Thirteen Things Lemme foreseen

Hi, Habr! I present to you the translation of the article "Thirteen speeches, which were written by Lem " by Mikołaj Gliński.

E-books, tablets and smartphones, Google and even the "Matrix" are described in the mid-twentieth century by the author of "Solaris". This is how Stanislav Lem predicted the future in which we now live.

Optons, lectons, trions and fantotons ... Perhaps these words are unknown to you, but you use most of the items they describe every day. Stanislav Lem, a classic of Polish science fiction, predicted their appearance long before they became part of our daily life. And Lem's work significantly influenced the creators of the legendary cartoon series and one of the most popular video games.

We talk about the most incredible predictions of Stanislav Lem, and also recall his statements on current topics, in particular about biotechnology and transhumanism.

Tablets and e-books

Perhaps Stanislav Lem was the first science fiction writer who predicted the end of paper books. This happened back in 1961 in the novel “Return from the Stars”, 40 years before the first attempts to create e-books. Lem represented them as small crystals with a memory that could be inserted into the device, something like a modern tablet. He called it "opton". Today we call it "Kindle."

All afternoon I spent in the store. There were no books. They have not been printed for almost half a century. And I dreamed about them after the microfilms of which the library "Prometheus" consisted! Nothing like this. It was impossible to rummage on the shelves, weigh on the volume's hand, guessing their volume. The bookstore was more like an electronic laboratory. The books served as crystals with a meaning forever embedded in them. You could read them with the help of an opton. By its appearance it even looks like a book; The difference was that the opto had only one single page between the plates. The touch of the hand - and it appeared further text.

Audiobooks

In the same work, Lem predicted the popularity of audiobooks, which he called “Lecton”:

But, as the robot-seller told me, optophones were not received very often now. The audience preferred lecton. They read out loud, they could even be instructed on the desired timbre, tempo and modulation.

Robots sellers, however, have not yet appeared, and humanity has already come to this, in any case, the rate of playback of audiobooks and podcasts can already be adjusted.

the Internet

Already in the early 50s, Lem assumed that in order to increase the efficiency of powerful computers, they should be united into a single network. In his "Dialogues" (1957) he called this development direction quite realistic: the gradual accumulation of "information machines" and "memory banks" would lead to the emergence of "state, continental, and then interplanetary computer networks."

Lem witnessed how many of his predictions came true. And it surprised him. His statement is known, which allegedly sounded right after Lem first used the Internet:

While I did not use the Internet, I did not know that there are so many idiots in the world.

Google

At about the same time, Lem predicted a future in which all people would have quick access to a giant virtual database, the “Trion Library”. The trions were tiny quartz crystals, "the structure of which may vary." Trions worked like modern flash drives, but were connected by radio waves, which formed a gigantic knowledge base. Here is how the writer portrayed this process in the novel "The Magellanic Cloud" (1955):

Not only light images that caused changes in its crystal structure can be fixed in Tryon - pages of books, photographs, different types of maps, drawings, drawings and tables: you can also easily capture sounds, including the human voice and music; there is the possibility of recording odors.
Lem's description is pretty accurate. What he says here is what we call Google today. However, we are still waiting for the opportunity to record odors.

Smartphones

In the same book, Lem describes what resembles an earlier version of a smartphone: small portable devices with constant access to the trion library. This excerpt from The Magellan Clouds also sounds like a story about our time:

Today, using this invisible network spanning the world, we do not think at all about its gigantic scale and clarity of work. How often each of us in our office in Australia, at an observatory on the Moon or on an airplane, got a pocket receiver, called the Central Trion Library, ordered the work he needed, and after a second saw him on the screen of his color surround TV.

This story would rather accurately describe our current life when many airlines provide access to free Wi-Fi on the plane. It is important to recall that Lem wrote these lines at a time when the average computer was of such size that it needed a giant hall. The creation of a worldwide network began to reflect at the end of the 60s, and they began to implement it only in the 80s.

3D printer

In the Magellanic Cloud, Lem also recalled an interesting production model that resembles the current 3D printing technology. Interestingly, the process logic that Lem talks about is not out of date.

Finally, a trion may contain records of "development" or "product samples." An automatic machine connected to the trion via radio will make the necessary product for the subscriber and thus will be able to satisfy the most inventive desires of visionaries who wanted to have furniture of old styles or original clothes. (...) If the role of the trions was only to oust the outdated form of knowledge accumulation, to ensure that everyone who wants to use all the treasures of world culture, finally, to simplify the distribution of consumer goods, then this role would be very is important.

Well, 3D printers are now available in some stores. As for the "product samples", today they are the AMF (Additive Manufacturing File) format files, in which you can save the color and materials of objects for printing in 3D.

The sims

And what can you say about Lem’s connection with computer games? Wil Wright, the developer of The Sims, one of the most successful games of all time, said more than once that Lem was his main ideological inspirer. What made such an impact on Wright? It was "Cyberiad" - a series of stories about two robot engineers named Trurl and Klapavtsy.

In one of these stories, Trurl encounters a dictator in exile on an asteroid and constructs a glass box for him, inside of which the whole universe is contained — an artificial civilization that can be controlled. This state in the box became a source of inspiration for Vila Wright, who created a game in which each participant can create their own virtual world.

Of course, Lem would not be Lem, if he did not mention in his story the problems of ethics, power and control over the fate of other people:

Here, prove to me that they feel nothing, they do not think that they do not exist as creatures at all, they understand that they are closed between two abysses of non-existence - the one before birth and the one after death - prove it to me, and I'll stop pestering you! Here, prove to me that you only imitated suffering, but did not survive it!

