live in a world without them. In other words, I set aside the reality of the situation for the sake of the movie adaptation.
He's got handhelds (and, essentially, Hathor) fully functional by 2030, and really doesn't consider that a very significant thing. He also throws some funky glasses into the mix, which might make their way into my novels, but probably not.
I've known all along that people shouldn't have to look at their handhelds to get visual data, but there's no way to describe everybody walking around with visors that sounds cool to people who live in a world without them. In other words, I set aside the reality of the situation for the sake of the movie adaptation.
Monday, April 13, 2009
Further Reading: Gods Tomorrow
Ray Kurzweil is a futurist with an impressive track record. In this interview, he talks about the future of travel and discusses some specific timelines for some pretty cool technologies.
A lot of it is stuff I've thought about for my sequel to the Ghost Targets series, Gods Before Men, but his timeline actually puts the techonology in place prior to Gods Tomorrow, which could invalidate a lot of the cool stuff going on in my series.
I'm not going to go changing anything yet, but it's still cool to see the sort of predictions getting thrown out there.
A lot of it is stuff I've thought about for my sequel to the Ghost Targets series, Gods Before Men, but his timeline actually puts the techonology in place prior to Gods Tomorrow, which could invalidate a lot of the cool stuff going on in my series.
I'm not going to go changing anything yet, but it's still cool to see the sort of predictions getting thrown out there.
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Further Reading: Gods Tomorrow
Hunch initially struck me as something very similar to the database services in Gods Tomorrow, but as I read more, I'm not so sure.
It's essentially a search engine (or maybe something more like Yahoo! Answers), where you ask a question specific to you (like "Who should I vote for?") and it asks you a series of related, more concrete questions that should be easy for you to answer, then proposes a customized answer to your general question.
That's essentially what I assume the database services are doing constantly, only instead of asking you questions, they would be crawling through your recorded history finding the answers from your past actions and decisions.
It's essentially a search engine (or maybe something more like Yahoo! Answers), where you ask a question specific to you (like "Who should I vote for?") and it asks you a series of related, more concrete questions that should be easy for you to answer, then proposes a customized answer to your general question.
That's essentially what I assume the database services are doing constantly, only instead of asking you questions, they would be crawling through your recorded history finding the answers from your past actions and decisions.
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Further Reading: Gods Tomorrow
Back when I was first writing Gods Tomorrow I came across an Ars Technica book review for a couple books about the people collect data about us today, and they way they're going to use that data to shape our future. Obviously, that's a direct predecessor of the Hathor in my story, so it caught my interest. I ended up ordering both books through Amazon.
Last night, I cracked open the first of them, The Numerati by Steve Baker. It's amazing. He's a journalist and this book is the result of his dedicated research into several fields that are trying to generate predictive mathematical models of real people (specifically, us). He presents it as a relatively casual narrative to a general audience, though (again, us).
I strongly recommend it to anyone interested in the themes that inspired the Gods Tomorrow future. It's fascinating, and probably incredibly useful information for all of us going forward.
Last night, I cracked open the first of them, The Numerati by Steve Baker. It's amazing. He's a journalist and this book is the result of his dedicated research into several fields that are trying to generate predictive mathematical models of real people (specifically, us). He presents it as a relatively casual narrative to a general audience, though (again, us).
I strongly recommend it to anyone interested in the themes that inspired the Gods Tomorrow future. It's fascinating, and probably incredibly useful information for all of us going forward.
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
Project Report: Gods Tomorrow
On Tuesday of last week, I completed my first major rewrite of Gods Tomorrow.
I finished the novel back in November, and immediately knew that there were some key elements that I needed to change. Chief among them was the prominence of Katie's boyfriend Marshall in chapters 2-4 (he then disappears altogether for the rest of the book).
