Fri, 22 Nov 2002Here's the cover of my forthcoming novel, "Singularity Sky", due in hardback from Ace Books next August. (Sorry, couldn't resist.) Hopefully I'll have several pieces of good news, fiction-wise, to announce here between now and the end of the year.
[ Discuss shameless self-promotion ] posted at: 19:59 | path: /promo | permanent link to this entry The Lifeboat Foundation believes that disaster is nigh: "advanced technologies thought to be available by about 2020 may enable one evil or simply clumsy person to destroy all life on earth. Our goal is to develop an 'insurance policy' in case of such a disaster. We believe that the entire world of nature, including human life, is deserving of such protection." In other words, as becomes more obvious if you read their background material, they're afraid of a hard take-off singularity with negative externalities. So they want to build a starship and go live somewhere else where the runaway intelligence excursion can't eat their brains! (Booga booga!) I admire their spirit, but I think they're pissing in the wind. We have met the singularity, and the singularity is us: even if they can run away (and the energy budget it would take to do so is enormous: to shift just 1 kilogram from here to Alpha Centauri in roughly ten years takes the equivalent of a 20 megaton H-bomb), they'll have to fundamentally change the way human beings think if they want to prevent their descendants from going down the same road. Moreover, they assume that running serves some useful purpose. Me, I'm not so sure. (They might be right, if the bandwidth hypothesis is correct -- that posthumans will want to stay as close as possible to the point of maximum informational density -- but there's no guarantee of that; an examinationg of most interstellar scenarios suggests that post- singularity seed AIs travelling on tiny relativistic starwhisps could easily outpace any lumbering human exodus, converting the target star systems into a seething mass of nanomachines long before the exiles could hope to arrive.) Space is a more hostile environment to life that has evolved at the bottom of an oxygen-saturated gravity well than it is to software intelligences living in clusters of radiation-hardened nanocomputers. Maybe their efforts would be better spent ensuring that any singularity is the kind that we can live with ... [ Link ] [ Discuss singularity ] posted at: 12:34 | path: /sing | permanent link to this entry |
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