Du sense of wonder à la SF métaphysique

[Lensman]

En tout cas, aucun rapport entre la "singularité" et un quelconque motif d'inquiétude particulier quant à l'avenir de la littérature de SF, plus que pour l'avenir de n'importe-quoi d'autre...
Oncle Joe

[Nébal]

Pas l'impression, non.

Mais pas l'impression non plus d'avoir eu de réponse à ma question...

[Gérard Klein]

En tout cas, aucun rapport entre la "singularité" et un quelconque motif d'inquiétude particilier quant à l'avenir de la littérature de SF, plus que pour l'avenir de n'importe-quoi d'autre...
Oncle Joe

D'accord sur le principe.
Quoique…

Il me semble évident que les I.A. survitaminées commenceront par éliminer les lecteurs de sf qui pourraient prévenir l'humanité et prendre le maquis. Je me demande du reste si Elles n'ont pas déjà commencé, à partir de l'an 2000. Curieux, non?

Et sans lecteurs…

Et si Stephanie Meyer était l'un d'Elles???

[Lensman]

Quant à la prospective, je reconnais que je suis un peu partisan, l'ayant pratiquée, souvent avec succès. Nébal devrait lire assidûment l'excellente revue Futuribles qui a publié du reste dans ses deux derniers numéros (septembre et octobre 2010) deux très bons articles illustrés de Lacaze sur les prospectives d'Albert Robida qui a souvent vu très juste sur notre Vingtième siècle.

Vivement le début du XXIIe siècle, pour lire un article sur l'auteur qui aura souvent vu juste sur le XXIe siècle... tiens, quel auteur, d'ailleurs? il n'est peut-être pas encore actif...
Bon, visons moins loin, et attendons l'article du milieu du XXIe siècle sur l'auteur qui aura bien vu le début du XXIIe...
Oncle Joe

[Nébal]

tiens, quel auteur, d'ailleurs?

Houellebecq ?

[Lensman]

tiens, quel auteur, d'ailleurs?

Houellebecq ?

Je le savais!
Oncle Joe

[marypop]

AAAAaaarrrgggghhhhhh

Le fil est vivant ...

Vade retro chronophages !

[Gérard Klein]

John Brunner.
Parfois Norman Spinrad.
(Sur le XXI° siècle s'entend.)

[Lensman]

Et si Stephanie Meyer était l'un d'Elles???

Humm... non, pas assez subtil, puisque tu te doutes de quelque chose... à moins que tu ne sois toi-même une IA, programmée en secret par Bergier...
Oncle Joe

[Lem]

Juste histoire d'y voir clair, il y a :

a. le problème de la Singularité comme "prédiction" crédible de ce qui pourrait arriver si…

b. le problème de la Singularité comme "inhibition" de la pensée prospective et spéculative

c. le problème de la Singularité comme "intimidation" semi-consciente exercée sur les auteurs de sf ; et son impact éventuel sur la sf comme genre.

En ce qui me concerne, je ne suis pas compétent pour juger le problème a. (je crois que GK la réfute implicitement dans la préface d'Excession au Livre de Poche pour cause d'IA impossible dans cet univers).

Sur le problème b, il me semble évident que la pensée prospective et spéculative a connu des jours meilleurs mais aussi que sa léthargie actuelle ne doit pas grand-chose au concept de Vinge.

Quant au problème c, on peut trouver qu'il n'a pas lieu d'être mais ça ne l'empêche pas de se poser, ou au moins de s'être posé. Trois exemples ci-dessous :

One reason lots of people don’t want to think long term these days is because technology keeps accelerating so rapidly, we assume the world will become unrecognizable in a few years and then move on to unimaginable. Long-term thinking must be either impossible or irrelevant.

