Spoilers Ahead. Danger, Will Robinson, Danger!!



The Bridge trilogy ends with the singularity emerging in the form of ubiquitous nanotechnology and, seemingly, immortality.

It is the last bit which interests me and which hasn’t been discussed, to my knowledge, in regards to ATP.

When Rei manifests psychically from the NanoFax machines she’s essentially created a new race, hasn’t she?

She’s jumped the bridge from AI to actual personhood. Presumably she is a real human, though made of reconstituted cheeseburgers and the like.

What does this mean for humanity? Immortality would likely follow, would it not?

At the end of ATP hasn’t Gibson given us the end of all things we know and vaulted the reader into, and past, the singularity?

Which explains why his next books are set in the present, where do you go beyond the singularity?

And what does a world with potentially immortal people look like?

Besides Highlander.

Question is, would they be people as we define the term? Extremely long-lived humans would constitute a new species, homo sapiens senex or some such. But how long would humans last if AIs became self-replicating? Unlike us, they aren't bound by limitations of time, space and gravity. For all we know, humans are the bridge between organic life with intelligence and electronic life, the next stage in evolution.

That's a platform I can get behind.

But this business of the singulairty, how much can we invest in it? Or will it turn out to be a kind of "Kurzweil Continuum?"

Though it does have a kind of built-in self-neagtion of criticism: "You don't know what comes after the singulairty, you can't tell, so you cannot say when or will it will or will not happen."

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Originally posted by John Maddox Roberts:
Question is, would they be people as we define the term? Extremely long-lived humans would constitute a new species, homo sapiens senex or some such.

We first need to determine to what extent being against death is ontologically definitive for the species. If it is, as I suspect, grossly central, then extreme longevity removes large blocks of strata in the human psychic equation.

Does war disappear, greed, what about love?

Is love defined as a seeming permanence against the ephemera of existence? If so, what happens when existence becomes potentially infinite?

I would argue that if you remove death we would find a nascent species that most humans living today would find repellant.

Something like a Nietzschean ubermensch.

But what people today might want for the species will, I think, become increasingly irrelevant if anything like a singularity ever sees reality.

quote:

Originally posted by UberDog:
The Bridge trilogy ends with the singularity emerging in the form of ubiquitous nanotechnology and, seemingly, immortality.

It is the last bit which interests me and which hasn’t been discussed, to my knowledge, in regards to ATP.

One could argue that the moment you have "real" AI, you have immortal beings, and your singularity is upon you.

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She’s jumped the bridge from AI to actual personhood.

Begging the question, isn't she an actual person when she is a holographic projection? I would vote that she is.

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Presumably she is a real human, though made of reconstituted cheeseburgers and the like.

Like real humans aren't made of reconstituted cheeseburgers.

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What does this mean for humanity? Immortality would likely follow, would it not?

I'm of the school, perhaps a school of one, that sees immortality as, well, not actually changing everything. It will certainly have a huge impact, especially on the social structures (and the planet, if we don't stop having children), but I don't think it will immediately change "who we are." I think there are two points in support of this:

1) A lot of the way we think is hard wired. (The possibility of uploading and changing this is interesting, but not the same question as was asked.)

2) Most people already think they are immortal most of the time. People who dwell on the fact that they are going to die are considered morbid, not normal. It's true that we all take mortality into consideration once in a while, but I'm not sure it would be such a huge shift to simply stop worrying about it.

OK. Let's put aside the possibility of altering the hard wiring.

I think a person who has lived for two centuries would have a signifiantly different outlook on life then one who hasn't.

I would also argue that Thanatos is "hard-wired" psychically. If you remove mortality then that starts to erode.

This changes human psychic topography.

You don't have to dwell on death for it to motivate your life.

Thanatos is a subconscious mover in the psyche.

OK, a couple of points on that, then.

Yes, two-hundred years of experience, and a potential for thousands of years more, will change your outlook on life. It will not, however, in my opinion, make you inhuman. Not right away, anyway.

