Tearing Toward The Spike by Damien Broderick
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TEARING TOWARD THE SPIKE Page 5 NOTES 1. See Vernor Vinge, True Names... and Other Dangers, New York:
Baen Books, 1987; Threats... and Other Promises, New York: Baen Books,
1988; and especially Marooned in Realtime, London: Pan Books, 1987. An
important source is his Address to NASA VISION‑21 Symposium, March
30-31, 1993, downloadable from
For a general survey of this topic in far greater detail than I can
provide in this essay, see my The Spike: Accelerating into the Unimaginable
Future (Melbourne, Australia: Reed Books/New Holland, 1997; the revised,
expanded and updated edition is forthcoming: The Spike: How our Lives are
Being Changed by Rapidly Advancing Technologies New York: Tor/Forge,
February 2001). 2. Private communication, August, 1996. Vinge's own most recent picture of
a plausible 2020, cautiously sans Singularity, emphasises the role of
embedded computer networks so ubiquitous that finally they link into a kind of
cyberspace Gaia, even merge with the original Gaia, that geological and
biological macro-ecosystem of the globe (Vernor Vinge, `The Digital Gaia,' Wired,
January 2000, pp. 74-8). However, on the last day of 1999, Vinge told me in an
email: `The basic argument hasn't changed.' 3. Alvin Toffler, Future Shock, [1970] London: Pan Books, 1972, p.
170. 4. See, for a simplified discussion, Nobelist Steven Weinberg's summary
article `A Unified Physics by 2050?', Scientific American, December
1999, pp. 36-43. 5. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html 6. See the late economist Julian Simon's readable and optimistic book The
Ultimate Resource at
http://www.inform.umd.edu/EdRes/Colleges/BMGT/.Faculty/JSimon/Ultimate_Resource/ 7. http://www4.nationalacademies.org/news.nsf/isbn/0309068916?OpenDocument 8. Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed
Human Intelligence, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1999. 9. http://merkle.com/merkle 10. http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/book98/ 11. Michio Kaku, Visions: How Science Will Revolutionize the 21st
Century and Beyond, Oxford University Press, 12. http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_503000/503552.stm 13. Personal communication, 8 December, 1999. 14. http://www.nas.nasa.gov/Groups/SciTech/nano/index.html 15. http://www.zyvex.com 16. Some thoughts on the difficult of containing nanotech (with some
comparisons to software piracy `warez'), and the
http://www.cabell.org/Quincy/Documents/Nanotechnology/hello_nanotechnology.html 17. http://pobox.com/~sentience/singularity.html 18. Sorry, that's me again; Yudkowsky didn't say it. 19. http://www.pobox.com/~sentience/AI_design.temp.html#view_advantage 20. To be fair, the Star Trek franchise has always made room for
alien civilisations that have passed through a singularity and become as gods.
It's just that television's notion of post-Spike entities stops short at
mimicry of Greek and Roman mythology (Xena the Warrior Princess goes to the
future), spiritualised transformations of humans into a sort of angel
(familiar also from Babylon-5), down-market cyberpunk collectivity (the
Borg), or sardonic whimsy (the entertaining character Q, from the Q dimension,
where almost anything can happen and usually does). It's hard not to wonder
why immortality is not assured by the transporter or the replicator, which can
obviously encode a whole person as easily as a piping hot cup of Earl Grey
tea, or why people age and die despite the future's superb medicine. The
reasons, obviously, have nothing to do with plausible extrapolation and
everything to do with telling an entertaining tale, using a range of
contemporary human actors, that appeals to the largest demographic and ruffles
as few feathers as possible while still delivering some faint frisson of
difference and future shock. 21.
http://abc.net.au/rn/science/ockham/stories/s54399.htm
The book that frightened Dr Kerr was my The Last Mortal Generation
(Sydney, Australia: New Holland, 1999). The
Spike, by contrast, would surely shock him rigid. Arthur C. Clarke, by the
way, took a different view of Last Mortal: in Profiles of the Future
(London: Gollancz, 1999), he generously called it `this truly mind-stretching
book' (p. 189). I much prefer to stretch minds than scare them witless.
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