Digital Rapture

I’m a sucker for a good Singularity article. The book under review is Digital Rapture: The Singularity Anthology. (A little amazed that the Singularity has become such a thing as to merit an anthology.)

The problem with this approach is that the very concept of singularity assumes the extreme difficulty, if not impossibility, of rigorous extrapolation beyond a tipping point. Embedded in singularity thinking is the conviction that the aftermath of a singularity is separated from our imaginative gaze by what Vinge calls “an opaque wall across the future.” Because of this, each vision becomes as good as any other and singularity narratives may demonstrate the most and the least disciplined application of rationality in SF. The word that appears in the titles of both books reviewed here is another symptom of the complexity of singularity imagination. The description of the singularity as “the Rapture for nerds,” first used by Ken MacLeod in his novel The Cassini Division, was clearly dismissive and ironic. One of the two titles reuses it in the same sense, but many texts do in fact posit singularity as an event of almost eschatological proportions. Furthermore, hard science fiction is not the only cultural site fascinated by the promise of greater-than-human intelligence — various transhumanist philosophies have also conceived of singularity in terms that are by turns quasi-religious and pornographic.

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