Defend your cyber-reality. It may be your only one.
A 'real' singularity
Bidisha's article today is just a little dollop. She doesn't say very much at all. It's a throw-and-run Guardian online type article. A keep-your-name-floating-about in-cybespace without-saying-too-much article. But I'll respond to it anyway.
I chose my new Guardian log in (shortly to be banned no doubt) after A.C. Clarke's comment that the computer age would end in a 'Cyberclasm' a catastrophe.
But the alternative view is that it will end in the singularity. Ray Kurzweil elaborates. People are noticing that being electronically connected has changed the very way we think. The Internet can form a sort of cybershell for the mind.
What is Cyberspace? Read the latest novel of Ian Banks,Transition Bidisha should read far more science fiction. How provincial people can be who find their intellectual edge in selectivity. You have to be omnivorous to make sense of modern life.
The best idea which I have come across recently, which you all probably already know about, I'm sure, is this: That computing power increases exponentially and that according to Moore's law it gets smaller quickly.
According to this theory, by 2045 there will be enough computing power to contain model reality itself, with verisimilitude, in computers. But it doesn't stop there. As each decade goes past computing power continues to double. Which means you can simulate hundreds then millions then billions of realities.
So the logic goes like this. What are the odds that we are living in reality against the odds that we live in what is called an ancestor simulation? Simulated reality. We have only a one in in a (multiple of) billion chance that we are living in THE reality. The likelihood is that we are living in an ancestor simulation designed by a future advanced human civilisation.
It's pretty logical. It's convincing. Of course the Matrix guys used this along with ideas taken from Baudrillard.
Where's God in an ancestor simulation. And so we can marvel at Douglas Adams insight that the final message to humanity from God was:
WE APOLOGISE FOR THE INCONVENIENCE
Douglas Adams must have intuited that we might live in one of the billion ancestor simulations.Of course if ancestor simulations were the case then you must wonder at the morality of a future advanced civilisation that could simulate the holocaust.
Bidisha should embrace cyberlife and perhaps she too will reach the singularity.
Ultimately, even if we are all only living in an ancestor simulation, all realities will hit the singularity and pop out into a shared space. The problem with these ideas about cyber-life is that they have been presented by mainly by conventional men writing in the 50s 60s and 70s.
But Stanislaw Lem presented them tastefully and with humour in his books. What a writer! And nowadays Ian Banks (and William Gibson too) are doing a pretty good job too visualising man-machine worlds and human computer integration.
Bidisha should embrace cyberlife and perhaps she too will reach the singularity.
Ultimately, even if we are all only living in an ancestor simulation, all realities will hit the singularity and pop out into a shared space. The problem with these ideas about cyber-life is that they have been presented by mainly by conventional men writing in the 50s 60s and 70s.
But Stanislaw Lem presented them tastefully and with humour in his books. What a writer! And nowadays Ian Banks (and William Gibson too) are doing a pretty good job too visualising man-machine worlds and human computer integration.