Your future as a black hole, 2004

Is Science Fiction About to Go Blind? That's the question Popular Science asks this month.
It's mainly an article about worldchanging allies Charlie Stross and Cory Doctorow (and we're happy to see 'em get the much-deserved press). But the frame within the story is set is a now-familiar one: "Awed at the pace of technological advances, a faction of geeky writers believes our world is about to change so radically that envisioning what comes next is nearly impossible."
Been there, done that. Here's a draft of a piece I wrote for the New York Times Magazine in 2002, which got bumped by the appearance of a vaguely-similar piece in the Week In Review section:

Who's afraid of the future? Science fiction writers, apparently.
It seems a strange charge to level. After all, science fiction has been the genre of choice for writers who love to ponder the future, its possibilities and its dangers, ever since Mary Shelley mythologized both the expanding vistas of science and the perils of technological hubris in Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus almost 200 years ago. Nonetheless, a growing number of science fiction writers and critics contend that works which tackle the future with true originality are becoming something of an endangered species.

"There's still plenty of space opera out there, with heroes running around in galactic Disneylands," says author Bruce Sterling, "but almost no one is addressing the nature of the 21st Century, or putting together, like, genuinely novel visions of life in the year 2050."

In the 80's, Sterling notes, it gave young SF writers such as himself "a hormonal rush" to see their wildest predictions begin to come true a decade later; in the 90's, that lag had run to a couple years; now, he says, between the time a SF writer can predict something and his publisher can get it on the shelves, reality will have caught up. "Genuinely novel ideas about the future have a short shelf-life these days."

In fact, some of the most respected American science fiction authors recently haven't been writing science fiction at all. Instead they're turning out scientific thrillers, spy stories, even historical novels. Sterling himself – though a founder of the "Cyberpunk" school of SF (the preferred term, "sci-fi" being outmoded), and the author of several books widely regarded as classics in the field – says he's now working on a "techno-thriller" set in the present day.

And many of those who are still writing in the genre, argues critic Judith Berman in her much-noted recent essay "Science Fiction Without the Future," are turning out stories "full of nostalgia… fear of the future in general, and the experience of change as disorienting and bad."

Berman, speaking in an interview, said she's concerned that the genre as a whole is moving away from stories which use future settings to explore the nature of societal change – think, for instance, of William Gibson's Neuromancer, or for that matter, 1984 or Brave New World. Instead, she says, writers are turning increasingly to escapist stories which rely on tropes from science fiction's past.

"A huge proportion of the books out there are about time-travel, or are set in alternate futures, or have a retro feel, like steampunk," Berman said, referring to the trend for science fiction set in the Victorian era. Where, she asks, is the novelty, the exhilaration about change, the engagement with the future's possibilities that SF used to offer? Why are science fiction writers shying away from the future?

There are a number of different answers. Berman herself blames the graying of the field, contending that the majority of SF writers and fans are Boomers, and that the discomfort and disorientation they feel in the face of technological change manifests itself in a desire to look back to simpler times.

Sterling sees a larger problem, a sort of "cultural anemia" in our society. Americans' confidence in the future has been rocked by events like the 9-11 bombings and the Dotcom collapse. We no longer have any "new, exciting destination myth," Sterling says. "Space certainly isn't it. Our space program has become a hollow symbol, something like one of those giant Stalinist statues of the worker and the peasant, full of rust and crumbling brick."

A simpler explanation, though, seems to make the most sense: the world is an increasingly complicated place, changing more and more rapidly, and finding ways to tell stories which make sense of the nature and direction of those changes is becoming more and more difficult. The accelerating pace of change is making the present harder to predict.

"Changes in our social relationship to technology – the speed with which people adopt technology and find strange ways to use it – beggar the ability of science fiction writers to stay ahead of them," says writer Neal Stephenson. And, he says, since SF stories set in the near future (as opposed to the Flash Gordon kind) rely on bursts of dizzying foresight for much of their narrative force, being unable to stay ahead of the curve tends to make authors shy away from writing them.

This, Stephenson says, may explain the current obsession with SF's past. When writing intelligently about the future is strewn with so many pitfalls, trying to make your case through historical analogy begins to seem more attractive. "Once you begin taking a science fictional viewpoint, you find that there's no reason it needs to be confined to an imaginary future," he says. "Science and technology have been shaping human destiny since the start." Stephenson himself is now at work on a historical novel.

