I’m gonna take a couple of weeks off from creating new blog entries. So Happy Holidays and a great 2 * 17 * 59 to all of you. [Factorization corrected after Fred Condo pointed out I'd posted it wrong. I was 17 when I finished hi-skool and I'm 59 now. Therefore…?]

I’d like to get a comment thread going that will keep some interesting stuff happening here. Thus my “End of the Year Question” on what life will be like after the Singularity.

By way of background, about two and a half months ago, I solicited comments from you readers in an entry called Need Help Understanding Supermind Experience.

I picked up some really useful ideas from the comments, some of which worked their way into a story called “Postsingular” that I sold to Asimov’s SF magazine a couple of weeks ago. And now I’m working on a follow-up story and I want more help from the hive mind.

The set-up:

The Earth is blanketed with self-reproducing nanobots called orphids (derived from “arphids” derived from RFID). Each of them is about as smart as a dog.

Rather that reproducing without limit, the orphids have thoughtfully leveled out at a population density of one or two per square millimeter on every surface on the planet (rocks, leaves, auto parts, skin).

Orphids use quantum computing; they propel themselves with electrostatic fields; they understand natural language; they’re networked by wireless.

They’ve settled onto people’s heads like lice, and they’re using magnetic fields to provide people with device-free orphidnet (super Web) access all the time. Thanks to their orphid lice, everyone is continually plugged in; everyone has a HUD (heads-up display projected over their visual field inside their brain). And thanks to the orphidnet anyone can in some sense see anything (or at least the orphid mesh on the object).

Higher-order AIs have evolved within the orphidnet — they’re called beezies. Some of the beezies are perhaps thousands as times as smart as us. And the smaller beezies are willing to help humans with tasks. Everyone has agents doing thought routines for them.

The question:

What will life be like in this post-Singularity world?

Here’s a few preliminary thoughts about this from my notes for my sequel to “Postsingular.” By the way, the story-in-progress has the working title “Bixie and Chu.”

How do people deal with the orphidnet day in and day out? Maybe they’re casual about it, used to it. After all, we’ve changed our tech so much since, say, Hieronymus Bosch’s time, but we act the same.

A lot of what people do is, no matter what the tech, based on the simplest biological needs.

Mating. Even if we have vat-grown children, there’s still competition to find a good partner to contribute a sperm or an egg, and to help raise your children. I think people would always prefer to raise their own children if possible, as this seems likelier to produce good outcomes.

Absolutely no privacy. Less shame about sex, less mystery. Yet, there are still the same reproductive issues, which are probably a root cause of modesty, which might be a way of playing one’s reproductive options close to the vest.

[Photo documenting my friend Charles Platt’s single day as a worker at a big box store.] Food, shelter, and what people own will inevitably be distributed according to the pyramidal inverse-power law statistics (a tiny number of very well-off people and a huge number of poor ones) that inevitably emerge in group computations.

But, with the orphidnet, you can get a lot of what you need for free, if people are generous, and why shouldn’t they be. Recycling. The whole world is a realtime EBay. You can always find leftover food. People set it out, like pies for bums. Just-in-time bread and breakfast. Couch-surfing is practical; particularly if there’s very little chance of crime.

We might suppose that in the Postsingular world, when people talk, emoticons form around them, visible in the computeresque overlays that everyone has happening with their brains, the Smileys hopping out of a speaker’s mouth. Also there will be more functional images, e.g. a copy of a bat that you’re referring to.

There’s a fad for going offline. “Going on the natch.” [That's my brother Embry and I in Micronesia, a high point of 2005.]

The orphids are in principle willing to turn off a person’s brain interface. Probably there will be some sleaze-ball spammer types trying to override that to push ads, scams, and political propaganda. (I’d like to have a scene with implacable orphidnet-controlled “shoon” robots attacking Heritagist spammers.)

Violent crime has become impossible to get away with. People can always watch you; and even if they see you do the crime, the orphidnet remembers the past, so anything can be replayed. If you do something, people can find you and punish you.

On the other hand, you can still behave like a criminal if you have indomitable physical force. Like if, for instance, you’re the government.

Perhaps there are some war-lords as well. Thanks to the all-seeing orphidnet intelligence it might be hard for the government to catch and swat criminals.

After all, with the orphidnet, anyone can mount what I call a “Golden Man” defense (the name comes from a Phil Dick story where a mutant always knows what’ll happen next, so nobody can kill him). But if your pursuers have the same knowledge, maybe it’s a wash.

Conceivably the orphidnet beezies might favor certain people and give them the benefit of a deeper-ply look-ahead than is available to the common ruck and rabble.

(Here's a link to large version of my “Bela and the Jellyfish.”)

Merry X and Happy New Y!

I finished my Philosophy and Computation class. It was fun to teach again. Two of the students made blogs for their semester projects. Lots of interesting stuff. Emil's is in a more finished state. Check ‘em out.

Emil Rojas

Greg Garcia

The photos today are of a reversible CA installation with video feedback by my student John Bruneau, also from the same class.

