The Internet of Slow Things

Future Tense

Future Tense is a partnership between ASU, the New America Foundation and Slate magazine to explore emerging technologies and their transformative effects on society and public policy. Future Tense hosts events and public conversations, and publishes original content from policymakers, scientists, humanists and journalists, including many ASU scholars, on Slate

An illustration made up of partial, colorful images of five types of landscapes. From left to right: a monumental building and waterfall on the bank of a river; a small outpost or hut suspended above a swamp; a suburban scene where roads have been flooded or replaced with canals; a grassy village with a thatched-roof dwelling; and a tower in a desert with plants snaking up its side.

Book Launch: Climate Action Almanac (Online)

Tracing Pathways to Positive Climate Futures Zoom Webinar – Register This event starts at 1:00 pm Arizona time, which is 12:00 pm Pacific and 3:00 pm Eastern. When we think

An illustration of zombies lurching across a dimly lit environment with blurry streetlights in the background.

What Zombies Can Teach Us About Surviving the Apocalypse (Online)

Register How prepared are you to survive the zombie apocalypse? No, really: How long would you have before you got to the bottom of your pantry? Would your community struggle

An illustrated background in bright colors of blue, magenta, and gold, showing rockets, cranes, ladders, and other technologies reaching up to create a busy, futuristic scene.

Science Fiction/Real Policy Book Club: All Systems Red by Martha Wells (Online)

Science fiction can have real policy impacts, and comes rife with real-life commentary. For the next gathering of our Science Fiction/Real Policy Book Club, we have selected All Systems Red

An illustrated background in bright colors of blue, magenta, and gold, showing rockets, cranes, ladders, and other technologies reaching up to create a busy, futuristic scene.

Science Fiction/Real Policy Book Club: Infomocracy by Malka Older (Online)

Science fiction can have real policy impacts, and comes rife with real-life commentary. For the third gathering of our Science Fiction/Real Policy Book Club, we have selected Malka Older’s novel

A copy of Neal Stephenson's novel Termination Shock, standing up against a white background.

Neal Stephenson, Termination Shock (Online)

With his string of bestselling novels, Neal Stephenson has carved out a space at the forefront of contemporary fiction, exploring and shaping our cultural imaginary about the future and how

Governing for the Future (Online)

How do we govern for the long haul? Humans are manipulating the planet in ways that will play out for centuries, but our decision-making is often myopic and localized. The

A blue figure holding the scales of justice, made up of binary code ones and zeroes, against a black background.

Stories of Algorithmic Justice (Online)

We often cling to the idea that artificially intelligent systems are neutral arbiters, despite knowing that these systems can only be as good as the parameters and data sets that

Future Tense Fiction: Double Spiral

By Marcy Kelly

Future Tense Fiction: What the Dead Man Said

By Chinelo Onwualu

Future Tense Fiction: Zero in Babel

By E. Lily Yu

Future Tense Fiction: Space Leek

By Chen Qiufan

Future Tense Fiction: No Moon and Flat Calm

by Elizabeth Bear

Future Tense Fiction: The Song Between Worlds

By Indrapramit Das

Mpendulo: The Answer

By Nosipho Dumisa

Thoughts and Prayers

by Ken Liu

This is the pop culture that helped us survive 2018

The Verge

When Robot and Crow Saved East St. Louis

by Annalee Newitz

Future Tense Fiction: Mother of Invention

A new short story by the author of Marvel’s Black Panther: Long Live the King, Nnedi Okorafor.

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What Black Panther Could Mean for the Afrofuturism Movement

By Michael Bennett
Slate – Future Tense

Digital cartoon drawn Image from the short story The Minnesota Diet. Four people watching a woman smash a whole into a wall with a hammer.

Future Tense Fiction: The Minnesota Diet

A new short story from the author of the Nebula Award–winning All the Birds in the Sky, Charlie Jane Anders.

Photo of Torie Bosch, and Cover for What Future. The year's best ideas to reclaim, reanimate and reinvent our future. 2017 Edition Edited by Torie Bosch and Roy Scranton. Cover photo of a tree in the jungle.

