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Fall 2008

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28 #1 Fall 2008 The Reluctant Transhumanist SF Writer Charlie Stross keeps his options open Interview by RU Sirius & Paul McEnery Singularity, 2012: God springs out of a computer to rapture the human race. An enchanted locket transforms a struggling business journalist into a medieval princess. e math-magicians of British Intelligence calculate demons back into the dark. And solar-scale computation just uploads us all into the happy ever after. Stripped to the high concept, these visions from Charlie Stross are prime geek comfort food. But don't be fooled. Stross' stories turn on you, changing up into a vicious scrutiny of raw power and the information economy. e "God" of Singularity Sky is re- ally just an Artificial Intelligence, ma- nipulating us all merely to beat the alien competition. e Merchant Princes (from a series of novels by Stross) are just as rapacious as anything on Wall Street, and a downstream parallel uni- verse is just another market to exploit. e Atrocity Archives gives us a gut- punch full of paranoia -- on the far side of hacking and counterhacking lurks an unspeakable chaos. And for all our en- gineering genius, Accelerando's paradise is won at the cost of planetary destruc- tion, with humanity cul-de-sac'd as our future heads off into the stars without us. For his latest novel, Halting State (released in June 2008), Stross savages the fantasy worlds we escape into for fun and profit and invites us to peek underneath the surfaces as our chatter- ing gadgets dress up reality with virtual sword-and-sorcery games, all under- written by oh-so-creative financial in- struments. All of Stross's highly connective pipe-dream superstructures are wide open to the one geopolitical prick that will pop them all like the balloon ani- mals they are. Be warned. Take care of the bottom line, or your second life will cost you the life that counts. It's no surprise that Stross is a highly controversial figure within Transhumanist circles – loved by some for his dense-with- high-concepts takes on themes dear to the movement, loathed by others for what they see as a facile treatment of both ideas and characters. But one thing is certain –- Mr. Stross is one SF writer who pays close at- tention to the entire plethora of post-hu- manizing changes that are coming on fast. As a satirist, he might be characterized as our Vonnegut, lampooning memetic sub- cultures that most people don't even know exist. H+: With biotech, infotech, cognitive science, AI, and so many other sciences and technologies impacting the human situa- tion, it seems that most social and political discourse remains back in the 20th century at best. You talk sometimes about being a post-cyberpunk person. How do you deal with the continued presence of so many pre-cyberpunk people? CHARLIE STROSS: As William Gibson noted, "the future is already here: it's just unevenly distributed." Most people run on the normative assumption that life tomorrow will be similar to life today, and don't think about the future much. And I'm not going to criticize them for doing so; for 99.9% of the life of our species this has been the case, barring disasters such as plague, war, and famine. It's a good strat- egy, and periods when it is ignored (such as the millennial ferment that swept Europe around 990 A.D. and didn't die down until 1020 A.D.) tend to be bad times to live. Unfortunately, for about the past 200 years -- that's about 0.1% of H. sapiens' life span as a species – that strategy has been fundamentally broken. We've been going through a period of massive technological, scientific, and ideological change, and it has invalidated the old rule set. But even so, at a day-to-day level, or month-to-month, things don't change so much. So most people tend to ignore the overall shape of change until it's impossible to ignore. en they try to apply the old rules to new me- dia or technologies, make a hopeless mess of things, and start on a slow and painful learning process. It's been quite interesting to watch the slow progress toward an inter- national consensus on certain aspects of In- ternet culture, for example. In that context, e Artificial Hippocampus with David Pescovitz, director of research at the Institute for the Future and Boing Boing Editor. RU Sirius PESCOVITZ: Biomedical engineer Theodore Berger at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles has developed an artificial hippocampus: a silicon substitute for the part of the brain that scientists believe encodes experiences as long-term memories. To do this, Berger built mathematical models of neuronal activity in a rat's hippocampus and then designed circuits that mimic those activities. The next step is to implant the devices in rats to see if they can process the electrical impulses associated with memory and then communicate them back to the brain for long-term storage. Joel Davis at the Office of Naval Research, a sponsor of Berger's work, said, "Using implantables to enhance competency is down the road. It's just a matter of time." While Berger's work is a far cry from a hard drive for the brain, I'm intrigued by the notion of being able to "back up" my memory just in case. Inter view MINI I m a g e b y D C S p e n s l e y

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