The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women-two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians-have rendered the notion of "capitalist democracy" into an oxymoron . . . I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible . . . In our time, the great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms-from the totalitarian and fundamentalist catastrophes to the unthinking demos that guides so-called "social democracy.

After much screaming on all sides, Phil Browermaster got the last word:

One area where transhumanists consistently disappointment me is politics. We can talk about accelerating change and singularities and human enhancement and the possibilities are endless, but when the subject comes to politics, everyone seems to revert to one of a very small number of philosophical templates, most of them created in the 19th century or earlier. And for some reason those are inviolate.

Read about the whole kerfuffle on H+.

We went to a Worldcon panel called "The Singularity: Are We Getting Any Closer?" featuring Farthing author Jo Walton and Julian Comstock/Spin author Robert Charles Wilson. They talked a lot about the pitfalls and plausibility of the Singularity, the idea that a drastic change in technology will result in a world we can barely visualize, full of sentient machines and vastly improved longevity, among other things.

Many people seem to think the Singularity is inevitable, noted Walton, but the panel was aimed at questioning whether we're any closer to it now than when Vernor Vinge pioneered it in his 1986 novel Marooned In Realtime.

For her part, Walton argues the Singularity is an interesting concept for science-fiction storytelling, but "it isn't going to happen. It's a completely mistaken concept [and] we've made no real progress towards it." The idea is based on a false extrapolation, similar to saying that since we could go 30 MPH 100 years ago, and 400 MPH 50 years ago, now we should be traveling at the speed of light.

And because people believe the Singularity is inevitable, some argue that you can't write about the future at all — since we can't imagine life after the Singularity, it's almost impossible to write about. Walton worries that this idea is the "turd in the punchbowl" of future-set science fiction.

Adds Walton: "To be fair, Vinge has written some excellent fiction within that constraint [of assuming the Singularity happens in 20 years], in the same way people write sonnets — but a sonnet is not the only poem you would want to write."

Wilson pointed out that if the Singularity really is coming, then it's inevitable — so there's no need for people to be cheerleaders for it. He compared it to "telepathy or dianetics," science-fictional ideas which some people adopted "with religious fervor." A core question in science fiction is "where is our technology going, and what can we do with it," noted Wilson. "The Singularity is just one answer."

Panelist Christopher Carson pointed out that the science fiction section in bookstores lately consists of nothing but "transhuman science fiction or urban fantasy." People tend to see the Singularity coming partly because devices are becoming more complicated — but that's often an example of "feature creep," like the fact that your cellphone now has a host of functions you don't understand and didn't ask for. That's not really a sign of progress, because those extra functions were designed by some marketing person somewhere, he pointed out.

The Singularity is notoriously hard to define, but people often say that you could bring Socrates forward in time and take him to Worldcon, and he would understand what it was about, more or less. But you couldn't take a goldfish to Worldcon and have it understand what was going on. A present-day human, visiting a post-Singularity world, would be more like that goldfish than Socrates.

But Walton says this is a loaded example, because Socrates is an extraordinary example. A "random Greek person" from Socrates' era might have a much harder time understanding Worldcon.

"The question I sometimes ask myself is, How would the Singularity work in Darfur?" says Wilson.

And there was lots of talk about the potential downsides of getting the Internet in your head, complete with phishing, spam, malware and bad memes. Says Walton, the first 100,000 people who get the Internet in their heads, without any terrible, life-ending mishaps, will have a really hard time upgrading later on. "Imagine an outdated computer in your head."

Singularity science fiction follows a Moore's Law of the future, where science improves our lives exponentially over time. Eventually human life is so radically transformed that it's unrecognizable to those of us living in the relatively crappy present.

Scifi author Vernor Vinge is usually credited with coming up with the idea of the singularity. He wrote explicitly about it in an early 1990s essay, but was obviously toying with the idea in his 1980s novels The Peace War and Marooned in Realtime, where a "bobble technology" has the power to freeze objects, people, and even towns inside time-stopping fields that evaporate after a set amount of time has elapsed. Anti-nuke activists use the technology to bobble weapons research facilities and military industrial strongholds. This results in a short conflict where anyone with weapons gets bobbled, and the world quickly returns to a semi-agrarian state where technology is regarded with suspicion.

