November 28, 2010

The Singularity in Our Past Light-Cone

Attention conservation notice: Yet another semi-crank pet notion, nursed quietly for many years, now posted in the absence of new thoughts because reading The Half-Made World brought it back to mind.

The Singularity has happened; we call it "the industrial revolution" or "the long nineteenth century". It was over by the close of 1918.

Exponential yet basically unpredictable growth of technology, rendering long-term extrapolation impossible (even when attempted by geniuses)? Check.

Massive, profoundly dis-orienting transformation in the life of humanity, extending to our ecology, mentality and social organization? Check.

Annihilation of the age-old constraints of space and time? Check.

Embrace of the fusion of humanity and machines? Check.

Creation of vast, inhuman distributed systems of information-processing, communication and control, "the coldest of all cold monsters"? Check; we call them "the self-regulating market system" and "modern bureaucracies" (public or private), and they treat men and women, even those whose minds and bodies instantiate them, like straw dogs.

An implacable drive on the part of those networks to expand, to entrain more and more of the world within their own sphere? Check. ("Drive" is the best I can do; words like "agenda" or "purpose" are too anthropomorphic, and fail to acknowledge the radical novely and strangeness of these assemblages, which are not even intelligent, as we experience intelligence, yet ceaselessly calculating.)

Why, then, since the Singularity is so plainly, even intrusively, visible in our past, does science fiction persist in placing a pale mirage of it in our future? Perhaps: the owl of Minerva flies at dusk; and we are in the late afternoon, fitfully dreaming of the half-glimpsed events of the day, waiting for the stars to come out.

Manual trackback: Gearfuse; Random Walks; Text Patterns; The Daily Dish; The Slack Wire; Making Light (I am not worthy! Also, the Nietzsche quote is perfect); J. S. Bangs; Daily Grail; Crooked Timber; Peter Frase; Blogging the Hugo Winners; The Essence of Mathematics Is Its Freedom; der Augenblick; Monday Evening; The Duck of Minerva (appropriately enough); Long Story, Short Pier ["the owl flies at dusk; it is always dusk; we can no longer tell a black thread from a white"]; Wis[s]e Words; Science Not Fiction; Anniceris; M. John Harrison; Mathbabe; International Studies Quarterly 57 (2013): 637--639 [!]; Brad DeLong; Market Failure; Kellan Sparver

The Great Transformation; Scientifiction and Fantastica; Modest Proposals

Posted at November 28, 2010 11:00 | permanent link

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