The plotlines of last decade's SF is the stuff of headlines today. Genomes are deciphered, lifespans of 130 years promised, sheep (and cats and mice and dogs and cows) are cloned (and does anyone expect the first cloned baby to be far off?). Schoolkids trundle off to class with notebooks running ten times the computational power it took to put a man on the Moon. Wireless Internet is common enough to become grist for stand-up comics. Engineers use virtual worlds to evolve new tool designs through a sort of artificial Darwinism. "Napster fabbers," machines which can turn out simple models of three-dimensional objects using lasers and gels, promise to do for simple material goods what their namesake did for music. Globalization is so pervasive that college students from Seattle to Genoa protest for trade reform, fundamentalist wackos of all stripes launch terror campaigns and somewhere in Kuala Lumpur or Helsinki a pimple-faced hacker is preparing the next virus to crash your computer. And it all shows no sign of slacking off.

Quite the opposite, actually. Change shows every sign of accelerating. Advances in computation, biotechnology and artificial intelligence are colliding to produce breakthrough after breakthrough, tumbling one after another. While politicians may make disapproving noises about stem cell research, and venture capitalists have grown wary, no one seems really to doubt that the overall trend is up, up and away. There's even a vogue among some younger SF writers to see this manic acceleration as heralding the arrival of a phenomenon known as the Singularity.

The Singularity describes a moment when technology begins evolving so rapidly that the future ceases in any meaningful way to be subject to anticipation. Imagine change charted as an exponential curve: at some point the line goes veering off the top of the graph. It that point, we will have run into the "prediction horizon," the theory goes – a transformation of such magnitude that nothing can be seen beyond it. Beyond the Singularity, the future goes opaque.

Though the idea of the Singularity has been sometimes dismissed as "the rapture of the nerds," many of the new generation say that all serious thinking about the future, perhaps even the present, must be done under the its shadow.

"If even science fiction authors are finding it difficult to think about the near future," says futurist and author Jamais Cascio, "it's a good sign that change is happening faster than anyone can reasonably apprehend." That in turn, he says, may be a sign that the prediction horizon is upon us, "that we aren't heading into the Singularity, we're already immersed in it."

If that's true, then science fiction faces a unique crisis.

"More than anything SF has propagated the meme that the future is linear and can be extrapolated from the present day," says Cory Doctorow, novelist and author of the Complete Idiot's Guide to Science Fiction. "What the genre's role is when the future becomes truly nonlinear and unknowable is an open question."

I no longer think this is true, though. I now believe that the failure of futurists and writers of speculative fiction to "see around the corner" is a failure of the will, a symptom of too much closed-loop thinking. For while folks who think about the future pride themselves on being out there, the kind of out there that gets you kudos as a SF writer or corporate futurist has become utterly predictable. There are few shockingly new visions, I think, not because it's impossible to envision the future, but because an increasingly narrow band of visions resonate with these communities.

I don't think the Singularity impossible. And it's definitely a useful metaphor. But it's current over-use strikes me as much more a matter of the last, industrial paradigm in futurism explaining away -- in its own terms -- its inability to see ahead, than of any intellectual or cultural vigor in the idea itself.

Then there's the cultural baggage of the predictors themselves. JC Herz said it best, when she wrote, "Hatched in the atomic age, the Singularity is the embodiment of our fears and desires about 20th-century technology: that someday, all the machines that we have created in our factories and computer labs will become sentient, awakened like giant robots by the promethean fire of our technological ambitions. And then they’ll get wise to their monkey masters, stage a coup, and kick us to the curb. From HAL to SkyNet to The Matrix, this fantasy of AI consciousness always reflects a particularly human cocktail of fear and guilt: fear of dying (and the attendant hope that instead we will be able to upload our brains to the uber-server), and a sneaking sense of guilt that this impulse is hubristic and naughty, and for it we will be punished by our silicon successors. It says little about technology, and everything about human beings."

