[Gllug] Story: open source evolutionary development tool

[Nix]

On Mon, 10 Oct 2005, Jack Bertram moaned:
> * Nix <nix at esperi.org.uk> [051010 10:50]:
>> On Sun, 09 Oct 2005, M. Blackmore yowled:
>> > Interesting ideas fiction writers have (off http://www.futurismic.com/):
>> > 
>> > Evolving A Better Software Engineer  [+] posted by Jeremy Lyon (0
>> > comments)   
>> > One of the problems with trying to write near-future science fiction in
>> > a world where the acceleration of acceleration
>> 
>> He meant `the acceleration of progress', perhaps.
> 
> Has anyone read Vernor Vinge's take on this issue - I can't remember

Yes. It's notably saner than Kurzweil's; Kurzweil appears to believe
that the acceleration of progress will necessarily make us all gods or
something like that. Vinge pointed out, *in the very works that Kurzweil
references*, that the entire point of a technological singularity is
that *one can predict nothing about events following it*. It's likely
to be impossible for us to understand those events well enough to
tell if they're heaven or hell: but more likely in my view the question
would become as irrelevant as it would be to ask a paramecium if life
as an investment banker were heaven or hell. The paramecium doesn't
have the perspective or intellect to even begin to answer the question.


Might I recommend Charlie Stross's _Accelerando_,
<http://www.accelerando.org/> and out in hardcover, for a
non-mindlessly- optimistic view of the Singularity. Extropians in
particular should raed it, to be *ahem* deprogrammed. Transcendent
entities may very well not mean human-equivalent intellects well, in
much the same way as we don't go around looking out for the interests of
paramecia or ants in our day-to-day lives.

> the names of the book exactly, but something like "Across Realtime".
> Quite challenging and interesting.

_Across Realtime_, an anthology comprising:

_The Peace War_: [1997, 2047--2048]
                 bobbles, force fields inside which [SPOILER], and simmering
                 rebellion in a depopulated future USA; the idea of LLNL
                 contractors starting the War To End All Wars and
                 precipitating the deaths of ~95% of humanity (as is the
                 backstory to this futrue history) is... peculiar.

                 The bobbles are excellently worked-out concepts, although
                 as Vinge later admitted they violate SR: there are ways
                 to work around that but they're all a bit ugly.

                 Moderately good.

_The Ungoverned_: [2096?] (US printings only)
                  A so-so tale involving an attempt by the New Mexican
                  government to annex much of the US, which has, um,
                  outgrown government in that terribly depressing way
                  so common within US libertarian fiction (this is type
                  II, `we were forced to abandon government and we found
                  we liked it so much that we will never go back', which
                  is only marginally less annoying than Type I's `we threw
                  off the shackles ourselves').

                  The attempt fails in a rather unexpected way.

... and one more, whose setting contains slight spoilers for _The Peace
War_; read on only if you want the first eight chapters of that book
spoiled to some extent. (In a fit of genius some printings of _Across
Realtime_ proceed to spoil those chapters in a much more blatant fashion
in the blurb on the back of the book!)


_Marooned in Realtime_: [~50 million years AD]
                        A far-future attempt to restart civilization
                        after the mysterious disappearance of all
                        mankind sometime after 2210 is threatened
                        by the marooning and effective murder of
                        one of the driving forces behind the project.
                        Wil Brierson, the only surviving policeman
                        in the drastically reduced population (~200),
                        has the unpleasant task of working out who
                        did it; tensions between low-techs (origin
                        before 2150 or thereabouts) and high-techs
                        (origin after that), and between political
                        factions among the low-techs make things
                        look hairy from the start. But there's much
                        worse trouble bubbling beneath the surface,
                        and Wil's investigation seems likely to
                        disturb it...

                        Some fascinating descriptions of far-future
                        biology and a pretty disturbing subject matter.
                        The diary is a particularly good piece of work.

                        The characterization is notably less flat than
                        in _The Peace War_.

                        Contains the first description of the Singularity
                        in published fiction that I know of
                        (unsurprisingly, since I think this novel is the
                        first place Vinge explicitly described it; the
                        paper on the Singularity scattered around the net
                        is from six or seven years later).


-- 
`Next: FEMA neglects to take into account the possibility of
fire in Old Balsawood Town (currently in its fifth year of drought
and home of the General Grant Home for Compulsive Arsonists).'
            --- James Nicoll
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