In Marooned In Realtime, people who were bobbled for thousands of years - including the employees of weapons labs - emerge from their bobbles to discover that the entire population of the planet has gone through a singularity and disappeared. Nobody knows where they went, but a few people who got bobbled directly before the singularity recall that humans had seemed on the verge of developing a collective consciousness using an internet-like communication system. Left behind, the remaining humans try to scrabble out a life on the planet, rebobbling themselves for millions of years in the hope that humans will return or another life form will evolve intelligence and keep them company.

In Vinge, then, there are two kinds of singularity: the kind made possible by bobbles in The Peace War, which create an unexpected future by vaulting everyone back into the past; and the kind that makes the human race as such get so complicated that they completely vanish.

For many years, however, most stories about post-singularity cultures have favored the latter type, where everybody becomes a mega-being and beams out of existence. You can find this sort of singularity everywhere from Rudy Rucker's latest novel Hylozoic, to JJ Abrams' shiny re-imagining of Star Trek with its effortless time travel and undefined superpowered "red matter."

But now we're starting to see the bleeding edges of a backlash against this kind of "everybody disappears" singularity where the human future is unimaginably awesome. Partly this backlash is coming from history-obsessed authors like Jo Walton and Robert Charles Wilson. Wilson's novel Julian Comstock imagines a 22nd century United States sapped of its energy resources and returned to 19th Century levels of technology.

But this trend is also coming from post-apocalyptic TV series like Jericho and the upcoming Day One, where people must learn to live without their Moore's Law-driven technologies.

Steampunk is another major anti-singularity subgenre. In steampunk, the future looks like the 19th Century (or vice versa). Humans can't get bio-rejiggered, souped-up, and uploaded into the incomprehensible noosphere: Instead, they've gone back in time to an easily-recognizable age. The zombie craze is part of this trend, too. Zombies are the opposite of post-human. In zombie stories, humans turn into proto-humans, mindless or nearly mindless hoardes of brain-eaters. The zombie is what humans might have been like hundreds of thousands of years ago in the salad days of homo erectus.

Does the singularity backlash mean that people are seeking out darker stories? Not at all.

There are plenty of optimistic anti-singularity tales. The TV series Firefly, for example, is about a world divided into the singularity haves and have-nots: If you live on the "inner planets," your technology is advancing exponentially; if, like our heroes, you stick to the outer planets, you're smuggling cows in a spaceship for cash. Nevertheless, the show is about people remaining loyal to one another and prevailing against injustice.

Neal Stephenson's latest novel Anathem is about a society that has rejected the singularity, and how this choice has not only saved their civilization but put them in a position to advance far more than they would have otherwise. And countless steampunk stories deliver adventure and happy endings, despite the fact that the future looks more Model T than Enterprise.

In an era of reduced economic expectations and green politics, the bobble-style singularity Vinge imagined over 30 years ago is starting to seem more realistic and even desirable. Not the bobble tech so much, but the "going back to the pre-information age" part.

Maybe this fantasy has become more attractive because we want to be more choosy about which technologies we use to change the future. Or maybe we're just sick of shiny tomorrows that seem unreachable. Either way, science fiction is taking refuge in the past for a while. Expect steampunk zombies living among fallen civilizations, but not necessarily in a depressing way. If you do see people beaming up into a high tech utopia, I'm willing to bet that's because you're watching something set in a retro scifi universe like Star Trek. The past is the new future - at least for the present.

Top image is of Stephen Martiniere's cover for Marooned In Realtime.

But that doesn't mean the Singularity isn't coming — it's just coming from a few different places. Vinge packs a lot of ideas into a short video, including the fact that we're already seeing more embedded networks everywhere, and networks can visualize the geometry of their idea based on the "ID number of the node they're pinging off of, and the round-trip time." And he's confident that cyberspace will be everting, and we'll be living in a consensual reality, sooner than we think. [via PR Web]

In Singularity, a pilot crashes on an island occupied by the Russians. According to Game Informer, Activision's Singularity

features mind-bending gameplay that not only has the player jumping through time, but using it as a weapon (let's see how well an armed enemy does when he's instantly aged into bones and dust!). Set on a small, unnamed island occupied by the Russians, Cold War tensions raise once again when a U.S. pilot discovers the horrific truth that became of experiments with element E99 in the 1950s.

