From: Damien Broderick (damienb@unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Sat Aug 16 2003 - 00:50:39 MDT
It's more than a quarter of a century since I read John Brunner's stunning
sf novel THE SHOCKWAVE RIDER, and I'd forgotten this prescient element:
http://www.skypoint.com/members/gimonca/brunner.html
< Brunner's future in "Shockwave Rider" includes an info-futures betting
pool called Delphi. Even as people struggle to keep up with the tiring pace
of technological change, they can win money by betting on the next
breakthrough. (There is info-futures betting for entertainment only on the
Internet today at http://if.arc.ab.ca/IF.shtml). Brunner sees this not as a
free-market instrument, but as a tool to be manipulated by government
bureaucrats who fiddle with the odds: "What the public currently yearned
for could be deduced by watching the betting, and steps could be taken to
ensure that what was feasible was done, and what was not was carefully
deeveed. It was a task that taxed the skills of top CIMA experts to ensure
that when the government artificially cut Delphi odds to distract attention
from something undesirable no other element in the mix was dragged down
with it." What appears on the outside to be freedom is actually government
control by information feedback. >
Damien Broderick
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