A Step Farther Out (11 page)

The results are pouring in, and not just from her VA hospital in Sepulveda, either. Ulcers cured, neuroses conquered, irrational fears and hatreds brought under conscious control—all without mysticism. When I put it to Dr. Brown that there was already far more objective evidence for the validity of the new psycho-physiological theories than there ever has been for Freudian psychoanalysis, she enthusiastically agreed.

One does want to be careful. There are many charlatans in the biofeedback business; some sell equipment, others claim to be "teachers." The field is just too new to have many standards, in either equipment or personnel, and the potential buyer should be wary. However: there is definite evidence, hard data, to indicate that you can, with patience (but far less than yoga demands) learn to control many allergies, indigestion, shyness, fear of crowds, stage fright, and muscular spasmodic pain; and that's got to be good news.

After I left the 1976 AAAS meeting in Boston I wandered the streets of New York between editorial appointments. On the streets and avenues around Times Square I found an amazing sight. (No, not
that;
after all, I live not far from Hollywood and thus am rather hard to shock.)

Every store window was filled with calculators. Not merely "four function" glorified arithmetic machines, but real calculators with scientific powers-of-ten notation, trig, logs, statistical functions, and the rest. Programmable calculators for under $300.
(Since 1976 the price of programmables has plummeted: you can get a good one with all scientific functions for $50 now; while the equivalent of my SR-50 now sells for $12.95 in discount houses. JEP)

Presumably there's a market for the machines: which means that we may, in a few years, have a large population of people who really do use numbers in their everyday lives. That could have a profound impact on our society. Might we even hope for some rational decision-making?

John R, McCarthy of the Stanford University Artificial Intelligence Laboratories certainly hopes so. McCarthy is sometimes called "the western Marvin Minsky." He foresees home computer systems in the next decade. OK, that's not surprising; they're available now.
(Since
that
was written, the home computer market has boomed beyond anyone's prediction; in less than two years home computers have become well-nigh ubiquitous, and everyone knows someone who has one or is getting one. I even have one; I'm writing this on it. JEP)
McCarthy envisions something a great deal more significant, though: information utilities.

There is no technological reason why every reader could not, right now, have access to all the computing power he or she needs. Not wants—what's needed is more than what's wanted, simply because most people don't realize just what these gadgets can do. Start with the simple things like financial records, with the machine reminding you of bills to be paid and asking if you want to pay them—then doing it if so instructed. At the end of the year it flawlessly and painlessly computes your income tax for you.

Well, so what? We can live without all that, and we might worry a bit about privacy if we didn't have physical control over the data records and such. Science fiction stories have for years assumed computer controlled houses, with temperatures, cooking, menus, grocery orders, etc., all taken care of by electronics; but we can live without it.

Still, it would be convenient.
(More than I knew when I wrote that; I don't see how I could get along without my computer, which does much of that, now that I'm used to it. JEP)

But what of publishing? McCarthy sees the end of the publishing business as we know it. If you want to publish a book, you type it into the computer terminal in your home; edit the text to suit yourself; and for a small fee put the resulting book into the central information utility data banks.

(So far I have described how I now, only two years after I wrote the above, prepare my own books. The difference is that after I have them composed on the TV-like screen, and edited to my satisfaction—a computer-controlled typewriter puts it onto paper, which is mailed to New York, edited again, and given to someone to type into electronically readable form for typesetting. Obviously that stage will be eliminated soon; why can I not send a tape and be done with it? Incidentally, the
NY Trib
had no typewriters or paper at all: reporters and rewrite persons worked on a TV screen, editors called that up to their screens, and when done the text went directly to composing without ever being on paper at all. JEP)

Once a book is in the central utility data banks, those who want to read it can call it up to their TV screen; a royalty goes from their bank account to the author's; where is the need for printer or publisher? Of course some will still want
books
that you can feel and carry around; but a great deal of publishing can be as described above, and for that matter there's no reason why your home terminal cannot make at reasonable cost a hard copy of anything you really want to keep.

Few publishers own printing plants; most hire that done. What publishers provide is editorial services and distribution. The latter function will largely vanish: the information utility does that job. There remain editorial services.

With such a plethora of books as might appear given the above—after all, the only cost to "publish" a book would be to have it typed, plus a rather nominal fee to the utility for storing it—critics and editors will probably grow in importance. "Recommended and edited by Jim Baen," or "A Frederick Pohl Selection" would take on new significance, and one assumes that these editors would continue to work with authors since they'd hardly recommend a book they didn't like (and some authors might even admit that a good editor can help a book). "Big Name" authors would probably have little to worry about, with their readers setting in standing orders for their works; new writers would probably have to get a "name critic" to review their stuff.

OK; still not all that new for veteran science fiction readers; but did you catch the time scale? The equipment,
all
of it, exists
now.
The telephone net to link nearly everyone in the US with the information utilities exists
now.
Computer electronics costs are plummeting. McCarthy's home terminal can be with us in the next five years, with the information utility fully developed in ten to fifteen.

In fact, the only obstacle is entrepreneurial: the equipment and technology exist at affordable costs. It takes only someone to organize it.

But—in twenty years we may not need the home terminals except as backup. Dr. Adam Reed of Rockefeller University has a new scheme: direct computer to brain hookups.

Ten years: Dr. Reed believes that within ten years we will have cracked the code that the brain uses for information processing and storage. Once that's done, information can be fed directly into the brain's central processing unit without going through such comparatively slow peripheral equipment as eyes and ears. You need not read a book: the computer can squirt the book's contents directly into your mind.

