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Comment by sxp | Hacker News Reader

While Stross is currently a neo-Luddite who doesn't believe in the Singularity, his book Accelerando is probably the best work of Singularitarian fiction ever written. It was written in the 2000s, starts in the 2010s, and covers the various decades of this century. I highly recommend it for anyone who wants to know how weird this century will be. It's also available for free online. [1]

It's one of my favorite books and the main reason I'm e/acc and many other pro-AI people love it because we view it as utopian sci-fi rather than the dystopian world Stross invented. This might be the best case of the Torment Nexus meme [2] in action.

1. https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/acceler...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torment_Nexus

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> This might be the best case of the Torment Nexus meme in action.

At least the author seems to think[1] it is one, if in not so many words:

> And don't ever let anyone tell you that Accelerando is techno-optimistic or pro-AI; by the end of the book our entire species is extinct, surviving only as simulations/memories recalled by something arguably not alive.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48163630

1) Having met Stross, and briefly spoken to him way back when, he never actually believed in the singularity as a possible future.

2) Turns out it was the sci-fi author who was wrong all along! Fascinating to see someone confidently citing a meme, while actively evidencing the fallacy it exposes.

>he never actually believed in the singularity as a possible future.

I think my favorite moment in the book is when one of the characters (at the time, a digitized consciousness traveling at near light speed in a space ship the size of a coke can to explore an anomalous signal sent by alien life) argues that the singularity is a ridiculous concept and will never happen. I always thought that was a really clever observation on the part of Stross that our perspectives are so narrow and provincial, we often can’t see what’s happening in front of our own faces. Your comment does kind of recontextualize that for me and I sort of wonder if that was the author speaking directly to the audience?

It could be either or both. He comments here sometimes, perhaps he will say. Or not, there's likely too many AI-bros in this particular thread.

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=cstross

You think accelerando is utopian sci fi!? Which characters perspective are you identifying with so strongly? They all have pretty severe societal challenges that makes me surprised to see the word Utopia.

Manfred and Amber’s lives don’t seem particularly dystopian. Human society, up until the Field Circus encounters the router and later returns home, seems pretty great. Chaotic and challenging, yes, sad for Microsoft shareholders, sure, but I would certainly rather live in a world with access to the technology they have than our own. Space exploration, extended life spans and rejuvenation, new methods of relating more closely with other human beings are all things I would love to experience.

The protagonist who believes that information should be free and that scarcity is mostly artificial due to bad economic models. And that it would be possible to implement proper pro-human capitalism or communism if we had enough compute to solve standard CS problems like filling knapsacks or maximizing flow through a graph.

> a neo-Luddite who doesn't believe in the Singularity

You’ve lost the plot. There is no singularity, your machine-god is not coming to save you.

Calling people Luddites for not believing in the Singularity is like calling people communists for supporting affordable health care.

Belief in the Singularity and belief in God strike me as extremely similar.

Both, I think, are extremely interesting ideas where very few theories, e.g. pro, anti, or anywhere in between, can be written off as ridiculous -- probably due to a lot of ambiguity and difficulty in defining proof.

For me, I find the Singularity very implausible due to the fact that we talk about "general intelligence" quite a bit, and the more we do, I'm finding that I don't think it exists. There are a set of low-level basic skills that I think -- if you don't have, you're not intelligent. And then there are higher level skills that vary wildly.

So, will we make AIs that can say and do very clever and amazing things; yes, this is happening. Will they be, like ascendant, or something? I would say -- yes, but perhaps not in the way we think? Like, humans made "The Bible." And that's obviously a big huge, impactful, maybe superhuman thing. But feels different from this idea of a "Singularity."

There's a reason the Singularty was called "the Rapture for nerds" before LLMs were even a thing.

You can find a lot of neo-religious behavior within the AI accelerationist community. Cults coming out of rationalism and fear of the wrath of an angry AI God, making the world right for AI's coming (and even killing the nonbelievers.) Evangelism. Promises of infinite plenty in a post-scarcity heaven. Even a persecution complex - "Luddites" are increasingly demonized, hated, accused of moral depravity for their doubt, and for not abandoning the world, taking up their prompt and following the AI.

