15 July 2007

Cory Doctorow: The Progressive Apocalypse and Other Futurismic Delights

from Locus Magazine, July 2007


Of course, science fiction is a literature of the present. Many's the science fiction writer who uses the future as a warped mirror for reflecting back the present day, angled to illustrate the hidden strangeness buried by our invisible assumptions: Orwell turned 1948 into Nineteen Eighty-Four. But even when the fictional future isn't a parable about the present day, it is necessarily a creation of the present day, since it reflects the present day biases that infuse the author. Hence Asimov's Foundation, a New Deal-esque project to think humanity out of its tribulations though social interventionism.

Bold SF writers eschew the future altogether, embracing a futuristic account of the present day. William Gibson's forthcoming Spook Country is an act of "speculative presentism," a book so futuristic it could only have been set in 2006, a book that exploits retrospective historical distance to let us glimpse just how alien and futuristic our present day is.

Science fiction writers aren't the only people in the business of predicting the future. Futurists — consultants, technology columnists, analysts, venture capitalists, and entrepreneurial pitchmen — spill a lot of ink, phosphors, and caffeinated hot air in describing a vision for a future where we'll get more and more of whatever it is they want to sell us or warn us away from. Tomorrow will feature faster, cheaper processors, more Internet users, ubiquitous RFID tags, radically democratic political processes dominated by bloggers, massively multiplayer games whose virtual economies dwarf the physical economy.

There's a lovely neologism to describe these visions: "futurismic." Futurismic media is that which depicts futurism, not the future. It is often self-serving — think of the antigrav Nikes in Back to the Future III — and it generally doesn't hold up well to scrutiny.

SF films and TV are great fonts of futurismic imagery: R2D2 is a fully conscious AI, can hack the firewall of the Death Star, and is equipped with a range of holographic projectors and antipersonnel devices — but no one has installed a $15 sound card and some text-to-speech software on him, so he has to whistle like Harpo Marx. Or take the Starship Enterprise, with a transporter capable of constituting matter from digitally stored plans, and radios that can breach the speed of light.

The non-futurismic version of NCC-1701 would be the size of a softball (or whatever the minimum size for a warp drive, transporter, and subspace radio would be). It would zip around the galaxy at FTL speeds under remote control. When it reached an interesting planet, it would beam a stored copy of a landing party onto the surface, and when their mission was over, it would beam them back into storage, annihilating their physical selves until they reached the next stopping point. If a member of the landing party were eaten by a green-skinned interspatial hippie or giant toga-wearing galactic tyrant, that member would be recovered from backup by the transporter beam. Hell, the entire landing party could consist of multiple copies of the most effective crewmember onboard: no redshirts, just a half-dozen instances of Kirk operating in clonal harmony.

Futurism has a psychological explanation, as recounted in Harvard clinical psych prof Daniel Gilbert's 2006 book, Stumbling on Happiness. Our memories and our projections of the future are necessarily imperfect. Our memories consist of those observations our brains have bothered to keep records of, woven together with inference and whatever else is lying around handy when we try to remember something. Ask someone who's eating a great lunch how breakfast was, and odds are she'll tell you it was delicious. Ask the same question of someone eating rubbery airplane food, and he'll tell you his breakfast was awful. We weave the past out of our imperfect memories and our observable present.

We make the future in much the same way: we use reasoning and evidence to predict what we can, and whenever we bump up against uncertainty, we fill the void with the present day. Hence the injunction on women soldiers in the future of Starship Troopers, or the bizarre, glassed-over "Progressland" city diorama at the end of the 1964 World's Fair exhibit The Carousel of Progress, which Disney built for GE.

Lapsarianism — the idea of a paradise lost, a fall from grace that makes each year worse than the last — is the predominant future feeling for many people. It's easy to see why: an imperfectly remembered golden childhood gives way to the worries of adulthood and physical senescence. Surely the world is getting worse: nothing tastes as good as it did when we were six, everything hurts all the time, and our matured gonads drive us into frenzies of bizarre, self-destructive behavior.

Lapsarianism dominates the Abrahamic faiths. I have an Orthodox Jewish friend whose tradition holds that each generation of rabbis is necessarily less perfect than the rabbis that came before, since each generation is more removed from the perfection of the Garden. Therefore, no rabbi is allowed to overturn any of his forebears' wisdom, since they are all, by definition, smarter than him.