The predicted schedule for arrival of the Singularity has also raised eyebrows. It’s more than coincidence, some say, that many Boomer scientists and writers predict the coming of the Singularity (and with it immortality) within a timeframe they may hope to see—indeed several writers have pointed out that the predicted ETA of immortality has an odd way of coinciding with the predictor’s seventieth birthday. (Ironically, though, while Boomers themselves are unlikely to see the real benefits of life extension promised by new technology -- benefits accrue far more heavily to the young, especially children -- the scrambling of their panicked hands may build the medical foundation for the next generation’s ability to live Methuselahn spans.)

Re-seen through these cultural and historical filters, he Singularity seems less and less likely, the product of a school of "freeze your head futurism" that fails to see that what's most interesting about technology is not what it does to us, but what it lets us do together.

Things are changing. Technology is accelerating. Few are betting much on the idea that technological progress is about to grind to a halt, or even slow down. Curves still rocket skyward. It’s hard to anticipate what breakthroughs may still await us in the next decades. The majority of scientists ever to live are alive today. Scientific paradigm shivers are so common that the press has gone blasé about reporting them. When it comes to technological prediction, as Stewart Brand points out, we’ve consistently gotten it wrong by being too optimistic in the short term, but far too conservative in the long.

But people with foresight today don't fetishize computers or biotechnology as some sort of nearly spiritual objects, any more than electricians go googly-eyed about the mystical power of the dynamo, the wonders of the electro-light and the transgressive thrill of "commanding lightning." If you grew up using them, it's pretty easy to see that computers are tools, and only a fool worships her tools.

The Singularity seems transgressively imaginative, promising to melt all that is solid about humanity into air under the white hot heat of computation, But really, ranting about the Singularity is actually a way of dodging our responsibility to imagine the future. We can't, by definition, know what's on the other side of the Singularity, so all we have to do today is work on cranking up those processing speeds. No need for messy debates about the trade-offs of different forms of technological development or the motivations behind various designs -- it's all just grist for the mill of technological transcendence. The Singularity has become a sort of rhetorical slight-of-hand, distracting us from the real work of making tough decisions and creating bold designs.

You can see a similar set of forces at play when it comes to the environment. It should be obvious that I take the consequences of our misuse of the planet seriously. But talk about the planet "dying" is just absurd. There are very few imaginable threats to humanity, much less life on Earth. Short of cosmic mishap -- we could get smashed to bits by a passing asteroid or fried in a gamma-ray burster -- or willful stupidity like all-out nuclear war, life will go on. It may well be horrific, and it is certainly something worth fighting against, but even widespread ecological collapse will not put an end to humanity.

That we continue to talk about the end of the Earth seems to me again less about the reality of environmental problems and more about who's been doing the talking. One gets a sense, reading the work of many older and prominent environmental thinkers that they sort of relish the idea of the planet burning to cinders sometime shortly after they die. It's a sort of "after me, the deluge" thinking. It seems a sign of older thinkers' inability to imagine that history will go on without them, perhaps even end up writing them into an unflattering role, or consigning them to mere oblivion: that the late 20th Century may be seen, centuries hence, as just a sordid little outburst of short-sighted greed, best forgotten.

Those of us who are younger don't have the luxury of failing to imagine the future. If you're under 30 now, the odds are excellent that you'll live to be a hundred. If you do, you'll live over half your life after the year 2025. For many old people, the world we're creating is (unfortunately) of little concern, except perhaps when they grow concerned over their legacies. For you, it is home. For old people, the idea that the future will be radically different is a cause of Singularitarian hand-waving or anxious scoffing and fearful skepticism. For you, it should be a source of hope and inspiration.
We need better visions, better predictions of the present, not more mumbled excuses about the Singularity and the incomprehensibility of the world.

Bring on the next generation of far-seers!

