Janet and I joined dear friends on Saturday for dinner and a movie. We saw I Robot. We all enjoyed the movie, but I complained about the lack of logic inherent in the film's premise. I crave Science Fiction that is Singularity aware, but there is not much out there.
A recent article in Popular Science | Is Science Fiction About to Go Blind? reflects my sensibilities. The introduction to the article includes excerpts from a soon-to-be-published novel, Accelerando, by British writer Charles Stross. Here is a portion of this Singularity aware story:
Donna the Journalist asks the crew members when they think the Singularity took place. “Four years ago,” Pierre suggests. Su Ang votes for 2016. But Boris, the jellyfish drinker, says the entire notion of a Singularity is silly. To him, there’s no such thing. Wait a minute, Su Ang responds. Here we are, traveling in a spaceship the size of a soda can. We’ve left our bodies behind to conserve space and energy so that the laser-sail-powered Field Circus can cruise faster. Our brains have been uploaded and are now running electronically within the tiny spaceship’s nanocomputers. The pub is “here,” along with other virtual environments, so that we don’t go into shock from sensory deprivation. “And you can tell me that the idea of a fundamental change in the human condition is nonsense?”
Only a small cadre of techno-prophets is attempting to extrapolate current trends and imagine what our world might look like in the next few decades. “We’re staring into a fogbank,” Stross says, “and we literally do not know where we’re going, only that we’re going there very fast.”
