Charlie Stross boggles at the difficulty a modern SF writer has in plausibly predicting near futures in fiction.

Here, in a nutshell, is why writing near-future SF has become so difficult. Say you want to set a story 30 years out, and as part of your world-building exercise you want to work out what technologies will be in widespread use by the time of the story. Back in 1900 to 1950 you could do so with a fair degree of accuracy; pick a couple of embryonic technologies and assume they'll be widespread (automobiles, aircraft, television): maybe throw in a couple of wildcards for good measure (wrist-watch telephones), and you're there. But today, that 30-year window is inaccessible. Even a 15-year horizon is pushing it. Something new could come along tomorrow and overrun the entire developed world before 2023.

He bases this conclusion on evidence of the time compression for technology spread. In the day it took a century for a technology to become common even in the most developed countries. Now it takes a decade, and the trend is for ever shorter commercialization and adoption times. He wryly notes that some of his own gee-whiz ideas, on closer examination, already exist in concept and are likely to be commonplace soon.

Politics looks backwards rather than forwards. In the day this wasn't so much of a liability since things changed slowly, but now? Listening to the various politicians in the world, especially in the US at this time of preparation for regime change, is like listening to historical news broadcasts. I've been on a 40's kick lately, listening to an XM station that plays music from that era interspersed with news reports of the time (WWII, New Deal and such). The structure of current political campaigns is similar. The historical era is different, but it's still about the past rather than the present, much less the future.

Politics is broken. The more power politicians gather to themselves the worse governance becomes in part because it is too slow to usefully engage with present realities. If you are up on your Boyd you can understand this as a hopelessly slow OODA cycle time. Reality gets inside politicians' OODA loops. They are helpless and always go down in flames.

An example of this is biofuels. Ethanol and other biofuels are dumb, always have been dumb, and careful thinkers saw this from the start. The increased world emissions resulting from biofuels - such as the incineration of Indonesian forests and peat lands to produce palm oil, and the pressures of food and fiber production for US grain based ethanol - were a clear and obvious consequence of biofuel subsidies, but politicians failed to grasp how short their grace period before exposure would be. They had to do something in order to appear to be leading the parade, so they just did any old dumb thing, as they always do, thinking they'd get away with it again.

The smart thing to do would have been to wait a while, to give the onrushing future just a little more time.

Venter proposed that our current energy and climate situation requires truly disruptive technology. One project he’s working on would use altered microbes to metabolize coal in the ground and generate methane, for a tenfold increase in carbon efficiency. Another project proposes a “4th generation biofuel,” where engineered algae directly convert CO2 into hydrogen in bioreactors. (MP3)

A report about that seminar notes:

“Corn-to-ethanol just is not going to get us there. It’s a negative carbon balance and has been heavily subsidized by all of us,” he said. “This is just the wrong experiment taking us very much in the wrong direction.”

Venter is trying to tackle the problem from another angle, using “biofuels by design.” He says his own startup, Synthetic Genomics, could deliver in as little as 18 months a biofuel that turns carbon dioxide into octane.

Cheap at twice the time. Three times. We knew that we were doing the wrong experiment before the negative results became so painfully obvious even to journalists and politicians, but did it anyway for political motives.

This is sick. We are punking ourselves by granting such powers to such inadequate institutions.