Accelreview
Oct. 7th, 2009 12:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bluegargantuaHey,
So last night I finished up Accelerando by Charles Stross. I've never read much Stross, but lots of people seem to like him, so I thought I'd give it a whack.
Accelarndo is essentially an envisioning of the Coming Singularity as seen through the eyes of three generations of the Mancx family. We start with Manfred, an early 21st century idea man trying to obliterate money. After disputes with his wife, spiny lobster AIs, a French aerospace manager, the Russian Music Mafia and a identify mugger, we move on to his daughter Amber who runs away from home to Jupiter at age 12 to become Queen of her own personal kingdom. Finally, we catch up with Amber's son Sirhan who sits in a bubble dome floating in Saturn for the return of the last known copy of his mother.
The book was kinda hard to get into at first. Stross wants to invoke a sense of the future shock that all of his characters go through, but that makes for some rough reading in spots. He sorta catches it up as he goes along. But he does go head on into one of the thornier problems that is often unaddressed in near-Singularity books like this -- the future super-intelligences descended from ourselves and our creations are as completely unknowable to us as we are to a tapeworm, and there's no reason to think that these super-intelligences should have any more care, or treat us any better than we would a tapeworm. Which isn't to say that these AIs are particularly malicious or ill-disposed towards us, they just can't recognize their intellectual ancestors and could wreak untold havoc unintentionally. I think it's an important point that doesn't get addressed enough. It's sort of the flip side of Blindsight's meditation on non-sentient intelligence.
It was an interesting book, although I'm not super interested in picking up more Stross right away. I've heard good things about Halting State so maybe I'll give that a look-see sometime later.
later
Tom
So last night I finished up Accelerando by Charles Stross. I've never read much Stross, but lots of people seem to like him, so I thought I'd give it a whack.
Accelarndo is essentially an envisioning of the Coming Singularity as seen through the eyes of three generations of the Mancx family. We start with Manfred, an early 21st century idea man trying to obliterate money. After disputes with his wife, spiny lobster AIs, a French aerospace manager, the Russian Music Mafia and a identify mugger, we move on to his daughter Amber who runs away from home to Jupiter at age 12 to become Queen of her own personal kingdom. Finally, we catch up with Amber's son Sirhan who sits in a bubble dome floating in Saturn for the return of the last known copy of his mother.
The book was kinda hard to get into at first. Stross wants to invoke a sense of the future shock that all of his characters go through, but that makes for some rough reading in spots. He sorta catches it up as he goes along. But he does go head on into one of the thornier problems that is often unaddressed in near-Singularity books like this -- the future super-intelligences descended from ourselves and our creations are as completely unknowable to us as we are to a tapeworm, and there's no reason to think that these super-intelligences should have any more care, or treat us any better than we would a tapeworm. Which isn't to say that these AIs are particularly malicious or ill-disposed towards us, they just can't recognize their intellectual ancestors and could wreak untold havoc unintentionally. I think it's an important point that doesn't get addressed enough. It's sort of the flip side of Blindsight's meditation on non-sentient intelligence.
It was an interesting book, although I'm not super interested in picking up more Stross right away. I've heard good things about Halting State so maybe I'll give that a look-see sometime later.
later
Tom
