"The Good Place" [Netflix] - is it set in an Omega Point Singularity?

When I first grudgingly dipped into episode 1, four years ago, I thought it was an unlikely setting but a typically zany and shallow sitcom. Leaning on Kristen Bell's following (since staring in cult hit series "Veronica Mars")...

But it repeatedly subverted my exceptions for the better, in terms of both continual plot twists and a liberal peppering of popular philosophy references (both explicit and situational). I liked its low-key ridiculing of contemporary theological beliefs that stopped short of stomping all over religion (from my heathen point of view).

There's a perpetual ambiguity of context - the show might be attempting to dramatise an actual spiritual afterlife, but there are myriad stylistic touches that scream of technological simulation. From Janet being a high-end sentient Alexa/Siri, to computer terminology or rebooting the neighbourhood, deleting and restoring memories, etc. Also, to cosmological concepts, with regards to the non-some of the non-human characters.

So I'd actually class it as science fiction. And the best type of sci-fi, in dealing at length with serious mid-deep future issues: digital sentience (e.g. via mind uploading), infinite torture, unlimited life spans, etc. As well as the moral philosophy of day-to-day living. Big brain stuff, all wrapped up in a (potentially) popular, approachable presentation.

Spoilers: Seriously, watch the end of the show first, if you're going to!

Hannu Rajaniemi's "Quantum Thief" Trilogy

Review:

The pinnacle of high-concept, hard sci-fi, space opera cyberpunk, seemingly packed with every single concept the author could find, and he's a very smart guy: physicist, mathematician, cosmologist, recently launched a synthetic DNA start-up (via his TEDx talk). Finnish, but writing while in Edinburgh, literally hanging out with Charlie Stross, it's no coincidence that he's taken up the baton of writing the most futurism-idea dense, fast-paced (show don't tell) space-romp fun. Think "Accelerando" with the breakneck pace of "Singularity Sky". Stross surpassed I.M.Banks for this crown (in my mind), with stories that made traditional (mainstream) spaceship fiction look like quaint period dramas, pootling about in sail ships.

Mind uploads, planet scale computronium and all types of Singularity as obvious givens for Hannu Rajaniemi. He imagines the consequences of massively duplicated and branched individuals, in a complex future where identity and memory are slippery constructs and inequality has been inflated to vertiginous levels. It is cyberpunk, spun out, with contemporary nationality wiped away by subcultural identities flung across the entire solar system.

References are littered everywhere, at every scale of the telling, from throw-away pop-culture name drops (of famous games, anime series, etc), to terms for Ukrainian governance sub-divisions, to politics, philosophy and the (centuries old) historical origins of transhumanism. The books are so thick with meaning that they're far bigger than themselves; overloaded; virtually all the names and terminology (while sounding awesomely fitting, also) link the reader out to explore countless Wikipedia articles and culture.

Each of the three books has it's own distinct flavour, thematic reflections: personal, social (structure), philosophical and particular literary influences. Each also converges on a different planet, so their sub-arks cohere well as separate books. But they undeniably form a very carefully pre-planned and crafted whole. Densely plotted, too: subtle elements of the very first chapter of the first book become key through to the last. So, although Rajaniemi weaves in little reminder snippets here and there, it's highly advisory to read these books consecutively, and even then it may be worth checking out glossaries and/or synopsis in between.

If you are reading my blog, then you may well be within the core audience for this story, too. It fits perfectly with everything I've aimed to write about here myself. Other reviewers have complained of these books flying over their heads. Certainly I've been compelled to re-read sections, research meaning, etc, and am still not certain of precisely what happens in the conclusion. It is, however, definitely wrapped up properly. And I've had a virtually parallel (although even less than mediocre) academic path through physics and computer science, with strikingly overlapping cultural influences to the author (being, myself, only a little younger).