Workshop: “Writing to Change Minds” with Slate’s Torie Bosch

Stubbornness may be the defining characteristic of the moment we’re in. People seem increasingly reluctant to listen to other points of view or deviate from their tribe. So how can

Space Is Not a Void

By Joey Eschrich and Ed Finn
Future Tense – Slate

Margaret Atwood, Prophet?

Ed Finn
Slate – Future Tense

What Algorithms Want

RSVP here >> Algorithms tell us what to read, where to go, and whom to date…but do we really understand them? It’s easy to think of algorithms as magical beings,

Future Tense Fiction: “Mr. Thursday,” by Emily St. John Mandel

“She’d seen the coat before in this moment, exiting this train, here. Every face in the crowd looked somehow familiar.” Read the full story on Slate.com

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How Frankenstein’s Monster Became Sexy

Joey Eschrich
Slate – Future Tense

Illustration of a woman with long hair, pronounced eyebrows, and full lips, against a red background.

Future Tense Fiction

In April 2016 CSI launched a new experiment with the Future Tense Channel at Slate: a regular writing series featuring original science fiction stories by well-known authors. We launched Future

Illustration of a woman with long hair, pronounced eyebrows, and full lips, against a red background.

Future Tense Fiction: “Mika Model,” by Paolo Bacigalupi

“The girl, the robot … this thing—I’d seen her before, all right. I’d seen her in technology news stories about advanced learning node networks…”

Algorithms Are Like Kirk, Not Spock

When technologists describe their hotshot new system for trading stocks or driving cars, the algorithm at its heart always seems to emerge from a magical realm of Spock-like rationality and mathematical perfection. Algorithms can save lives or make money, the argument goes, because they are built on the foundations of mathematics: logical rigor, conceptual clarity, and utter consistency. Math is perfect, right? And algorithms are made out of math.

What Algorithms Want

We spend an awful lot of time now thinking about what algorithms know about us: the ads we see online, the deep archive of our search history, the automated photo-tagging of our families. We don’t spend as much time asking what algorithms want.

The Internet of Slow Things

Higher education is obsessed with 3-D printing. Makerspaces and fab labs are sprouting like extruded weeds on college campuses, and everyone from business school deans to librarians are asking how 3-D printing and fabrication can be implemented in teaching.

Apocalypse Moon: Neal Stephenson on his new novel, Seveneves, and the future of humanity

An interview with Neal Stephenson about his new novel, Seveneves, humanity’s resilience, and more.

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Take a picture. It’ll last longer

An experimental philosopher’s project to document 100 or even 1,000 years of change with a single photograph.
Joey Eschrich
Slate – Future Tense

Headshot of Jonathon Keats

A Crazy Experiment Attempts to Document Change With a Photo Taken Over 1,000 Years

A new project by experimental philosopher Jonathon Keats at Arizona State University involves creating simple, incredibly durable pinhole cameras that will slowly create a single image over the course of a century or a millennium.

An Interview With Margaret Atwood

Climate fiction, or “cli fi,” can be a dreary genre. Storytellers like to make a grim business of climate change, populating their narratives with a humorless onslaught of death, destruction, drowned monuments, and starving children. Margaret Atwood is the conspicuous exception, somehow managing to tackle the subject, including these familiar elements, with deadpan wit and an irreverent playfulness, making it both more interesting and believable. The flood is coming, her MaddAddam trilogy promises, but there is hope.

Cover of Science and science fiction. An interview with Paul Davies. Statement reads Ed Finn sat down to discuss project Hieroglyph with physicist and cosmologist Paul Davies, director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science at Arizona State University.

An Illuminated Manuscript About Space Exploration, Science Fiction, and Physics

You just don’t see many illuminated manuscripts these days. There’s a good reason why: They take a long time to make. I learned this recently when I set out to commission a thoroughly modern illuminated manuscript: not a religious text, but an interview with theoretical physicist and cosmologist Paul Davies, a professor at Arizona State University and the author of books like How to Build a Time Machine.

Future Tense: Can We Imagine Our Way to a Better Future?

On October 2, 2014, Future Tense and Issues in Science and Technology hosted an event in Washington, DC inspired by Project Hieroglyph.