The natural endpoint of Lapsarianism is apocalypse. If things get worse, and worse, and worse, eventually they'll just run out of worseness. Eventually, they'll bottom out, a kind of rotten death of the universe when Lapsarian entropy hits the nadir and takes us all with it.

Running counter to Lapsarianism is progressivism: the Enlightenment ideal of a world of great people standing on the shoulders of giants. Each of us contributes to improving the world's storehouse of knowledge (and thus its capacity for bringing joy to all of us), and our descendants and proteges take our work and improve on it. The very idea of "progress" runs counter to the idea of Lapsarianism and the fall: it is the idea that we, as a species, are falling in reverse, combing back the wild tangle of entropy into a neat, tidy braid.

Of course, progress must also have a boundary condition — if only because we eventually run out of imaginary ways that the human condition can improve. And science fiction has a name for the upper bound of progress, a name for the progressive apocalypse:

We call it the Singularity.

Vernor Vinge's Singularity takes place 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.

The Singularity is what happens when we have so much progress that we run out of progress. It's the apocalypse that ends the human race in rapture and joy. Indeed, Ken MacLeod calls the Singularity "the rapture of the nerds," an apt description for the mirror-world progressive version of the Lapsarian apocalypse.

At the end of the day, both progress and the fall from grace are illusions. The central thesis of Stumbling on Happiness is that human beings are remarkably bad at predicting what will make us happy. Our predictions are skewed by our imperfect memories and our capacity for filling the future with the present day.

The future is gnarlier than futurism. NCC-1701 probably wouldn't send out transporter-equipped drones — instead, it would likely find itself on missions whose ethos, mores, and rationale are largely incomprehensible to us, and so obvious to its crew that they couldn't hope to explain them.

Science fiction is the literature of the present, and the present is the only era that we can hope to understand, because it's the only era that lets us check our observations and predictions against reality.


Cory Doctorow's website is Craphound.com, and he is co-editor of Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things.

Cory Doctorow is one of a dozen Locus columnists and reviewers. Every issue, we review over 50 books and magazines, most before they appear in print. A subscription will get you all those as well as the rest of the magazine -- news, People & Publishing, commentary, reports on events, and a list of all books and magazines published that month.


Previous Cory Doctorow columns posted on Locus Online:

Comments are welcome, but are moderated. Anonymous comments will not be posted.

22 Comments:

At Monday, July 16, 2007 6:05:00 AM, Anonymous Robbo said...

Does this mean Ray Kurzweil, in his quest for the Sinularity, is as deluded as all the other "faith inspired" people Richard Dawkins rails (so rightly) against?

SF is truly writing about the present, yet how capable are we of seeing where we are now if, as McLuhan said: "Any pervasive environment is imperceptible."? Or is that why we feel compelled to cast our eyes to the future (and reinterpret the past) - like fish peering out of the water?

I'm with Buckaroo Banzai on this one: "No matter where you go, there you are."

Cheers.

 
At Monday, July 16, 2007 6:30:00 AM, Blogger Midgley said...

But Heinlein's starship captains and pilots were women...

 
At Monday, July 16, 2007 9:11:00 AM, Blogger Daniel S. Ketelby said...

R2D2 is a fully conscious AI, can hack the firewall of the Death Star... but no one has installed a $15 sound card and some text-to-speech software on him, so he has to whistle like Harpo Marx.

I designed R2D2 and, yep, that was a deliberate in-joke. I'm still looking for a workable LP Rom Drive for my home PC though.

 
At Monday, July 16, 2007 9:11:00 AM, Blogger Sam said...

"Does this mean Ray Kurzweil, in his quest for the Sinularity, is as deluded as all the other "faith inspired" people Richard Dawkins rails (so rightly) against?"

No, because he's based his ideas on observation and extrapolation rather than inarguable and contradictory axioms.

ObNerd: Cory shows a shockingly poor understanding of transporter and replicator technology. But he's right that they probably would have rather different applications than those shown onscreen.

 
At Monday, July 16, 2007 10:15:00 AM, Anonymous deugli said...

Lapsarianism and progressivism are both linear. It seems to me that a truly opposing view of history is that it is cyclical.

 
At Monday, July 16, 2007 10:26:00 AM, Blogger Sean Bedlam seanbrk@yahoo.com.au said...

Trying to get any grip on the
future of us Earth folks seems as mind-boggling as imagining the size of Universe. Which rocks, actually.

 
At Monday, July 16, 2007 11:13:00 AM, Anonymous Matt Jarpe said...

