Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Yeah, I think that the book reflects a kind of measured ambivalence, rather
than raw contempt. I'm generally both optimistic about, and pleased by,
technology (though not universally, cf Little Brother), and parts of the
Singularity narrative are as exciting to me as they are to its most ardent
promoters.
  

    
A label like "technological singularity" can suggest a range of
meanings, there's a range of variations in the ways it could play out,
some more benign than others. The common fear is that an evolving
super-intelligence would recognize the fraily of the human species and
stomp us like bugs. I thought your vision of "the cloud" as an
inherently human system was more positive than some of the most
dystopian possibilities, though your protagonist's distaste for
"virtualization" suggested a critique of this version of the transhuman
possibility.

I actually don't think it's a possibility at all. Artificial or
machine intelligence isn't the same as machine intelligence, and I
can't imagine a way that human consciousness can be "uploaded" - even
if you could make faithful copies, there's no persistence of the
original (and you address that question at some point). 

Nobody's every quite explained to me how the singularity can occur.
It's like saying, if you throw more and more switches in increasingly
complex patterns, eventually the switches will become sentient, and
switch themselves. I'm don't have Kurzweilian depth with computer
science, though; wonder what I'm missing?
  

    
Do you both write to a particular audience or just explore ideas of
interest to you? Cory, I notice the marketing departments tag a lot of
your work as YA (Young Adult). That's an odd market all by itself, as
it turns out its mostly not YA's reading books in that category and I
don't think of you as a YA writer at all. Comments on what happens to
both your works after they are written, and the future of distribution?

Without being gushy, when I see a new book or piece by either of you,
my response is more like, "oh, oh, what have they got to say!". 
  

    
Following up Cory #76 -- if the Rapture of the Nerds happened tomorrow
and we all went uploading up to AI heaven, I think it'd be kind of
cool. I'm a skeptic, not a hater. But I wouldn't call myself an
optimist, either.
  

    
JonL #77: I think the best discussion of this is, ironically, obscure
and hard to find in print: "Mind Children" by Hans Moravec. (Which also
discussed a plausible thought experiment for how mind uploading might
work.)
  

    
Ted #78: I would submit that Cory and I share overlapping audiences
with Neal Stephenson, Vernor Vinge, and the other smallish group of SF
writers whose primary audience is not the traditional *things go
faster* SF readership but the IT-literate/internet geek audience who
are interested in *things get smarter*.  (I'd like to add William
Gibson to that list but I don't think I'm in his ball park.)

I've written [a lot] more about this topic here:

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2012/05/sf-big-ideas-ideology-what
-is-.html

and here:

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2006/10/lets_put_the_future_behind
_us.html
  

    
I have a dumb question... because I sometimes like to hear what I'm
reading in my mind.  How do you pronounce Huw?
  

    
Ok, a silly question. I have read most of Charlie and Cory's books. I
swear I read the term "The Rapture of the Nerds" in a book recently. It
was in a throw-away line, but I remember thinking at the time that it
would be a great title for a play...

Was it in one of the Eschaton books? Or maybe Accelerando?
  

    
Ken MacLeod used it, approximately, in The Cassini Division - Ellen
Ngwethu mocking the Outwarders. Could that have been where you saw it?
  

    
#82: Welsh variant spelling for Hugh.
  

    
You mention that science fiction has a core set of traditions. After
reading science fiction for more years than I care to mention I tend to
agree with the statement. I would be interested though in what you
think those traditions are as I am not sure I could articulate them.
  

    
Gareth: let's see ...

* Generally optimistic outlook on the Enlightenment-era vision of
Progress, especially Progress through Science: if we apply Science to
our problems, things will Always Get Better
* Colonialist/imperialist attitude to unexplored or uninhabited
territory ("space: the final frontier", "the Earth is vulnerable: we
can't keep all our eggs in one basket!")
* Apollonian rather than Dionysian (the life of the mind are of
greater value than the pleasures of the flesh)
* Speed is good. Increases in speed are better. We're going places!
* The human species is the apex of creation (yes, I said "creation";
in this vision, evolution is a teleological process, directed towards
the goal of producing humanity). Non-humans are less important or
valuable and are there for us to use as we will (see also: Genesis
1:28).

