NEAL STEPHENSON ON WHERE TECHNOLOGY SHOULD GO:

The needs of the world are great: New forms of energy, space transportation and infrastructure all need to be tackled with imagination and innovation, he said. He grew animated as he discussed his latest initiative: He is now pushing for a return to a can-do American culture that can “get big stuff done.”

He is trying to carve out a place for science fiction to help by, well, predicting the future. Wait, that’s not quite it: He wants science fiction to help by creating the future — supplying the imagination and inspiration to the next generation of engineers and scientists, just as writers like Stanislaw Lem helped inform and usher in the space age. And as he might have done by giving engineers a vision of the Metaverse, though he doesn’t say that part out loud.

He is doing it through Hieroglyph, a project of writers who hope to reignite the popular imagination to “develop new technologies and implement them on a heroic scale,” as he put it in a recent essay in World Policy Journal, with fiction that returns to its techno-optimistic roots.

Faster, please. Plus, a key quote: “We can’t Facebook our way out of the current economic status quo.”

UPDATE: Had the wrong link before. Fixed now. Sorry!