It's kind of funny that Jack William Bell and I, arguing on the importance of serious speculation in science fiction, both used this essay to bolster our opposing arguments. Like a lot of things, what you get out of this article depends on what you bring into it.

http://feedback.matthewjarpe.com/2007/07/15/singularity-shmingularity.aspx

 
At Monday, July 16, 2007 11:38:00 AM, Blogger chanio said...

I guess that social intervention is also a religious idea: puritans believed that instead of changing the English government, they would rather improve everyday life to make the change happen.

If SF culture intended us, people, to be less reactive to actual injusticies and more patient with our beliefs, then there is a subversive SF that fills our future with nonsense and jerking gadgets. I see a similar strategy in nowadays news. Great networks twisting communications and interpretation of real facts and other facts that have never happened. Sensorship.

Good SciFi should be against wars.

But also, should be written by experienced and active people. SF is our planned direction to our future! Not that I believe that it is going to be our only future: remember J.Lennon's "Life is what happens while you are making other plans..."

 
At Monday, July 16, 2007 11:40:00 AM, Blogger chanio said...

I guess that social intervention is also a religious idea: puritans believed that instead of changing the English government, they would rather improve everyday life to make the change happen.

If SF culture intended us, people, to be less reactive to actual injusticies and more patient in our beliefs, then there is a subversive SF that fills our future with nonsense and jerking gadgets. I see a similar strategy in nowadays news. Great networks twisting communications and interpretation of real facts and other facts that have never happened.

Good SciFi should be against wars.

But also, should be written by experienced and active people. SF is our planned direction to our future! Not that I believe that it is going to be our only future: remember J.Lennon's "Life is what happens while you are making other plans..."

 
At Monday, July 16, 2007 11:55:00 AM, Anonymous nona said...

Huh. You know, it's funny-- I've long thought that the Singularity has a lot in common with the Jewish concept of "tikkun olam," which literally translates to "repair the world."

It basically means that Jews have an obligation to work towards a perfect world, because that's how we bring about the messianic age. And inherent in that is the belief that humans *can* perfect the world, that the capability to do so is within us, which is a rather beautiful idea.

 
At Monday, July 16, 2007 12:28:00 PM, Anonymous S. F. Murphy said...

I think the one failing assumption that most singularity based fiction has to date is the assumption that every human alive at the time in which singularity occurs will be someone who is willing, desires and can afford to have the technology to be uploaded fitted into their bodies.

I believe there will be a very large number of humans who will not have such technology, for any number of given reasons, and that a Singularity Event will likely create the same thing we always have had throughout human history.

Haves, those that move into the Posthuman-postsingularity existence, and those who do not.

I think the other default problem I see with Singularity Fiction is that it almost always assumes that the Singularity Culture will destroy whatever is left behind. I think this is a rather simplistic interpretation, especially in lieu of the argument that we mere human normals will not be able to fathom why post-humans do what they do.

Respects,
Steven Francis Murphy
North Kansas City, Missouri

 
At Monday, July 16, 2007 1:18:00 PM, Anonymous MRicciardi said...

Intriguing and enjoyable essay...there's a great deal of this speculation popping up these days....

My thoughts: This putative point of maximal/complete progress would seem to be what some philosophers used to call the Omega Point (the culmination of evolutionary processes in the human species, or there abouts)...writers like Ernst Mayer, perhaps also Desmond Morris...

Also, Vinge's singularity is described (in some of his on-line writings) as the point of (complete) 'run-away technology', wherein an 'ultra-intelligent machine (robot)' makes its own 'ultra-intelligent machine'(UIM)...thus realizing (according to Good) "the last invention man need ever make"...just wanted to clarify, or add a bit more specifics to your description...

One note: the ultra-intelligent machine/bot (or its 2nd gen. off-spring) would need to have (endless) access to raw materials, in order to build its population...thus, these UIMs would necessarily have to control humans to the degree necessary to insure supply (future human-robot wars?)...otherwise, we could simply with-hold supplies (or cut supply lines) to the UIMs in order to control their numbers and activity.

We might, of course, live in perfect harmony with our bot brothers and sisters. But somthing tells me that things won't go so smoothly.

Thus also, the 'post-singular' human is not necesarily a given...no doubt some hybrid or cyborgian form...but I see many problems arising both in the getting to that point, and the leaving of that phase of human evolution behind us.....

...the postsingular world may be a post human one...more akin to the Extropian view. -M.R.