That seems to me to cover most of the unspoken ideology of traditional
SF. Once we move past 1960 things get a little blurrier, but this is
still the kernel embedded at the heart of the enterprise. It is,
needless to say, deeply conservative (if not reactionary): a belief
system for the likes of Dick Cheney!
  

    
The phrase "Rapture Of The Nerds" has been around awhile, from one
article in NYT;

The science fiction author Ken MacLeod described the idea of the
singularity as “the Rapture of the nerds.” Kevin Kelly, an editor at
Wired magazine, notes, “People who predict a very utopian future always
predict that it is going to happen before they die.”

so <jef> got that right. Must have been where I read it. There is also
this from '08, which I am sure I did not read;

<http://thinkchristian.net/the-rapture-of-the-nerds>

So is an older (but great) meme. Bought the book, but have not started
it yet.



 
  

    
I can't remember the original source, but Ken says he acquired "the
Rapture of the nerds" elsewhere. (I'll ask him again next time I see
him. Which is usually in a pub, which implies beer, which doesn't do
good things to my short term memory the next day.)
  

    
Sorry for the digression, it is a great title! 
  

    
I'd like to pipe in briefly to note that I am really enjoying this
conversation. The questions and resulting responses are a wonderful
read.
  

    
@tcn: I think that YA fiction is just fiction that can be ordered by school
librarians without too much trepedation, apart from that, it's just fiction,
though often with a young adult protagonist.
  

    
One thing I don't see explicitly mentioned in <87> is "alien
encounter," or at least an assumption that interplanetary species
exist, and that they do "thinking" pretty much the way we do, so that
communication is possible, if not likely. The usual assumption is that
they have advanced technology and are more intelligent (though George
Alec Effinger once wrote of alien visitors who wore bad leisure suits
and spent their time on earth shopping for cheesy black velvet
paintings).

Aliens do appear in ROTN, but we don't learn much about 'em. Do you
think aliens are interesting and/or useful in hard science fiction?
(Related question: "Star Trek: threat, or menace?")
  

    
#87 I was a little surprised by your 1st tenet.  It feels to me as if
much science fiction is about people being shaped by, or surviving the
consequences of science.
 
Overall the belief system seemed closer to Tony Blairs rather than
Dick Cheneys?
  

    
jon #93: I'm not generally interested in aliens of the space-going
variety. They're often placeholders for the author's fear of the
culturally different. Or you end up with Star Trek syndrome -- aliens
are just humans in latex face-paint with horribly over-simplified
background stories (one planet, one culture, one language, that sort of
thing). Not to mention that the sheer implausibility of running into
something that looks vaguely like us and can coexist in our biospheres
is still vastly less implausible that the prospect of us running into
talkative tool-users with a similar type of cognitive model! (We don't
even share *that* with all the great apes; in my view, human-like
intelligence is even less likely than human-like morphology.)

Having said that, speculations about extraterrestrial biota are
another matter entirely. (But they tend to be rather drier and harder
to generate emotionally engaging drama from.)
  

    
Gareth #94: it's worth noting that there are only a handful of core
plots in fiction -- human versus human, human versus nature, human
versus self -- and we can recapitulate these in any genre. (Human being
shaped by science is just human versus nature in science drag.)

As for the belief system being more Tony Blair than Dick Cheney, I
don't see a hell of a lot of blue water between them.
  

    
I thought your sentient lobsters in Accelerando were some of the
coolest things going:)
  

    
Speaking of which, Charlie, where did you get your sense of humor and
how did you develop it so well in your writing style? I laugh more
during your books than just about any others. It's a great gift.
  

    
Just catching up with this wonderful conversation. 

One historical-documentary note: the Souls in Silicon, the November
1993 story in Omni by Frederick Pohl and Hans Moravec has some claim to
being Singularity's official kickoff. 

<http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/project.archive/general.articles/1993/Silicon/S
ouls.html>
  

    
Ted #98: I found it living feral in a back alleyway and lured it into
my flat with offers of cat food and chopped liver.

Stet #99: Vinge published first (March '93 --
http://mindstalk.net/vinge/vinge-sing.html ) and he described the idea
informally in his 1986 novel "Marooned in Realtime". But if you really
want to trace the taproots of singularity-fic in SF, why are you
ignoring Olaf Stapledon?