So perched atop the shoulders of high-concept sci-fi past, I'd definitely not recommend this series to the genre naive! Something to build up to, even more so than advice for readers to get a feel for Culture novels before embarking upon "Excession" or "Use of Weapons". Even then, you'll probably have to just roll with punches and maybe go back to pick out more of the details later. But  worth the effort and it works on multiple levels anyway!

[1] Quantum Thief (332 pages):

The first and best of the three. There is just no way that the others could ever have competed with the addictive rush from the tidal wall of novelty this installment hits you with! Also, with so much still a mystery, the fictional solar system feels bigger and far more real; a story in a crazy place, rather than about the place itself (which is more the case as the books progress).

The main setting here is also the most compelling in its familiarity, being structured around extreme technologically enabled privacy, with surveillance and control through information, all pressing issues (much like our present). The morally ambiguous gentleman thief character archetype drops perfectly into this setting, initiating the serie's liet motif of examining imprisonment, imposed control, security, enforced uniqueness, versus theft, liberation, diversity, etc.

[2] Fractal Prince (331 pages):

Feels the most out of place with the city of "Sirr"; it's characters didn't quite fit for me, or at least they are less knotted up with the plot than most of the others (arbitrary and single use by comparison). Twaddud felt stilted. Also, my disbelief was stretched thinnest here, with a core plot mechanism that could be a satire of Hofstadter's "Strange Loop" concept.

It's probably the easiest book to get lost in, which is saying something, since there are glimpses of deeper meaning secreted in plain sight throughout the trilogy, like fractal detail to gaze upon during re-reading. But this novel's "Arabian Nights", story(s) within story(s), "Inception" like structure doesn't help, and the intermingled interludes and flashbacks gain more concrete context from reading the next installment.


[3] Causal Angel (303 pages):

Neatly ties together all the pieces, places and people previous covered. Yet it is slightly shorter than the previous two books and feels shorter still. The plot is more linear, like it is following the ballistic trajectory that was set in motion.

Perhaps it could have dwelt a little longer on certain places and people; maybe some of the developments risked feeling a little too emotionally gymnastic, or unremarked upon. Although the core characters were developed across the entire length of the ark.



Discussion (SPOILERS Ahead!):

Hydrogen Swan Song

This is a good novel. A good sci-fi novel by a great author. A great author who died last year, at an unfitting age, and will be fondly remembered by his body of fantastic works.

Photographed - Hydrogen Sonata. Front inset Iain M Banks. Rear inset Iain Banks.

It certainly held my attention, and looking back, the second 300 pages felt more like a last 3 chapters (in that the end of the story flew by far too soon). However, I didn't find it as exciting or stimulating as previous Culture books. Maybe I am just not as ravenously enthusiastic for this kind of material as I was previously; older and wise to these fantastic vistas. The concluding details didn't feel surprising, but it never really felt like they could have been; I was resigned to the plot arc being somewhat frustrating, inevitably stuck dancing around the familiar end of the rabbit hole (so to speak).

As I've said previously, there's no way to wrap up the Culture itself: they have been so well written as the epitome of a stable utopia: stubbornly determined to keep on partying forever, while making damn sure everyone else has as much fun as possible too! So I was hoping for a complete change of pace by having a prequel. There are teasers here, but little exploration of this direction. 

Rough Rebuttal to a Kurzweil Critic

This is very much an 'off the top of my head' response to a blog post by my friend, found here: http://www.simonpstevens.com/News/FlawWithTheFuture

A) Nit picking - I guess you are probably just simplifying matters for the sake of a concise introduction paragraph there but:

Vinge popularised the term 'singularity' in this context in 1983, but Stanislaw Ulam talked to von Neumann privately of singularity well before (1958), and Turing spoke of machine thinking taking over (1951). [1]

More significantly, Vinge's expectations for singularity are distinct from Kurzwiel's in that he expects the more sci-fi friendly course of events, with an AI spontaneously boot strapping itself towards super intelligence. He also estimates an early to mid 2030s time scale.

