Critical design fiction and the Torment Nexus

The Routledge Handbook of AI and Literature, edited by Genevieve Lively and Will Slocombe, will be out in December. I've got a chapter in it, offering a thunderously gloomy assessment of Kai-Fu Lee and Chen Qiufan's AI 2041: Ten Visions of Our Future. I don't mean to be like this, I obviously fell into a cauldron of Adorno when I was a baby.

The chapter also offers the concept of "critical design fiction." Chen’s intro to AI 2041 suggests that science fiction has the ‘capacity to serve as a warning’ but also that ‘every future we wish to create, we must first learn to imagine.’  Critical design fiction is my attempt to somewhat formalise and test this idea. Critical design fiction would be fiction which:

• adjusts the probabilities that what it represents will occur, 
• if it had been written differently, it would have adjusted those probabilities differently,  
• decreases the probability of something it represents occuring, OR could have decreased its probability if it had been written differently. 

By ‘what it represents’, I'm talking about the general type of events or states of affairs, rather than the specific details of what the characters do or experience. So although it brings some precision, there is plenty of room for interpretation and contention. Similarly, I haven't tried to formalise the difference between 'the same story written differently' and a 'different story.'

Why am I so interested in 'decreasing the probability' of things? Critical design fiction is in part a response to science fiction's 'Don't Build the Torment Nexus' problem. 

The chapter, by the way, got far too long, and so half of it budded off into a separate essay: 'Machine Learning in Contemporary Science Fiction,' over at The SFRA Review.

Massive thank-you to Genevieve and Will for their thoughtful and patient edits. The AI and Literature handbook has a formidable academic publisher price, so this is one to ask your library to order. If you are desperate to read something in it and can't get access, let me know and I'll see if there's anything I can do.

Vimes' 'Boots' Theory

A small sneak peek from a chapter included in the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to British Utopian Literature and Culture since 1945, edited by Caroline Edwards. 

"[...] Here it is worth noting that Vimes’s “Boots” theory is wrong. At least it is overstated: “The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.” This is not the reason but a reason, and a minor one at that. Vimes leaves out the basics: primitive accumulation, extraction of surplus value, return on capital. Put simply, the poor are so poor because their great-great-great-etc.-grandparents were told by men with swords that the fields, forests and pastures where they had always grown, gathered and hunted were actually somebody else’s property. Nowadays, no matter how hard they work on the land, or in the mill, or at the factory, it never pays as well as merely owning it. 

However, if Vimes’s theory were to have captured the main reason for poverty, then neoliberalism would have an easy and effective solution: improved financial inclusion. This is precisely what Vetinari and Moist oversee in Making Money. New paper fiat currency is inserted into the money supply as micro-loans. In this respect, the idea that “to back the currency [...] [y]ou just needed the city” is slyly equivocal. On the one hand, “the city” suggests the people of the city, workers and entrepreneurs like Dibbler, as well as the communities and material infrastructures in which they are embedded. Ankh-Morpork is a city-state, and “the city” also suggests the government: Vetinari backing the currency with his sovereign power to detain. Finally, the City is also the colloquial term for the UK’s financial services sector, including investment banks like JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Barclays and HBSC. Dibbler may be free to participate in the city that “turns worthless gold into … everything,” but his freedom depends upon “the Silence of the Law,” and that silence depends on his usefulness to the Discworld version of financialisation. [...]"