As our everyday lives become increasingly science fictional -- as the stuff of fiction becomes the stuff of mundane reality, and the exceptional in everyday life (the Segway) strikes consumers as not science fictional enough -- what are the dangers we face? Beyond technological apathy, James John Bell, in the following, arguing along the lines of award-winning SF author Vernor Vinge, posits a "singularity" of apocalyptic proportions. Whether this "singularity" is simply another fixation or a complex solution is for the reader to decide.

The End of Science Fiction: When Technological Extrapolation Hits A Wall Across the Future

James John Bell

"Okay," Bobby saidÖ "then what's the matrix?Öwhat's cyberspace?"

"The world," Lucas said.

William Gibson, Count Zero (1986)

<1> Science fiction, as a genre of popular fiction, can trace its roots as far back as the 2nd century AD, where fantastical worlds were conjured up in order to comment on current beliefs. The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1996) outlines a very specific ancestry:

[Science Fiction] is a descendant of the type of prose fiction sometimes referred to as Lucianic Satire (after Lucian of Samosata, a Greek writer of the 2nd century AD). Lucianic Satire -- also commonly known as "Menippean Satire" after an earlier writer, Menippus, whose works are now lost -- is a kind of fiction which tends to the fantastic but also puts considerable emphasis on the discussion and dramatization of ideasÖ In Lucian's fictions, the ideas discussed, and frequently lampooned, were those of Classical Greek philosophers, many of whom were exponents of early "science". (13)
In the 17th century, such tales were slugged with many different names, like "utopian fiction," and dealt with the technologies spawned by the discovery of science (formerly known as the "mechanical philosophy"). It was in the 18th century that realist authors discovered the future. Scholars point to L'An 2440 (translated as Memoirs of the Year 2500) written by Louis Sebastien Mercier in 1771 as the first popular "future novel." The truly "first" science fiction novel noted by scholars is Mary Shelley's Gothic horror tale, Frankenstein, Or The Modern Prometheus (1818). The term "science fiction" didn't come along until pulp magazine editor Hugo Gernsback used the word "scientifiction" in April 1926 to describe a "Jules Verne, H. G. Wells and Edgar Allan Poe kind of story." The somewhat derogatory "sci-fi" was coined in the 1950s, by analogy with hi-fi. It was at this time that science fiction (SF) split with the pulps and blended science, technology, politics and the future into its own genre.

<2> Then something happened. While some SF authors extrapolated the future far into outer space with their unrealistic space operas, others became interested in a realistic technological future and developed the hard SF and cyberpunk genres. Here technology, and later computers, would dominate their landscapes.

<3> The future began to look pretty grim. SF authors like John Brunner, Norman Spinrad and J. G. Ballard took notice of the impacts of technology on people and the environment. In the '60s and '70s Brunner penned four seminal novels detailing the end of the world -- The Sheep Look Up, Jagged Orbit, Stand on Zanzibar, and Shockwave Rider. All of these have recently been brought back into print, with his 1972 pollution ridden apocalypse The Sheep Look Up being re-released this summer. These catastrophic visions of the future began to be echoed by society and science. Now it appears that many gifted SF authors, scientists, and philosophers who can see beyond the dust of impending apocalypse have hit a wall -- and it is of their own making.

<4> Last year's Hugo award winning science fiction author (and San Diego Professor of Computer Science) Vernor Vinge argues that SF has been the first to sense that something gigantic is looming on humanity's horizon. He writes, "hard sci-fi writers are the ones who try to write specific stories about all that technology may do for us. More and more these writers felt an opaque wall across the future. Now they saw that their most diligent extrapolations resulted in the unknowableÖsoon" (Vinge 1993, 11-12).

<5> Audiences can actually "see" this wall across the future in the plots of today's popular science fiction films, like The Matrix, Terminator and AI, where a dystopian technological event occurs allowing machines to take over. That part of the story becomes a gap in the plot and the viewer, along with the characters, is left guessing how it actually happened. This "omega dilemma" becomes a part of Vernor Vinge's 1986 SF classic Marooned in Realtime where Vinge's characters try to figure out what happened to the billions of Earth's inhabitants after returning from a century-long stay in suspended animation:

"Something happened, but we have only circumstantial evidence as to what it was."