Kurzweil's vision, on the other hand, needs no Skynet (Terminator) type event. He sees little/no distinction between us and our machines. Our computers already form a kind of inseparable hybrid intelligence with our biological selves, and the level of integration will only increase in future (no clear machine/human divide). Kurzweils brand of future fantastic is about as boringly down to earth as his speaking style.

Also, I believe Kurzweil expects human level AI well before 2045 (as you stated), he in fact estimates that one could acquire (for $1000) computing power equivalent to all the brains of all the humans currently alive Earth by that date.


B) Given that the graph of his that you included goes back 10^11 years (most the way to the beginning of the universe) you can't really get away with saying we could be at the * beginning* of the growth curve! ;op  Also, remember that curves are mathematical structures that approximate the real world, not the other way around. Reality is not pootling along trajectories inscribed by God or gods. The 'laws' of the universe emerge from it's increasing complexity, they do not exist outside/before it's existence.

On: "The Third Replicator" from New Scientist 01-Aug-2009

I was a little inspired by the elegance of the framework Susan Blackmore proposes in this article. I've long been a firm believer in evolution in all domains, particularly in technology (i.e. beyond biology and genetics), but I may have been a bit fuzzy on where "Memes" (pronounced: meems not mems apparently) fitted in. What follows is my interpretation of the ideas.

* My Definitions:

+ Behaviour: is the instructions that translate current state into future state.

(State includes all of the world that influences and is in turn influenced by an entity.)

+ Genes are molecular-machines; a particular subset of entities in biochemical phase-space (a conceptual, multi-dimensional, graph space in which all (bio)chemical structures can be defined).

+ Humans (and all species of life forms) are 'gene-machines'.

+ Memes are concepts learned by certain gene-machines. (Meme-capable Gene-machines: MCGMs)

+ 'Meme-machines' include all of our (technological) creations.

+ Temes are the hypothetical, next type of replicators (where memes and genes where the previous two). And i think (as far as suggestions for naming Temes is concerned) they should be called "T3M3S" or "T3MES", standing for *Tier-3* (T3) replicators with the l33t speak adding the connotations of digitisation/computerisation.

** Replicators take control:

+ Genes control *behaviour* of biochemistry.

+ Memes control *behaviour* of specific species of gene-machines.

+ Thus, Temes should control the *behaviour* of a specific 'species' of meme-machine.

** Replicators are shaped:

+ Genes are selected by their utility in the environment (the biosphere) and distorted by it.

+ Memes are selected by their utility in the meme-o-sphere (brain-space) and the success of their physical implementation, if there is one.

** The march of the replicators:

When genes first appeared (in primordial biochemistry) they were able to evolve/emerge new biochemistry so much faster, than the previous (almost entirely surreptitious) biochemical processes, that they took control of biochemistry and quickly began to utilise all the biochemical resources (in the world).

When a species passes a critical threshold, where after memes are able to proliferate, genes can no longer compete for control of the species' behaviour (because memes evolve/emerge orders of magnitude faster, it would be a very biased arms race). Thus memes assume control of genetics: they assert huge selection pressures for genes that increase the size (depth and breadth) of the meme-o-sphere (i.e. the pool of human minds available for use). They don't stop at controlling the host species' genes either; as the mem-o-sphere grows, it asserts increasing influence over the entire genetic phase space, through that to the entire biosphere.

Genetically complex species can only emerge and persist within an environmental niche created by the baroque mountain of genetic species that emerged previous to it (like an exponentially expanding mass of foam). This is exactly the same for memes; the more complex (e.g. baking bread) build out (and sometimes up) from the less complex (e.g. how to make fire). The 'landscape', into which this web of concepts expands into, I will call 'meme-space': an unimaginably multi-dimensional place in which all possible concepts can be contained. In it is everything from: linking an oral noise to an object, to how a state of the art computer processor is built, and much more beyond that.

