Nexus is part techno-thriller, part spy novel, and entirely dystopian in its outlook on the near future. The first two are real (if only prototypical). Computers that you stick to your skin like bandages. But perhaps a softer Singularity is more realistic: posthuman technologies emerge not all at once but gradually. Similarly, any attempt to guess at what will happen to the human species once it shares the universe with a posthuman species (other than, you know, extinction) is largely futile.Ī great deal of Singularity fiction embraces a “hard” Singularity, where the AI or the posthuman threat outpaces humanity in a very short period of time. Beyond the point of the AI’s emergence, we can’t really predict what the future will hold for us. Once we get an AI that no longer relies on humans to improve its own processing capability, we’ve hit Singularity: the AI is god and we are its primate crash-test dummies. Singularity generally deals in two closely related concepts: artificial intelligence and posthumanism. By its very definition this would seem to belie the idea of a Singularity at all, but bear with me. William Gibson once said, “The future is already here-it’s just not very evenly distributed.” I’m starting to think this is the case with the Singularity as well.
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