Charles Stross - Accelerando (2005)

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The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.

Charles Stross
[Core concepts: Human beings all have souls. Souls are software objects. Software is not immortal.]

Charles Stross
Life begets intelligence, intelligence begets smart matter and a singularity.

Charles Stross
Not everyone is concerned with the deep future, Manfred interrupts. It's important! If we live or die, that doesn't matter—that's not the big picture. The big question is whether information originating in our light cone is preserved, or whether we're stuck in a lossy medium where our very existence counts for nothing. It's downright embarrassing to be a member of a species with such a profound lack of curiosity about its own future, especially when it affects us all personally! I mean, if there's going to come a time when there's nobody or nothing to remember us then what does –
Manfred?
He stops in midsentence, his mouth open, staring dumbly.

Charles Stross
She may be mad, he realizes abruptly. Not clinically insane, just at odds with the entire universe. Locked into a pathological view of her own role in reality.

Charles Stross
She still believes in classical economics, the allocation of resources under conditions of scarcity. Information doesn't work that way.

Charles Stross
You grew up during the second oil crunch, didn't you? Sirhan prods. What was it like then?
What was it...? Oh, gas hit fifty bucks a gallon, but we still had plenty for bombers, she says dismissively. We knew it would be okay.

Charles Stross
Humans are not as unsophisticated as mulch wrigglers, they can see the writing on the wall. Is it any surprise, that among the ones who look outward, the real debate is not over whether to run, but over how far and how fast?

Charles Stross
His ideas are informed by a painfully honest humanism, and everyone—even his enemies—agrees that he is one of the greatest theoreticians of the post-EU era. But his intellectual integrity prevents him from rising to the very top, and his fellow travelers are much ruder about him than his ideological enemies, accusing him of the ultimate political crime—valuing truth over power.

Charles Stross
He's been off-line for the best part of six hours and is getting a panicky butterfly stomach at the idea of not being in touch with everything that's happened in the last twenty kiloseconds.

Charles Stross
Things have gone downhill since Mom decided a modal average dose of old-time religion was an essential part of her upbringing, to the point that absolutely the best thing in the world Tante Annette could send her is some scam programmed by Daddy to take her away. If it doesn't work, Mom will take her to Church tonight, and she's certain she'll end up making a scene again. Amber's tolerance of willful idiocy is diminishing rapidly, and while building up her memetic immunity might be the real reason Mom's forcing this shit on her—it's always hard to tell with Mom—things have been tense ever since she got expelled from Sunday school for mounting a spirited defense of the theory of evolution.

Charles Stross
One ape's hallucination is another ape's religious experience - it just depends on which one's god module is overactive at the time.

Charles Stross
Friendly fascism, says Sadeq. It matters not, whosoever is in charge. I could tell you tales from my parents, of growing up with a revolution. To never harbor self-doubt is poison for the soul, and these aliens want to inflict their certainties upon us.

Charles Stross
Experiments in digitizing and running neural wetware under emulation are well established; some radical libertarians claim that, as the technology matures, death—with its draconian curtailment of property and voting rights—will become the biggest civil rights issue of all.

Charles Stross
Well then. Will the naysayers please leave the universe?

Charles Stross
Annette's communiqué is anodyne; a giggling confession off camera (shower-curtain rain in the background) that the famous Manfred Macx is in Paris for a weekend of clubbing, drugging, and general hell-raising. Oh, and he's promised to invent three new paradigm shifts before breakfast every day, starting with a way to bring about the creation of Really Existing Communism by building a state central planning apparatus that interfaces perfectly with external market systems and somehow manages to algorithmically outperform the Monte Carlo free-for-all of market economics, solving the calculation problem. Just because he can, because hacking economics is fun, and he wants to hear the screams from the Chicago School.

Charles Stross
But if we run away, we are still going to be there. Sooner or later, we'll have the same problem all over again; runaway intelligence augmentation, self-expression, engineered intelligences, whatever. Possibly that's what happened out past the Böotes void—not a galactic-scale civilization, but a race of pathological cowards fleeing their own exponential transcendence. We carry the seeds of a singularity with us wherever we go, and if we try to excise those seeds, we cease to be human, don't we?

Charles Stross
Growing old is natural, growls the old woman. When you've lived long enough for all your ambitions to be in ruins, friendships broken, lovers forgotten or divorced acrimoniously, what's left to go on for? If you feel tired and old in spirit, you might as well be tired and old in body. Anyway, wanting to live forever is immoral. Think of all the resources you're taking up that younger people need! Even uploads face a finite data storage limit after a time. It's a monstrously egotistical statement, to say you intend to live forever.

Charles Stross
Democracy 2.0. He shudders briefly. I'm not sure about the validity of voting projects at all, these days. The assumption that all people are of equal importance seems frighteningly obsolescent.

Charles Stross
Manfred decides that he's going to do something unusual for a change: He's going to make himself temporarily rich. This is a change because Manfred's normal profession is making other people rich. Manfred doesn't believe in scarcity or zero-sum games or competition—his world is too fast and information-dense to accommodate primate hierarchy games.

Charles Stross
Simple old-fashioned death, the kind that predated the singularity, used to be the inevitable halting state for all life-forms. Fairy tales about afterlives notwithstanding. A dry chuckle: I used to try to believe a different one before breakfast every day, you know, just in case Pascal's wager was right—exploring the phase-space of all possible resurrections, you know? But I think at this point we can agree that Dawkins was right. Human consciousness is vulnerable to certain types of transmissible memetic virus, and religions that promise life beyond death are a particularly pernicious example because they exploit our natural aversion to halting states.

Charles Stross
Sounds kind of long-term to me. Just how far ahead do you think?
Very long-term—at least twenty, thirty years. And you can forget governments for this market, Bob; if they can't tax it, they won't understand it.

Charles Stross
A religious college in Cairo is considering issues of nanotechnology: If replicators are used to prepare a copy of a strip of bacon, right down to the molecular level, but without it ever being part of a pig, how is it to be treated? (If the mind of one of the faithful is copied into a computing machine's memory by mapping and simulating all its synapses, is the computer now a Moslem? If not, why not? If so, what are its rights and duties?)

Charles Stross
The turbulent lives of their entrepreneurial ancestors led to grief and angst and adventures, and as Sirhan is fond of observing, an adventure is something horrible that happens to someone else.

Charles Stross
Humans are just barely intelligent tool users; Darwinian evolutionary selection stopped when language and tool use converged, leaving the average hairy meme carrier sadly deficient in smarts.

Charles Stross