(På engelska, så kan det gå på utländska listor också, och jag kan använda et
imitt EAPA-zine. --AE)
-----
Went to a few interesting meetings last week - most were skiffy related! - and
being a bit short of time I'll report briefly from them.
November 22nd i went to a meeting about Virtual Reality. VR goggles have
become "The Christmas Present of the Year" in Sweden. A number of companies
presented their VR products and services. Something called Chinapreneurs talked
about the development in China, where the minister of commerce has declared
that VR is an area China will give priority. The Chinese company Alibaba has
recently started the first VR department store where customers can walk around
as in an ordinary store and get electronic information about the items for
sale. VR is growing fast. The world market is believed to be worth 60 Billion
US dollars in 2025, a market China hopes to grab a part of. A game company
showed their VR game projects by which the player could eg get virtual super
powers A Lithuanian company (doing business in the Nordic region) showed how
they used VR to design apartments. They also let the audience try their system
- which I did. I have tried VR before but earlier simpler systems. It was an
eerie experience to walk around in a VR apartment. You could eg walk through
walls and i you stepped outside the balcony you'd float in the air.
A number of publishers invited to an author evening on the Scala Theatre
November 23rd. Elisabeth Åsbrink has written the book 1947, non-fic about that
year which she believes is a critical year in history which defined the start
of the Cold War. It was touching to hear about how her father who was a little
boy at the time escaped the Nazis - and the father was in the hall. It was
interesting to hear Lena Andersson. She has a Q&A radio show and her book has
witty answers to questions from listeners she has had in the show. She also
writes columns for a newspaper where she also airs rather liberal and pro
market-economy opinions. (Remember: in Europe a "liberal" isn't a communist but
centre-right.) One Robert Karjel held an short but engaging lecture about the
EU fleet combatting pirates off the coast of Somalia. This author is a navy
officer and was on the Swedish frigate that during his tour of duty was the
command vessel for the operation. A very interesting speech (with Powerpoint
pictures) which told us that the situation is much more violent than many are
aware of.
I went to two events November 24th. The Russian sf author Dmitry Glukhovsky
(known for the dystopian Metro 2033 series) talked and signed his new book
Future in the Stockholm SF Bookstore, a novel on the theme eternal or prolonged
life. The evening before he'd been interviewed in the Stockholm Culture House
and there was a piece about him in our biggest morning paper. He's polyglot
speaking six languages and skeptical to the Putin regime. His new novel (which
isn't in the Metro series) discuss who things would change Big Time if we could
prolong life or even make it eternal. We'd risk overpopulation, unless we'd
employ draconic family planning measures. Someone with eternal life would have
to give that up to be able to conceive a child. Our ethical values would
change. Much of the things we do is because we want to "leave something behind"
- but there's no need for that if we have eternal life. We might become less
creative. And what happens to offices where you are elected for life (like the
Pope or US Supreme Court) if we have eternal life? I asked him if he'd done
much research for the novel. He said he'd been reading articles and such about
prolonged life for years and been in contact with eg so called transhumanist
groups (more below) to get information. His next projects is writing the script
to a graphic novel and a non-sf criminal thriller.
The other event of the day was a book presentation organised by a new group
calling themselves Warp (from Star Trek no doubt!). That's a group that wants
to promote a positive and optimistic view of the future. The book presented was
Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future by Johan Norberg (
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Progress-Reasons-Look-Forward-Future/dp/1780749503 ;)
who was there. He began with saying that people today tend to be more
pessimistic than ever, despite that the world has improved - and keeps
improving - more than any time in history and that people live better than
ever. Every indicator shows improvement: since the fall of the Soviet Empire
extreme poverty has been reduced by 90%, more countries than ever are
democracies, despite impressions from media there are fewer wars today,
Internet and globalisation ties people together, the ozon layer is healing GPS
navigation and double bottom oil tankers have reduced oil spill by up to 98%,
leaded petrol is banned, fast urbanisation means a lot of land goes "back to
nature", etc etc. His book lists ten reasons to be an optimist rather than a
boring pessimist about the future and he especially mentioned two of them: 1)
Poverty reduction. 1.2 billion people have been lifted from extreme poverty the
last 25 years, thanks to globalisation and a more liberal economy. 100 people
are lifted from poverty every minute. 2) Longer lives. Before 1890 the average
life was around 30 years. Now it is around 70 years for the world as a whole
(longer in developed countries). That's thanks to medical science, fighting
infant mortality, providing antiboitics against infections, vaccin against
smallpox and other diseases, etc. Norberg said it is dangerous to be
pessimistic. We miss the scientific and other progress being made all the time
and pessimism triggers primitive, dangerous impulses. We become xenophboic,
aggressive and so on (resulting in eg electing one Mr Trump to office...). I've
met Norberg before and he's a very good speaker, always defending the free
market economy and globalisation (like in his book In Defence of Global
Capitalism). You can ind interesting lectures by him (in English) on Youtube.
