Writing about Singularity: needing help with references and bibliography
It was Yudkowsky’s Fun Theory sequence that inspired me to undertake the work of writing a novel on a singularitarian society… however, there are gaps I need to fill, and I need all the help I can get. It’s mostly book recommendations that I’m asking for.
One of the things I’d like to tackle in it would be the interactions between the modern, geeky Singularitarianisms, and Marxism, which I hold to be somewhat prototypical in that sense, as well as other utopisms. And contrasting them with more down-to-earth ideologies and attitudes, by examining the seriously dangerous bumps of the technological point of transition between “baseline” and “singularity”. But I need to do a lot of research before I’m able to write anything good: if I’m not going to have any original ideas, at least I’d like to serve my readers with a collection of well-researched. solid ones.
So I’d like to have everything that is worth reading about the Singularity, specifically the Revolution it entails (in one way or another) and the social aftermath. I’m particularly interested in the consequences of the lag of the spread of the technology from the wealthy to the baselines, and the potential for baselines oppression and other forms of continuation of current forms of social imbalances, as well as suboptimal distribution of wealth. After all, according to many authors, we’ve had the means to end war, poverty and famine, and most infectious diseases, since the sixties, and it’s just our irrational methods of wealth distribution That is, supposing the commonly alleged ideal of total lifespan and material welfare maximization for all humanity is what actually drives the way things are done. But even with other, different premises and axioms, there’s much that can be improved and isn’t, thanks to basic human irrationality, which is what we combat here.
Also, yes, this post makes my political leanings fairly clear, but I’m open to alternative viewpoints and actively seek them. I also don’t intend to write any propaganda, as such. Just to examine ideas, and scenarios, for the sake of writing a compelling story, with wide audience appeal. The idea is to raise awareness of the Singularity as something rather imminent (“Summer’s Coming”), and cause (or at least help prepare) normal people to question the wonders and dangers thereof, rationally.
It’s a frighteningly ambitious, long-term challenge, I am terribly aware of that. And the first thing I’ll need to read is a style-book, to correct my horrendous grasp of standard acceptable writing (and not seem arrogant by doing anything else), so please feel free to recommend as many books and blog articles and other material as you like. I’ll take my time going though it all.
I don’t think you understand what true power implies. The heart of the Singularity concept is not an ensemble of technological developments like rejuvenation and nanofabrication, access to which then diffuses through society as a result of political and other developments; the heart of the Singularity is self-enhancing greater-than-human intelligence. It implies that something or someone becomes omnipotent by human standards. It can kill all humanity, it can change them as much as it wishes, it can remake this whole solar system into whatever it wants.
In principle, you could have a post-singularity world where there is a slow diffusion of transhuman powers, but that would have to be by design, because the ruling power wants it that way. One might imagine a small clique, who happen to be the owner-operators of the first transcendent AI, who start out reserving advanced technology for themselves, but who intend to gradually share it with the rest of humanity, but only after conditions are met. What sort of conditions? Maybe someone outside the clique gets access once they possess a stipulated level of ethical maturity and practical competence. Maybe someone outside the clique gets access once they have been safely brainwashed into servile adoration of the original clique-members. Maybe someone outside the clique gets access once they have been brainwashed into adopting a peculiar set of beliefs and dispositions which originally marked the clique as an oddball subcultural cult, but which will become the new norm of post-singularity civilization.
But such changes can surely be made rapidly and by force, given a post-singularity level of technology. Mind control, personality alteration, the synthesis of designer people according to any blueprint at all—the work of less than a day for the robot agents of the ruling power. And I haven’t even touched on how unlikely it is that the ruling clique would remain separate from the powers they control through their obedient AI. Eventually someone will want to be the omnipotent being themselves, rather than just commanding it, and it is rather unclear what happens to a human will and intellect when it is no longer constrained by the intellectual and physical limitations of its natural form.
The post-singularitarian society that I envision is something similar to the one Yudkowsky described somewhere (I can’t find the post), in a story that had humanity find out that the stars were going on and out in the sky at regular intervals in a way that made it clear that it was a message, intended to them. They end up focusing on decoding that message. Eventually, they become a super-advanced genius race, with most of its members kept in stasis while the rest were occupied in decoding the signal and responding to it (there were shifts), with the hope of exiting their “AI Box” “Matrix” universe, optimizing the energy involved.
Edit: I see someone downvoted this post. Is it because I don’t know what I’m talking about? Cause mending that is the whole reason I started this thread in the first place. My premise is that this society does not leave the Solar System. In fact, I’d rather they didn’t leave Earth at all. Their main challenge is to optimize the limited resources of the planet in energy and substance to allow the people who remain alive (which may be greater or smaller than what we have, but will probably consist of immortal, nigh unkillable individuals, whose numbers might increase might increase, if they insist on reprodcing at a faster rate than people die, perhaps even an arithmetic rate, depending on whether that’s sustainable or not). Thus it’s a very ecologically-aware society, where saving time and effort to reach goals is a capital element of life, at least for the time being.
A way of maximizing everyone’s lifestyles while not accepting a diminishing of the number of living individuals would be to, again, put most of them in stasis, so that the rest may enjoy themselves to their own satisfaction, until it’s their turn to go to Sleep again. The advantage would also be, for immortals, that Science and other aspects of Culture would develop at a pace that would still allow every individual to learn and assimilate the full conents of it. A time of Wake would be spend updating on the latest progresses, creating new material, and otherwise having as much fun as possible.
Why would they restrict themselves in this way?
Not enough power to do otherwise. Space travel takes massive energy, as far as my pedestrian understanding goes. That, and the huge vastness of space and me assuming no FTL. In other words, not worth the effort. The opposite would assume we’d find new energy sources or new laws of physics: I don’t want to assume either thing.
