I mentioned in my post on Vinge’s A Deepness in the Sky that I don’t believe the Singularity is a problem. Commenters Dripgrind and Coveysd asked about that, and I decided the answer was worth a post.
Vinge came up with the Singularity in Marooned in Realtime (Analog, May-August 1986; Bluejay, 1986), which I read in 1987 when it came out in Britain. I thought then that the Singularity was a terrific SF idea—the idea was that technological progress would spiral so fast that something incomprehensible would happen. In the book, most of humanity has disappeared, and the plot concerns the people who missed it. (Incidental on-topic aside—the reason I re-read Marooned in Realtime is for the journal of one of the people who missed it. The plot, the ideas, the other characters have all worn fairly thin over time, but Marta’s journal as she lives alone on a far-future Earth remains compelling.) I was astonished at reaching the end of the book to discover a little afterword in which Vinge claimed to believe in the coming Singularity. I thought it was a great idea for a story, maybe even two or three stories, but too obviously silly for anyone to really believe.
Since then, the Singularity has come to be an object of almost religious faith in some quarters. In The Cassini Division, Ken MacLeod has a character call it “the Rapture for nerds,” and that’s just how I see it.
I understand how Vinge, a brilliant writer who had worked in computing for years, could, in 1986, have seen how incredibly quickly computers had developed, and extrapolated that to other things. I mean it’s like someone seeing in 1950 that a hundred years before the fastest speed was twenty miles per hour and now it was supersonic and extrapolating that line straight forward to having FTL by 1983. Nevertheless, I regard this as a kooky belief. Yes, in 1950 we were supersonic, and gosh, we’re in 2008 and…we’re still traveling in jets only very slightly faster than in 1950, and cars, and subways, and buses. Even computers are only incrementally better than they were in 1987, and this isn’t entirely because they’re mostly handicapped with Windows. I’m not saying they haven’t improved. I’m just saying that if we’d carried on the extrapolated curve between 1950 and 1987 we’d have something a lot better. Instead, we got the internet, which is a lot better, which is a new thing. That’s what people do. They come up with new things, the new things improve, they have a kind of plateau. It doesn’t go on forever. A microwave is shiny and science fictional but a toaster makes better toast, and most people have both, and few people have much in their kitchen that’s much newer. And people are still people, traveling fast, using the net, and though they may go through paradigm shifts, I don’t think we’ll ever get to the point where understanding the future would be like explaining Worldcon to a goldfish, and even if we did, it wouldn’t be very interesting. If you want to argue about how much closer to the Singularity we are than we were in 1987, fine, but I’d suggest taking a look at The Shock of the Old: Technology in Global History Since 1900 by David Edgerton first. But my view remains, nice SF idea, not going to happen.
I wouldn’t care at all about people believing in the Singularity, any more than I care about them believing in the Great Pumpkin, if it wasn’t doing harm to SF for everyone to be tiptoeing around it all the time.
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. It’s a lovely science fiction idea, and so are Gethenians, but I don’t see people going around solemnly declaring that we must all believe there’s a planet out there with people who only have gender once a month and therefore nobody should write SF about gendered species anymore because of the Gethenian Problem. 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. This hasn’t been a problem for Vinge himself, who has produced at least two masterpieces under this constraint. But a lot of other people now seem to be afraid to write the kind of SF that I like best, the kind with aliens and spaceships and planets and more tech than we have but not unimaginable incomprehensible tech. (Think Citizen of the Galaxy or pretty much anything by C.J. Cherryh.) I recently asked about this kind of SF in my LiveJournal and only got one recommendation for something I wasn’t already reading. Maybe it’s just a fashion, but I blame the Singularity—and that, to me, is the Singularity Problem.
FWIW, Matthew Jarpe agrees with you.
I love John C Wright’s take on this theme in the Golden Age, post-post singularity. It’s interesting that this is seen as a “nerd’s rapture” I find it a pretty dreary, pessimistic concept.
If The Singularity happens then let it happen. It can be predicted as easily as the outcome for any sports league’s season or the Kentucky Derby – in other words, not quite.
A lot of SF has lost me, not because it’s focus has been on the Singularity (and idea I consider sufficiently whiz-bang) but because the stories bore me to tears. Bloated multi-part novels requiring me to read them in some sequence not made plain on the cover are part of the reason. You mention Citizen of the Galaxy – look at its length compared with novels now. It crams all those great ideas and a great story in under 200 pages.
And don’t get me started on “Mundane SF”. If I want mundane, I’ll pay closer attention to my every day life.
I am a nerd who wants to be raptured. (MacLeod says it as if there were something wrong with it.) I realize that there are many who are not of my faith, but their faith is OK.
parzooman, Where scifi loses me is where it loses itself: focusing on the technology behind the Singularity and not the humanistic and societal impact. —> there are some folks out there writing that are getting it right. Thought provokingly right.
I think the inherent problem with singularity is the use of Moore’s Law and to attribute only pro-singularity factors into the equation. There are setbacks in science (stem cell research being a fine example…) there are definitely advances in science , but it’s the cool accidental discoveriesand unexpected discoveries which by nature can be added into the equation as a factor based on historical data—but you really can’t do much but plot the events as they happen.
“Steady on course Captain!”
“Where are we going Boats?”
“Hell if I know Sir, the bow’s pointed that way.”
Hah. I defy you to find any idea that is too obviously silly for anyone to really believe. People believed von Däniken’s stuff. Even flat-earthism still has a community of believers. Somewhere I am sure there are people who worship Donald Duck as a god. (It is a documented fact that there are people on Vanuatu who worship the present Duke of Edinburgh as a god, or at least who claim to do so.)
Don’t blaspheme His Duckyness, please.
Personally, I love singularity, post-singularity, mundane, space opera, or any other kind of fiction. If written well, there’s room for all kinds at the table. But I agree with the basic argument here: if the singularity nudges every other idea away from the table, that’s bad for the genre.
My concern with singularity stories is that they are not engaged with the issues of being human but rather present an escape from those questions and concerns. Especially as they become more codified or stylized.
I think the problem I always have with the Singularity is that it’s founded on a premise that if you supply human beings with an infinite stream of information they’ll make effective use of it.
We see already that most people are receiving more information than they can sensibly process, hence the rise of garbage science. We used to rely on structured filtration systems to tell us which information was worth paying attention to. We now have new sorts of filtration systems, but they’re highly imperfect; some of them tell people that MMR is dangerous or that there’s a global conspiracy to poison us all with lightbulbs.
Those of us who are much better than average at making connections between disparate information, critically discarding information that seems to us to be pointless, and then effectively using the remaining knowledge and connections to good purpose should be able to excel. But those things are hard to do, and I am by no means convinced that we have more people doing them than the number of ‘great thinkers’ we’ve ever had.
Jared Diamond, writing about the people of New Guinea, makes the point that they absorb, process, and retain just as much information as we do, but much of the information is relevant to the natural world around them and to the detailed workings of their society. We can, if we wish, learn and see exactly the same things, but in practice we don’t and we would be unable to cope. And he always stresses that finds he has much in common with people who’ve grown up in these tiny villages.
AlisonScott: The primary use of any new technology will always be porn (The First Law of Monkeydynamics).