(2004)

I wouldn't care at all about people believing in the Singularity, any more than I care about them believing in the Great Pumpkin, if it wasn't doing harm to SF for everyone to be tiptoeing around it all the time.
What irritates the heck out of me is that so many other people have come to have faith in this, despite zero evidence, and that this is inhibiting SF.
It's a lovely science fiction idea, and so are Gethenians, but I don't see people going around solemnly declaring that we must all believe there's a planet out there with people who only have gender once a month and therefore nobody should write SF about gendered species anymore because of the Gethenian Problem. Yet somehow the Singularity resonated to the point where Charlie Stross called it "the turd in the punchbowl" of writing about the future, and most SF being written now has to call itself "post-Singularity" and try to write about people who are by definition beyond our comprehension, or explain why there hasn't been a Singularity. This hasn't been a problem for Vinge himself, who has produced at least two masterpieces under this constraint. But a lot of other people now seem to be afraid to write the kind of SF that I like best, the kind with aliens and spaceships and planets and more tech than we have but not unimaginable incomprehensible tech. (Think Citizen of the Galaxy or pretty much anything by C.J. Cherryh.) I recently asked about this kind of SF in my LiveJournal and only got one recommendation for something I wasn't already reading. Maybe it's just a fashion, but I blame the Singularity--and that, to me, is the Singularity Problem.

The singularity problem and non-problem, 2008

[Lensman]

Lem: c'est un bon résumé!
Pour le propblème c, il n'a juste pas beaucoup de sens si on réfléchit au fait que les auteurs de SF s'adressent à des humains...
Rien n'empêche en SF (au contraire, même!) d'imaginer un monde où il y a autre chose que des humains (des créatures différentes, supérieures, bizarres, incompréhensibles, tout ce que l'on veut...). Seulement, le public du roman de SF, lui, reste humain...
Bon, si les IA s'emparent du monde, il y aura peut-être une sorte d'équivalent de la SF à l'usage des IA...
Oncle Joe

[MF]

Juste histoire d'y voir clair, il y a :

a. le problème de la Singularité comme "prédiction" crédible de ce qui pourrait arriver si…

b. le problème de la Singularité comme "inhibition" de la pensée prospective et spéculative

c. le problème de la Singularité comme "intimidation" semi-consciente exercée sur les auteurs de sf ; et son impact éventuel sur la sf comme genre.

posé comme ça, c. n'est qu'un cas particulier de b., me semble-t-il ?

[bormandg]

Lem: c'est un bon résumé!
Pour le propblème c, il n'a juste pas beaucoup de sens si on réfléchit au fait que les auteurs de SF s'adressent à des humains...
Rien n'empêche en SF (au contraire, même!) d'imaginer un monde où il y a autre chose que des humains (des créatures différentes, supérieures, bizarres, incompréhensibles, tout ce que l'on veut...). Seulement, le public du roman de SF, lui, reste humain...
Bon, si les IA s'emparent du monde, il y aura peut-être une sorte d'équivalent de la SF à l'usage des IA...
Oncle Joe

Pour le problème c, il signifie en clair: comment un Huron décrirait-il notre monde? Est-il possible de percevoir des concepts qui, pour nous, n'ont pas de sens, et qui deviendront essentiels pour les post-humains?
Et, tout compte fait, je crois que la réponse est oui; j'en veux pour témoin la discussion d'un humain avec le gel intelligent de Starfish. Par contre, les romans dans le style "plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, et les post-humains seront comme nous" (je pense à la trilogie de J C Wright) me paraissent complètement à côté de la plaque...

[Lensman]

Par contre, les romans dans le style "plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, et les post-humains seront comme nous" (je pense à la trilogie de J C Wright) me paraissent complètement à côté de la plaque...

... et en fin de compte - sauf talent particlier de l'auteur, s'il arrive à distraire le lecteur parce qu'il sait camper des personnages, distiller une annecdote, etc (ce qui est sympa, je ne me plains pas, quand on tombe sur un bon faiseur...) -, cela donne des textes qui ne sont pas très intéressants.
Oncle Joe

[Lensman]

Fred vient de trouver un site génial sur l'hypothèse M (la bonne, bien sûr..):
http://kasmana.people.cofc.edu/MATHFICT/
C'est hilarant !


Oncle Joe