Link: Gwyneth Jones on developing robot technology | Technology | Guardian Unlimited Technology.
A long time ago, back in the 1980s, a new kind of science fiction burst on to the scene. For progressive fans of the genre it was like a supernova, blasting the old finned space ships, streamlined Metropolis robots and tentacled aliens right out of the sky. It was called "cyberpunk", and if you want to know what it looked like, you can see the cyberpunk future in Ridley Scott's dark, elegaic Bladerunner. The manifesto went like this: in the forseeable future there will be no aliens, and no trips to distant planets. Digital technology, however, will get better and better at an incredible rate, throwing up fantastic new gadgets that will not remain in the hands of the wealthy. They will immediately be adopted by "the street". Every punk will have a supercomputer in his pocket (and this was before desktop PCs, mind you, when video-camera, Wi-Fi internet access phones weren't even a twinkle in a Finnish eye). And everything else in the world will get much, much, worse.
Much of the science-fiction establishment hated the cyberpunks. Science fiction was supposed to be about progress, and how advances in technology will inevitably create a better world. But they were right, and the truth they told is highly relevant to this new century of sci-fi come true....
