entombed in the shrine of zeroes and ones

Marooned in Realtime is Left Behind, actually. Only if it were better written and starred Hercule Poirot.

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ewx.livejournal.com

Mmm, but it wasn't Vinge who came up with 'the rapture of the nerds'...

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merovingian.livejournal.com

s/nerd version of the Rapture/already beginning
s/just as likely to happen/totally awesome
s/just as embarassing to write about/going to involve a lot of robots

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ronebofh.livejournal.com

I AM THE SHOVER ROBOT.

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merovingian.livejournal.com

DO NOT TRUST RONE. HE IS MALFUNCTIONING.

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some_other_dave

...he will help grandma down the stairs...

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merovingian.livejournal.com

(This unnecessary comment is here only so I can haul out an appropriate icon.)

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Actually, I thought Charlie Stross's Accelerando did a pretty good job of subverting the subgenre: sort of "if the Singularity did happen it might kind of suck".

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waider.livejournal.com

Meh, my take on that was "if Charlie Stross wrote about the Singularity in a book called Accelerando it might kind of suck". Charlie Stross, fine, Singularity, whatever, combination, ew no.

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Speaking as a former cow orker of his, Charlie Stross is a really smart guy with a twisted sense of humour. The trouble is that he isn't quite as smart or knowledgable as he thinks he is, and he's lazy about his research. This tends to show up in his fiction, IMO. Of course, I may be biased, seeing the person behind the story...

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He does tend to write rubbery science, and I'm not sure whether it's intentional or not. E.g. he seems to be one of the legions of writers who believe you can communicate faster than light using particles in a nonlocally correlated quantum state, or maybe it's just deliberate handwaving for a plot device.

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Charlie writes too fast for the books' good, I think.

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To qualify the following, I am an annoying pedant (but you knew that already), so things that bug me about books and stories won't annoy other people. I'm willing to let FTL tricks go on the "obvious plot device, and maybe we just don't know enough to do this yet" basis, but I get annoyed when people bugger up on "basic facts", even in F&SF. For example, there was a screwup of that kind in Donaldson's 2nd Thmoas Covenent trilogy (forgotten the title of the individual book, even though I remember the screwup: it may well have been corrected in later printings), which had me hurling the book across the room.

Given the above context, here's an example from Charlie's work. He wrote an "alternate world" short story, set in the era when Ollie North and Fawn Hall were big news, which had some cool ideas (IIRC, it was called A Colder war, or something similar). In that story, he has Americans studying a spysat image in which they are looking at bodies strewn around some Afghan hillside and speculating as to the cause of death. All very cool and dramatic, except that even the current spysats don't produce images with the kind of resolution needed to show severed arms and strange mutilations, and '80s satellites were such that they struggled to distinguish between similarly-sized warships of different types. I know he can cite the "It's an alternative world, technology is better there!", but it bugged the crap out of me.

Of course, I'm probably biased, because I worked with the guy, and saw him make factual errors about events in the UK on a particular newsgroup (the latter wouldn't have bothered me, except that he was an oldbie and his US readership would take his assertions as the Voice of God, on a newsgroup which normally exhibited severe pedantic tendencies) . . . This probably sounds like I dislike Charlie. Actually, I don't, but I've learned that he's a normal human, complete with an assortment of virtues and flaws, as opposed to some God of Writing. My reaction probably means that I should never spend any real time around my favourite authors. ;)

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Writers are human. It's the 19h Century that got small.

Honestly, there are no Gods of Writing.

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A cautionary tale.

Once upon a time, I had an office mate who knew very much about pi and the calculation thereof. He read Contact. He was unhappy with the glaring mistake of generating pi one digit at a time. He wrote a testy message to Carl Sagan, explaining that a man of Carl's stature in the community should know better and do better. (For the non-mathematical, the well known algorithms for generating pi do so by doubling the number of calculated digits each itteration.)

Carl, bless his soul, returned to star stuff.

My office mate thereafter figured out an algorithm that, you guessed it, generates pi one digit at a time...

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Hmm... I do remember that in the 1980s, there was a popular rumor that existing super-sekrit spy satellites had attained resolution so high that license plates (or in some versions, newspapers) could be read from orbit. Later I read many explanations of various reasons that this could not be so, but it was the sort of "there's a lot goes on they're not telling us" kind of rumor (as Terry Pratchett would put it) that is almost impossible to dispel.