The Sun pours energy into space in all directions, and Earth is just a dot which intercepts far less than 1% of that. You can build giant solar panels in space and then beam the collected energy elsewhere in the solar system, or just store it in batteries and physically move the batteries to where they are needed. Also, a post-singularity civilization can surely build fusion reactors as a mobile self-contained power source. A “Bussard ramjet” model of interstellar craft can fuel its fusion reactor while in flight by magnetically collecting the interstellar atoms in its path, and then refuel at a planetary system e.g. by tapping the atmospheres of gas giants.
Earth civilization currently uses an extremely limited range of resources—the tiny fraction of solar output which happens to reach this dot in space, and the tiny fraction of the Earth’s mineral volume lying within a few kilometers of its surface. You can already multiply this by some large factor, just by building solar panels in space and by mining asteroids. If we talk about more radical schemes… one common idea is to dismantle whole planets and completely surround a star with solar collectors. Even a mildly expansive civilization could give rise to an ever-increasing number of settled solar systems, with some fraction of them completely encircling their central star in this way. Eventually I would expect experiments on individual stars—mining the stellar atmosphere by stimulating solar flare production, attempts to form metastable plasma structures that can survive within the star, who knows.
At the same time, there is no law of nature to keep human and nonhuman intelligence operating solely at human scales of space and time. There should be intelligent beings which are smaller and faster, and others which are bigger and slower. The “body” of an intelligent being could be a network of sensorimotor devices of arbitrarily large spatial extent. The speed of light doesn’t provide an upper limit on size, just an upper limit on the “mind-body clock speed” of such a being (e.g. the minimum time it takes a signal to come in from the outermost periphery and for a response to be sent back out: you stubbed your toe, withdraw it; your sensor-web near Venus is needed elsewhere, relocate it).
In principle it is possible for a post-singularity civilization to hang back from, and completely renounce, such expansions and transformations, in all possible forms. But is it likely?
You know, Dyson spheres and all that stuff, they are utterly unfeasible: require far too much material, more than there is in the entire Solar System, not to mention maintenance and transportation costs. Same, at a lower scale, with building solar panels in space. I put the viability of all those awesome dreams as anything other than wishful thinking in question, Show me numbers.
Now, that we develop complete and utter mastery of this planet. Within the limits of what power renewable energies can offer: even the constant, titanic calculations and information flows that would require would require an awful lot of power, nevermind actually doing stuff to things with it.
OK, how about the number “1”? It’s estimated that a shell of very-low-density “statites”, surrounding the sun at the distance of Earth’s orbit, would require as much mass as can be found in one large asteroid. Increase the mass per statite by two orders of magnitude, and you can still build a swarm with cross-section larger than the Earth.
We can quibble about materials and about long-term stability. It might be that, without constant care, intricate megastructures on an interplanetary scale will collapse or disperse after a few thousand or million years. But to say they are physically impossible is somewhat obtuse. Consider the natural asteroid belt. It is already a type of “structure”—a toroidal region of space populated with a million distinct objects, with total mass something like 5% of Earth’s moon. So tell me why a colony of mining robots, digging into the moon and shooting ore off to space factories, couldn’t produce a comparable archipelago of artificial space objects?
The specifics of various proposals may be infeasible—e.g. the idea of a solid, rigid Dyson sphere—but I don’t see the basic idea of massive engineering in space being shown to be comprehensively impossible.
Okay. Lack of imagination on my part: I was primed to imagine a Dyson Sphere built around the solar system, not a small, pre-mercurial, partial structure. After all, inconcievable doesn’t mean impossible.
Nevertheless, I want to portray a humanity that’s focused on conservation and optimization and recycling and re-using. At least as an intermediate step before attempting to tame the Solar System. Even when they move out, I want them to be sustainable in terms of resources in the scale of billions of years. Meaning that the regime that we’re keeping right now (humans have moved and processed so much rock, we’re a geological era all by ourselves) wouldn’t be the one we’d be using in The Future.
The best Singularity story I’ve read is After Life by Simon Funk.
The best Singularity story I’ve read by far is Mostly Harmless by Douglas Adams. (In fact it’s the only vaguely realistic Singularity story I can remember reading.)
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If you are specifically interested in the interaction with Marxism, then the novel “Singularity Sky” by Charles Stross talks a little about it.
The most obvious angle is the means of production. Here’s a link to a list of writings about post-scarcity societies
I can’t believe that guy wrote a crime thriller about Rule 34…
Also, thanks to you guys, I’ve discovered the pleasures of kindle. There, were, so many choices for me to deciiiide…
Unfortunately, the Qeendom of Sol isn’t available in my country’s Kindle store (and, absurdly, they don’t let you buy from other countries). Anyone know of any PERFECTLY LEGAL MEANS for me to lay my hands on a digital version of this work?
EDIT: Oh lawdly… Wallet, meet Kindle, Kindle, meet wallet. Kindle uses “AWESOME CHEAP BOOKS”. It’s Super Effective. Wallet takes massive damage. I ended up spending much more on books than I otherwise would have.
IIRC, Raphael Carter’s The Fortunate Fall was a very good edge of the Singularity story.
I’d definitely recommend Strauss’s Accelerando as a more realistic than most exploration of some of these ideas, though not a very Marxist exploration. It’s available for free online.
And if you haven’t read it already, Stephenson’s The Diamond Age is a very explicit exploration of artificial class divisions in a post-scarcity society.
Is Diamond Age really post-scarcity?
Have you read The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect? Only good book I can think of that really goes through the singularity. A Fire Upon The Deep is pretty important, some of Greg Egan’s novels do an interesting (if fun-theoretically bad) job.