Singularity "Reveal" Trailer:

I'm really liking the screenshots from Singularity, with their rusting Soviet architecture, weird ghostly figures, people dissolving into time-ravaged skeletons, alien bug-creatures and that all-powerful time-warping glove. You can see the gallery of screenshots below, but first, here are a couple of other new trailers:

The newest Metal Gear Solid game, Metal Gear Solid Touch, will be a "rail-shooter" of sorts, featuring unlockable wallpapers for your iPhone or other device as you play.

Metal Gear Solid Touch for the iPhone, from Konami Mobile:

Lost Planet 2 was announced at the X-Box Live event. This time around, it's 20 years later, the ice has melted, and you're fighting in jungle settings instead of the snow. And the game focuses on a bunch of characters instead of just one.

Lost Planet 2 Trailer:

And here are those Singularity screencaps, courtesy of ActionTrip:

Rucker's ideas include "magic doors," gateways to alternate dimensions, that swarm around people and provide portals they can jump through any time they want to escape this particular space-time continuum. He also suggests that writers could do a lot more with "dreams and memories" and how they can become real. My favorite idea is that memories could actually be a form of time travel, and some people might learn how to jump through them into the past — or pull people from the past into the present. (This reminds me a little bit of Scarlett Thomas' frustrating but brilliant novel The End of Mr. Y.)

He also suggests tackling "the afterworld," but from a scientific perspective. Or you could write about "quantum computational viruses . . . something like a computer virus might infect matter, perhaps changing the laws of physics to make our world more congenial to some other kinds of beings." Along those lines, he instructs people to write about "the subdimensions," and "the holographic universe."

After lobbying for people to write about humans developing "new senses," unlike the boring old telepathy or sensitivity to radio waves, Rucker suggests an idea he's explored himself: a flat Earth. Except what he wants to see that's different is "an infinite flat Earth," where you can keep going and going and the flatness doesn't end. He says it would be the perfect setting for a road trip, kind of like On the Road for aliens.

Check out more of Rucker's ideas on his blog, and invent some of your own while you're at it. Photograph by Rudy Rucker.

Vinge writes that these scenarios include:

The AI Scenario: We create superhuman artificial intelligence (AI) in computers.

The IA Scenario: We enhance human intelligence through human-to-computer interfaces—that is, we achieve intelligence amplification (IA).

The Biomedical Scenario: We directly increase our intelligence by improving the neurological operation of our brains.

The Internet Scenario: Humanity, its networks, computers, and databases become sufficiently effective to be considered a superhuman being.

The Digital Gaia Scenario: The network of embedded microprocessors becomes sufficiently effective to be considered a superhuman being.

Later, he writes about how the singularity will probably be a "hard takeoff," or a very rapid transformation, rather than a gentle, gradual shift:

What I'm thinking of would probably be the result of intentional research, perhaps a group exploring the parameter space of their general theory. One of their experiments finally gets things right. The result transforms the world—in just a matter of hours.

I base the possibility of hard takeoff partly on the known potential of rapid malcode (remember the Slammer worm?) but also on an analogy: the most recent event of the magnitude of the technological singularity was the rise of humans within the animal kingdom. Early humans could effect change orders of magnitude faster than other animals could. If we succeed in building systems that are similarly advanced beyond us, we might experience a similar incredible runaway.

His essay also sums up many of the other essays in this special issue of IEEE Spectrum, so it's a great place to dive in. Image via IEEE Spectrum.

Signs of the Singularity, by Vernor Vinge [from IEEE Spectrum's Special Issue on the Singularity]

Sadly, there was no dykey good cop/bad cop action between Terminateen and Sarah Connor last night. Instead, Summer tried to befriend a suicidal teen girl, but then decided to let her die. It was like Mean Girls, only more confusing. (What was that bra on the door about?) We keep hearing about how Summer can't fit in as a teenager, even though she did it just fine in the first episode. Meanwhile, Sarah befriended a dorky guy who made a computer that probably wasn't Skynet, but it played a mean game of chess.

And we had the afore-mentioned mega-subtle girl-grooming stuff. Including a scene where Terminateen is putting on eye-liner, and John Connor says it's not brain surgery. She replies that the eye-pencil would have to be a lot sharper for that. D00d! She just compared her eyeliner to a scalpel. Shortly afterwards, Sarah shaves her legs and we linger for ages on the massive blood drop falling into the bathwater. Subtlety, thy name isn't Sarah Connor Chronicles. Oh, and meanwhile we're discovering how gross and difficult it is to grow a whole new healthy skin, for our evil male Terminator. It's just hard to look pretty.

