edfinn

Basically I think it's because dystopianism is much easier than coming up with a plausible optimistic scenario. It's cheap to criticize other peoples' ideas and expensive to come up with something new. This is not to say that dystopianism doesn't perform a very valuable service, warning us about stuff we might not want to do... But if that's all we ever see, dire warnings and apocalyptic hellscapes, who is going to believe in or work towards a world we might actually want?

That's the challenge Hieroglyph is intended to meet. Neal Stephenson laid it out beautifully in his initial essay Innovation Starvation (which got this whole thing started).

What is the relationship between art and death?

Great question. There are a few different metrics:

How many people are getting involved in the conversation? Are we recruiting new participants to the Hieroglyph site, which is free and open to anyone who'd like to register? And what are they doing once they sign up?

Are these ideas shaping research trajectories? We've got some anecdotal evidence for this but I'd like to continue tightening the feedback loop between science and science fiction by seeding research inspired by one or more of these stories. You can see a few examples already of cross-pollination on the Hieroglyph site. One of the guidelines for writers was to come up with a narrative that a young scientist or engineer could read and then achieve in her or his professional lifetime. I want to give some of those people the permission and resources try it out.

Are we changing the model? This is the hardest to measure, of course. But I think (anecdotally again) that there has already been an incremental shift away from lazy dystopianism. Can we encourage more big picture thinking in schools, in politics, and in countries around the world? For example, I love the Big History project I just read about in the New York Times. Can we work on this together, Mr. Gates?

Great question! I wish I had a rank-ordered list but I don't. Let me throw out a few examples that have been on my mind recently:

Einstein and the theory of general relativity (Let me preface this by pointing out my Ph.D. is in English...) Theoretical physics in general is something you can do with a pencil or a piece of chalk--it's pretty much all imagination. Einstein's quote "Imagination is more important than knowledge" is one of the things we tend to slap on coasters and t-shirts around here.

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus This book, considered by many the first science fiction novel, melded political theory, social justice and the coolest science of the day (Galvanism, continental natural philosophy, etc) into a story so successful its metaphors and monsters are absolutely everywhere today.

So many more...the double helix, calculus, the telegraph, the Internet These are all examples of insights or inventions that, first of all, happened in multiple places or with different people at the same time, suggesting that some kind of cultural conversation or moment might have brought them into being (e.g. "it's calculus time!"). And second, they all involved profound shifts in perspective, either in the initial discovery or their transformative impact on society. They are all imagination machines or engines of one kind or another, grounded in scientific discovery but only really "real" through their cultural impact.

The name draws inspiration from the idea that certain concepts in science fictions are so powerful that they become iconic symbols: Heinlein's rocket ships, Asimov's robots, etc. These ideas are so sticky, so deeply etched in the cultural consciousness (like hieroglyphic symbols) that they inspire generations of research. For example, it's almost impossible to work on robotics without considering Asimov's three laws, or having your work evaluated in that context.