On Futurismic late last week, I felt slightly bad about being so hard on Charlie Stross, or at least insofar as I was impolite, when someone said:

“Anissimov may be an expert on transhumanism, but he needs to work on his “humanism” – finishing off his disagreement with Stross’ post by slagging off one of his novels is cheap and small-minded.”

In response, I said:

“Bah, I’ll try to be nicer in the future. I just feel entitled to a slight rant once in a while. I think there’s a relevant connection between disagreeing with someone’s futurist reasoning and their approach to fiction. The ironic part is that Stross strongly promotes pro-Singularity ideas via his writing. If he thinks that mankind should forget the Singularity in the 21st century, he is working against himself.”

Then, Charlie Stross himself showed up and said:

“Michael Anissimov: “The ironic part is that Stross strongly promotes pro-Singularity ideas via his writing. If he thinks that mankind should forget the Singularity in the 21st century, he is working against himself.”

Er, no. Firstly, I’m saying: we cannot count on a singularity coming along in time to save us. (Or, indeed, on it being the right kind of singularity to save us, as opposed to our mobile phones or lifelogs or whatever interests it.) When embarking on an engineering project you can’t blithely count on some new enabling technology or material (that isn’t even on the drawing board) showing up in time to make the rest of your machinery work. You especially can’t rely on the arrival of a technology you can’t even define (and we don’t, as yet, appreciate the shape or structure of a mature intelligence amplification technology, much less a true AI — although I’ll concede that some of our tools today would look almost supernaturally powerful from a 1950s perspective).

Secondly — and you’re probably going to hate me for this — I am agnostic about the benefits for humanity of a singularity event. That is to say: it could be very good — or it could be our nemesis. I am not a singularitarian ideologue. I’m an SF writer who thought this was a Really Neat Idea and it needed exploring.

I’d like to live long enough to live forever, be able to reconfigure my own consciousness, reset my body to whatever age or condition I want (or do away with a body altogether), and all the rest of it — but I’m not basing my life on the assumption that on January 27th, 2031 (or pick any other date) I’m going to be able to do all this.”

No one is counting on a Singularity except people like Kevin Kelly. The entire Singularity Institute is based on the idea that a good Singularity shouldn’t be taken for granted. Then, I said:

“Charlie, it’s possible to advocate a Singularity without basing your life on the assumption of its success. In fact, many Singularitarians see it as entirely plausible that a successful Singularity will never occur. We just see it as an important cause. If we lack the engineering pieces necessary to make it happen, that only makes us consider it worthy of more investigation and development, not less.

The fact that you got the impression that people were counting on a Singularity to save them shows the misunderstanding circulating around the concept and how people really treat it — the appealing “Oh, look at those silly nerds, aping the awful fundies without even knowing it!” idea. This idea, while largely made up, is so seductive that it may be the first thing that many people think of when they hear the word “Singularitarian”.

Google “Rapture of the Nerds” and read the Black Belt Bayesian link for a better idea of my qualm here.

I know you’re an SF writer exploring an idea. I’m a pro-Singularity thinker (not ideologue — that would imply that I’m fanatically devoted to an idea without questioning its many assumptions) who is tired of Singularity advocates being portrayed as nerds waiting for the rapture. SF writers can have tremendous influence over how people see the future. So it would only be natural that I would object to your idea that the Singularity should be ignored.”

Stross replied:

“I appreciate your concerns (and I’m familiar with the Black Belt Bayesian blogger’s points), but I think you overestimate my significance as a mover and shaper of public opinion. Written fiction is, alas, a niche market these days, not much more significant than poetry: a single episode of “Buffy” or “Lost” has about as big an audience as the best-selling novel of any given year, never mind your average midlist SF novel (which it outstrips by about two orders of magnitude).

(Finally. It is generally a huge faux pas for an author to take issue with a review … but as a point of note, I’d like to mention that “Accelerando” is a fix-up of a series of short stories, written between early 1999 and late 2003, drawing on discussions that were going between about 1991 and 1995 on the EXTROPY-L mailing list — an early predecessor to the Extropy Institute’s current discussion group — which both Ken MacLeod and I were on. So I’m going to take your diagnosis of it as cocktail party chat circa 2005 as a net predictive win :)”

I would disagree with Stross that sci-fi writers are so meaningless. Do note that published science fiction authors are at the top of the geek hierarchy chart, and this isn’t random. Bruce Sterling has written:

“If poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, science-fiction writers are its court jesters. We are Wise Fools who can leap, caper, utter prophecies, and scratch ourselves in public. We can play with Big Ideas because the garish motley of our pulp origins makes us seem harmless.”
– Bruce Sterling in the Preface to Burning Chrome by William Gibson

Makes you seem harmless to idiots. The non-idiots among us know that when most people think about the future, they actually think exclusively in terms of science fiction they’re aware of. This is called the fallacy of generalization from fictional evidence, and it is absolutely ubiquitous, especially among the Doctorow-loving crowd.

I think that disregarding the Singularity event because one considers the outcome to be fundamentally uninfluencable is dangerous and foolish. Of course there is a difference between a seed AI or human augmentee committed to egalitarianism and one created committed to narrower desires. We have the responsibility to make it committed to egalitarianism. When Stross crosses from sci-fi into public statements about his views on the Singularity, it is only natural for people like myself to show up and say, “you’re wrong”, and do so with an aggressiveness that is commensurate with how important I regard the issue to be.

In the overarching blog post, Paul Raven remarks:

“I think it’s fair to say that Michael is still hung up on a Gernsbackian idealist template for science fiction as a prediction engine; he’s much more qualified than I to talk about transhumanism and so on, but he doesn’t seem to recognise that sf is primarily a tool for examining the present (if indeed you consider it to have any value beyond pure entertainment, which is an equally valid opinion).”

Even if authors and the intelligensia like Raven view it as a tool for examining the present, this means little, because nearly everyone else exposed to it adds it to their “experience bank” for imagining the real, actual future.

Raven then quotes me when I say:

“Insofar as I care about sci-fi at all, which, honestly, is not a whole lot.”

And says:

“Not a whole lot, but enough to get riled when an sf writer seemingly treads on your ideological turf? You kids play nice, now.”

Notice that I only got excited when the discussion switched from characters in a story to public statements. When it did, I was happy to get all riled up, partially because it’s fun, exciting, and intellectually challenging, but also because I consider it genuinely important. Even if you don’t buy the latter, go with me on the former.