How many people post about how AI seems to be draining them of meaning and purpose, that it doesn't live up to the hype, that keeping up with the rituals is exhausting, but feeling that the problem must be with them and not AI? That's a religious person having doubts about the nature of their faith, unable to accept that the God they believe in might not be real, and framing their issues as their own moral failing.

And all of this before the "Singularity" even shows up, and people upload their minds - I mean, meet God in the air.

It's religion, very specifically neo-Christian ideologically. Regardless of any arguments one might make about the practical benefits of using AI in any particular field, it is obviously also religion.

He had already disappointed me in 2011 with this post

https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/06/reality...

Why is that disappointing? Everything he said there seems perfectly reasonable.

A large part of that goes via arguing about consciousness.

Starts of with a quite defensible:

  First: super-intelligent AI is unlikely because, if you pursue Vernor's program, you get there incrementally by way of human-equivalent AI, and human-equivalent AI is unlikely.

But the moment he hits that (parenthetical) paragraph about consciousness, he blends human capabilities with human-like consciousness.

If human-like capabilities required human-like consciousness, early models (like GPT-4) passing all those exams would suggest those models being "as conscious as" a university student. (My inner Douglas Adams wants to invert this, but the best I can do is "The Xarloxians did not consider university students to be conscious beings; their reasoning being…", which you may recognise as a riff on Babel fish and the non-existence of God).

> In the background of what looks like a Panglossian techno-optimist novel, horrible things are happening. Most of humanity is wiped out, then arbitrarily resurrected in mutilated form by the Vile Offspring. Capitalism eats everything then the logic of competition pushes it so far that merely human entities can no longer compete; we're a fat, slow-moving, tasty resource – like the dodo. Our narrative perspective, Aineko, is not a talking cat: it's a vastly superintelligent AI, coolly calculating, that has worked out that human beings are more easily manipulated if they think they're dealing with a furry toy. The cat body is a sock puppet wielded by an abusive monster. https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/05/crib-sh...

Regardless of believing in the “singularity” or not, please explain how this sounds utopian in the slightest without borderline (if not literal) sociopathic anti-human worldviews.

I don't find it to be utopian, but in trying to imagine how, it occurred to me that maybe the idea that we even survive to be entangled in the wider universal future, maybe that is utopian? To matter.

I think there are a lot of paths where we just rock ourselves back to a regressed agency societal state, and just never have the capacity to have any affect on the wider universe. Which is maybe good for the universe, as we are certainly not a role-model for certain forms of balance. But maybe the balanced view doesn't seek to dominate and influence and become ubiquitous, after all

> Regardless of believing in the “singularity” or not, please explain how this sounds utopian in the slightest without borderline (if not literal) sociopathic anti-human worldviews.

There was a guy on here the other day trying to argue that Brave New World wasn't a dystopian novel. There are some absolutely wiiild world views out there.

Pretty much everyone in Brave New World is happy.

You might not like the society they've built, but there are certainly arguments that a society where most people are happy is pretty utopian.

(It's very debatable, of course, but it's not instantly dismissable)

> there are certainly arguments that a society where most people are happy is pretty utopian

Sure, like a pig, in a cage, on antibiotics...and an AI life companion in their ear. What I can't understand is why they're still on a forum with humans when they can go have that today.

Not antibiotics? Surely nobody could be happy with that! Truly they are a terror.

I'm almost 50, but I absolutely could see how someone younger could view it that way -- precisely because the present is much more similar to than novel than it used to be?

Like, "cautionary" but not full on "dystopian."

> There was a guy on here the other day trying to argue that Brave New World wasn't a dystopian novel. There are some absolutely wiiild world views out there.

I think that's likely to be all the sex and drugs? Though I'm basing that on the Wikipedia plot summary. I have no interest in darkening my day by actually reading any work that can be rightly described as "dystopian".

Misreading SF is super popular in the techbro milieu.

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