bring on the techno-future

[_stranger_here]

Ours is not a household of many rules, but I try to maintain certain standards: thus, as some of you know, for a few years I've placed a moratorium on any mention of the Singularity within these walls. Why? Because long ago I formed an impression of how discussions about the Singularity tended to run, which was pretty much along these lines.

Well

Comments

[nihilistic_kid]

I think the main flaw with the Singularity is what happens the generation before, when computers achieve consciousness but not quite average human-level intelligence. You know, think Tony Danza or somebody like that. Obviously, these computers would give all their money to 419 scammers, join the Reform Party and then die, shorting out while trying to read ebooks in the bathtub.

[_stranger_here]

Artificial life will find a way!

[orbitalmechanic]

It's nice that this comes along right when I'm watching a lot of the Terminator movies and stuff. Not to mention BSG. Because I look at it and I'm like: AND THEN THEY'LL KILL US ALL!!!!!!!

Which, since mostly I agree with you on the subject, is really enjoyable. You'd be LUCKY to power a lawnmower! That might mean the lawnmower might not KILL YOU!

[spudofdoom]

As I read through this (giggling) it struck me that I haven't really heard much Singularity talk for quite a few years, except perhaps as a sort of retrospective, like your discussion here. It could just be the change of social circles -- from the Bay Area to Madison -- in which case this comment is completely moot...

... but I wonder how much the era was part of it? I remember there was a great sense of general philosophical entitlement among the self-appointed technological intelligentsia, and of course nobody felt particularly bothered by trivial concerns such as funding for crazy projects.

I wonder if the Singularity obsession with inexorable technological advancement and its consequences wasn't sort of symbiotically entwined with the heady-yet-anxious house-of-cards feeling of 2001. A bubble of that magnitude can only keep existing as long as a sufficiency of people believe that they live in extraordinary times.

[_stranger_here]

That's a sharp observation. Changing cities and social circles has definitely given us a different sense of where popular culture is at, and back then we were living at the epicenter of people who gave a damn about ideas like the Singularity. But yes, the late 90s right up through the start of the new millennium carried a great sense of possibility, anticipation of a new era on the horizon, the promise that tech would change everything, the looming apocalyptic fear that e.g. Y2K would destroy civilization as we knew it, though even that was kind of thrilling too. "2001" sounded so science-fictional and futuristic. Especially if you were working tech in the Bay Area, when all sorts of ridiculous projects seemed (and often were) possible.

Whereas now we're... what? Is it too obvious to mark the zeitgeist with milestones of recent disasters and economic decay? I'll say this: at the moment, I think the hive mind is less sanguine about the future.

[merovingian]

Oh, Y2K made us even more confident. We licked that one so easy - sociological ramifications just got swept aside by clever applications of technology!

[ext_42693]

I've always thought of Accelerando and Cory's work as being "dot-com boom" fiction. But even though the dot-com boom is over, my feeling is that the level of Singularity talk is higher than it's ever been. Kurzweil has given the notion wider visibility, and the success of his books indicates that lots of people find his message compelling. I can't help but think it's another manifestation of the millenialist impulse.

[merovingian]

(This reminded me of a story I half-finished and now I'm writing the rest.)

[_stranger_here]

Send it to Strange Horizons!

[ext_42693]

Replying to something Ben said in the first quoted e-mail:

the only one I think is really gung-ho booster about it all and sure of "living in the future" is Egan.

I don't think Egan is gung-ho about it at all. A lot of his fiction reads like horror because he is willing to examine all the unpleasant implications of uploading. And he has pretty explicitly mocked the idea of the Singularity (for example, in "Singleton").

In novels like Diaspora, Egan has written about a future where uploading is commonplace, but he doesn't suggest that it will lead to superhuman intelligence. The characters in Diaspora are not fundamentally smarter than humans; they're alien to us without being smarter than we are. (In contrast to the way posthumans are depicted in a lot of SF, supposedly being vastly smarter than we are but speaking and acting just like we do.)

[benrosenbaum]

Well, it seems like there are really four issues which need distinguishing in terms of folks being "gung-ho about the singularity."

Let us define, for the purposes of this conversation, that wooly and fuzzy term "the Singularity", S for short, as "a profound and irreversible change in human existence brought about by the impact of consciousness/intelligence-as-computation and associated technologies".

One issue is how profound people think such a change is. This can range from Vinge (who thinks that immediately after S, we will be as ants, nay, microbes before the mighty posthumans) to Stross (who plays it Vinge's way in some short stories, but also talks about Singularities as multiple technological ratchets in mode of production, so that after S we will be as citified agriculturalists to tribal hunter-gatherers, rather than as microbes to gods) to Egan (who, as Ted says, has people millions of years from now, in Diaspora, who are in cybernetic form but who are otherwise not all that different, in mode of existence and effective

[scarypudding]

Plausibility is the last refuge of a scoundrel.

[ext_42693]

This is hard to tell from fiction, since a given author decides to set a story in a milieu not because it is the most likely option, but because it works for the story.

Actually, I'd say this caveat applies to all four of the issues, rather than just the likelihood issue. And obviously what any of us conclude about a writer's beliefs based on reading their fiction is pretty subjective. I get the feeling that Egan prefers to write stories about extremely rational characters, whether they're uploaded or not. This doesn't mean that there aren't other types of people living elsewhere in the same fictional universe. Also note that Diaspora is only one of his novels.

(As a side note, I recently saw a comment by Charlie Stross where he said that readers interested in what he really believes is going to happen should put down Accelerando and pick up Halting State.)

(In this context it is worth mentioning Moles' Dictum about everyone writing far-future fiction now either having to have a Singularity happen, or a reason why it didn't).I