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What!?! You can't?!? when they'd pass that law, and what's the penalty if I don't stop?

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What is it with futurists not being able to see the obvious fact that all technology progress is asymptotic?

sheesh.

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wisn.livejournal.com

HEY, YOU'VE GOT YOUR ZENO IN MY ASIMOV!

Wow! They taste great together!

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Are we talking vertical asymptotes or horizontal ones here?

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vardissakheli.livejournal.com

I like the idea of a rapid progression to infinite technology, immediately followed by infinite antitechnology that rapidly runs up against an asymptote of zero technology.

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depends: do you graph time on the X or Y axis?

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pobig.livejournal.com

I always wanted to see a singularity novel where only a subsection of humanity vanishes off into the nether reaches of whatever, and the rest either don't notice or congratulate them and ask them to go the hell away.

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It could be argued that there are several novels where we see the aftermath of such an event, where humanity has effectively split into two separate species (Ilium) is an obvious recent example; others should leap to mind but it's 6:30a.m. and my brain hasn't woken up yet). Most such novels seem to assume that those "passing through the singularity", as it were, either wind up in charge or lose interest in the rest of humanity.

I don't recall any novels which show the process of such a split.

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Robert J. Sawyer really seems to hate AIs and uploads; he wrote one book in which the great menace turns out to be beings who migrated into software form, suddenly became incredibly paranoid and decided to destroy all organic life as a potential threat.

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ronebofh.livejournal.com

I wonder if that's the equivalent of adults harshing teenagers by conveniently forgetting what it's like to go through puberty.

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wisn.livejournal.com

"LEFT BEHIND: WORLD WITHOUT NERDS"

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I tend to think of the Singularity as a constantly moving set of goalposts: the point at which technology, society and humanity become incomprehensible depends on the perspective of the observer. To a stone-age tribe of hunter-gatherers, we're already past that point (agriculture, medicine, telecommunications, democracy (hell, nations where one monkey rules over tens of millions, and isn't killed or driven out of the tribe when he loses a challenge) and riggable voting machines etc. usw yadda yadda ad nauseam).

From our perspective, optimistic ol' me thinks we're more likely to run out of decent energy sources before we can get there (kinda hard to grow enough food when there's no petrochemical fertilisers, or to make microchips when there's no electricity). . . or maybe that would count as a different kind of singularity.

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because we need it.

Most biologists of my acquaintence think we're headed for a big die-back in this century or the next.

I suspect that more people are Stone Age hunter-gatherers than you realize, just have better places to hunt and gather and only know the real science about whatever little bit they're maintaining. The advantage we've got is distributed maintence, both of knowledge and technology, not of people in general knowing all the details.

My favorite news photograph from the 90s was someone in full Amazonian regalia talking on a phone.

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I'm a chemist, but I'm inclined to agree with your biologist friends.

My point about Stone Age hunter-gatherers isn't that they no longer exist or that they are stupid or inferior. As I understand it, the idea of the Singularity is that the "after" side is incomprehensible and unimaginable to those on the "before" side. I think that would apply to modern western society (technologically, politically and in other ways), from the perspective of the average SAHG.

This does not mean that they are unable to adapt to contemporary technology if they are exposed to it. After all, shitloads of people in this country, yours and many other nations happily use telephones without having the slightest idea of how they really work: when they dial the number of their best friend, they might as well be reciting a magic spell, for all they know about what actually happens within the phone, or the assorted telephone exchanges en route.

The above, and my earlier comment probably mean that I don't really believe in the Singularity, as presented by certain SF authors, in the sense that I don't believe in it as a sudden one-off event. Change is a process, it takes time, even if the rate of change can vary.

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There is a good argument that Stone Age hunter-gatherers don't exist now or that most of us are still hunter-gatherers, only we go to the supermarket instead of finding a place to trap horses. The people who are still hunting and gathering have contacts with people with radios, generators, and stuff (I saw a short film of an Amazonian family that bought a generator and TV and watched Bay Watch every week).

I agree with you on the unlikelihood of A Singularity. The biggest changes were in the 19th Century, to electric communications, lighting, etc., and we've been making it easier to use near light-speed communications ever since, but the jump from 3 day to almost instantaneous happened in the 19th Century. The Net is only a bit more than deskilled telegraphy compared to the changes telegraphy made possible (coordinating rail transport for one).

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