I always derided art-talk. Art history, movements, art-appreciation. I saw BS and I assumed it was BS. I now think that art is just hard and part of why it's hard is that nonsense and sense are hard to tell apart. It's not that objectivity doesn't play a role, it just requires some work in applying it. In any case, I missed out on stuff I shouldn't have missed out on. Young me's loss. Old me's gain.<p>One idea, that I think could be expressed as one of those movements which encompass science, art and philosophy starts with the definition of history, which basically defines history as stuff people wrote about things that happened. Prehistory is the stuff that happened before with a hundred years of commentary, nuance, various waves of correctness and such. But, arbitrary demarkations are uncomfortable. We much prefer a nice definable river or mountain range to act as our border than a straight line on a map. As definition go, history's in an interesting one. Someone writes about a guy who was the king, that's history. Someone finds bones and a fancy hat in a lavish grave, that's prehistory.<p>Now, by that definition we're running into some interesting hockey stick phenomenon. Our accumulation of history, via the digital record is growing f-ing vast. Vast! Google decided (independently, which is creepy but moving on) to make me a little album with dates and places of a recent trip I took. It's choice of photographs was good and so was the labeling.<p>So, written history with some guy or girl compiling a list of kings and laws and even daily accounts of wars and politics and money are now superseded. Written history is giving way to recorded history. Is recorded the right word? Is history? Post-history?<p>Back to sci-fi. Sci-fi of the 20th century was about technology. Video phones and space blimps. Alien invasions and human colonization of new worlds. Fantasies of mixed specie societies reflecting our struggles to transcend ethnicity and culture. Today's science fiction is, I believe most enlightening in describing the human response to technology. What will the world be like when tinder puts you in a virtual room with a would be friend? How do we react to real wars (as apposed to a science fiction version of romantic fantasy) in the communication age. How will it feel to be a 90 year old who can run a half marathon. What will it be like for people who can access thousands of hours of conversations their grandparents had with <i>their</i> parents?<p>These are interesting questions.