Paul-Choudhury - Arc 1.x / The first year of the future

Arc

1.x / The first year of the future

http://www.arcfinity.org
Lacon House, 84 Theobalds Road
London WC1X 8NS

Editor-in-chief
Sumit Paul-Choudhury

Managing editor
Simon Ings

Art editor
Craig Mackie

Picture editor
Adam Goff

Sub editor
Sean ONeill

Publisher
John MacFarlane

Digital director
Neela Das

Marketing
David Hunt

Production
Melanie Green
Mick OHare

Connect:
http://arcfinity.tumblr.com
http://www.twitter.com/arcfinity
http://www.facebook.com/arcfinity

Subscribe/Back Issues:
http://www.arcfinity.org/subscribe

Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd. England

Arc is published quarterly by Reed Business Information Ltd.
ISSN 2049-5870

Arc was conceived by Henry Gomm, John MacFarlane and Sumit Paul-Choudhury

W elcome to Arc - a futuristic collection of fact, fiction and opinion from the makers of New Scientist. Each quarter, we prospect the future, gathering stories, speculation, witness and opinion from the very best writers we can find. Arc is your entertaining, provoking, infuriating, wildly unreliable and deadly serious guide to tomorrow. Each stunningly illustrated, book-length digital collection runs to around 160 print pages.

This sampler brings together some of our favourite pieces from our first year of publication. The first four volumes of Arc are still available and as good a read now as ever. After all, they were made for the future.

We hope youll enjoy this taste of Arcs first year. Do follow us youll find us as arcfinity on Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr, or at arcfinity.org to keep up to date with what were working on, including details of our regular short story competition. Were making more of the future all the time.

Simon Ings

Managing Editor

Sumit Paul-Choudhury

Editor-in-Chief

Arc 1.1: The future always wins

Margaret Atwood headlines our debut issue, featuring some of the biggest names in science fiction: Bruce Sterling, Stephen Baxter, M John Harrison, Hannu Rajaniemi, Alastair Reynolds and Adam Roberts. Also in this issue: how we lost the oceans to our machines; a meeting with the collapsonomics crowd; the best time-travel movie ever made; and China Miville making first contact with some genuinely alien intelligences.

Arc 1.2: Post human conditions

What happens when humans are pushed beyond their usual design tolerances? In this issue, we talk to online animals and rubber aliens, consider the plight of bored astronauts and Soviet science fiction filmmakers, go in search of the future in South Korea and take a look at grown-up games in the city. Golden Age legend Fred Pohl provides the intro; award-winning writers Nick Harkaway, Paul McAuley and Jeff VanderMeer the fiction.

Arc 1.3: Afterparty overdrive

The partys over. The worlds ravaged, the economys kaput. But no matter how bad things get, well always know how to party. Lavie Tidhar heads a cast of hot new writers including Tim Maughan, Nan Craig and David Gullen in an issue that laughs in the face of the gathering dark. What happens when music doesnt need us any more? Can the Singularity be stopped? What are facts, anyway? And why is Neal Stephenson building a 20km high tower?

Arc 1.4: Forever alone drone

Are you lonely tonight? Really? How can you be sure? Drone planes and hidden cameras, voyeurs and angels cluster round to read stories of the technological wilderness by Nancy Kress, Robert Reed, Bruce Sterling, Liz Jensen and Jack Womack. Plus: what urban infiltrators can tell us about life in future cities, why were all becoming drone pilots, Icelands digital fortress, an American trapped in America and Kim Stanley Robinson on the ultralite lifestyle.

Liz Jensen

Bruce Sterling

Sumit Paul-Choudhury

Samuel Arbesman

Lavie Tidhar

Holly Gramazio

Kyle Munkittrick

China Miville

Paul Graham Raven

Simon Pummell

In the future, machines will make discoveries beyond the ken of humankind. Samuel Arbesman thinks this merits a proud hug

Scientific knowledge has been expanding for some time. No one can be expected to be well-versed in our entire body of knowledge. These days, our insights often come from recombining what we happen to know. And thats the trouble: imagine a paper in one corner of science says that A implies B, and another paper, elsewhere, says that B implies C. Due to the magnitude of scientific endeavour, there is no longer any guarantee that someone will think to combine these papers.

This is real. Don Swanson, an information scientist active in the 1980s, dubbed this elusive, tip-of-the-tongue not-quite-insightundiscovered public knowledge and now, with computational help, many discoveries and relationships have been revealed that previously lay hidden. The balance between the scientific abilities of humans and computers is shifting. What will happen when computers cease to merely assist us with our discoveries, and discover things for themselves things we cannot understand?

Unassisted human insight seems to be reaching it slimits. In the future and sooner rather than later we will arrive at a point in science and mathematics where any discovery that is made (by computers, of course) will be only dimly understood by human beings. Steven Strogatz has written about his with a bit of worry. He argues that we are living in a special window of time, stretching from the dawn of the scientific revolution 350 years ago to a point a few decades into the future. Only people living in this window can truly say that they have understood the world.

Strogatzs window is already closing. In mathematics there is something called the four-colour problem. Draw a map as intricate as you like, full of wiggles, crenellations and complicated frontiers. You will always be able to colour that map, distinguishing each territory from its neighbours, with just four colours. The proof of this was assembled with the help of computers in 1977, and no single person understands it. The proof is inelegant, gargantuan and computationally complex. We know it is true, but we do not know why. More recently, in 2009, Michael Schmidt and Hod Lipson created an AI program that could distil the laws of motion merely by observing data from the swings of a double pendulum. In the process, they created an AI capable of deriving meaning from datasets too large or complex for humans to study.