Positive Liberty

(As an aside, are people getting tired of the science fiction blogging? I’m thinking of starting a side project for this material if the main readership isn’t interested.)

I recently finished reading Vernor Vinge’s Rainbows End.

Executive summary: I have to say I was disappointed. I would give it two stars out of five; it had its moments, but it took itself far too seriously and seemed much more concerned with being an “important” novel than with being a good one. Vinge takes on some very big ideas here. But I think he forgets about writing an interesting plot along the way, and I think his treatment of the singularity — or rather the idea of the singularity in general — represents a kind of presentism, a form of sloppy thinking about the nature of human societies that can be discerned in fiction as clearly as it can be in history. Rather than making assertions about the peculiar specialness of this or that era, literature should try to speak to all eras so far as it can. And to do this, abandoning strict technological verisimilitude may often be a wise choice.

More, with some major spoilers, below the fold.

Consider the prose. Vinge spatters his text with exclamation marks. To my eye, the effect is always the same, whether the author has four Hugos or none: In pointing out just how little excitement I feel, the exclamation mark becomes a presumption! And presumption is annoying.

Vinge also tends to overuse stock phrases. At one point, two characters each experience the “low point of their week” within a few pages of one another. Yet it isn’t a very strong parallel construction, and even if it were, it would still be a lazy phrase of a type I’d not want to foreground through use in a parallel construction.

The title, too, is a gimmick, and not a new one, and I noticed it before I had read any further. Frustratingly, this gimmick also seems used to no particular end: The chapter entitled “The Missing Apostrophe” promised, from the look of it, to answer the riddle of why the punctuation went missing. Yet “The Missing Apostrophe” never delivers on its promise.

I would think an editor should have caught these things at some point, or at least queried Vinge about what he was doing with them. But maybe it’s hard to do that to someone with four Hugos. (And yes, those Hugos kept me going, even where I wondered if my time might be spent better elsewhere.)

And now for the plot, which so far as I could tell consisted almost entirely of science-fiction cliches. Yes, doing a cliche well is the mark of a good writer, and his are indeed finely turned-out cliches. They weren’t the dreck you see from beginning writers — far from it — but I still found them all too predictable.

Strange Horizons, an online magazine of speculative fiction, keeps a list of tired old plotlines as a warning to prospective authors. As an exercise, I tried to retell Rainbows End using only their cliches; my work is shown below.

–A man comes back from a state of obliviousness to learn that he is now living in the future.
–Weird things happen, but it turns out they’re not real.
–A writer has writer’s block.
–In the future, everything is electronic, until a kid is exposed to ancient wisdom in the form of a wise old person who’s lived a non-electronic life.
–An AI is running amok on the Internet.
–Some characters are in favor of immersive VR, while others are opposed to it because it’s not natural; they spend most of the story’s length rehashing common arguments on both sides.
–An evil unethical doctor performs medical experiments on an unsuspecting patient.
–”And I would have gotten away with it, too, except for those meddling kids.”

All but the first and the last entries come directly from the Strange Horizons page of “Plots We See Too Often,” and even these first and last are themselves undeniable old saws. With one major plotline aside — we’ll treat it below — this was the plot of Rainbows End.

I’m not even joking about that last one. On page 297, the main villain is made to speak almost exactly these words. (It didn’t help, either, that I saw them coming and was dreading them for the previous hundred-fifty-odd pages.) Elsewhere, Vinge’s “frustrated author” character declares, sometime in the mid-21st century, that nothing is new anymore, that all plots are played out, and that there is no original writing left to be done. By the end of Rainbows End, it has the feel of a confession.

But we are denied the perfect Scooby-Doo ending: The Mysterious Stranger (oh yes, there’s even a “Mysterious Stranger”) is never unmasked, and our apparently supernatural entity never turns out to be the proverbial milkman from the very first scene. Although he still could be: I understand that Vinge is considering a sequel, in which the Mysterious Stranger’s identity may yet be revealed.

The bad guys’ plan (one of them, at any rate; meanwhile, they plot to subvert every computer network on Earth and simultaneously infect everyone with a mind-control virus) well, the bad guys’ other plan is purely preposterous, even for the future: An evil consortium wants to shred the paper libraries of the world and replace them all with VR books. After shredding — and not before — the documents will be analyzed to produce the electronic libraries’ content. Fahrenheit 451, meet Soylent Green.

