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Milburn, Colin. Nanovision: Engineering the Future. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. 296 pp. Trade paperback. ISBN 978-0822342656. $22.95.
From where do we get our vision of the future? How much of this vision is based upon scientific facts, and how much is based upon fictional interpretations of such facts as presented through literature and films? These are questions which go back at least as far as Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, both of whom spent their fair share of time squabbling about the factual versus fantastic elements of their stories. Yet accusations of a lack of scientific robustness are not something restricted to the squabbles between sf writers, but are rather a significant aspect of any scientific discourse. Just like sf writers, scientists are vulnerable to being either lauded as visionaries who can see the future or dismissed as fools who fail to distinguish reality from fantasy.
One of the most hotly debated ideas to occur in both science and sf within the past generation is the concept of the Singularity. First presented by computer scientist and sf writer Vernor Vinge in a NASA lecture in March of 1993, the Singularity was the name Vinge gave to the moment when everything will change: "Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended" (http://mindstalk.net/vinge/vinge-sing.html). While Vinge insisted that the accelerating rate of technological change and the creation of artificial intelligences equal to those of humans would result in a future that humans could not imagine, both scientists and sf writers have obsessively discussed, debated, and sought to describe what that future will be like after the Singularity. Some futurists such as Ray Kurzweil propose a Utopian Eden in which humans are practically immortal, while films such as the Terminator and Matrix series have imagined apocalyptic futures in which machines seek to mie over humans. Thus it is that, less than twenty years after the phrase "the Singularity" was first coined, it has already acquired an impressive number of foundational texts, visual images, and mythic tropes. These futuristic visions are what Colin Milburn refers to as "nanovision," and it is these sometimes shared, sometimes oppositional visions communicated by both scientists and sf writers that...