Bruce Sterling Live In Person!

Bruce Sterling is a Visionary. No, really. That's his actual job title. He's the Visionary-In-Residence at the Art Center College of Design at Pasadena, California. He's at the College for the whole of this year (except right now, cos he's here in Singapore!), teaching students about the future of design. Pretty exciting stuff.


Taken with my 7210 so it aint the highest quality. But that's Bruce Sterling there. :-)

Sterling (who, by the way, has an honorary Doctorate in Science!) gave a talk titled "From Cyberpunk to Industrial Design – Writing Science Fiction in the 21st century" on Saturday night as part of the Singapore Writer's Festival. Appropriately enough, it was held in the new National Library's Pod, a futuristic egg-shaped structure perched at the top of the Library building. Gorgeous view of the city from there, too.

But I digress. About the talk itself- it was quite awesome.

After one of the talk's organisers briefly introduced him (famous science fiction writer, etc), Sterling began by talking about his current work at the Art Center College of Design and how design has been a primary area of interest to him of late. He spoke a bit about business process reengineering and only half-jokingly said that instead of calling himself a science fiction writer, he now considered himself an artist who's main area of concern is the impact of technology on society.

He then spoke about a bit about science fiction. Specifically, he said there's an inherent conflict between the words "science" and "fiction," science being logical and based on falsifiable theories and fiction being a form of art dealing with human emotions and all that kinda jazz. According to him, design represents a third way of thinking, as design isn't quite science and its not really art either. Design's about, well, interface (he may not have used that precise word though). And he believes design can bridge the gap between science and fiction.

At this point of his talk he took out a designer object, a tube-shaped object that turned out to be a spectacles container with a twist. It had hinges on both sides, allowing him to open the case on one side, flip it around and close it on the other. Neat trick. But as Sterling showed, this wasn't good design. The obvious flaw was that if you flipped the case over while your spectacles were inside, they'd fall right out of the case. Also, his spectacles were too big to fit in the case. Finally, the case itself was pretty fragile. So it wasn't a particularly useful design. Just a good gimmick.

According to Sterling, good design centers around safety and utility- basically, good design is practical. Useful. He explained how rapid prototyping is the designer's secret weapon. Rapid prototyping is form of computer-aided manufacturing where an object is designed as a 3D model in a computer and then automatically constructed by 3D printers or similar such devices. Sterling said that design isn't a precise process. It's extremely hard to get a design right the first time. The beauty of rapid prototyping is that it allows designers to churn out physical model after physical model of their designs til they finally get it right.

Continuing with the design meme, Sterling talked about how working with designers for the past year or so has really changed his mindset. Sitting there at the talk listening to him, I could really feel his love for design. It's clearly something he cares deeply about. He's even trying to apply it to his fiction! His next novel may well fall into, or invent, the genre of design fiction. I doubt he'd be disappointed if it did.

Then he spoke about another topic that's close to his heart- sustainability. Taking a water bottle (a Voda water bottle, no less), he outlined it's life-cycle: from raw materials to factory to distribution to the consumer (him) and it's final destination, a land-fill. This, he said, isn't a sustainable system. If we keep throwing away all our consumer objects like we do now, there won't be enough land-fills on Earth to store all the waste. Clearly there's a need for a sustainable system.

The problem with sustainability as a concept, he said, is that it isn't a very attractive concept. Put in another way, it's not really sexy enough. The problem, said Sterling, is the word itself. It's a dead word. Not one that's likely to come up in a conversation. He gave an amusing example of a man coming home from work to say "Honey, this dinner was really sustainable!" Not gonna happen. His implication ws that the word sustainable seems to denote stagnation, a lack of progress.

But, Sterling continued, sustainability doesn't have to be about keeping things the same- it's about allowing society to continually make new mistakes, instead of repeating the same old ones again and again. No society had ever achieved that, he said, though scientific culture comes the closest- being a system where everything is refutable, offering the possibility of complete upheavals of accepted theory given new discoveries.

The key to understanding sustainability is time, he said. We need to stop thinking about permanence. The common science fiction concepts of utopias and apocalypses have to go. The first implies perfection, which in turn implies stagnation- nothing'll ever change in a perfect society. The second- well there won't be anyone left, will there? So no point thinking about it. Sterling said that we need to reconsider the way we think about the future. It's not a place we're going to reach one day- rather, it's a continual becoming. The future as a process.

Sterling then described three ways of achieving sustainability, the way he saw it. The first was to make everything bio-degradable. Which was what humans did prior to industrialization as they didn't know how to make artificial materials. Even so, he said, there remains pollution from ancient times in the form of stone artifacts. He gave us the example of archeologists cutting their hands on prehistoric flint weapons made by hominids. I think what he was getting at with that example is that it's kind of impossible to make EVERYTHING bio-degradable. Heh. Some of the objects we leave behind'll make archeologists of the future blow up. Hopefully those objects won't last that long.

The second way of reaching sustainability was to build monuments. What Sterling meant by this was objects that are very long-lasting. However, he said, this isn't really feasible because no society wants to use the same old stuff forever. How many people want to use their great-grandmothers furniture?

