SF Stewing

I'm stewing on some ideas in the hopes that they come together into something coherent. It may need cleaning up my board and brainstorming plots on it--though that means erasing the Vincenzi stuff I have up there. Here's what I have:

EcoTechnics

Reading Wired's stuff  on the internet of things/industrial internet, I wonder what a society dominated by "smart" objects might look like. If your clothes are tagged and your closet, hamper, and laundry machine talk to each other, does that mean your closet would recommend a certain shirt on Tuesday? If I grab a certain pair of paints, would it tell me to try out a certain shirt? If I get up ten minutes later than normal, would I have black tea waiting for me instead of green? Could my bed, closet, shower, and vehicle cross-communicate to know what I like to do on early Saturday volunteer days?

Would this world create a more insular space--always wearing slacks on Monday with the blue shirt, jeans on Saturday with the striped black shirt--or would there be a way to introduce spice, play, and discovery to such a system? I can imagine that such a system could deeply cement the tedium of workaday lifestyles, but wouldn't necessarily do that. At the same time, "smart" objects depend on incredible quantities of data mapped across a life. This could produce an elite class of statistical programmers producing more efficient worlds by having increasingly responsive objects (an incredible expansion on the increased transcription proficiency of voice capture on smartphones).

How would this elite class define its goals? Would they simply be interested in efficiency (an immediate goal and product of smart objects) to the end of producing a para-governmental body that focuses and adapts services based on the measured behaviors of clients? Such goals could encourage insular lifestyles and ultimately undermine the imagination in a disempowering way, despite increasing overall efficiency. This is dystopic without be anti-utopian. Then again, meta-analysis may introduce new media to your diet and bring about a more cosmopolitan and dynamic world (the way good broadcasting schedules or even mixtapes can).

How this fits together into a story is pretty unclear. I can imagine someone working through this space--or even working in it--or having two people who use the technology in divergent ways... Then there are the political ramifications that could develop a more intricate, even spy-fi style intrigue. I think of this as "EcoTechnics," a field or business that looks at the overlay of technical systems in ecological, inter-related ways (hence a late morning needs more coffee because of poor sleep). And then there is:

Rewind

I'm still sorting this out, but SciFri was discussing--and I had previously read a brief on--how scientists are working to rewrite mouse memories. The therapeutic end may be the treatment of trauma patients--rewriting damaged PTSD neurons--to alternative therapies to dementia and or Alzheimer's. This suggests some crazy mind control stuff which I wouldn't mind hinting at but have no interest in focusing on. Instead, I want to consider the more unnerving repercussions of such therapy.

For example (and this is the story/character I can consider playing with in some form), if we take someone with PTSD and run them through a mnemonic gamut that reconnects the trauma with neutral or positive sentiments, won't that just inspire the actions that initially caused the PTSD? Now, though, those actions are part of a neural process that is positive rather than damaging; the person has just been cognitively primed to pursue high-danger acts.

In a more casual environment, you could get something like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, though not in the dominant story. One of the technicians (Elijah Wood) uses the memories of Clementine (Kate Winslet) to activate her sympathies based on how Joel (Jim Carrey) had wooed her previously. If neural pathways have a certain valence (a fight with your partner is negative), but that valence can be neutralized or challenged, then the initial stimulus no longer has the weight attached to it (the fight no longer bears emotional weight).

This relates to how Hume and Spinoza (in different ways) look to emotions as accurate and effective triggers for decision making; it becomes the challenge of ethicists to persuade through both logical argumentation and emotional triggers their points. Argumentation lays the reasoning for a particular position, but the emotional triggers actually make people act differently. If the emotional valence is suddenly trivialized--it can be established post facto--then how would human relationships, intimate and otherwise, change?

...

I can imagine tying these together. I would like to think of SF as responding to a whole suite of technological and social changes or providing a novel perspective on our current political and technological footing. To meet the former, I want to envision the world as a unified whole that has been dramatically changed by technologies and politics emerging now. The potential for statistical behavioral analysis and an adaptive physical environment with the implications for rewriting the emotional relevancy of human memory is exciting and horrible. That said, I don't really have characters emerging from this yet.

So stewing I will continue.