Futurama

Of course, Lem did not anticipate the appearance of Futurama, but it was from his work that the creator of one of the best television animated series of the early 21st century drew inspiration. Screenwriter show D.S. Cohen told:

My mother loved science fiction. She infected me with love for this genre. Among the books that I read as a child were Stanislav Lem’s works such as The Star Diaries of Iyon Tikhiy and The Stories about Pilot Pirks. I think those strange, surreal and funny stories made a big impact on me; I especially liked the idea that robots could be humans. That is why Bender, the most "humanized" character of "Futurama", is to some extent obliged by this to Stanislav Lem.
Cohen said that one story had a special meaning for Futurama:

I especially remember the story ... about a planet inhabited by some robots, and suddenly people are landing there, and killer robots are already going to kill people, but they pretend to be robots to escape, and here, of course, be careful, spoiler! - It turns out that all the inhabitants of this planet are actually people who pretend to be robots, and they hide from each other in despair. This story is directly reflected in Futurama.

The story Cohen is talking about is probably The Eleventh Journey from Ion Silent's Star Diaries, and the episode of the series is called The Fear of a Planet of Robots (The Fear of a Bot Planet, the fifth episode of the first season).

Electronic dust ...

There are other innovative, sometimes rather strange ideas in “Kiberiada”. For example, “smart dust” is microscopic computers capable of self-organization, no larger than a grain of sand, working as a single system. The idea of ​​smart dust is fully consistent with the latest achievements of nanotechnology.

... and electronic bard

Another bold and ingenious idea from Cyber ​​Ida is an electronic bard, a computer device that can write poetry. Apparently, the great invention of the robot engineer Trurl was partially materialized in the form of experimental programs for writing poems, which are now full on the Internet. And to see this electronic bard, designed by Lem, be sure to visit the Copernicus Science Center in Warsaw: there you will see robots playing in performances based on the stories of Lem and other authors.

If you want to invent a robot-poet yourself, use the secret recipe of Stanislav Lem: make sure that you "weaken the logical contours and strengthen the emotional ones", and do not forget to "strengthen the semantics and make the prefix of the will". Insert a “philosophical stub”, “full semantic scan” and “connect a rhyme generator”, discard “all logical contours” and replace them with “self-centered self-centered connectors with Narcissus type clutch”. As you can see, everything is very simple!

Virtual reality technologies look at us literally from every angle. And Stanislav Lem convincingly portrayed virtual reality (the so-called "phantomics") in 1964, long before many Western futurologists began to seriously discuss this idea.

In his book "The amount of technology" Polish science fiction describes the "phantom generator" that can create an alternative reality that can not be distinguished from the "original".

Lem portrayed this technology as multi-layered: a person leaving virtual reality does not have to return to “real” again. Rather, with its help, you can switch between different systems without having confidence whether you are in "fantomatic reality" or in the real world. Of course, this would lead to a blurring between truth and fiction, and Lem saw this as a potential danger:

(...) the inability to distinguish a fan-made performance from reality would lead to irreparable consequences. He can go to commit a murder, after which the murderer, justifying himself, argue that he was deeply convinced that this was just a “fan-automatic performance”. In addition, many people are so entangled in real and fictitious life situations that cannot be distinguished from each other, in the subjectively unified world of real things and ghosts, they cannot find a way out of this labyrinth.

Matrix, or Big Simulation

In his analysis of phantomics, Lem approached the concept of an ideal simulation known to us from the movie “The Matrix” or from the recent series “The World of the Wild West”.

Lem portrayed the gloomy image of a large simulation in the novel Futurological Congress (1971). It is associated with the concept of "cerebromatic", that is, a direct impact on the brain with the help of chemical substances. In 2013, Israeli director Ari Folman filmed the film “Congress” based on the novel.

Post truth

Lema was interested in the philosophical aspect of the rapid development of technology. The writer came close to understanding how information circulates in the modern world. Today it is clear that the writer predicted many phenomena of modern media related to the concept of post-truth. In the novel The Voice of the Lord (1968), Lem wrote:

Forbidden thoughts can rotate in the head in secret, and what can you do if a significant fact sinks into the flood of falsifications, and the voice of truth - in a deafening scale and, although it sounds free, it is impossible to hear it? The development of information technology has led only to the fact that it is better to hear the loudest voice, even if it is a false one.

Transhumanism ...

If Lem could have foreseen the post-truth world, then why could he not have foreseen the emergence of transhumanism? Of course, the writer did not use this word, however he approached this idea in the short play “Do you exist, Mr. Jones?” (1955). In the work that formed the basis of the film “Layer Cake” by Andrzej Wajda, Lem reflected (then only hypothetically) about the legal status of a person whose body and organs (including the brain) as a result of numerous operations are almost entirely made up of prostheses. The company that financed the treatment sues him because he considers it his property. The play touches upon issues that are becoming relevant only today, and explores the phenomena that have been named only recently: for example, transhumanism ...

... and biotechnology

Lem was always aware that new technologies have their own dark side. Already in the sixties, he believed that the conquest of the human body by technology was only a matter of time.

In "The Twenty-first Journey" of "Star Diaries of Ion Quiet" the main character lands on the planet of Dikhtonia. The inhabitants of this planet have made such progress in science that they can change their body in any way and as much as they like.

Many years later, at the end of the twentieth century, Lem, reflecting on the danger posed by the cloning of human organisms (he considered this phenomenon as the beginning of a new era of slavery), recalled his stories:

My satirical stories written 40 years ago, in which the cerebral cortex is used as a decoration for wallpaper, begin to take on the form of a terrible reality.

Terrible or not, our reality still fascinates us - and the prophetic gift of Stanislav Lem plays an important role here.