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Innovation Starvation, the Next Generation

Humankind has lots of great ideas for the future. We need people to carry them out.
Neal Stephenson
Slate – Future Tense

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Don’t Diss Dystopias

Sci-fi’s warning tales are as important as its optimistic stories.
Ramez Naam
Slate – Future Tense

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The Dystopian City and Urban Policy

Science fiction has inspired scientists and political activists, but it should be an inspiration for municipal governments too.
Annalee Newitz
Slate – Future Tense

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Meeting My Protagonist

When I wrote a novel about a Nigerian space program, I didn’t expect it to be so close to the truth.
Deji Bryce Olukotun
Slate – Future Tense

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Project Hieroglyph Story: “The Day It All Ended”

A short story from Hieroglyph, a new science fiction anthology.
Charlie Jane Anders
Slate-Future Tense

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Only Science Fiction Can Save Us!

What sci-fi gets wrong about income inequality.
Lee Konstantinou
Slate – Future Tense

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Forget the Tricorder

Why gadgets aren’t the coolest part of science fiction.
Joey Eschrich
Slate – Future Tense

An Aerialist, Two Clowns, and a Robot Walk Into a Carnival …

In his 1984 film The Terminator and its sequels, James Cameron imagines a dystopic future in which armies of intelligent robots move with startling suddenness from positions of servility to utter and violent dominance, destroying civilization and driving humankind to the brink of extinction.

This, of course, is pure science fiction. There’s little reason to believe things will unfold that way. First, they would take all our jobs and wreck our economy.

This is the nightmare narrative of our future with robots and artificial intelligence. The utopian version of this tale—one accepted by many powerful people in industry and government—involves a …read more

Confess Your Digital Sins

A voice cries out in the desert:

“Know thyself, not thy selfies!”

“Digital media will not save you!”

“The zero is not whole and the one is not The One!”

Technically, we’re not in the desert—we’re in a dusty parking lot in downtown Phoenix. And the voice is not coming from the Prophet Isaiah, but from professor Ron Broglio, whom I’ve ordained as a Minister of the Digital Tabernacle. As people wander into the massive circus tent at Arizona State University’s Emerge: Carnival of the Future, they are greeted by a pair of shifty evangelists preaching the analog Word. (Disclosure: …read more

How to Make Music With Drones

The good thing about performing music with drones is that they always show up for rehearsal on time. The bad thing is that they might suddenly drop out of the air and onto your head.

I learned all this while putting together a piece called “Drone Confidential” for Arizona State University’s Emerge, a “Carnival of the Future” that was held in Phoenix recently. Emerge is an annual circus of cool new technologies in performance, dedicated to showing how artists and machines can work together to create something awesome. …read more

A close up photo of a computer screen with unreadable numbers and words stack on each other and all different colors.

What if Computers Know You Better Than You Know Yourself?

I recently read about the launches of both an “ultrasecure” mobile phone for protecting privacy and a clip-on camera that takes a picture of everything you do at 30-second intervals. Our cultural relationship with data is more complicated and contradictory than it has ever been, and our debates on the subject almost always center on privacy. But privacy, the notion that only you should be able to control information about yourself, cloaks a deeper tension between information and meaning, between databases and insights.

Event Recap: Former Intel CEO Craig R. Barrett on the Future of Moore’s Law

By Sarah Rothbard This post originally appeared on Zócalo Public Square. Zócalo Public Square is a partnership of the New America Foundation and Arizona State University; Future Tense is a

Neil deGrasse Tyson on Van Gogh’s Role in Space Exploration and Other Great Tales of Science

By Torie Bosch Science panels don’t normally involve a striptease, even a G-rated one. But on Saturday, March 30, Neil deGrasse Tyson took off his shirt to prove a point

Are Cyborg Humans (and Animals) Still True Life Forms? A Future Tense Panel Recap.

By Adam Sneed Cyborgs have arrived on Earth, but there’s no reason to worry. They’re nothing like the cold machine-men from The Terminator. Cybernetic technologies that integrate with the human

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Is It Time To Take Cyborg Rights Seriously? A Q&A With Neil Harbisson.

Torie Bosch Slate – Future Tense

Celebrate National Science Fiction Day by Learning To Live in the Future

By Ed Finn It’s 2013, people—we are living in the future. Since the news is still awash with problems we created for ourselves decades or centuries ago (the permanent fiscal crisis, gun control, the political powder-keg that is the Middle East), it may have escaped your notice that today is also National Science Fiction Day.