From editing DNA in mice so as to learn how to make humans more space-faring to the continued search of habitable other worlds, to deep algorithm learning to make machines smarter and growing human organs in animals for future transplant, it was a day of mind-blowing inspiration for the 150 or so of us who attended the Melon sci-fi conference in Hong Kong last weekend.
Fritz Demopoulos, founder, telling daughter Emma, “Books are the best weapons.”
As technology advances, and the age of quantum computing dawns, the line between science fiction and real life is blurring. The second “Melon: Sci-Fi and Beyond” sought to bridge both worlds by putting scientists and writers in one room and the blend of imagination with deep science produced magic. To keep it real, there was the added dimension of money as investors, publishers and entrepreneurs talked about how content creators could better commercialise their work.
Asked Fritz Demopoulos, founder of Melon, at the opening “Who’s more important – the writer or the scientist?” Quoting Isaac Asimov, “sci-fi is describing humanity’s reaction to technology”, he said that books are the best weapons in the world in firing up the imagination.
The co-evolution of science and sci-fi
Hugo award winner Allen Steele, who’s spent a lifetime collecting sci-fi magazines, said that science and sci-fi have shared a pattern of co-evolution over the century. “Sci-fi does not predict the future, serious sci-fi writers don’t consider themselves prophets but they have had an impact on what scientists and technologists have investigated and invented since the industrial age.”
Pocketphones were first mentioned in books in 1949, the idea of a Google-like search 1946, he said. The further back you look, the more obvious the link becomes.
Urging young writers to read older sci-fi books, he said, “A conversation only has meaning if you know what’s been said before. You take ideas that have been formed and with query and extrapolation, that becomes more meaningful as time goes on.”
Saying that memory is as crucial as foresight, he told the audience, “Live in the future but don’t neglect the past.”
“Before it destroys us, AI will save us”
Antonie Blondeau: “True AI is self-learning.”
Antoine Blondeau, co-founder and chairman of Sentient Technologies (HK/US), has spent the past 20 years working on the development of Artificial Intelligence. “What is intelligence? Over the past 20 years, my answer is that AI is the development of self-learning. It’s not about knowledge or data, the only reason we want those is so we want to make decisions. True AI is self-learning.”
Sentient, regarded as one of the world’s largest AI technology startups, and the leader in massively scaled, distributed, AI, is working on deep algorithm science. “Machines can learn very quickly in terms of feedback loop. If you make a small difference, it learns very quickly and the outcome and performance can be very quick.”
The reality is, we are already using AI in our lives. I met a couple of startups who are using AI – one to personalise clothing for men and a company who invests your money based on machine learning.
Blondeau said there are three steps to building self-learning machines – one, perception, two, knowledge and three, decision making. “The best understood is perception, the most difficult is knowledge and a lot of progress has been made in decisions.”
And to the eternal question of whether AI is good or bad, he said, “Before AI destroys us, it will save us. We will live longer, some possibly forever. Let’s not hold it back before we see what it can do for us. I am concerned about us not using it for the right purpose.”
What is Human 3.0?
Lisa Nip, synthetic biologist at MIT Media Lab, US, who’s part of the team working on CRISPR, the gene-editing technology, is definitely a woman of the future. CRISPR is being used to modify mice and eventually eliminate Lime Disease and could relieve human congenital diseases, with due diligence being done on philosophical and molecular ramifications.
Lisa Nip: Dedicating her work to making humans space-faring
She’s dedicating her work to making humans space-faring and in her talking about Human 3.0, she asked the question, what makes humans human? Is someone with a pacemaker or prosthetic limb human? A phone is an extension of our memory. If so, then augmenting humans is part of scientific evolution.
“Would engineering make us less human? It’s a wholly natural instinct to respond and morph to changing circumstances.”
Admitting there’s heavy augmentation needed due to the hostile conditions in space, she said, “You cannot change the seasons, you can only change yourself.”
Human 2.0, she said, was fusing man with machine while Human 3.0 was augmenting ourselves with organisms. “It’s for the survival of the human species.”
Agreeing that scientists could be more imaginative, she said sci-fi is “one of the motivations for me to do my work at the lab. A lot of movies that shows lab work, believe me, it is not nearly as exciting.”
She looks to sci-fi as a goal and among her favourite books, she cited Old Man’s War, the sci-fi novel by John Scalzi, A Wrinkle In Time (Madeleine L’Engle) and Enchantress From The Stars, young adult scifi (Sylvia Engdahl).
Golden era for content creators
Just as it is the golden era for consumers, it is also for content creators. “A new set of ‘railways’ are being built,” said media investor Paul Aiello, referring to new distribution platforms and OTT that are disrupting traditional media.
Paul Aiello (left) and Sugi Widjaja: The pendulum has shifted back to content producers.
