Singularity, Doctorow on

Doctorow, Cory. Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future. San Francisco: Tachyon Publications, 2008. Immediately relevant: "The Progressive Apocalypse and Other Futurismic [sic] Delights" (from Locus, July 2007), and "When the Singularity Is More Than a Literary Device: An Interview with Futurist-Inventor Ray Kurzweil" (from Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, June 2005).

See for CD's take on, and very elegant introduction to, Vernor Vinge's idea of the Singularity, "when our technology reaches a stage that allows us to 'upload' our minds into software, run them at faster, hotter speeds than our neurological wetware substrate allows for, and create multiple, parallel instances of ourselves. After the Singularity, nothing is predictable because everything is possible. We will cease to be human and become (as the title of Rudy Rucker's next novel would have it) Postsingular" ("Progressive Apocalypse" 142). Alternatively stated ("An Interview"), the Singularity is "the black hole in history that will be created at the moment when human intelligence can be digitized. When the speed and scope of our cognition is hitched to the price-performance curve of microprocessors, our 'progress' will double every eighteen months, and then every twelve months, and then every ten, and eventually, every five seconds. […] What it means to be human will be so different that what it means to be in danger, or happy or sad, or any of the other elements that make up the squeeze-and-release tension of a good yarn will be unrecognizable to us pre-Singletons" (145). In the interview, Kurzweil allows that "'Sure, it'd be interesting to take a human brain, scan it, reinstantiate [sic] the brain, and run it on another substrate. That will ultimately happen. But the most salient scenario is that we'll gradually merge with our technology. We'll use nanobots to kill pathogens, then to kill cancer cells, and then they'll go into our brain and do benign things there like augment our memory, and very gradually they'll get more and more sophisticated. There's no single great leap, but there is ultimately a great leap comprised of many small steps'" (154).

9. BACK, 4. LITCRIT, RDE, 23/VI/11