Thinking outside the [black] box
Interesting piece in today's NY Times, Airlines Study Alternatives to Jets' Black Boxes, looks at the renewed interest in streaming data or detachable recorders in the wake of the Air France crash. Money quote:
These problems have been discussed for years in the industry. What is different now is the attention being paid to the still-inexplicable loss of Flight 447, the apparent inability to retrieve the boxes from the Yemenia Airways Airbus that crashed into the deep waters of the Indian Ocean off the Comoros Islands and the expectation of air travelers that multimillion-dollar airplanes should have more, not less, technological capability than the average Twitter user.
— via NY Times
This will be an interesting process to follow, since fights over expensive retrofits to the passenger fleet often have to be justified by counting headstones. It's not just loss over deep water (uh, not to put too fine a point on it, controlled flight into buildings...) that affects the current cockpit voice recorder (CVR) and digital flight data recorder (DFDR), and sometimes the most significant moments of a doomed flight are unrecorded or unrecoverable. The National Transportation Safety Board has been asking for better recording tech for years (see their "most wanted" item).
Comments
Maddie_C
Tue, 07/14/2009 - 11:23am
Permalink
Hard SF and technology economics
Hi John.
Your post talks about the expense of technology and how hard it can be to justify the expense to get technology deployed (i.e. counting headstones).
It made me think about these movies we've all seen that take place in some imagined future where all this cool technology just "exists." I don't remember ever seeing anyone in these movies arguing that some technology is "needed" and having to fight for it and justify the cost. You know... Star Fleet just seems to have all these star ships and space stations, but we never hear about the bogged down deliberations in the United Federation of Planets where Vulcan wants some new zoomy-thingy but Earth is whining that it costs too much. Maybe that would make for boring stories, I don't know.
But I know you are a SF fan, so I am curious if you know of any fiction that deals with technology like it would be in the real world, where it might have more to do with whose congressional district gets the contract than whether the technology is any good (see, for example, the latest hooha over the F-22 Raptor).
John McDaid
Tue, 07/14/2009 - 1:10pm
Permalink
Economics in sf
Hi, Maddie_C...
While fiction can't include every aspect of a society without bogging down, you make a good point about the importance of economics in descriptions of future worlds. And there is a tradition in science fiction of dealing with these questions, though admittedly not so much in mass-media incarnations. (Although, uh, soylent green, anyone?) Fiction that deals with the on-the-ground realities and practicalities like funding and politics is sometimes categorized as "near future" or "mundane" sf.
For me, the first club out of the bag is almost always Robert A. Heinlein, and you can go back to his work in the 1940s and find economics and labor issues in "The Roads Must Roll," and especially, "The Man Who Sold the Moon," where an entrepreneur trying to finance a moon landing pits soft-drink companies against each other for the right to paint their logo on the surface.
There is, in fact, a subgenre of sf works where critique of economic systems is a main element, from Pohl and Kornbluth's The Space Merchants to Bruce Sterling's Islands in the Net.
Contemporary sf authors with a keen understanding of economic realities include Charles Stross and Cory Doctorow, whose short story, "Anda's Game" is about sweatshops producing in-game value. Doctorow's latest novel, Makers — currently being serialized at Tor.com — also promises insights in this area.
Cheers.
-j
Note: Sources consulted for this post included The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (Wikipedia link, not Amazon, thanks again, RI Lege), the New York Times, and io9.