Most of the lectures are online in podcast form. Click the button to access them.

Yesterday I went to San Francisco to go to a party; first I met up with my son Rudy at the Monkeybrains World Headquarters on Folsom Street. I saw a cool graffitti painting. Looking at that writing, I feel like I’m in a science fiction novel, which is a place I like to be.

The party was at Last Gasp, a San Francisco comix and graphic novel publisher that’s been around since the days when the Zap-o-saur thunder lizards roamed the Earth.

I introduced myself to the host, Ron Turner. People were lining up to say hi to him, influential underground publisher that he is. Like a cross between Santa and the Godfather.

Our friend cyclecide Linda works at Last Gasp: I asked her if she braids Ron’s beard, she said, no, his daughter-in-law does that.

Somehow I’d imagined I’d know a lot of people here, but I hardly knew anyone. But Rudy and his friends are always nice to me. One was dressed like a clown with a gold tooth, which went great with a scary circus clown poster from the Last Gasp collection.

I ran into my cartoonist Zaposaur theropod pal Paul Mavrides. Last Gasp has a large collection of original cloth side-show banners suspended on rollers.

Rudy and I rooted around among them the banners, and saw a giant anteater.

Also vampire bats attacking a cow.

I got a picture of two archetypal underground San Franciso women. If you tell strangers you’re photographing them for your blog, it makes you almost legit. Speaking of bloggers, Scott Beale, a.k.a. Laughing Squid covered the party as well; he has some terrific pictures.

I’ve been up in San Francisco a couple of times recently. Last week I went to the “Writers With Drinks” reading at a Mission venue called The Make-Out Room.

I didn’t get any clear pictures. They had a nice disco ball. My writer-friends Terry Bisson and Karen Joy Fowler gave terrific readings. Standing in for them is this a picture of Isabella Rossllini in Blue Velvet, which I saw in the afternoon at the Castro theater. What a star she is.

Last week in the afternoon I walked through Dolores Park. Sometimes I think we should move to San Francisco.

My favorite SF writer Robert Sheckley died last week.

I posted some memories of him a couple of months ago when he got sick.

A few more notes.

In the mid-1980s I co-edited with Peter Lamborn Wilson and Robert Anton Wilson an edgy SF anthology called Semiotext(e) SF (AK Press, Edinburgh 1989). I got Bob to mail me Xeroxed pages from his journals, which we included as a piece called “Amsterdam Diary.” Let me quote three good bits here.

“How much reading of other fiction writers must I do to convince myself that the finest work done is woven out of the author’s own experience, his own and no others, no matter how much he chooses to disguise or exploit the fact.”

“Good fiction is never preachy. It tells its truth only by inference and analogy. It uses the specific detail as its building block rather than the vague generalization. In my case it’s usually humorous — no mistaking my stuff for the Platform Talk of the 6th Patriarch. But I do not try to be funny, I merely write as I write. In the meantime I trust the voice I can never lose — my own. The directions of its interest may change, even by morning. But what does that mater if I simply follow them, along for the trip rather than the payoff (always disappointing), enjoying writing my story rather than looking forward to its completion. Wise-sounding words which I hope describe where I’m really at.”

“Two weeks until my 50 birthday. The thought, the mood, of impending doom. Fifty is well enough — but what about 60, what about 70? What about death, a second away or 20 more years, but looming up faster every year. They go by faster & faster as one grows older. What happened to the golden inexhaustible summers of my youth? Maybe they weren’t always golden, but they did seem to stretch on forever. I thought I’d never grow up.”

Robert did me the signal honor of writing a very warm and hilarious preface for my collection Transreal (WCS Books, Englewood CO 1991). He initially protests, “What is Rucker trying to do to me? Why did he select me for this job? Why is he seeking to undermine me with his mind-experiment, why does he want to invade my mind with the contents of his trashy situations, with the faecid droppings of his clever simian mind?” But then he relents. “This is SF rigorously following crazy rules. My mind of science fiction. At the heart of it is a rage to extrapolate. This is what Rucker does. Among other things. At the heart of it is a rage to extrapolate. Excuse me, shall I extrapolate that for you? Won’t take a jiffy. And so we have it. Rudy the crazed mathematician, like a poet hidden in the light of thought singing songs unbidden ‘til the world is wrought to sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not…”

In return, I got the opportunity to write a preface for Sheckley’s Minotaur Maze (Pulphouse, Eugene OR 1990). I said, “The paramount quality of Sheckley’s writing is the purity of his language. The timing of his cadenced phrases is exquisite. His richly charged clarity arises, I would say, from the excellent moral qualities which Sheckley as a writer exemplifies — he is a man in love with writing and with the simple sweetness of life.”

One final quote from the Sheck-man himself in Minotaur Maze, one to bring tears to the eyes: “The premise could be seen wavering, there were repercussions of a rhetorical nature, and the author could be glimpsed, a ghostly figure of unbelievable beauty and intelligence, trying desperately, despite his many personal problems, to put things together again.”