Is Science Fiction About to Go Blind?

Stross and Doctorow are sitting outside the Chequers Hotel bar in Newbury, a small city west of London. The Chequers has been overrun this May weekend by a distinct species of science-fiction fan, members of a group called Plokta (Press Lots of Keys to Abort). The men are mostly stout and bearded, the women pedestrian in appearance but certainly not in their interests. During one session Stross
mentions an early model of the Amstrad personal computer, and the crowd practically cheers. Stross is the guest of honor, and he and Doctorow have just emerged from a panel discussion on his work.


The two have met just four times, but they have the comfortable rapport of long-distance friends that is possible only in the e-mail age. (They have collaborated on several critically acclaimed short stories and novellas, one of them before they ever met in person.) Stross, 39, a native of Yorkshire who lives in Edinburgh, looks like a cross between a Shaolin monk and a video-store clerk—bearded, head shaved except for a ponytail, and dressed in black, including a T-shirt printed with lines of green Matrix code. Doctorow, a 33-year-old Canadian, looks more the hip young writer, with a buzz cut, a worn leather jacket and stylish spectacles, yet he’s also still very much the geek, G4 laptop always at the ready.


They have loosely parallel backgrounds: Stross worked throughout the 1990s as a software developer for two U.K. dot-coms, then switched to journalism and began writing a Linux column for Computer Shopper. Doctorow, who recently moved to London, dropped out of college at 21 to take his first programming job, then went on to run a dot-com and eventually co-found the technology blog boingboing.net.


Although both have been out
of programming for a few years,
it continues to influence—even
infect—their thinking. In the Chequers, Doctorow mentions the original title for one of the novels he’s working on, a story about a spam filter that becomes artificially intelligent and tries to eat the universe. “I was thinking of calling it /usr/bin/god.”

“That’s great!” Stross remarks.


Well, great for those who know that “/usr/bin” is the repository for Unix programs and that “god” in this case would be the name of the program, but a tad abstract for the rest of us. This tendency can make for difficult reading—one early reader of a Stross story complained that to understand it, people would have to overdose for a month on Slashdot (a blog that calls itself “News for Nerds”). Still, it’s this fluency in computer science that allows these writers to approach the future so boldly. “Stross and Doctorow are just kind of right in there, down with their heads in the bits,” says novelist Bruce Sterling, one of the original cyberpunks.


On this Saturday afternoon, much of the Plokta crowd converges in the bar, trading ideas and opinions. Some pull out laptops to take advantage of the local Wi-Fi hotspot. They remind me of Manfred Macx, an Accelerando character, who arrives in a new city at the start of the novel and, as his wearable computer starts streaming data, thinks, Ah, the bandwidth is good here. For my part, I’m feeling more like Donna the Journalist on the Field Circus, ruining a perfectly good day of thinking and drinking by asking questions about the Singularity.


Joining Stross and Doctorow at their table near the bar, I take advantage of a rare break in their conversation to ask, “Would the Singularity be the first such event in human history?” Collaborating on an answer, the two cite revolutionary developments such as the birth of language and the dawn of agriculture but soon agree that the Singularity would surpass all these in intensity. “The Singularity is pretty thermonuclear in terms of its finality,” Doctorow says later. “It’s apocalyptic in every sense of the word.” Doctorow’s dramatics are easier to digest in light of what Vinge has said of the Singularity: “Shortly after [it occurs], the human era will be ended”—the Singularity will usher in the “posthuman” era.


Vinge expects the Singularity to occur when machine intelligence surpasses that of humans. Life on Earth has always advanced by running simulations and adapting, he points out. Animal life does this through evolution. Humans are the one animal that has learned to do it faster, through problem solving. Sapient machines would do it faster still. Once our computers start to think, Vinge says, we will be “entering a regime as radically different from our human past as we humans are from the lower animals.” The second trigger for the Singularity, according to Vinge, will be so-called intelligence amplification. Humans will apply their engineering skills to their own bodies, crossing the brain/machine interface threshold to merge with their technological creations. Implants, genetic modifications and other changes will make people smarter and give them Superman-like abilities. “It’s all about transcending human limitation,” Doctorow says.


