You’ve heard me mouth off last week about the Geek Rapture (a utopian Singularity scenario) and why I liken it to a religion (link). A few science fiction authors were kind enough to throw in their two cents. We’ll also be touching on this subject in the episode 7 of Meme Therapy the science fiction podcast which is going online in a few days.

Here’s the question I put to the authors:

A good number of people are eagerly awaiting the imminent Geek Rapture (the utopian singularity scenario). Do you see this as a rational belief, wishful thinking, or the start of a science fiction religion?

I’m presuming the geek rapture you are refering to is the singularity? The AIs becoming godlike superbeings is just another of those sfnal ideas that is presently in vogue. It’s just a re-issue of the Frankenstein idea, or the wish for gods to take control and responsibility, which is that old idea called religion.

Neal Asher is a British science fiction writer

You mean the Singularity? Spare me. The Singularity is the Apocalypse of the Cult of Exponential Progress. An “apocalypse” is a sort of loser’s tantrum thrown by people who have been stomped good and haven’t come to terms with it yet. The overall pace of both scientific and technological progress has slowed down significantly in the last twenty or thirty years, and while we’re still pulling occasional miracles out of a hat in narrow fields like genetics and pharmaceuticals, lead-acid batteries still rule in high-current power storage, CPU speeds have stalled between 3 and 4 GHz, and the &$!*% Space Shuttle’s successor is nowhere in sight.

The shape of everyday life in the West hasn’t changed much since WWII. Do this thought experiment with me: Pretend you can look down on the 20th century from a height. Which year looks more like 1950: 2000 or 1900? In 1950 we had radio, television, computers, commercial aviation, controlled nuclear fission, cheap cars, suburbs, and mandatory public education. In 1900 we had none of these things. We now have better airliners, TVs, and computers than we had in 1950, but they’re still airliners, TVs, and computers. Much of what I now do on email I used to do on the phone. The biggest single technological miracle to appear post-1950 is the global computer network. (I’d call manned space travel another, but we’ve basically given up on manned space travel.)

Cornerstone Singularity elements like immortality of the body, uploading of minds to computers, and general-purpose nanoscale molecular assemblers aren’t even on the radar. We may achieve these things, but that achievement will come in smallish steps over the next 100 to 200 years. There will be no mysterious technology-driven threshold beyond which everyday life will become incomprehensible to those living before.

If the Singularity is a religion, it’s a poor one, because most of its underlying assumptions are rational, measurable and thus falsifiable. (Try that with Christianity or Islam!)

Jeff Duntemann,writer, editor, technologist, contrariarn. You can hear more from Jeff and his science fiction in Episode 7 of our podcast.

I think they need to wake up and smell the coffee. By the time I die, I fully expect the world to more or less resemble the one I’m living in now. I actually think the pace of change is slowing down, not accelerating. Analysts think the new Airbus will still be operational - with some modifications and evolutionary improvements - in 2070. They’re saying the same thing about the 747 - it’ll still be flying in commercial service a hundred years after it was developed. They could be wildly wrong, but more and more (maybe this has something to do with getting older) I think the 21st century is going to play out on a very slow timescale, not at all as a lot of SF would have us believe. We are not going to get transcendant AI or all pervasive nanotechnology anytime soon. It’s like industrial fusion power: ain’t gonna happen before 2050, and probably later than that. Where we live, it’s going to take until 2012 for them to just widen one stretch of highway! No flying cars for us.

That doesn’t mean I’m not interested in fictional scenarios where things ramp up much faster, and we get a really weird, unrecognisably strange mid 21st century. I just don’t think on a gut level that it’s going to happen. But SF has never been about the balance of probabilities, it’s always been about the most interesting scenario.

I’m not really a typical gung-ho futurist SF writer in this regard, though. I’m as interested in the past as I am in the future. I ride horses, and take great delight in mastering this skill - one that involves an applied science of biomechanics - which has been around for thousands of years. I can bore the pants off anyone about how great steam trains are. I like Napoleonic adventure stories. I still have a film camera and a record player. Our house still has a rotary dial telephone. I wrote the first draft of Revelation Space on a manual typewriter. Really, I’m a bit dazed and confused by the 20th century, let alone the 21st

Alastair Reynolds is a welsh science fiction writer living in the Netherlands.

I see the imminent Geek Rapture as wishful thinking. It’s probably not the start of a science fiction religion — the adherents, by and large, are too rational for that.

Singularity is _possible_, certainly, but far from inevitable. I don’t think that there’s any guarantee that we’ll eventually create the sort of self-directing artificial consciousnesses that will be key to unlocking the Singularity — nor that, if we do, the result will be a series of events that plays out to Singularity in the way people like Ray Kurzweil foresee. What I do believe, assuming our poor contentious species makes it that far, is that whatever does end up happening will be as startling and unpredictable as the 20th century was, and in retrospect will look as inevitable.

William Shunn, is a science fiction writer who also podcasts (link)

And in case you’re new to Meme Therapy you can read interviews with all of these authors right here on Meme Therapy just scroll down or follow the links in the sidebar.

Related posts:

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response to this post, or trackback from your own site. Wax-political uses threaded comments so you can reply to any comment directly by clicking on the relevent reply to comment link.