With a Little Help

What Hacker News says

1. wes-expAug 2011
   I would like to see some good science fiction that actually attempts to imagine what our real future might be like. For some reason it seems like writers (or maybe it's the fault of people funding TV/movies) can only imagine a future having to do with space and/or aliens. What about the future of internet, computers, and/or mobile devices?

   I don't think it's a coincidence that Star Trek and so on emerged during the Space Race period. The public consciousness was very much focused on space travel. The fiction was well-timed then, but now?

   I would gladly read a story or watch a show about the following:

   - What happens when we have automated every last low-skilled job? Utopia? Chaos?

   - What happens when every single action is recorded about your daily life? Crime-free paradise? Totalitarian nightmare?

   - What impact would a computer super-intelligence have?

   I'm just going off the top of my head here. I'm sure some writers can come up with better stuff than this.

   TL;DR: Space was a hot subject during the Space Race. Now, though, it's time to see some science fiction address the future of other technologies that we are now approaching. If the tomorrow project does that, I'm all for it.

   Update: I followed the link to Cory Doctorow's story Epoch in arethuza's comment. This in turn brought me to the full book With a Little Help. Its introduction reads:

   "It turns out the future doesn't really care about space travel. [...] Luckily, we have Cory Doctorow; he thinks about the Internet, a lot."

   I'm sold.

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2. icebrainingAug 2011
   There was someone in a talk or podcast (damn, when can we get search engines for our memories?) who discussed the idea of creating physical tokens as representations of virtual objects or events. With the arrival of cheap 3D printers, there is now the possibility of making personalized tokens.

   As for offered books, I think hardcovers will become the tokens; for example, for Cory Doctorow's With a Little Help (which I've never read), the hardcover edition comes with an SD card with the ebook and even a audiobook.

   And the reality is that at least for me, only one in ten books or so actually have any meaning besides the content; most are just books I bought for myself for no special occasion, and I don't really benefit from the space they take.

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3. arethuzaApr 2011
   One of the stories in Cory Doctorow's "With a Little Help" is based on the problem of what do you sell to an "immortal, sovereign quadrillionaire living in a vat"

   http://craphound.com/walh/

   [Edit: The whole of "With a Little Help" is available for free as a podcast, with the stories being read by some interesting folks:

   http://www.archive.org/details/WithALittleHelpPodcasts

   ]

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