And I’m sure this would just sound like a marvelous idea to any university administration. After all, once we discovered microfilm, why, the first thing we did was to grind up every copy of the Gutenberg Bible. The whole thing leaves open the obvious question: Why not scan the books harmlessly and then sell the paper versions to collectors? Even if book prices had fallen off a bit in the coming VR world, eBay has still got to be a better financial proposition than the shredder.

“I had to phrase the story carefully to make it plausible at all,” Vinge said in one interview. I bet.

Why Why Why does Vinge do this to us? The answer lies, I think, in the pretensions Rainbows End has toward being an important book. (”A novel with one foot in the future,” the dust jacket proclaims. Silly me, at first I wrote that off as a bit of hyperbolic ad copy.)

Rainbows End is an intervention in futurology as much as it is a science fiction tale, and its real aim is not a well-constructed or original plot. No, it seeks to portray a world, one in which the technological singularity has either arrived or is about to arrive:

In futures studies, a technological singularity (often the Singularity) is a predicted future event believed to precede immense technological progress in an unprecedentedly brief time. Futurists give varying predictions as to the extent of this progress, the speed at which it occurs, and the exact cause and nature of the event itself.

One school of thought centers around the writings of Vernor Vinge, in which he examines what I. J. Good (1965) described earlier as an “intelligence explosion.” Good predicts that if artificial intelligence reaches equivalence to human intelligence, it will soon become capable of augmenting its own intelligence with increasing effectiveness, far surpassing human intellect. In the 1980s, Vernor Vinge dubbed this event “the Singularity” and popularized the idea with lectures, essays, and science fiction. Vinge argues the Singularity will occur following creation of strong AI or sufficiently advanced intelligence amplification technologies such as brain-computer interfaces.

With the arrival of the singularity, human history will enter an unknowable phase, one in which technological breakthroughs happen so rapidly and so tellingly that it will no longer be possible even to think meaningfully about the nature of the future. Or even, one suspects, about the nature of man. It’s an idea that Vinge has done much to make famous, particularly in his 1993 essay “The Coming Technological Singularity.” At the present rate of technological advance, we may live in a pretty changed world a decade from now. Once we hit the singularity, we won’t even recognize two days ago. In our world, old people can’t always keep up. At the singularity, no one can ever keep up.

When the singularity arrives, it will be futile to try to understand what’s going on around us, for we will find ourselves with only two tools at our disposal: There are the evident facts, which have been rendered nonsensical. And there are the played-out plots from yesteryear’s fiction, which are hardly any better. These are the tools that the characters use in Rainbows End, but they ultimately fail: The order that they try to impose upon their experiences can never encompass the whole. They cannot, among other things, unveil the Mysterious Stranger, because he has already advanced beyond their technological ken.

The heroes of Rainbows End are therefore repeatedly surprised by technologies that they thought did not exist. One fellow, rather absurdly, waits a couple of weeks for a product he desires to be invented; he happens to be one of the few who know about it. And a good deal of the plot actually turns on that hoped-for product. (Alas, deus ex machina is a very old cliche, and I’m sure it can’t really encompass this new, post-singularity world.)

[Futurist] Ray Kurzweil justifies his belief in an imminent singularity by an analysis of history from which he concludes that technological progress follows a pattern of exponential growth. He calls this conclusion The Law of Accelerating Returns. He generalizes Moore’s law, which describes exponential growth in integrated semiconductor complexity, to include technologies from far before the integrated circuit.

Whenever technology approaches a barrier, Kurzweil writes, new technologies will cross it. He predicts paradigm shifts will become increasingly common, leading to “technological change so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history” (Kurzweil 2001).

And yet… and yet. What we find in Rainbows End are a whole lot of things that futurologists have already predicted: Wearable computers, immersive and near-universal virtual reality, cell phones that have wormed their way into our brains. Can thinking machines be far behind? (And if so, will they show benevolence toward us, or cold indifference?)

But I am more or less sure that the real transformative value of the information revolution is close to nil. At least, in the sense that worries people. Yes, thanks to computers, we are in effect fantastically more intelligent than we used to be, and we are better able to communicate. Yet the basic problems of life are the same: We all face limits, economical, intellectual, emotional, that define who we are and that allow the elusive thing we call character to emerge. Will there be thinking machines one day? Fine. Let them join the game. But they won’t bring about the singularity, because, for all I can tell, the singularity is just our current take on a very common — and very old — misreading of history.

