Singularity Countdown

Robert Sawyer's WWW: Wake was a pleasure to read. The book explores the vision of an emergent intelligence arising nearly randomly from transient processes of the backbone of the World Wide Web. It also offers a taste of the world of the blind, through the eyes (so to speak) of Caitlin, a teen who deftly navigates the Internet with her screen reader. Finally, it touches on the life of an ape who itself begins to bridge the gap of consciousness. The whole tale itself appears to be a fable of the bicameral mind, a theory by Julian Jaynes that consciousness is a cultural construct that has only arisen in the past three millenia. I am mixed, however, by the author's apparent unwillingness to explore some tantalizing hints of social commentary.

Helen Keller, most famously known as a deafblind person through The Miracle Worker, a twentieth-century play and movie based on her autobiography, The Story of My Life, was an anti-war activist. Both she and her friend Mark Twain (also largely not remembered for his political activities) were radical activists, outspoken for universal suffrage, pacifism, and socialism. After reading WWW: Wake, one might be left under the common misconception that she championed nothing other than the rights for people with disabilities, when that was actually only the beginning of her work:

"I was appointed on a commission to investigate the conditions of the blind. For the first time I, who had thought blindness a misfortune beyond human control, found that too much of it was traceable to wrong industrial conditions, often caused by the selfishness and greed of employers. And the social evil contributed its share. I found that poverty drove women to a life of shame that ended in blindness." (Helen Keller, in Why I Became an IWW)

I kept on the lights after reading Daemon, by Leinad Zeraus. By far the scariest book I've read this year, this techno-thriller was written like a screenplay. And I found its interpretation of emergent Artificial Intelligence to be plausible, even questioning of the form that might take: though the book's "Daemon" is fantastically powerful and unquestionably intelligent, it is limited in well-defined ways. For example, this is quite clear in the conversations with the entity throughout the book.

Although it seemed as first to be a classic good versus evil plot, it slowly seeped into dark corners where ethics were no longer hard-fast rules, and where the reader was left wondering just who the hero was supposed to be. I don't think there was a single character left untouched, whose intentions and motivations were purely good or evil.

The story represents the few months before an imagined singularity, never clearly stated in the book, although hinted at near the end. The content is current, and I could imagine the scenario happening in the near future, or even now, with not too much of a stretch of the imagination. And the action has hollywood (or at least indie film) written all over it, although it was a bit violent for my tastes.

I was pleasantly surprised at several points in the story, most of all in the end third. At that point in the book, I had become a bit disappointed because it seemed as though the plot were crystallizing to a predictable sheriff in the white hat roping up all the bandits. Was I in for a surprise.

Not only was the ending nothing like that, by that point, I found myself agreeing with the "villain's" motives (if not his means). And the last chapter was such a mind-boggler that I'm still working out the implications in my mind.

The book ends as the best stories should. All the pieces are tied up, yet it's clear that the entire story is simply the beginning of a larger one.

There is a protagonist, even though it's unclear who that is throughout most of the book, and that person travels the archetypal hero's journey, resurrection and all.

Plus the story throws a strong punch at the corporatocracy, and that's a big plus in my book.

Here's a parting quote:

"[The mythmakers] were the ones who invented rhyme and meter — the programming language for human memory in pre-literary civilizations. It was a cultural checksum — a mnemonic device. You couldn't fuck with the code or the rhymes didn't work; and if the rhymes didn't work, people noticed. And so the knowledge of a people was passed down intact. It was a shamanic code. If you fucked with the code, then socity lost its collective mind."

I've just read two works of fiction that each have as part of their premise the potential extinction of the human race as a result of a technological singularity. What struck me, other than the plausibility of such a scenario, was how strikingly differently the stories handled it.

[Message Contains No Recognizable Symbols], by Bill Hibbard, is a dark and serious look at an inhumane future. After Life, by Simon Funk, is just as serious, although presented in a way that makes one almost long for the panacea of extinction. Both are freely available online, although After Life is also available in dead tree format.

Read my take...