The potential for immortality is no guarantee that you won't die. If Thanatos is actually hard wired (and I'm not convinced), then I suspect people who pursue risk of death will take measures to make sure they are actually at risk. If immortality is available through uploaded copies, you turn off your WiFi and erase all copies of yourself before you go out base jumping. I can't see a lot of people doing that, which makes me think that Thanatos is not, actually, that basic or common an urge.

I think the behavior of potential immortals is nicely explored in the Mars series by Kim Stanley Robinson. Basically, it changes everything, but people are still people.

Dude, you totally gotta read Richard K. Morgan!

A 200-year lifespan is de facto immortality. 200 years ago, in 1807, medicine was little better than medieval and virtually none of the technology we use had been invented. Material culture was backward by the standards of ancient Rome. 200 years from now (barring catastrophe) the world will make ours look like 1807, if not 1007.

I had good times in 1007, you!

Hey, man, if you can remember the 11th century, you weren't there.

Well,

In the ANN field there are people who is getting to the point that "brain" and "mind" are not the same thing. If one can succeed in making "mind" independent from "brain", then I'd say that we acknowledge immortality.

In my opinion, the goal of keeping "mind" alive independently of a "brain" can be achieved in the next 50 years.

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Originally posted by John Maddox Roberts:
Hey, man, if you can remember the 11th century, you weren't there.

You're right. I was a total straight-edge in the 11th century, I didn't get my proper funk on until the fifteenth century.

All the pillaging I missed!

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Originally posted by cbarreto:
Well,

In the ANN field there are people who is getting to the point that "brain" and "mind" are not the same thing. If one can succeed in making "mind" independent from "brain", then I'd say that we acknowledge immortality.

In my opinion, the goal of keeping "mind" alive independently of a "brain" can be achieved in the next 50 years.

It was my understanding that Cartesian dualism was finally out of favor.

Or is this not what you are talking about?

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Or is this not what you are talking about?

No, not Cartesian dualism... but the distinction between hardware and software would be a closer idea.

I suspect that WG was unaware that he was arriving at a singularity when he wrote the ending of ATP. But being a smart fellow (with smart friends who read his work) he probably knew he was at the very first day of it before the book was published.

As he himself said:

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It’s sort of on the very last page the singularity happens and I declare my inability to describe it.

Indeed, although he does not believe in a Kurzweil's or Vinge's singularity (the Geek Rapture, or millenarism for the Third millenium, "Anyone convinced of the onset of the Singularity, in my opinion, should read Norman Cohn's The Pursuit Of The Millennium"), he cannot propose an alternative. Which is why he considers he cannot write about what lies after such a socially changing event.

I am also a singularity skeptic, and I even doubt the Idoru replication really marks a singularity. Mainly because it is a gimmick rather than an application of Science, energywise, so it is a technological feat unsupported by the rest of the science/technology presented in the novels. Also, because an AI becoming embodied as a human is quite different from a human becoming an AI. We do not know what really remains of Rei in her bodies. It could be simply a statement. "You denied my humanity because I lack a body, so I made myself some".

Yet, making a body is comparatively easy when you think of making a mind out of a big lump of neurons.

I like the uncertainty at the end of "All Tomorrow's Parties" (an uncertainty represented by refusing to tell us more than what we see Silencio doing at the end). It says to me: just because the means of production have been radically leveled doesn't mean you get paradise.

Soo desu ne, future arriving unevenly and such.

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Originally posted by Psychophant:I am also a singularity skeptic, and I even doubt the Idoru replication really marks a singularity. Mainly because it is a gimmick rather than an application of Science, energywise, so it is a technological feat unsupported by the rest of the science/technology presented in the novels. Also, because an AI becoming embodied as a human is quite different from a human becoming an AI. We do not know what really remains of Rei in her bodies. It could be simply a statement. "You denied my humanity because I lack a body, so I made myself some".

Yet, making a body is comparatively easy when you think of making a mind out of a big lump of neurons.

It seemed clear to me that the Reis had minds, thus making it an advent of the singulairty.

What an array of Singularities to choose from!