Psyberspace

This essay was quoted in the Chapter by Lyle Burkhead (see earlier entry on Meaning. However Lyle Burkhead’s link did not work, but the Wayback machine found it. This is a real classic. Of course this ability to recall links from the dead upsets some people. I enjoy having this essa as it matches a book I have True Names: And the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier celebrating Vinge’s idea. Here is an opening quote in the essay defining Singularity.

The acceleration of technological progress has been the central feature of this century. I argue in this paper that we are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth. The precise cause of this change is the imminent creation by technology of entities with greater than human intelligence.

Update: Actually it is available online without the Wayback Machine.

A big download but a nice example of what can be done on the web, and a great story. I recall having this typeface in letraset to make brochures and so on in the early 70s. Mastication Is Normal: Behind the Typeface

Update: I just noticed that on win98 I don’t see this font as intended. You can ask anyone with XP to sent you the coopbl.ttf file. I had to copy the fonts out of the special Windows/Fonts folder to a new folder in XP to see them.) On the Win98 machine in the Windows/Fonts folder I went to File > Install New Font, found the folder where I had saved them, Presto! I had a go at Stencil and Brush Script MT Italic as well We use both for some documents at Mt. Lyford Horse Treks.

I am noticing a particular style of futureology… I have not really grasped it fully, it might be a syndrome, which is a sort of illiteracy. Some tech has different meaning to others, and it is quite an art to get the difference. It is easy to over estimates the power and impact of technology as such, but underestimate the power and impact – i.e. meaning – of specific technology. Technology is media, it mediates between us and the world, and so lumping it all together as having one big impact – the message of technology – makes some sense. “Man is a tool using animal”.

But finer perception is needed. Looking at “technology” like that is to see all of the inventions in a meaningless way, like looking at the alphabet as 26 letters. The alphabet becomes more interesting once arranged in words, words have more meaning in their context too (Jaron Lanier mentions the importance of say, “I do” in certain contexts.) McLuhan was a literary critic and so looked at media with a sort of super-literacy. For example moveable type was, according to McLuhan and it makes sense, the fore-runner of the whole of industrialisation because it unconsciously impacted how we saw the world, as bits we could put together in different ways. Lego. The NET extends other media and exponentially extend moveable type, even if nothing more was ever be invented, we will be – are now – totally transformed once again, it keeps happening only faster and it is hard to notice.

This is a chapter, Singularity or Automorphosis, out of an online book Nanotechnology without Genies, (c) 1999 by Lyle Burkhead. Where does this interesting chapter fit into my hypothesis?

Adding this link on Sunday, 25 August 2002: Vernor Vinge on the Singularity

I have argued above that we cannot prevent the Singularity, that its coming is an inevitable consequence of the humans’ natural competitiveness and the possibilities inherent in technology. And yet … we are the initiators. Even the largest avalanche is triggered by small things. We have the freedom to establish initial conditions, make things happen in ways that are less inimical than others. Of course (as with starting avalanches), it may not be clear what the right guiding nudge really is.

Here he makes it clear that some small tiny thing, unknown to us now could be triggering the avalanche. That allows the future to remain an unknown. This is from a 1993 article – better than the interview I post later.

I heard someone say in the movie about Stanley Kubrick, that 2001 was the first SF movie that left the future unknown.

An article in 21C Magazine by Jaron Lanier on the movie Minority Report including his role in talking it over with Speilberg. I think the futurology of the movie was flawed, but I like this last comment by Jaron:

… movie people as a whole have trouble understanding the joys of interactive media. It’s just a different culture. A dystopian movie about virtual worlds, like The Matrix, can make its way through Hollywood and be distributed, but a utopian movie about an interactive future seemingly cannot. Movie people are subliminally terrified by interactivity. It spells not only a loss of creative control, which movie people would miss more than you can imagine, but also a loss of business model. Napster lurks implicitly inside every shared virtual world that’s under the control of its users. The world that seems utopian to me is dystopian to Hollywood.

Another item by Cliff Bostock, just great. Decoding Hillman. Images of James Hillman, which I will not reproduce here, out of respect for the man, though I support Cliff Bostock having them there, because they are central to his essay, but that’s enough. Cliff quotes “literalizing the process of deliteralizing,” Catherine Keller’s critical phrase in the article.