"Yes, but that 'something' killed every human outside of stasis." He could not disguise his sarcasm.

She shrugged. "I don't think so. Let me give you my interpretation of the circumstantial evidence:

"During the last two thousand years of civilization, almost every measure of progress showed exponential growth. From the nineteenth century on, this was obvious. People began extrapolating the trends. The results were absurd: vehicles traveling faster than sound by the mid-twentieth century, men on the moon a bit later. All this was achieved yet progress continued. Simpleminded extrapolations of energy production and computer power and vehicle speeds gave meaninglessly large answers for the late twenty-first century. The more sophisticated forecasters pointed out that real growth eventually saturates; the numbers coming out of the extrapolations were just too big to be believedÖ To call that time 'the Extinction' is absurd. It was a Singularity, a place where extrapolation breaks down and new models must be applied. And those new models are beyond our intelligenceÖ There was no Extinction, Wil. Mankind simply graduated, and you and I and the rest missed graduation night." (126-129)

If his SF writing is any hint of his prophetic accuracy, Vinge also penned a novella in the summer of 1979 entitled True Names that detailed life on a computerized "Other Plane" a few years before William Gibson launched the cyberpunk craze with Neuromancer. At the time Vinge's early hackers, called "vandals," inspired many researchers in computer science who were building the foundation of today's Internet. In the story a cadre of characters, all disguising their true names with colorful aliases, use "fifty thousand baud" connections from their home machines to jack into a highly feasible worldwide virtual reality network. The novella has recently been brought back into print accompanied by a number of essays in the collection , True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier.

<6> Some of these essays deal with Vinge's "wall across the future," what he and scientists are calling the coming technological Singularity. Vinge was the first to use the mathematical term "Singularity" to describe the point in history where accelerating technological progress becomes near infinite and thus unknowable. Mark Pesce, the co-creator of Virtual Reality Markup Language (VRML), and the author of The Playful World: How Technology Transforms Our Imagination, suggests that Vinge is correct and that the tomorrow being quickly approached is as unclear as a brick wall:

As an idea, the Singularity can be approached from any number of directions; in reality, as every day passes we find new paths opening into this ultimate event. It could be the perfection of artificial intelligence -- emergent, hyperintelligent, possibly malevolent, or the complete mastery of the physical world through nanotechnology -- which could melt us all into a puddle of the fabled gray goo, or the radical augmentation of innate human abilities into a final trans-human form. Most likely these events would be connected, synchronous and fundamentally inseparable -- but no science fiction author has risen to speak that vision. (227)

Singularity is technically a mathematical term, perhaps best described as akin to what happens on world maps in a standard atlas. Everything appears correct until one looks at regions very close to the poles. In the standard Mercator projection, the poles appear not as points but as a straight line. Each line is a singularity: Everywhere along the top line contains the exact point of the North Pole, and the bottom line is the entire South Pole.

<7> The singularity on the edge of the map is nothing compared to the singularity at the center of a black hole. Here one finds the astrophysicist's singularity, a rift in the continuum of space and time where Einstein's rules no longer function. The approaching technological Singularity, like the singularities of black holes, marks a point of departure from reality. Explorers once wrote "Beyond here be dragons" on the edges of old maps of the known world, and the image of life as scientists approach these edges of change are proving to be just as mysterious, dangerous, controversial, and unknown.

<8> There is no concise definition for the Singularity. Author and inventor Ray Kurzweil defines this phenomenon as "technological change so rapid and profound it could create a rupture in the very fabric of human history." Kurzweil and many transhumanists define it as "a future time when societal, scientific, and economic change is so fast we cannot even imagine what will happen from our present perspective." A range of dates is given for the advent of the Singularity. "I'd be surprised if it happened before 2004 or after 2030," writes Vernor Vinge. A distinctive feature will be that machine intelligence will have exceeded and even merged with human intelligence. Another definition is used by extropians, who say it denotes "the singular time when technological development will be at its fastest." From an environmental perspective, the Singularity can be thought of as the point at which technology and nature become one. Whatever perspective one takes, at this juncture the world as scientists have described it becomes "extinct," and new definitions of life, nature, and human will be required.