 
At Monday, July 16, 2007 1:29:00 PM, Anonymous Damien Broderick said...

Much of what Cory says is astute, of course. But there's an irritatingly self-congratulatory tone as well. Why didn't those dumb convention-bound Star Trek hacks realize everything that we understand 40 years later? Didn't they know about molecular nanotechnology in the 1960s? Well, no. Big shock.

Cory repeats (yet again) Ken MacLeod's sarcastic jab about a technological singularity being "the Rapture of the nerds." Amusing, sure, the first couple of times. It would have been cleverer, though, if it hadn't been answered in advance. Dr. Vinge, whose brilliant insight the Singularity is, was on to this more than 20 years ago. I carefully made the point ten years ago, in the first book specifically addressing this topic, that the Singularity (or, as I called it, the Spike) is not a religious concept. Here's what I wrote in 1996, and updated a tad for the 2001 US edition of my book:

Traditional Western theology taught believers that the physical world would end in the Parousia, the return in glory of a resurrected Redeemer who would establish his new, clarified kingdom, reviving the dead so they might join those who survived the cataclysmic End Time battles, punishing the wicked in a Last Judgment. Modern fundamentalists still expect to see apocalypse explode outside their window any day now, despite its failure to occur on 1 January 2000, as their predecessors have expected it any day for the last couple of thousand years. They call it the Rapture. Devotional art shows whole families rising into heaven inside their gleaming automobiles, into the arms of a smiling and radiant Californian Jesus.

The [Singularity] is not the Parousia. Some of the dead, however, as it happens, might well be revived, if they've had the good sense to get their heads frozen. The living, too, might have a chance to enter a remarkable new kingdom, but it won't be the Rapture. Nobody expects Jesus Christ to be there.

You, on the other hand, might be. So might I. It's not clear what sort of shape we'll be in.

Vernor Vinge noted before the end of the millennium, in the Afterword to his [1986] novel set in a world emptied of all but a few stragglers following a [Singularity], Marooned in Realtime: `It's an ironic accident of the calendar that all this religious interest in transcendental events should be mixed with the objective evidence that we're falling into a technological singularity' (p. 67).

It's also a piercingly important distinction. Despite its reverberations with mythology and apocalyptic imagery, taken literally, the [Singularity] is not a religious vision. It is a metaphor drawn from science, from the screaming upward curve of an exponential graph. That's all. Everything else is guesswork and projection, mixed, inevitably, with desperate hope and deep, archaic dreads.


Sometimes he who laughs last hasn't got it the first time around.

 
At Monday, July 16, 2007 3:09:00 PM, Blogger Hippo said...

The "anti-gravity Nikes" are actually anti-gravity skateboards. And they are originally from back to the Future 2.

There goes your carefully constructed argument.

 
At Tuesday, July 17, 2007 12:07:00 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

"Hell, the entire landing party could consist of multiple copies of the most effective crewmember onboard: no redshirts, just a half-dozen instances of Kirk operating in clonal harmony."

But the real question is: which one will get to kiss the girl in the end?

Seriously, though, great essay, Mr. Doctorow.

 
At Wednesday, July 18, 2007 2:41:00 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

"I think the one failing assumption that most singularity based fiction has to date is the assumption that every human alive at the time in which singularity occurs will be someone who is willing, desires and can afford to have the technology to be uploaded fitted into their bodies.

I believe there will be a very large number of humans who will not have such technology, for any number of given reasons, and that a Singularity Event will likely create the same thing we always have had throughout human history.

Haves, those that move into the Posthuman-postsingularity existence, and those who do not."

I think perhaps that your understanding of the term "Singularity" is a bit limited. There will be no limits. Nobody will be left behind. Everything will be saved; nothing will be saved.
I tell you what. If I exist as a distinct entity at that point, I will scoop every last one of the hypothetical "have-nots" and place them in a billion different life simulations and determine which one each individual would prefer to live.

 
At Wednesday, July 18, 2007 11:37:00 PM, Blogger Mark said...

The notion that the world is decaying and every generation doing less than the last goes back far before Abrahamic religion; it's heavily present in the Classical Greek attitude to the golden/silver ages. Plato's Cave of Forms is about the premise that it is impossible to learn or create anything new, you can only dimly recall what you already should have known and create fumbling parodies of the true forms.

