Singularity? No Problem

Jo Walton offered some notes on the singularity and the problems it seems to be causing for SF writers in a recent post at TOR.

Here’s what was said:

“What irritates the heck out of me is that so many other people have come to have faith in this, despite zero evidence, and that this is inhibiting SF. “…”Yet somehow the Singularity resonated to the point where Charlie Stross called it “the turd in the punchbowl” of writing about the future, and most SF being written now has to call itself “post-Singularity” and try to write about people who are by definition beyond our comprehension, or explain why there hasn’t been a Singularity.” (bold face mine)

I mentioned before that I agreed with the assessment that there would never be a singularity event, but that opinion obviously shared by some hasn’t prevented the seeming need to adequately explain away the singularity for readers who are concerned about such bible-esque armageddons.

Now admittedly I haven’t read all that much POST Nineties SF (some, and I’m working on it), but I’ve yet to see anyone use the most simple, straight-forward explanation of all.  What I have seen are authors who simply leave the entire concept out of their world building (which works for me), but may not work for others in the ‘believeability’ department.  (How some folks can believe in one fictional concept and reject another fictional work because it doesn’t embrace the first piece of make-believe is beyond my understanding. Selective sense-of-wonder disorder? Adult Willing-Suspension-of-Disbelief Deficit?)

Anyway.  The simplest work-around to the singularity ‘problem’ is – it didn’t happen.

As some have pointed out, the progression towards technologies that could engender a singularity that will occur within our life times (or close enough) requires that the current rate of change remains unchanged.  Moore’s Law describes an exponential increase and the path towards the singularity assumes that that will continue, while prior experience with other technologies will easily illustrate that this is not the case; at some point, a wall is reached, the exponential growth ceases and only cosmetic changes occur until a new technology comes along to supplant the old one, at which point the roller-coaster ride begins all over again.

Fortunately, we don’t even have to wait to see if we come to the end of the exponential growth cycle in computing to know if such will occur before or after the singularity, because there are numerous, plausible future events that could curtail such growth tomorrow.

Natural disasters, biological events, warfare, alien invasion, cosmic blow-offs are just the few off-the-top-of-my-head, easily imagined future events that could slow or even stop technological advancement next year, next month, or even tomorrow, because, if the research stops, so does the development of technologies that could lead to the singularity.

If you presume that a post-apocalyptic* society remembers our concerns about run-away technology – or even blames such for the downfall, and you presume that their cultural attitudes embrace some small piece of ‘just because we can doesn’t mean we should’, and then give them a little time to recover from the apocalyptic* event, you’ve created any number of plausible post-non-singularity futures, futures that can embrace just about any stripe of SF you might imagine.  If you really want to have astrogators plotting their interstellar routes on punch cards fed into the electronic calculator – now you can. (Gotta keep those machines down…).  If you’re full-on with steampunk – there’s your background for coal-fired FTL drives.  And if you really want to get nasty, you can have your pseudo-Victorian Era Earthmen run afoul of an alien species that embraced a singularic future .  The coal-fired Earthmen will win, of course, because their ‘old world tech’ can’t be affected or influenced by mere electronics.

Hmmm.  I like that one so much I think I’m going to start taking notes…

*See comments

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It’s Gonna Be One of Those Multiple Post Days…

SFSignal is now including my updates of Pulp Comic Story in their ‘free fiction’ section of the Tidbits.

A.  THANK YOU VERY MUCH

B. please email commentary as I don’t have a forum on that site – maybe I ought to add one? – but I DO want to hear what people might have to say.  No excuses in advance, but I do recognize that the text needs some editing, for typos and to nuance it a little.  When you’re trying to mix comic book narration and Grimm’s Fairy Tales style, you can easily get lost in a weird never-never land where the text says what you want it to say but doesn’t SAY what you want it to say.  Feel free to comment here also.

C. Jo Walton takes Heinlein juvenovels to task for their dystopian societies.

Huh?

Summary:  Starman Jones – poor sharecropping farmers/guilds. Tunnel in the Sky – overcrowding. Farmer in the Sky – overcrowding. Citizen of the Galaxy – slavery.  Red Planet, Between Planets – “imperial” Earth. Space Cadet – nuclear war. The Rolling Stones – no one ever goes near Earth.  Have Space Suit – Will Travel – Earth is stupid. Time for the Stars – overcrowding.  Star Beast – everyone is kowtowing to aliens.

Lack of resources, overpopulation and overbearing governments just absolutely LEAP OUT from the pages of these novels. Not.

Interesting that Starship Troopers, Podkayne of Mars and Rocketship Galileo aren’t mentioned in this survey of indictment.  Maybe S.T. was left out because we’ve been drowned in oblique criticism of that book by way of the (awful) movie – but let’s remember that in that testament to military rule, you don’t get a vote unless you’ve served, and every school child is abused by wounded vet teachers who deliberately display their injuries while brainwashing the kiddies.  And in Rocketship Galileo there are NAZIs on the moon!  Oh the horror!  (Maybe R.G. is the secret prequel to S.T.:  see, Hargreaves and the boys didn’t destroy the Nazi moonbase – they were captured and converted, the Nazis took over the Earth and viola – Starship Troopers.)

Perhaps it was word length that led to this piece by Walton.  You certainly can’t stretch ‘everyone needs a compelling reason to want to leave Earth’ into a full length entry. 

Sorry to say, but I think someone missed the point.  Those novels were not about the background histories/societies, they were about what people did after leaving them or breaking with them.  It’s called contrast.  The overall message is – be smart, be observant, don’t kowtow to convention and take responsibility for yourself.  In other words – Grow Up, because when you grow up, you leave childhood behind.

Lots of commentors stepped outside the box by mentioning non-juvenile works in support of this dystopian theory.  Yes, valid as far as the body of work is concerned, not valid when focusing just on the YA stuff.  But I’ll play the game.  In Time Enough For Love, Lazarus is ALWAYS leaving things behind.  He leaves a paranoid Earth to save the Howards from persecution, he founds new worlds so he can have ‘breathing room’, he leaves one set of descendants to start a whole new line.  At the opening of the novel he’s preparing to leave life.  Those things left behind are often dystopic – but not necessarily because they actually are.  We don’t know how they actually ‘are’ – we’re only seeing them through the eyes of a (prejudiced) leaver.

Let the dead past bury its own, as someone once said. These stories are not about how bad things are, they’re about how good things can be for people who beat their own drum.

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Two Quick Mentions

Tor’s new website has been in beta for a bit now. I just signed up and you can too.  (Sign-up is still a bit buggy – I was unable to use a password that had numerals in it.)  Looks pretty good and there are already a couple of stories up – for free – by Scalzi and Stross.

Slightly related to the prior post (Ping Pong) is this rant that riffs on IO9′s bit about SF that has been bad for science.  Seems I’m not the only one who’s happy to get mentioned by IO9 but not pleased with their particular take on how to present the genre.

My take? Scientific RESEARCH (read ‘legitimate research’  which is, yes, a whole other discussion) is never the culprit.  The development of and engineering of the new technologies that research gives rise to can be used for both good and bad.  More often than not, the negative extremes of those developments are more often fully realized than the positive extremes.  Our continued existence is evidence that the bad is never as awful as it is orginally predicted to be.

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