As I considered my options for tweaking that relationship, one obvious option that leapt out to me was to replace her conversations with Marshall with conversations with her dad. He does play a major role through the rest of the novel, albeit as a historical reference rather than an actual actor in the plot. Ultimately I decided to use voicemail recordings to her father that she uses in the form of a diary, rather than actual conversations. For reasons that the reader can only guess at, her father never actually takes any of the calls, which changed the tenor of those scenes from the brief bright spots in the early part of the book (where her boyfriend cheers her up after a frustrating day at the office) to a pitiful showcase of Katie's loneliness in her new life.
I offset that a bit by toning down the "new girl" feel of the first few chapters -- one of few complaints that I'd consistently gotten from my test readers. Actually, most of them suggested that I had done a good job of making Katie likeable by showing her vulnerability, but that eventually the book hit a sort of, "Get on with it!" level, where the character flaw was clearly established and I was just beating a dead horse.
I mostly addressed that issue by going through the relevant chapters and doing what I could to get the narrative out of Katie's head (something I'm constantly encouraging my sisters and Dad to do as I critique their stories). I showed enough of her insecurity through her actions, without beating the reader over the head with her internal responses. At least, that was my goal. The one test reader who has seen the new version said it came across well (but he had never seen the first draft).
I also significantly expanded the chapter in Little Rock, in which Katie practices traditional police work (which is essentially her role in the story, while those around her are more versed in high technology). My initial outline for the novel required exactly the sort of scenes that I added, but when I got to that point in the first draft I was ahead of my word count projection and felt like the story flowed more organically by skipping ahead to her meeting with Martin.
In the rewrite, I went ahead and incorporated the scenes I'd planned from the start, and I think they not only help establish Katie's character strongly enough to better carry her through the muted scenes that follow, but also significantly improve the introduction of Martin's character over the rough draft version (which was basically just a repeat of the introduction of Ghoster, which was disappointing to several test readers, myself included).
Beyond that, I changed some wording issues to impact the feel of the novel (primarily the way each of the other major players addresses Katie, from scene to scene, for consistency), and then cleaned up the ending. From the start it had a strongly action-movie ending (read: believability issues), and it felt unfortunately rushed to me. In the first week of December I did a quick rewrite to clean that up a little (extending the closing into two chapters instead of one), and kept tinkering with it over the next couple months. In my big rewrite in February, I completely revisited everything that happens during the climax and denouement, and toned down a lot of the special effects material while leaving the plot essentially unchanged.
Status: Complete, second draft
I finished the novel back in November, and immediately knew that there were some key elements that I needed to change. Chief among them was the prominence of Katie's boyfriend Marshall in chapters 2-4 (he then disappears altogether for the rest of the book).
As I considered my options for tweaking that relationship, one obvious option that leapt out to me was to replace her conversations with Marshall with conversations with her dad. He does play a major role through the rest of the novel, albeit as a historical reference rather than an actual actor in the plot. Ultimately I decided to use voicemail recordings to her father that she uses in the form of a diary, rather than actual conversations. For reasons that the reader can only guess at, her father never actually takes any of the calls, which changed the tenor of those scenes from the brief bright spots in the early part of the book (where her boyfriend cheers her up after a frustrating day at the office) to a pitiful showcase of Katie's loneliness in her new life.
I offset that a bit by toning down the "new girl" feel of the first few chapters -- one of few complaints that I'd consistently gotten from my test readers. Actually, most of them suggested that I had done a good job of making Katie likeable by showing her vulnerability, but that eventually the book hit a sort of, "Get on with it!" level, where the character flaw was clearly established and I was just beating a dead horse.
I mostly addressed that issue by going through the relevant chapters and doing what I could to get the narrative out of Katie's head (something I'm constantly encouraging my sisters and Dad to do as I critique their stories). I showed enough of her insecurity through her actions, without beating the reader over the head with her internal responses. At least, that was my goal. The one test reader who has seen the new version said it came across well (but he had never seen the first draft).
I also significantly expanded the chapter in Little Rock, in which Katie practices traditional police work (which is essentially her role in the story, while those around her are more versed in high technology). My initial outline for the novel required exactly the sort of scenes that I added, but when I got to that point in the first draft I was ahead of my word count projection and felt like the story flowed more organically by skipping ahead to her meeting with Martin.
