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)