“The strength of the old platforms is falling apart and there’s a cross-section of new companies coming in, from Amazon to Tencent to various other names. The consumer is benefitting.”
Sugi Widjaja, equity investment analyst for Capital Group (Hong Kong), said the pendulum was shifting back to content producers. Citing Nintendo as an example, he said content drives platform and hardware sales and digital distributors are looking for great content.
“The new world of distribution channels means that for the first time, content producers can go direct to consumers and get direct feedback, and authors can now find niche audiences for obscure subjects. There is now democratization of content flow to the consujmers.”
In China, with high mobile penetration, Widjaja said content creators should look at capturing fragmented time and changing the way they produce content – for example,, shortform videos vs longform. “There’s also no need to create entire content, you could break it up into sections.”
He said authors could also leverage AI and data to “produce content for a particular segment”.
Aiello said that sci-fi could what’s needed to “connect human values to stories”. “We live in a world of social concerns and political correctness and what can we put on air. This is a great opportunity for sci-fi to address those issues,” said Aiello.
Jo Lusby, former managing director North Asia for Penguin Random House and now running her own agency, agreed the power dynamic between traditional publishing houses and writers has shifted. “They understand the future of global content lies in the hands of content owners and originators.”
Interestingly, physical books are not going anyway anytime soon. Lusby said there’s a huge boom in brick-and-mortar book retail in the US and UK and ebook sales have plateaued. Emerging are audio books – in Sweden, 80% of all books read are audio and 20% print, she said, adding she’s working with a start-up in this sector.
As with anyone who produces content, writers have to become more social media savvy and managing their own profiles has become more important. “I see a time when they will hire media managers before they hire an agent.”
And she cited Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale) as an author who continues to create relevance for her ideas by engaging with modern technology, and staying in the public eye in an authentic manner”.
Writers, go forth and create
Stan Chen: Go big and diverse, go commercial and go global.
As for the writers in the room, the litany of ideas that came from listening to what’s happening in real life as well as other authors clearly fired their imagination, with many taking copious notes.
While striking a balance between the logic of the story and the logic of science is important, authors agreed that in fiction, the former takes precedence but having a better understanding of the science was critical to their work.
Anna Wu: Money makes a difference and the genre is attracting new writers.
In China, sci-fi is a growing genre and scriptwriter Anna Wu said money makes a difference. “In 2017, China’s box office hit a record high of 56 billion yuan, making it the second largest box office in the world, and the proportion of science fiction film is rising. In 2018, several major video websites in China will invest more than 60 billion yuan in online dramas. As far as I know, science fiction will play a big part of it.”
From left, Regina Wang, Gu Shi and Zia Jia, women shaping Chinese sci-fi.
Regina Wang, writer, Co-founder of AppleCore and international PR Manager at Storycom, predicted a future of “more women – more female writers, more female fans and more female entrepreneurs in the industry”.
Stan Chen, whose first novel in English, “The Waste Tide” will be published in the US and UK next April, is not averse to experimenting with his work. Regarded as “China’s William Gibson”, he tried co-writing with a robot “but the output didn’t make much sense so I may turn it into a poetry book”, he said, saying there’s also a trend towards audio books.
He said there were three trends shaping China’s sci-fi genre – one, bigger and diverse as more young writers and readers create more sub-genres; two, increased commercialisation – sci-fi will translate to multiple media forms such as Manga, TV, film, games and theme parks; and internationalsation – a lot of Chinese works are being translated and published following the breakout success of Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin.
He called Melon “an incredible accelerator in which science, art and business collide and enlighten the future”.
Zen Cho in conversation: The second in the “Sorcerer To The Crown” series will be published next March.
UK-based Malaysian author Zen Cho, whose first novel “Sorcerer To The Crown”, won the 2016 British Fantasy Society Award for Best Newcomer, said, “I really enjoyed the multi-disciplinary content particularly the science sessions.”
How it all comes back to travel
Other than the implications on travel of humans living longer, and perhaps forever, and mankind discovering habitable other worlds – imagine the possibilities for space travel then – what I found most interesting were the parallels between the world of sci-fi and travel.
Its content creators face similar challenges as travel suppliers in getting their products and services discovered and consumed. The industry faces similar disruption as travel as new platforms disintermediate traditional channels and having to capture consumers’ fragmented time as mobile takes over our lives. And, like writers, suppliers have to become media and tech-savvy to manage their online presence.
Yet there’s never been a better time to reach consumers directly without expensive middle layers and taking advantage of real-time consumer feedback loops to deliver unforgettable – and in sci-fi’s case – out-of-this-world, experiences.
At one point during his panel, Capital Group’s Sugi Widjaja, who’s also spoken at WIT, told writers, “Maybe there’s an opportunity for a middle layer person who understands the distribution problem, takes your IP and spread it.”
Sounds exactly like what travel content providers need too.