The 26th was a non-sf related event, an afternoon about the 19th Century
writer Carl Jonas Love Almqvist since it was 150 years after his death. He was
a freethinker and liberal (who a couple of years in his youth took part in
experimeting with starting a small "utopian" group) who wrote several classics
of Swedish literature. He worked for the liberal newspaper Aftonbladet and had
an affair with Sweden's pioneer female journalist one Wendela Hebbe (also on
Aftonbladet). We were in the beautiful main hall of the Swedish Academy where
the Nobel prizes are announced. It began with a play featuring Almqvist and
Hebbe set on the day before Almqvist fled Sweden... You see, he had totally
scandalised himself! He had borrowed huge amounts of money and was accused of
trying to poison the man he owed the money with arsenic. The thing is that he
was probably guilty of this and he lived out his life in exile in the US and
Germany. The play was very interesting, eg featuring Almqvist's own music on
piano and the Aftonbaldet editor talking through a speech tube. He lived on top
of the editorial office and kept himself informed through this early
pre-telephone device. In the interval we were treated with white wine and
very tasty hors d'oeuvres. The second half featured texts and poems by
Almqvist and examples of his music. It's rather unknown, but CJL Almqvist was
also a composer. Sheets totalling some 4 hours of his compositions exist. The
pianist Mats Persson is presently working on complete recordings of it.
Sunday November 27th was dedicated to Transhumanism. There was the
"pre-business meeting" of the Swedish chapter of the Humanity Plus society
(said to exist in 120 countries). So called transhumanists want to improve the
human body and reach longer - perhaps eternal - life. (The first H+ meeting
I've been to. My contribution was to note that space exploration was important
and we need to improve the human body to travel in space and colonise Mars.)
After that there was a big one-day conference in the Stockholm Cultural House
called Human+Machine, with films, lectures and panels - almost like an sf con!
Guest of Honour, sort of, was James Hughes, founder of Institute of Ethics and
Emerging Technologies. He talked about eg that robots will set us free, so we
don't have to work but can live on a "basic income". He also had some weird
ideas, eg using hormones to "make man more ethical". Eg the hormone oxytocin
will make people more loving and "cuddly" and could be sneaked into water and
food. The problem is that this loving only applies to those close to us, and
instead we become more racist... (Another problem is that - beside perhaps the
social ban against befrauding, attacking and murdering others ethics is a
matter of opinion. Who can mathematically prove what good ethics are? To
promote one ethical system before another must be seen as abuse. ethics must be
decided by arguments, not chemicals.) I had other things to do so I didn't
listen to all the panels, but I noticed eg the former sf author Annika Lidne
(of the near future thriller Coma, http://annikalidne.com/fiction/coma ;) was
in the panel "Maximising the Human Body). The next panel was called "Maximising
the Intellect" so they had it all covered... In the last panel "Why We Have to
Go Beyond the Human" we heard James Hughes again and the chairman of the
Swedish Humanist Society, Christer Sturmark (who says there's no conflict
between being a humanist and a transhumanist, as long as you don't believe in a
magical being sitting on a cloud called "god"...). The panelists talked about
eg how to define a human, that aliens must have the same ethical status as long
as they are self-conscious, that computers may become intelligent and
self-consciou, that we one day may live forever by uploading our minds to
computers, and things like that. The films shown where "Primer", "Ex Machina"
and "Her", all of them 100% scientifiction. An interesting day, with a nearly
packed crowed (up to 150, no empty chairs - I had to stand to hear the parts of
the program I did hear). If you're interested in this movement, go to
http://manniskaplus.nu/ ;(in Swedish) or https://www.facebook.com/humanityplus/
The very next day I went to a book release about the strange, visionary,
almost utopian architect Le Corbusier
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Corbusier ;(
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Corbusier ;) a book written by Johan Linton.
this guy planned huge building complexes resembling something from Amazing
Stories' Frank R Paul. He visited Sweden several times, and eg suggested that
downtown Stockholm should be bulldozed and replaced by long winding buildings
of this type... He also visited a sort-of-utopia, the 1950s Stockholm suburb
Vällingby, the planned suburb which was Sweden's first "ABC town" (standing for
work, homes & center, ie in Arbete Bostäder Centrum in Swedish = ABC). I grew
up near Vällingby and am interested in archtecture. Nothing expresses utopian
ideas and wishes for the future more than buildings, while houses at the same
time tend to be extreme symbols of only their own time.
--Ahrvid
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