The Aremac Project is getting closer to being science non-fiction:
http://www.newsweek.com/id/91688
Moral? When you write science-fiction, be sure to place your setting far enough into the future, or science will catch up with you.
I think mind-reading to the level in The Aremac Project is still at least a decade off, but you never know.
I don't generally recommend ambiguity as a writing technique, but in this case I'm glad I gave no specific dates in the novel.
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
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3 comments:
The name 'Aremac' sounds interesting.
While the day is still far off, when the exact content of a person's mind can be read.. I think we now have the capability of reading the emotional state of a mind.
Myth, I agree--up to a point. There are millions of emotions, but we don't have names for the vast majority. It's like colors. We can distinguish many millions of colors (at least women can--we men are a bit deficient in that regard), but can name only a few hundred, at most.
But things are moving faster and faster in the mind-reading business. My interest is in what impact it will have on society--and this is what I pursue in Aremac and the sequels.
The story got me thinking about the meaning of the term "mind reading," because that's what the FMRI system is doing: reading, as in recognizing a pattern and relating it to an agreed-upon definition of a concept. It's more like reading words on a page than it's like actual telepathy (which I think comes from Latin roots meaning "feeling at distance," though I haven't checked it). And there's a big difference: two people can read the same series of words and arrive at much different mental images; this is why police artists have such a tough job. So, while the FMRI may be able to distinguish the brain light-up patterns for "hammer," 'hitting," and "igloo," the actual image of a hammer hitting an igloo may be much different for the person thinking and the person reading the FMRI.
We are still a long way from an Aremac.
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