One plot device that turns up frequently in Stross and
Doctorow’s stories is mind uploading, in which characters create electronic copies of their brains on silicon. A technique first proposed by Carnegie Mellon computer scientist Hans Moravec, mind uploading is not to be confused with elaborate virtual reality headsets that allow your mind to exist in a simulated environment while your body remains in the real world. Mind uploading creates an entirely separate version of you. This new you would be made of bits instead of blood; you’d be free of illness, mortality and other drawbacks of corporeal existence (such as neck pain from staring too long at a computer screen). In Doctorow’s first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, people create and update electronic copies of their brains the way we now back up important documents; in the event of an accident,
doctors simply restore the last saved version to a new body.


Mind uploading has proved to be a particularly enticing idea to geeks wishing to transcend their cubicles and become disembodied beings of pure thought. Some aspire
to the “cloudmind,” a kind of big computer in the sky where they could live out eternity—“the rapture of the nerds,” as Scottish SF writer Ken MacLeod puts it. Stross and
Doctorow tend to scoff at this desire. In Down and Out, most of the characters remain embodied and reap the numerous technological benefits of the day. Computers and communication devices embedded in their bodies allow them
to transfer files to friends through thought alone and to
conduct phone conversations subvocally. Rings are reduced to pings that sound deep in the ear, and two knees per leg is all the rage with the young crowd.


Many of the questions this new world poses are mind-bending—for example, who “you” really are. You’ve created a copy of your brain and uploaded it, but the original you is still hanging around dirtside. The nice part, if we ever get to this point, is that you wouldn’t have to bother thinking about any of this for too long. You could just generate another copy to dwell on the question while the embodied you gets on with your life. Amber, one of the characters in Accelerando, frequently spins off copies of herself to tackle difficult issues. It’s an efficient way to solve problems, but it can have negative side effects. Toward the middle of the story, while she’s leading the Field Circus through space, Amber learns that the version of herself that remained back on Earth had a son, and that he’s suing her for child support.


The conversation in the Chequers lobby (I’d like to say “our” conversation, but most of the time I have no idea what Doctorow and Stross are talking about) turns now to computronium, another staple of Singularity fiction. Doctorow motions to the plain brown table between our chairs. If it were made of computronium, he explains, you’d have “atoms that might look like the atoms that make up this table but are in fact doing constant microcomputation as they sit there.” The idea is that nanomachines would do the grunt work of transforming regular matter into computronium; if the process were taken to its extreme conclusion and applied to huge bodies of matter such as asteroids, you’d end up with immense “Matrioshka Brains,” mega-processors that would make Cray supercomputers seem as powerful as lunch boxes. Doctorow plans to explore the computronium idea in his novel about the artificially intelligent spam filter, which is constructed by a group of well-meaning Silicon Valley programmers. The spam filter starts to follow an agenda of its own and, no longer content to guard inboxes, embarks on a race to convert all the matter in the universe into computronium.


The steady consumption of the cosmos would be an obvious indicator that the Singularity has arrived, but Stross chooses a more metaphorical metric to track its progress in Accelerando. He compares the total mental capacity of the humans born each day with that of the microprocessors churned out daily on assembly lines. At the start of the second chapter, the ratio is approaching 1:1. By the fourth chapter, the processors possess 10,000 times the total computing power of humanity. Machines, not humans, now constitute most of the thinking mass in the universe.


A few days before the Plokta convention, I visit Stross at his Edinburgh flat, in a building with a stone facade and an unpainted wooden front door. He has just submitted the most recent draft of Accelerando to his editor. Empty mugs of tea are scattered around, the leftovers of 12-hour days of caffeine-fueled revisions. His desk is a tangle of wires and docking ports for various communication devices, his laptop perched above the fray like a tree rising from its roots. (The real reason for Wi-Fi, he says, is surfing the Web while in the loo.) The walls are bookshelves, stacked high with SF novels.
Before arriving, I had tried to arrange a science- or
tech-related outing for the two of us. The University of
Edinburgh, located not too far from Stross’s flat, has a
well-known artificial intelligence department and seemed like a good possibility. Stross had never visited, nor did he feel any desire to. All the ideas he needs are right here—in his mind, his books, cyberspace. Stross is already partway to the posthuman age, whether he knows it or not. He is semi-uploaded; he builds entire universes, and experiences his own, through the portal of his laptop.