Star Trek wasn't about the future, or even the present, though. It was, by Roddenberry's own admission, a combination of Horatio Hornblower and Wagon Train, with a futuristic setting copied from Forbidden Planet. And Horatio Hornblower is from early 20th Century novels of moderate historical accuracy about the late 18th Century, and Wagon Train was mid-20th Century TV about the 19th Century.

 
At Thursday, July 19, 2007 4:56:00 PM, Anonymous David Harmon said...

Hmm. Your description of the Singularity seems very specific -- indeed, you seem to be projecting the argument of the moment onto it.

IIRC, the original point of the SF use of the term, was simply that:

1) given that technical advances tend to have unpredictable effects on society, then:
2) eventually, there will be technical advances whose effects are so sweeping and unpredictable, that:
3) our present-day selves definitely cannot predict the evolution of society beyond that point.

Note that this last is very much a function of perspective! The Classical Romans were hardly "stupid", but explaining modern cultures to them would be pretty tough. Consider the cumulative and interacting effects of post-feudal governance, cheap printing, rapid long distance travel, mass-production of consumer goods, machine industry, cheap guns, mass media, telecommunications, etc....

Even Vernor Vinge himself, in Across Realtime, dodged depicting the Singularity itself -- instead, he offered a character from just before the critical point!)

 
At Friday, July 20, 2007 11:01:00 PM, Blogger Alan said...

Excellent article, and more of them ought to be done-- assuming the unintended consequence is not to draw impressionables to futurology.
Since i was friends with FM 2030, a cryonically suspended futurist/transhumanist let this be said: first his good points: intelligent; kind; patient (for his age, 69 at the time of suspension-- rather early for a transhumanist one might say) and all the rest. Two of FM's negative aspects: 1) optimistic to the point of smarminess; he argued too much, and too naively, for a cooperatively in-tune futurist. Natasha Vita More excused this as coming from an older man (shall we in PC-talk say an age challenged transhumanist) but you can be 100 percent certain he was always that way, even as a child, you don't get at all far up the food chain by being too civilized, not if you're male. His positive outweighed his negative, but what negatives he had! Enough to turn you into a Luddite.
My real message here to you younger people is: PLEASE do not be naive as it not only wastes your time-- which unlike wealth you cannot get back-- but can even shorten your life by bringing you to grief. Put this message in your mental hard drive and do not lose it. Don't ever become a futurist, instead invest in knick-knacks or crochet doilies while watching Andy Griffith or I Love Lucy.

 
At Sunday, July 22, 2007 5:43:00 PM, Blogger Alan said...

Excellent essay. Cory is quite right a space mission in the (far) future would be incomprehensible to us but obvious to the crew.
SF very often projects animalized intelligence onto the future.

 
At Monday, July 23, 2007 8:46:00 PM, Blogger Alan said...

One more comment, this time attempting to get to the heart-- if there is one-- of futurology.
What is futurology? half legitimate.
If futurists would preface their essays, speeches and books by saying,"the purpose of this is to tweak your interest in the future, as being interested in the past and present is not enough; one must reserve some interest for what is to come". it would make sense as SF if nothing else, and almost certainly more. Yet naturally, in the service of brevity and assuming everyone gets the game, futurists don't do this.
Now some trends have been predicted, the internet for one was predicted because with all the effort being expended in creating it during the 1980s you would have to be a Helen Keller in an isolation chamber futurist not have noticed the trend leading to the world wide web.
Unfortunately, for us at least, most predictions do not pan out. During my youth in the '60s great excitement abounded over the Gemini and Apollo Programs, the future would show us all to be Tang drinking moon orbiters, touching down in our spacecrafts to party in our lunar dwellings. Well, one thing was almost predictable: today there is not one person living on the Moon, and no one has visited the Moon since the early '70s-- an entire generation ago.
Not good.
Now, if we could actually predict the future it would probably be best to use such gifts to invest in the stock market, make trillions and use the funds to end poverty. Or what FM 2030 exhorted-- "don't talk about ending poverty, talk about creating wealth instead!"

 
At Sunday, September 06, 2009 5:52:00 PM, Anonymous Matt said...

"Does this mean Ray Kurzweil, in his quest for the Sinularity, is as deluded as all the other "faith inspired" people Richard Dawkins rails (so rightly) against?"

Personally I think Kurzweil, or anyone else currently alive who believes they'll "live long enough to live forever" (ie. live to see the medical singularity which will allow immortality for all) is deluding himself.

The IEEE report on the singularity is definitely worth a read though.

 

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