In the rewrite, I went ahead and incorporated the scenes I'd planned from the start, and I think they not only help establish Katie's character strongly enough to better carry her through the muted scenes that follow, but also significantly improve the introduction of Martin's character over the rough draft version (which was basically just a repeat of the introduction of Ghoster, which was disappointing to several test readers, myself included).
Beyond that, I changed some wording issues to impact the feel of the novel (primarily the way each of the other major players addresses Katie, from scene to scene, for consistency), and then cleaned up the ending. From the start it had a strongly action-movie ending (read: believability issues), and it felt unfortunately rushed to me. In the first week of December I did a quick rewrite to clean that up a little (extending the closing into two chapters instead of one), and kept tinkering with it over the next couple months. In my big rewrite in February, I completely revisited everything that happens during the climax and denouement, and toned down a lot of the special effects material while leaving the plot essentially unchanged.
Status: Complete, second draft
Thursday, February 5, 2009
Project Report: Gods Tomorrow
Last October, during a brief chat with D--, I came up with the idea for Gods Tomorrow, a near-future sci-fi murder mystery that I ended up writing as my NaNoWriMo project. It takes place in a world where we as a culture have traded our privacy for the convenience of a mega-database that tracks everything we do, and offers services based on the near-omnipotence that data provides.
Specifically, it's the story of a girl who joins an FBI task force dedicated to tracking down criminals who are able to exist off the grid, outside the database.
Since I finished it, five people have read it, and a couple more are currently in the process. Of those five, I've only heard positive reviews overall. (Naturally there has been some constructive criticism, but the general reception of the book has been overwhelmingly positive.) Based partly on the constructive criticism, and partly on my own opinions as the book evolved over time, I've gone back and done three small revisions, mostly adding conversations early in the book to lay sufficient groundwork for developments later.
There are two major changes I'm still considering making, which would change the...I don't know, feel of the book, without fundamentally changing the plot. They would also take a pretty significant investment (of time, as well as mental and emotional energy), and even though I'm confident that both of them would be improvements, I'm not yet sure that the benefit will offset the cost. So...meh, I dunno. I may do a big fancy rewrite, or I may leave it as-is.
That's Gods Tomorrow.
As I got into the project, though, I found myself thinking more and more that it felt like the pilot for a TV series, more even than the first novel in a series. For a while I seriously considered doing the research and trying to figure out how to pitch a TV series (and I still haven't wholly given up on that), but for now I'm actually just aiming to write a series of books that feels like a "Law & Order: Future Crimes" spinoff.
So, in that vein, I'm currently working on two sequels to Gods Tomorrow. The FBI task force I mentioned earlier is called "Ghost Targets" (because "ghosts" is the nickname for people who are invisible to the database, for reasons demonstrated in the book), so for now I'm toying with the idea of using that as the series name. Ghost Targets: Expectations will be the second book in the series, wherein the Ghost Targets team learns of a murder at the clinic where the miraculous anti-aging drug is under development (and where, for reasons of international competitiveness, the database is not allowed to record). Drama ensues.
That one I'm excited about. I've got a full plot synopsis (three to five pages) including all the key plot developments, the main characters, and their various motivations. In other words, I've got the groundwork for a whole novel there.
The third in the series, Ghost Targets: Momentum, is just a rough sketch by comparison. It's about football in the future. What more can I say? I have a page and a half done -- the opening scene -- and no prewriting. I don't really even have names for the characters. I've come up with a couple suspects and an actual killer, without even having a clear idea who the victim is. The writing process is a weird little beast.
I've also started kicking around ideas for one about video games, probably Ghost Targets: Diversions, but I haven't even gotten as far as the actual crime, let alone the players and plot of it. I know the mechanic by which the killer will be a ghost, though....