<9> Many leading technology industries have been aware of the possibility of a Singularity for almost a decade. There are concerns that, if the public understood its ramifications, they might panic over accepting new and untested technologies that bring us closer to the Singularity, like cloning and genetically engineered foods. For now, the debate about the consequences of the Singularity has stayed within the halls of business and technology; the kinks are being worked out, avoiding "doomsday" hysteria.

<10> From the perspective of technological civilization at the dawn of the 21st century the "Singularity story" is a prophecy of corporate globalization -- representing the utopian vision of a technological dream world -- propaganda for advanced capitalism. This is the "diamond age" of civilization that is written about in cyberpunk futures. The Singularity, navigated by the elite hands of global corporations, is the title of the final chapter in the story of human progress -- beyond which technology reigns supreme in a post-human world. The mythic implications of the Singularity are that it signals an "era transition" -- when a new assumptive base is created to replace the increasing abstraction for people who exist in an increasingly interconnected technological world. This then forms the basis for the creation of a new consensual world-view -- a New Story.

<11> There are times in history when the meanings behind certain myths or symbols will "flip" -- mean the opposite of what they once represented. A class of people, a style of clothes, a word -- all can have their meanings shift over the course of time. For example, in the sixties and seventies computer literate professionals were known as "geeks" and "nerds". A shift was underway in the eighties and nineties in how computer professionals were perceived, they are now called "hackers", "webmasters", "architects" and "techies". The new language reflects both the respect given to expert computer users and the power of information technology in our society. Recognizing these kinds of shifts in culture as they're happening are key to understanding the future.

<12> The scientific community is undergoing such a "flip" regarding their role in society. Scientists for over the last four hundred years have served as stable guides for establishing the path of progress. A few decades ago the scientist's position as "championing the future" began to shift towards "warning about the future". A landmark moment was Rachel Carson's publishing of Silent Spring in 1962. Over the years more and more scientists (and scientist science fiction authors) have joined the ranks of those "warning about the future" -- thousands of scientists are currently busy warning the world about global climate change. Even scientists optimistic about the future have hedged their predictions with warnings. Kurzweil's book title, The Singularity is Near, reminds one of the city street corner's prophets of doom and gloom wearing placards that read -- The End is Near. Some scientists, like Bill Joy, the chief scientist at Sun Microsystems, are even warning that we could lose control of this accelerating technological convergence. They believe that this exponentially expanding technological utopia, or "technotopia," could cause the total extinction of life as we know it, others say the direction we're headed smacks of eugenics -- the creation of an elite super-humanity. The Singularity story is thus becoming defined as both technological savior and the secular story of apocalypse.

<13> Today, our popular culture is awestruck with this kind of apocalypse, from the rise of machines in this spring and summer's films Matrix Reloaded and Terminator 3 to Michael Crichton's mini-machine takeover in his new novel, Prey. A machine apocalypse is becoming almost as popular as the Christian apocalypse. Witness the sales of the fundamentalist Christian-bent Left Behind science fiction book series on the apocalypse, which has sold over 55,000,000 copies. Moreover, Left Behind's Armageddon came out in April and is perfect reading while watching the evolution of war action on Iraq. It continues the story of those left behind after the Christian rapture and tells of the "battle of the ages" when the armies of the world are drawn inexorably toward the Middle East for total war. The number of Americans who believe such things are staggering. A Time/cnn poll recently showed that "59 percent of Americans believe that the prophecies in the Book of Revelation will come true." One-quarter of people polled "believe that the Bible predicted the September 11 attack," and 17 percent of Americans "believe the end of the world will happen in their lifetime." The die-hard religious Americans are planning their escape from the present world into rapture, while the scientists and hackers construct their own popular techno-version of the end times.