Consider Wikipedia’s statement of the numbers: “When plotted on a logarithmic graph, 15 separate lists of paradigm shifts for key events in human history show an exponential trend.” Well, sure. But why do you suppose this is? I’ll tell you an answer, but you aren’t gonna like it: Human nature inclines toward the logarithmic. We just love to think we’re on the steep end of anything, that our now is more now than any other now that ever was. That we stand on the cusp of history.

Historians have a word for it: presentism.

Presentism is the belief that we occupy a privileged moment, whether ontologically or just through sheer dumb luck. The fervent conviction that we are about to be radically transformed, and that beyond us lies the unimaginable, is the rankest form of presentism I have ever seen. It’s not that I’m “opposed” to the singularity, as some futurologists are, or that I think its arrival would be a bad thing for humanity. It’s just that I’ve seen its type before. And it’s not a real thing at all. It’s an intellectual blind spot.

“I’m reading a book,” I said to Scott, “that’s set just slightly in the future. It’s trying to predict what life will be like a few decades from now.”

“Oh,” he said. “So it’ll get everything wrong then?”

“Yep.”

“And we’ll even live to see it get everything wrong.”

“Looking forward to it.”

“And a lot of the stuff probably even seems wrong already, doesn’t it?”

“Yep.”

It’s sort of like what my dad must think of those old Tom Swift books he gave me as a kid (and which would likewise have turned up on eBay, or in a shredder, if I were not such an inveterate bibliophile): The Golden Age of sci-fi imagined a 2006 of jet packs, ray guns, domed cities, and people living on Mars. And the authors of that era fervently believed that these gadgets would transform humanity — either an apotheosis or a second Fall, but it sure would be something big. And it never happened. There was a kind of presentism in the old Tom Swifts, too, in that sense. Something big, about to happen, right around the corner…

But most of the Golden Age technology was never meant to be, at least not by 2006. Ray guns fall on the lack of a compact energy source; faster-than-light travel is still against the laws of physics as we know them. And even the Golden-Agey things that we can do — like video phones — aren’t all as useful, or as widely used, as the writers imagined.

I have the suspicion, then, that our bad intellectual habits run in parallel to those of the Golden Age: We imagine that, in the future, the “future” will be everywhere, and that it will transform everything in its wake. Most of all, it will be our future, the one that we imagine. Not domed cities on Mars, but strong AI and a virtual reality community that overlays all of San Diego with visions from Terry Pratchett, J. K. Rowling, or the great-grandchildren of Pokemon (a scary thought, that last).

In a sense, our predictions could hardly be anything other than our own, but consider the hubris of it all: I see no reason to think that we’ll actually get the future we prefer to predict, when the Golden Age got nothing of the sort. The jet-pack no longer seems far in the future. Instead, it’s way out there on some technological road not taken. And that’s the most likely fate for our own technological imaginings — when we use them, not as symbols or other literary devices, but as real, honest-to-goodness predictions of the future.

(See here for a good example of “future-technology-as-literary-device.” I am confident that the future world of Paolo Bacigalupi’s “The Calorie Man” cannot possibly come to pass. Its technologies are prima facie absurd. But what a great symbolism they evoke! This is how science fiction should be written, not in the service to careful predictions of the future, but with an eye toward symbolic richness and deep, resonant emotions. No, this isn’t a plea for “soft” science fiction over “hard” science fiction. I just do wish the authors of the latter had a better sense of wonder, sometimes.)

Not only is the singularity so very similar to the Golden Age rocketopian fantasy — with information technology doing the heavy lifting that antigravity once did — but it’s also, well, like just about any breathless trend that anyone’s ever discovered. These things can’t keep going like they are forever. Nothing ever does. It is the curse of presentism that we so readily believe otherwise.

Oh, and the real unpredictability of the future doesn’t lie after some approaching singularity. Perhaps the most puzzling thing about singularity theories is just the plain dumb fact that it’s never been very easy to predict the future. We’re always surprised by the latest new technology we encounter. Every breakthrough is a shock. And the singularity will change things how, exactly?

Predicting the future has always been an exercise in near-perfect futility. And thank goodness for it: An effective futurological science really would be the death of humanity as we know it. Part of being alive is being surprised — pleasantly or unpleasantly — by the changes that happen around us. In a sense, the singularity is here. Right now. It always has been.

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