That's the tricky bit. I've established a world where there's virtually no way to get away with a crime, and then set up my series to follow the detective who investigate people who do get away with crimes. So I have to, at the same time, impress my readers with how cool and effective the system is, and find loopholes in it for my occasional thieves and murderers to slip through. Once I get to season two, it'll be a little easier because of the larger plot arc that drives season two, but the first five books are going to be kind of gimmicky. And I'm accepting that, but I'll have to find some way to keep them from feeling gimmicky to the reader.
It is my intention, in the next week, to get my promotional material for the first novel completed and mailed off to my agent, so that she can get started trying to sell the series while I get involved in the nitty-gritty of trying to sort out sequels.
That's the current state of things, when it comes to Gods Tomorrow and the various Ghost Targets books. I'll keep you posted as things develop.
Specifically, it's the story of a girl who joins an FBI task force dedicated to tracking down criminals who are able to exist off the grid, outside the database.
Since I finished it, five people have read it, and a couple more are currently in the process. Of those five, I've only heard positive reviews overall. (Naturally there has been some constructive criticism, but the general reception of the book has been overwhelmingly positive.) Based partly on the constructive criticism, and partly on my own opinions as the book evolved over time, I've gone back and done three small revisions, mostly adding conversations early in the book to lay sufficient groundwork for developments later.
There are two major changes I'm still considering making, which would change the...I don't know, feel of the book, without fundamentally changing the plot. They would also take a pretty significant investment (of time, as well as mental and emotional energy), and even though I'm confident that both of them would be improvements, I'm not yet sure that the benefit will offset the cost. So...meh, I dunno. I may do a big fancy rewrite, or I may leave it as-is.
That's Gods Tomorrow.
As I got into the project, though, I found myself thinking more and more that it felt like the pilot for a TV series, more even than the first novel in a series. For a while I seriously considered doing the research and trying to figure out how to pitch a TV series (and I still haven't wholly given up on that), but for now I'm actually just aiming to write a series of books that feels like a "Law & Order: Future Crimes" spinoff.
So, in that vein, I'm currently working on two sequels to Gods Tomorrow. The FBI task force I mentioned earlier is called "Ghost Targets" (because "ghosts" is the nickname for people who are invisible to the database, for reasons demonstrated in the book), so for now I'm toying with the idea of using that as the series name. Ghost Targets: Expectations will be the second book in the series, wherein the Ghost Targets team learns of a murder at the clinic where the miraculous anti-aging drug is under development (and where, for reasons of international competitiveness, the database is not allowed to record). Drama ensues.
That one I'm excited about. I've got a full plot synopsis (three to five pages) including all the key plot developments, the main characters, and their various motivations. In other words, I've got the groundwork for a whole novel there.
The third in the series, Ghost Targets: Momentum, is just a rough sketch by comparison. It's about football in the future. What more can I say? I have a page and a half done -- the opening scene -- and no prewriting. I don't really even have names for the characters. I've come up with a couple suspects and an actual killer, without even having a clear idea who the victim is. The writing process is a weird little beast.
I've also started kicking around ideas for one about video games, probably Ghost Targets: Diversions, but I haven't even gotten as far as the actual crime, let alone the players and plot of it. I know the mechanic by which the killer will be a ghost, though....
That's the tricky bit. I've established a world where there's virtually no way to get away with a crime, and then set up my series to follow the detective who investigate people who do get away with crimes. So I have to, at the same time, impress my readers with how cool and effective the system is, and find loopholes in it for my occasional thieves and murderers to slip through. Once I get to season two, it'll be a little easier because of the larger plot arc that drives season two, but the first five books are going to be kind of gimmicky. And I'm accepting that, but I'll have to find some way to keep them from feeling gimmicky to the reader.
It is my intention, in the next week, to get my promotional material for the first novel completed and mailed off to my agent, so that she can get started trying to sell the series while I get involved in the nitty-gritty of trying to sort out sequels.
That's the current state of things, when it comes to Gods Tomorrow and the various Ghost Targets books. I'll keep you posted as things develop.
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