<14> The two sequels to the blockbuster film The Matrix promise to delve further into the philosophy and origins of Earth's machine-controlled apocalyptic future. Cast members were required to read Wired editor Kevin Kelly's book Out of Control -- The Rise of Neo-biological Civilization before they could read the first script. Page one reads, "The realm of the born -- all that is nature and the realm of the made -- all that is humanly constructed -- are becoming one." A few other books on the Singularity are out now -- others are in the works and due out over the next couple of years. Taking the Red Pill, edited by Glenn Yeffeth, features scientific and philosophical essays that explore both the technological speed-up toward the Singularity and The Matrix's portrayal of a post-Singularity world. Ray Kurzweil's essay, "The Human Machine Merger: Are We Heading for The Matrix," goes head to head with Bill Joy's essay, "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us." He contends that circa 2030, the technology of The Matrix will be within our grasp and humanity will be teetering on the edge of the Singularity.

<15> Whatever the form the "wall across the future" takes, Singularity or Christian rapture -- it reveals something about how technological society views the present world. I believe these cultures' obsessions with apocalypse is really just an amplified desire for change -- a longing for a different tomorrow, one that they can't fully articulate, but that they know is out there. Be it Independence Day, The Matrix, or Terminator, people the world over continue to pay top dollar to watch the icons of consumer society get wiped off the map.

<16> When people are fixated to web sites, movies, TV, and books that focus on an apocalypse, like the Singularity, what they're really doing is withdrawing from a present (and a future) that they find unacceptable. Vinge indicates that fixation on the Singularity by technological society will become more prevalent.As the 2002 Guest of Honor at the 60th World Science Fiction Convention in San Jose California, Vinge echoed his earlier 1993 speech to NASA and the military, when he first warned them about a coming Singularity. "The dilemma felt by science fiction writers will be perceived in other creative endeavorsÖAs we move closer to this point, it will loom vaster and vaster over human affairs till the notion becomes a commonplace. Yet when it finally happens it may still be a great surprise and a great unknown."

Works Cited

Bell, James John. “Exploring the Singularity.” The Futurist 37.3 (May-June 2003): 18-24.

Bell, James John. “The Many Faces of Apocalypse.” Conscious Choice 16.6 (June 2003): 32-33.

Booker, M. Keith. The Dystopian Impulse in Modern Literature: Fiction as Social Criticism. Westport: Greenwood, 1994.

Brennan, Shelley. “A Rupture in History.” The Galt Global Review (6 August 2002). <http://www.galtglobalreview.com/infotech/siliconlimitations_pt2.html>

Brunner, John. The Sheep Look Up. 1972. Dallas: BenBella, 2003.

Gibbs, Nancy. “Apocalypse Now – The Biggest Book of the Summer is about the End of the World. It’s also a Sign of our Troubled Times.” Time 160.1 (1 July 2002): 40-48.

James, Jennifer. Thinking in the Future Tense. New York: Touchstone, 1996.

Joy, Bill. “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us.” Taking the Red
Pill: Science, Philosophy and Religion in The Matrix. Glenn Yeffeth, ed. Dallas: BenBella, 2003.

Joy, Bill. “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us.” Wired 8.4 (April 2000): 238-262.

Kelly, Kevin. Out of Control: The Rise of Neo-Biological Civilization. New York: Addison-Wesley, 1994.

Pesce, Mark. “True Magic.” True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier. James Frenkel, Ed. New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 2001. 221-238.

Pringle, David, ed. The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Science. Surrey: Carlton, 1997.

Vinge, Vernor. "The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era." Vision-21: Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering in the Era of Cyberspace, NASA-CP-10129. Cleveland, OH: NASA Lewis Research Center, 1993. 11-22.

Vinge, Vernor. Marooned in Realtime. New York: Baen, 1986.

Resources

Ray Kurzweil's website Kurzweil AI (www.kurzweilai.net) where articles by the world's scientific community discuss the Singularity and related technological advances.

James John Bell's website The Last Wizards (www.lastwizards.com) where science and popular culture, from The Singularity to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, is dissected for its political and cultural impacts.