And speaking of unsubtle, the dream sequence where Sarah kills the inventors of the atomic bomb is brilliant, haunting, and a giant sledgehammer with "MESSAGE" imprinted on it so it leaves a mark on your head. The whole running monologue about whether you'd kill Oppenheimer and co. was sort of fascinating, until it dragged on and on like most of this show's monologues. Way better was John Connor's explanation of the Singularity: basically, machines get smarter and smarter, and build machines that are smarter than they are, until they're smart enough to own your ass.

I just can't wait until the stencil-bra slimer tries to mess with our Summer, and gets what he/she deserves. It'll be like Termina-Heathers.

In Soul Code, an older woman backs up her memories. And then she restores the backup into the brain of a much younger woman. And we discover how that brain-swap affects both women's relationships. (Not well, judging from the hints Linsberger drops.) It's sort of Down And Out In The Magic Kingdom meets The Handmaid's Tale.

Linsberger says the idea came from an interview with Chobot that turned into a brainstorming session. The movie's special effects will be less about creating a startling virtual world, and more about representing the emotional states of the characters.

So why will this movie be such a downer? Linsberger is still worried that artificial intelligences could turn into an oppressive Master Control Program that will make us play frisbee for our lives. But he's also scared of the Singularity, the moment when AIs supposedly become more advanced than humans. He wants us to think about how to preserve our humanity in a world where consciousness can be simulated as well as recorded. Soul Code could be a throwback to beware-technology movies of the 1970s like Rollerball and Westworld instead of building on Tron, which arguably helped replace them. [SFSignal]

Here are a couple of her smartest points:

But the real nature of singularities is that they can't even be predicted. In some sense AI is such an easy answer to what the singularity will be. In actuality it will probably be some advance we can't even think about right now, as incomprehensible as the internet to a potato farmer in 17th century Ireland. He would not even have the tools to begin to understand what it was, let alone, and maybe more importantly, what use anyone could have for it, and why anyone would care. There are potatoes to pull, goddammit, leave me alone with that shit . . .

The word singularity is a lie, both in SF and in life. There is no one singularity. You keep pushing through them, and it's fucking terrifying, and fucking amazing. You wake up and one day the USSR is gone and the tech boom crashed and you're divorced and you sell tires instead of playing professional soccer and your toaster wants to talk to you about pork futures and the size of your penis and your sofa wants to have a serious conversation about the works of Vernor Vinge. You wake up and you're making independent movies instead of selling tires and Europe up and got themselves a common currency and you had twin girls when you thought your birth control was top notch and the Supreme Court threw an election and gay marriage is so old-fashioned when there are four sexes and flights to Saturn leave daily.

The Singularity [via Whatever]

There's a great moment after nanomachines have covered every single object on Earth, tagging everything with information but also connecting it to the network. Rucker's protagonist Ond is coming up with soaring calculations and theorizing in his head. But then he disconnects from the Orphidnet and finds he can't remember what he was just thinking about. Those thoughts are like web links when you're not on the Internet. Without even realizing it, his mind has been using the Orphidnet's extended capabilities.

And soon afterwards, the nanomachine start tagging extradimensional beings that have been sneaking into our world for centuries without being detected.

Some people call the Singularity "the rapture for nerds," but that's "a defensive move," Rucker argues:

[It's] saying: "These maladjusted loser posthumanists are so desperate for the world to change and fit them in that they worship this singularity just like outsider fundamentalists hoping for the End Times to come and give them a chance at success." Some people feel a little hostility towards the notion of the Singularity. Like something that's being forced on you. And it's a little annoying to see a middle-brow popularizer like Ray Kurzweil writing a best-seller about the Singularity, and to see organized Singularity conferences.

Rucker used to agree with those Singularity-haters. But Charles Stross' novel Accelerando changed his mind and made him see the story possibilities of a post-Singularity world. Some science fiction writers kept insisting they couldn't write about such a strange future. But that's what science fiction is for, Rucker argues, and Stross was already doing it.

Hence Postsingular, Rucker's attempt to go past the "heavily touristed landmarks" of the Singularity into what happens next. Now he's working on the sequel, Hylozoic, which includes talking rocks and telepathic atoms. "Keepin' it weird," he says.