Issue link: http://cp.revolio.com/i/393
29 #1 Fall 2008 I suspect the mainstream is only a decade or so behind the cutting edge: the debates over spam and intellectual property that the geeks were having in the early 1990s are now mainstream. (Of course, a decade feels like an eternity when you're up close and personal with it.) H+: Remaining on the cyberpunk tip for a moment, Gibson's Neuromancer (the whole trilogy, really) popularized a trendy subculture that impacted on both enter- tainment and actual technology. Do you think that Accelerando could have that ef- fect? Do you see yourself as a popularizer of memes that are just taking root? CS: Naah. A chunk of Accelerando was extracted in raw juicy nuggets from my time on the extropians mailing list in the early to mid- nineties; another chunk came out of my time in the belly of a dot-com's program- ming team in the late nineties. I wanted to get my head around the sense of temporal compression that was prevalent in the dot- com era, of the equivalent of years flicker- ing past in months. But it's too dense for the mainstream. As we've already noticed, a lot -- probably the majority -- of people aren't interested in change; in fact, they find it frightening. And Accelerando compressed so many ideas into such a small space (I think there's about 0.5 to 1 novel's worth of ideas per chapter in each of its nine chapters) that it's actively hostile to most readers. Some people love it, those who're already into that particular type of dense fiction-of-ideas, but many, even seasoned SF readers, just turn away. I would like to hope that I've gone some way toward changing the terrain within the SF genre itself, though. Robert Bradbury's concept of the Matrioshka Brain (or Jupi- ter Brain, in earlier iterations) is one of the most marvelous SF concepts I've run across in a long time, and not trivially easy to re- fute. I wanted to get past the then-prevalent idea that you couldn't write about a Vinge- an singularity -- it's difficult, but we've got tools for thinking about these things. And I got the idea of computronium into com- mon enough parlance that Rudy Rucker recently took a potshot at it, implying that it's part of the universe of discourse in my field. H+: I'm curious about the Econom- ics 2.0 idea that is featured in Accelerando. What do you think about economic sys- tems in a presumably post-human world? Do any of the theories – free market, Marxist, and so forth – that have guided those who ideologize these things con- tinue to make sense after replicators and the like? CS: In a nutshell, about Economics 2.0: economics is the study of the alloca- tion of resources between human beings under conditions of scarcity (that is, where resources are not sufficient to meet maxi- mal demand by all people simultaneously). Resource allocation relies on information distribution -- for example, price signals are used to indicate demand (in a capitalist economic system). In turn, economic inter- actions within, for example, a market en- vironment hinge on how the actors within the economic system use their information about each other's desires and needs. To get a little less nose-bleedingly ab- stract: say I am crawling through a desert and dying of thirst, and you happen to have the only bottled water concession within a hundred miles. How much is your wa- ter worth? In the middle of a crowded city with drinking fountains every five yards and competing suppliers, it's worth a buck a bottle. But in the middle of a desert, to someone who's dying of thirst, its value is nearly infinite. You can model my circum- stances and my likely (dying-of-thirst) re- action to a change in your asking price and decide to hike your price to reflect demand. You can do this because you have a theory of mind, and can model my internal state, and determine that when dying of thirst, my demand for water will be much higher than normal. And this is where informa- tion processing comes into economic inter- actions. What kind of information processing can vastly smarter-than-human entities do when engaging in economic interactions? In Accelerando I hypothesized that if you can come up with entities with a much stronger theory of mind than regular humans pos- sess, then their ability to model consumer/ supplier interactions will be much deeper and more efficient than anything humans can do. And so, humans will be at a pro- found disadvantage in trying to engage in economic interactions with such entities. ey'll be participating in economic ex- changes that we simply can't compete ef- fectively with because we lack the informa- tion processing power to correctly evaluate their price signals (or other information disclosures). Hence Economics 2.0 -- a sys- tem that you needed to be brighter-than- human to participate in, but that results in better resource allocation than conventional economic systems are capable of. H+: What do you think about trans- humanism and singularitarianism as movements? Are these goals to be at- tained or just a likely projection of tech- nologies into the future that we should be aware of? CS: My friend Ken MacLeod has a rather disparaging term for the singularity; he calls it "e Rapture of the Nerds." is isn't a comment on the probability of such an event occurring, per se, so much as it's a social observation on the type of personality that's attracted to the idea of leaving the decay-prone meatbody behind and uploading itself into AI heaven. ere's a visible correlation between this sort of personality and the more socially dysfunc- tional libertarians (who are also convinced that if the brakes on capitalism were off, they'd somehow be teleported to the apex of the food chain in place of the current top predators). Both ideologies are symptomatic of a desire for simple but revolutionary so- lutions to the perceived problems of the present, without any clear understanding of what those problems are or where they arise from. (In the case of the libertarians, they mostly don't understand how the cur- rent system came about, or that the reason we don't live in a minarchist night-watch- man state is because it was tried in the 18th