Popular Science, your source on modern literary trends

[mmcirvin]

Here's a surprisingly good recent Popular Science story about "Singularity"/"posthuman" science fiction. (Patrick Nielsen Hayden's inevitable response: "No, science fiction's just going to do it until it needs glasses.")

I have trouble taking the Singularity notion literally: it strikes me as too obviously inspired by apocalyptic religious eschatology. I don't think we're approaching any end of history, and there's a big difference between an exponential and a curve with a vertical asymptote. But I picked out the philosophical-SF angle being explored by Vinge and Egan in the early 1990s as the most important trend in the literary SF of the era, and I've enjoyed Stross's and Doctorow's further riffs on it.

(I was amused to see that the article mentions the speculative cosmology in Egan's novel Schild's Ladder, which was partly inspired by the work of my Internet friend John Baez. Personally I thought that in that particular book Egan let the science get away from him and overwhelm the fiction; for my money Permutation City and Diaspora have more interesting takes on posthuman life mixed with wild cosmological ideas.)

Comments

So high, so low, so many things to know

[dumplechan.livejournal.com]

I don't think we're approaching any end of history

That's because we already reached the end of history, and are currently accelerating away from history on the other side, on beyond zebra, or at least beyond Fukuyama!!!11!1

Game nerd note: There was a play-by-email game called Singularity (basically a very neat little card game). Even the video game Alpha Centauri included a post-human "transcendence" scenario.

Since singularity is (by definition) hard to imagine, it's also hard to write about or suspend disbelief about. I'm interested in transhuman or posthuman literature in general, as it's somewhat believable that humans will make a step to something not-exactly-human. Or as one of Lem's book reviews says, "Down with evolution! Long live auto-creation!" (Or something of the sort...)

That reminds me that I want to re-read Vinge's books soon. A Deepness in the Sky may be the best science fiction I've ever read...

Re: So high, so low, so many things to know

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

The thing that really struck me about Deepness is that it provided further evidence that when Vinge writes bad guys, he makes them BAAAD. Few write them badder.

Also, I think it's interesting that the article never mentions the large political differences between, say, Vinge and Stross. Reading some reviews you'd think that was the only important thing.

My favorite Lemian treatments of the subject were in the lectures of the chatty artificial intelligence GOLEM XIV. "In casting off man, man will save himself" and "Nor are your interstellar neighbors busy signaling their presence. Rather, for millions of years, they have been practicing cognitive collaptic astroengineering, whose side effects you take to be fiery freaks of Nature..." According to GOLEM (whose lectures Lem wrote long before Vinge) there's not just one Singularity past which beings are unable to conceptualize, but several, and he just ascended past the first of them and can dimly map out the configurations of a few others, without understanding them fully.

Re: So high, so low, so many things to know

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

"That's because we already reached the end of history, and are currently accelerating away from history on the other side, on beyond zebra, or at least beyond Fukuyama!!!11!1"

And in detail it looks remarkably like more of that damn history, though in fact it is anti-history post-Ginnangu-Gap, as chronicled by Mr. Acreff-Monales.

[tomscud.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the link. I've missed out on a lot of the recent singularity stuff ("Lobsters" I think was the most recent I've read), but it is very readable, even if it is all "the rapture for geeks". Certainly I don't expect it to look like MAROONED IN REALTIME, when the superadvanced people literally disappeared from the face of the Earth.

I think the basis of whether the singularity will actually happen comes down to whether 1 of 3 things is possible: (1) artificial consciousness, (2) genetic or mechanical enhancement that improves basic reasoning abilities in humans or (3) uploading of human minds, especially if they can be run faster than real-time with existing computer resources. If any of them are really possible, then you get the feedback loop of enhanced intelligence working on innovations that further enhance intelligence. Otherwise, well, not.

(And then there's the scary prospect of a real, live energy crunch slowing, stalling, or even reversing technological progress. 1 billion Chinese people living at US lower-middle-class energy consumption levels is going to take a lot of magic-tech to sustain.)

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

The other thing is that, while computer hardware is still exponentiating in many ways, computer software hasn't gotten better at anything like that ferocious rate; I don't see any evidence of a Moore's Law there at all, except in that it's possible to take brute-force advantage of hardware improvements. In many ways we still make software the same way we did in 1970 or 1980, and it's a laborious and error-ridden process.

It seems to me that a singularity in which technology improves the pace of change beyond the ability of modern-day humans to conceptualize it would really take the coming of a generation of superintelligent software beings that can bootstrap their own development, and I don't see how that's in the cards any time soon. It could maybe be brute-forced through mind-uploading, but we're clearly nowhere near being able to do that; that in itself would take several extraordinary technological improvements over what's available today, unless a singular acceleration of the technology happens first.