The amount of physical matter controlled, by these replicators, increases during each epoch: primordial biochemistry would almost certainly have been limited to a very meagre resources (e.g. the some organic compounds in an ideal zone around a hydrothermal vent). Cellular life conquered the world, incorporating practically all sources of water, carbon, nitrogen, etc, into trillions of tonnes of usable biomass. Now that us Meme-machines dominate the world, we (with our agriculture) account for much of that biomass, but far beyond that we're shifting around enormous amounts of inorganic matter too (housing, industry, infrastructure, mega-engineering projects like dams); a significant fraction of the earth's surface has been configured by us (for better or worst).

** Inferences on the next replicator King:

By analogy to the previous two phase changes (between dominant replicators), we would expect the "Temes" (the next level of replicators) to exhibit the following traits:

+ They are an emergent behaviour of a specific species of meme. i.e. an entity created by that meme, like a computer, or, more realistically, a particular type of software running on computers.

+ The domain of their possible natures (Teme-space) will have been ponderously explored, to a relatively limited degree, by Memes. Controlling their species' behaviour in a similarly blunt way to how hedgehog behaviour is modified to favour running away from moving cars, rather than curling up: through the ruthless pruning of individuals with unsuitable genes, rather than a logical induction.

+ Multiple Teme-capable Meme-machines (TCMMs) may begin to emerge in tandem, as may have been the case with proto-humans (Neanderthals, 'hobbits', homo-erectus, etc). Or perhaps a merging of two potential candidates may spontaneously create a suitable Meme-machine, rather than a gradual enhancement of a single Meme-machine (Memes are much less limited than genes when it comes to hybridisation).

+ We're not aware of Teme control over memes as yet, so: Either, no TCMMs have been created yet, or their influence is still fairly small (on a par to higher mammals that teach offspring some simple ideas by example). The latter would put us in a period of hybrid control (between Memes and Temes), where we are unwittingly assisting Temes increased prevalence by satisfying our own goals (our exponential increasing of computing power mirroring the earlier explosion in human brain size.

+ Following the pattern of increasing dominion over matter, Teme-machines could go far beyond merely scratching the surface of one planet; if they took the best features of Meme and Gene machines, for example, they would be able to manipulate an unlimited amount of inorganic matter at the molecular level: nanotechnology at it's most fanciful; utilisation of all planetary matter for the Teme-o-sphere!

** Conclusion (end of Meme)

A view I find enticing is that there is, and will never be a transition to Temes; digital information is just another change of medium for Memes. After all, they've gone from, learning by example to verbal to written to a bifurcation of various multimedia. What difference does encoding them in microscopic bits of matter make? It might not even make any difference if the ones slinging them about are Artificial Intelligences of superhuman intellect.

On the other hand, perhaps these superhuman intelligences will not be created in out image: consciousness as we know it is playing an ever decreasing part in the replication, transmission and even recombination of Memes (i.e. on the Internet); what if this trend continues to the point were the Memes are pushing themselves around; pure ideas coming into a life of their own in an entirely unfathomable level of reality.....

Ok, so that's probably just me flapping my trap with the delusion of thinking I'm saying something vaguely profound, when I'm just taking an idea an inference too far. However, just because we are unable to imagine any level of intelligence beyond our own logical consciousness, is that a good reason to believe one won't emerge? By definition we would lack the ability to comprehend that domain. Just as it's impossible to frame the concept of MMPORPG gold farmers [1] in a way that a dog could appreciate.

This "replicator" categorisation may be entirely useless; a trend line drawn from 2 cherry picked data points. Alternatives that follow a similar vein may be more pertinent. Ray Kurzweil, in "The Singularity is Near" suggests 6 epochs: (1) Physics/Chemistry (2) Biology/DNA (3) Neurons/Brains (4) Technology [where we are now] (5) Merger of humanity and technology (6) Universe awakens [all matter is intelligently configured].

Energy for free?

New Scientist (02/12/06):

Understanding the swing of things: "By engineering such variations, Peyrard has shown, you could make heat flow 10 times more easily in one direction than its opposite."! If this can be applied in a real world aplication, surely it would mean rewritting the 2nd law of thermodynamics for starters!