The third way, the one that Sterling's really interested in, is to digitally track EVERYTHING- all consumer objects, anyway. Using RFID and similar technologies, track objects throughout their life-cycles and then fold them back into the production stream when they've reached the end of their usefulness. Sterling says the individual technologies needed to create such a system exist today- digital tracking, searching, databases, etc. They've just never been integrated in this way yet. In the scenario that he was positing, every object would have it's own story, so to speak. You could find out it's complete history from its factory origins to its movements across the world to when it finally reached you. According to him, the possibilities for such a system are innumerable but also almost unimaginable as it's something completely NEW. This is something that could only happen at this current stage of human history as only now do we have the required skills and technologies.

It's a bit of a complicated notion, this. Hard to see how it'd work as a system. And of course, rife with possibilities for abuse (loss of privacys just the tip of the iceberg). But at the same time, it's tremendously exciting. Especially when Bruce Sterling's the one talking about it. He's got a real gift for communicating his vision, that man. But it's a testament to how much of a brain-bender this idea is that Sterling's spent the last 3 years trying to write a novel about it but has so far been unable to do so.

Sterling predicts that this system of digitally tracked objects will result in a breakdown between the real world and the virtual world (spoken like a true cyber-punk, huzzah!). Every significant object will be linked to something virtual. Imagine, he said, a water bottle with a full history, discussion boards, blogs and other web resources dedicated to it. What an incredible idea! It'd be nothing less than a complete revolution in consumer-product relationships if it happens, thats for sure. By the way, if you're interested in learning more about these exciting ideas of Sterling's, read this transcript of his August 2004 talk at SIGGRAPH. It's a very very good read as long as you don't mind plowing through some slightly technical concepts.

Going back to the topic of The Future, Sterling said that it'll either be unimaginable (propelled by technologies like the above) or unthinkable (we'll all be wiped out by nuclear war- yep, sounds pretty unthinkable to me). He also predicts that almost all of today's pressing problems will be solved purely by accident, as by-products of technological advances of the future.

He finished off by mentioning his blog, which is kind of his own rapid prototyping process. He posts snippets of interesting news about technology and culture and the like.

Following the talk, there was a Question and Answer session. I made some notes of the more interesting questions and answers. I didn't take down the exact questions so I'm just paraphrasing em.

The first person to ask a question was a bit kiasu- he asked 3! Very good questions, though. His first was: How, in a "trackable society," do you track insubstantial objects (like oil spills or gases)?

Sterling's answer was to use sensors. He gave the example of using sensors in bathrooms to detect foreign substances in your body when you shower. Like, if your sensors detect hydrazine (airplane fuel) in your body, you could call up your friends and ask if the've got hydrazine in them too and go online and try to find out where it came from, if there's been a leak in some plane somewhere or something like that. He also gave the example that cars could have sensors to detect emissions from other cars on the road.

The man's second question was about the issue of biodegradability in tracking devices.

Sterling said that silicon, typically used for such devices today, can't biodegrade as it's basically glass. So either a) recycle it after it's been used in a product, b) embed it inside the product it's being used to track, or c) use organic semiconductors that are biodegradable- something like digital ink with transmitters in it that can be sprayed onto the surface of an object. Apparently, there are at least 2 companies that are working on this technology today.

The man's third question was about the difficulty of assigning unique names to mass-manufactured, identical objects.

Sterling's answer was that this was basically a taxonomy problem, a problem of naming. If you've got a thousand models of the Toyota Prius on the roads, what's your specific car's unique name? Grey Toyota Prius? Grey Toyota Prius with modified engine? How about unique names for the parts in the car? Sterling's suspicion is that there won't be a perfect solution. Instead information will be highly mutable. Different people will use different naming schemes (sounds kind of like how tagging works in Internet bookmark systems like del.icio.us). He gave the example of a government automobile body- they'd be more interested in the movements of cars and legal matters and so on. An auto enthusiast site, on the other hand, would be more interested in performance, mod parts and so on. So the two organisations would use different terminologies but they might cross-reference each other for shared information.

The second person to pose a question asked about the issue of privacy.

Sterling recommended the book Spychips by Katherine Albrecth for more information about privacy issues today. He did say that things are going to get very very scary for the forseeable future. Governments and malicious organisations will be able to use information from things like RFID tags to track people. BUT all this information will also available to everyone, so that evens things out a bit. HE also said that privacy is just one area affected by these new technologies- the ramifications are much more far-reaching than just that (I got the impression he's getting a bit tired about people just focusing on the privacy issue).

Yet another person asked a question about the science fiction concept of the Singularity- a future time where technological change will outpace people's ability to understand it, resulting in a society completely incomprehensible to people living before the time of the Singularity.

Sterling answered that he had actually given a seminar on the topic for the Long Now Foundation (the MP3s available here). He said he doesn't believe the original concept as put forward by Verner Vinge is very useful- however, he does believe the world of a hundred years from now will be as incomprehensible to the people of today as the world of today would be to people living in the 19th century.

OK that's pretty much all I got. I'll post up some of my own ideas on the talk later.