Of course it won't be the same experience: that is, when I read
War and Peace
there was more than a transfer of information. There were also emotional responses. Those would be lacking in the direct information-acquisition experience. Thus there will probably remain a few nuts who read, just as TV hasn't quite eliminated literacy in the US; but it may well be that within your lifetime the normal method of acquiring information, particularly of grasping the content of dull books that everyone wants to have read but no one wants to read, will be through computers.

This means a complete restructuring of our education system, and perhaps it is high time; yet I have met few teachers who have thought about the new capability at all, and there is no one I know of planning for the time when we do not have to sit in classrooms for the first twenty years of our lives.

There will always be a need for education, of course; for those who can teach their pupils to
use
the information available to them; and who will teach them to be civilized (although that latter may not be a function of schools, and certainly is only indifferently performed in large areas just now.)

Incidentally: Reed believes that each of us has a different code; not all brains use the same information processing symbols. Thus each of us would need a computer that has been taught to use
our
coding system. That is no bar, of course; the computer system need not be very expensive, and probably won't be, at least not after a few years. (One speculation: if each of us uses a different coding system, then true telepathy would be rare—and far more common among identical twins than among others. All of which seems to echo experience.)

And the implications of all this are staggering. In the near future—in
your lifetimes,
most of you—there will be those who, having obtained an implant, will quite literally know everything known to the human race. (This assumes that the information utilities will also exist; but those seem inevitable.) Want a multiple-regression equation linking weather, gasoline consumption, electricity generation, ship keels laid, the price of wheat futures, and the number of wall posters in Peking? Merely think the question and wait; it shouldn't be long before you have it.

Because, according to Reed, the implanted transceivers I have used in various stories
(High Justice, Exiles to Glory,
etc.) are perfectly workable—but, as mentioned earlier, I may have been too conservative. Certainly though we will have implants that "talk" to you, feeding information directly to auditory and optic nerves; in fact we have them, crudely, now, and use them to make the blind see and the deaf hear. So far have we come in the past few years. In the not distant future we shall do more for the handicapped than was ever thought possible. The "Bionic Man," shorn of some of the more impossible touches that violate the laws of thermodynamics, may become reality in this century.

But go further: when the coding system is completely known, a human personality can be "recorded"; and if the cloning experiments prove out, the personality can be transcribed into a younger edition of the same person: know what you have learned at fifty, or eighty, and put that into a body aged 25.

Far out? Science fiction? No. There's a very real possibility that it can happen to some of you; a very small possibility that it might happen to me.

It's getting hard for science fiction writers to keep up: even we are getting future shock. But it's all for real, you know.

It can all happen. The Big Brains are coming.

Mankind needs frontiers. We need new worlds to conquer, impossible odds to overcome, a place of escape from bureaucracy and government; a place where life is hard but the problems are simple, requiring no more than courage, determination, and hard work to win great rewards.

Even for those who will never go chasing out to the frontier there's a great comfort in knowing it's
there:
that you could, if you chose, pull up stakes and try your hand at making a new life. For the warriors and dreamers among us a frontier is so vital that if there isn't a physical one, we'll create an internal problem and fight that.

I suppose that man's need for a frontier is a debatable proposition, in that somebody might question it; but I doubt that many science fiction readers would dispute the point. To a very great extent this is what science fiction is all about.

Unfortunately, science hasn't been cooperating with us. First comes Special and General Relativity to say that we won't ever travel to the stars. Then come the space probes to rob us of our traditional solar system. What's left?

As I've said before, I firmly believe we'll overcome the speed-of-light barrier, and if we don't, we'll still find a way to leave the Solar System; but that may take quite a while, and suppose I'm wrong. Are there no frontiers left?

Venus was once a favorite. Hot and swampy, a younger sister of Earth, with grey skies laden with thick clouds; primordial ooze, scattered thick forests burdened with heavy vines and hanging mosses; thick fungus that ate men alive; a world populated with strange animals, dragons and dinosaurs and swamp creatures resembling the beastie from the Black Lagoon, Venus was a world to challenge us.

Then the scientists took away our Venus, as they had taken away our Mars. For a time the extremely high temperatures of Venus gave some comfort to Velikovsky and his supporters, and thus argued for a more unstable and less orderly Solar System than we had imagined—we could take comfort in fright. In a world of cosmic catastrophes there is room aplenty for adventure and derring-do.

After all, Dr. V. had predicted that Venus would be very-hot, possibly even still molten from her fiery birth from Jupiter; but, alas, even that is denied us. Pioneer looked down on Jupiter and found that he is not even solid. The Queen of Heaven does not resemble her mythological father, no, not in the least.

Velikovsky would have hydrocarbons (and carbohydrates) in the Venerian atmosphere, and he may well be right; but mostly there is carbon dioxide (CO
₂
) in fearful amounts, diluted with sulfuric and hydrofluoric acids. Here and there may lurk clouds of ice crystals and water vapor, but mostly there is a poisonous and corrosive brew pressing down with 90 atmospheres on Aphrodite's face.

Venus does not seem an attractive place.

* * *

When I was a boy I read a juvenile" novel so utterly forgettable that I recall neither plot nor title nor author nor characters. One incident in that book impressed itself in my mind.

The heroes had stranded themselves in the Arabian (or Moroccan or Tunisian or Saharan) desert, and were about to be engulfed by wild barbaric tribesmen on camels—when lo!, the tribesmen retreated in panic, driven away by the sight of a regiment of British Tommies in full uniform.

There were, of course, no British troops for hundreds of miles. The author made a point of explaining that this sort of mirage happens quite often in the desert. I remember looking for one many years later; it's true enough.