Slashdot Mirror
Charles Stross Interview
An anonymous reader writes "I'm surprised nobody mentioned this yet: a very interesting interview with author Charles Stross, whose current cycle of singularity-based stories Accelerando (featuring character Manfred Macx) is as tightly-packed with cutting-edge speculations as Bruce Sterling's work. An excerpt from the first of those stories is currently available on the Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine website."
Wasn't it Vernor Vinge who coined the term Singularity in relation to exponential technologic growth which overwhelms our ability to predict and comprehend?
His writings are suffused with it. It is a key theme in A Fire Upon the Deep and Marooned in Realtime. It also weighs heavily in the background of A Deepness in the Sky. All IMO are brilliant pieces of SF.
there is a great clipping from one of the papers on the singularity and nanotech:
I would expect diamondoid drextech - full-scale molecular nanotechnology - to take a couple of days; a couple of hours minimum, a couple of weeks maximum. Keeping the Singularity quiet might prove a challenge, but I think it'll be possible, plus we'll have transhuman guidance. Once drextech is developed, the assemblers shall go forth into the world, and quietly reproduce, until the day (probably a few hours later) when the Singularity can reveal itself without danger - when there are enough tiny guardians to disable nuclear weapons and shut down riots, keeping the newborn Mind safe from humanity and preventing humanity from harming itself.
The planetary death rate of 150,000 lives per day comes to a screeching halt. The pain ends. We find out what's on the other side of dawn.
(After a series of Singularity/Monty Python takeoffs on the Extropians list, Joseph Sterlynne suggested that the systems should be programmed so that the instant before it happens we hear the calm and assured voice of John Cleese:
"And now for something completely different.")
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
Yeah, reducing entire philosophies to an incorrect one-phrase blurb does tend to produce ridiculousness.
Extropian graphs are like metaphors... they are a way of describing something, but they do not take priority over the real thing. Similarly, those graphs are just a demonstration of the larger point of the difficulty of predicting the near-future in an exponentially-progressing-technology era.
The graphs flow from the arguments, not vice versa.
Worst S/N ratio ever!
</CBG>
Just to stay on-topic to some extent, here's his story in Asimov's . Definitely worth a read! Has a sense of humor that reminds me of Stephenson.
Steven N. Severinghaus
Coincidentally, I saw this /. item just as I had finished reading Stross's "Antibodies", a short story, in a collection of the best science fiction of 2000. I'd never heard of the guy before, but his writing is wonderfully close to my experience and that of most /.'ers - I guess he's a bit new as a recognized author so not many of us know much about him. What I've read so far seems very promising though!
Energy: time to change the picture.
Well, I haven't yet read through all of his paper (I'll work on it) but his base proposition that super A.I. will take over the universe is a bit of a stretch considering we can't even make A.I. that can match wits with a lab rat and pull a draw.
Of course, once we can make an A.I. as smart as a lab rat, progress should be happen really, really fast thereafter, so maybe he's right.
All this reminds me of some old Chinese curse having to do with living in interesting times.
Everything in the Universe sucks: It's the law!
Incidentally,I have it on good authority that the Oxford English Dictionary is going to cite "Lobsters" as the first use of slashdot as a verb -- turns out that the OED editors have still got this quaint prejudice in favour of hardcopy, so being in a book in the British Library (or US Library of Congress) gets you into the OED, and being on slashdot itself doesn't.
The most significant factor in singularity is determining what is actually possible under the constraints of physical laws. In all likelihood the universe is not infinitely maliable to our will. Eventually, what is technically possible will reach a plateau, where nothing more advanced can be made.
The most straightforward example is faster than light travel. The universe seems to have a set limit for allowing an object from going from point A to point B. There may be ways around this by warping space. But there are limits on how much space you can warp. Eventually we will reach a point where we cannot travel faster from point A to B.
There are probably some people out there saying "But we don't know what the limits are. People used to say it was impossible to go faster than the speed of sound." That's true, we don't know what the limits are, therefore we should act like there are no limits ... yet. But someday we will figure this universe out and then we'll know the limits. We'll know the fastest speed. We'll know the bountries of what is possible, and we will build to those bountries. We'll travel as fast as possible. We'll make ourselves as intelligent as beings can be under the constraints of the universe. We'll live as long as possible. And technology will be at a plateau from which it cannot grow any higher.
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.