[extropy-chat] Sterling, Wired, and the Singularity

[Emlyn]

On Wed, 08 Sep 2004 11:51:17 -0500, Damien Broderick
<thespike at satx.rr.com> wrote:
> 
> > > >More likely yet, we live in a dull, self-satisfied,
> > > >squalid eddy in history, blundering around with no concept of
> > > >progress and no sense of direction. "
> >
> > > Where is this guy living, camp xray?
> >
> >Watts?  Elko, Nevada?  Guy needs to wake up and smell the gigaflops.
> 
> Well, to be literal-minded about it, the Brucester is living in a very
> tasty part of Austin, so the very air is fragrant with wi-fi gigaflops.
> Meanwhile, other people are making the same sort of point (boo hoo, the
> future didn't turn out like the Jetsons, and now nothing is ever going to
> happen except more terrorism and unemployment poverty and boredom, boo hoo):
> 
> http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPPrint/LAC/20040908/SCIFI08/TPEntertainment/
> 
> Damien Broderick


I think this article, while equally negative, is actually making the
opposite point... that the world is getting a lot harder to
comprehend. I wonder if Bruce is actually having the same problem that
a lot of us have, which is that when you stick your head in the
firehose for long enough, you become a little dulled to sensation. At
some point, you read an article describing something along the lines
of "some guys opened up a cell, swapped the dna for carbon nanotubes,
and created artificial life" and think ho hum, I wish there was
something more interesting to read. There's definitely a
can't-see-the-forest-for-the-trees issue too, and these days there
really are such a lot of trees.

There's also the idea, which Bruce Sterling makes as well, that Vinge
damaged sci-fi with the singularity meme.

I wonder... maybe sci-fi always appealed to us geeks because it was a
way to escape imagine extremely interesting things that seemed
inconceivable in real (mundane) life. Perhaps decline in interest is
due in part to the increasingly interesting world we geeks live in?
After all, if I've got 24hr internet access and the associated
bombardment of incredible factoids about the world that we live in
right now, sci-fi needs to go a loooong way to stimulate my amazement
modules enough to get my attention. And so the readership you have
left are the fantasy drones who need escape literature because the
world is far too bamboozling.

Also, I must argue with the idea that sci-fi isn't as good... there is
a lot of really quite stunning sci-fi on the shelves these days (eg:
egan, bear, and our very own mr broderick). I often read it to relax
my mind over a weekend when I've gone into information overload.

-- 
Emlyn

http://emlynoregan.com   * blogs * music * software *