There are multiple ways of extracting useful (work) energy from a temperature difference. Generally a system that does this is called a 'Heat Engine'. Therefore, combining a brand new, state of the art, physics violating heat pump and a thermoelectric generator (using the Seebeck effect) or even a good, old fashioned, Stirling Engine, you can use any heat reservoir (i.e. any matter or radiation with a temperature, i.e. anything!) and extract *all* it's heat (within the operating temperature of this new device) into useful energy.

The article doesn't say anything of the possible uses of a real device (perhaps a conjecture too far considering the massive potential), and as always there are skeptics saying that the 1D computer model of the 'Breather' effect, slowing thermal conduction, is not applicable to the 3D world. Though, carbon nanotubes are practically 1 dimensional creations.

...D'oh!...Hang on, just figured out why my free energy idea is folly: selective resistance to heat flow can no more 'pump' heat, than a diode can pump electicity! (so the answer is a resounding NO...for now) However, you could make digital electronic circuits out of such components that use pure temperature to operate them instead of voltage. Possibly very useful, if components can be realised at a tiny scale.


Also pointed to by this edition is the Pentagon buying 1 Petaflop (10^15 calculations per second) machines off IBM/Cray, to be built in the next few years. Though they'll probably just be used to calculate simulations of nuclear weapons in excruciating detail (seeing as live tests are frowned upon these days... yes france i'm looking at you! I know Pakistan and India have been naughty too, and North Korea would like us to think the have, but you should know better!), the raw computational power available in such a machine is approximately equivalent to that of all the neurones in a human brain...... which might make for a truely interesting application, if we had more than the fintest clue how the human brain is structured! Hopefully by the time the price of a 1 Petaflop device has fallen from a state budget busting $1/4 Billion to the price of an off the shelf PC (about 2025), we'll have figured out the missing details.

[Imported from "LewyLife"] A 3rd blog for the personal and mundane:

Hey, so I've been feeling particularly tired and rubbish of late, but never mind. I've still been able to finish reading Accelerando (by Charles Stross - basically a dramatization of "The Singularity is Near" by Ray Kurzweil) and check out some new software/services:

Since previously trusty Firefox went to pieces on my 64bit computer for no apparent reason, I've been needing an alternative. Eventually i got around to trying Opera (which I'm using right now). It has tabbed browsing and some useful features Firefox doesn't have, so I recommend it.

This groovy picture by Eboy inspired me to check out a few other things:

Last.fm - a custom internet radio player, equivalent to Pandora, arguably better.

Well, err, actually that's all the new stuff I'll be using from there for a bit, but i did also just get on Facebook which had been coming for a while. Well… gotta try and stay in touch with the youth, you know, even if i am just an old fart at heart!

2023-11-29 Addendum: I've imported the few posts from my old LewyLife blog to this less defunct blog, and deleted that to tidy up. Images missing that were presumably embedded via URL links only.

Post Singularity Social Simulation

Second Life is getting BIG, and keeps having various interesting problems: e.g. homogenising swarms of self replicators (akin to a risk of advanced nano-tech) and recently this mini debacle (after a online 'business' in second life shut down due to all it's products presumably being copied and freely distributed by some helpful citizen with a 'copybot').
This is entirely reminiscent of the situation in Charles Stross's "Singularity sky" when a technologically repressed society suddenly gains the ability to transcend an economy of scarcity (i.e. they get replicator factories). It is also a very pertinent simulation for big issues of change in the real world. Showing the possible dangers of self replicating technology, especially seeing as we can't restart reality after editing certain annoyances out of existence!

The big issue here though is IP (Intellectual Property). Certainly the thorniest issue of this decade in my opinion (and likely a few to come). What's happening in second life spells out exactly the situation we will be in 40 years from now; you just can't own information! The transition to this state is already well under way. Record companies, movie big wigs and the like, having a hard time accepting this, will have to bite the bullet soon and find a way to make money in a new style market, or face seriously humiliating closure (like the second life start up).