Accelerando

"Manfred's on the road again, making strangers rich.

It's a hot summer Tuesday, and he's standing in the plaza in front of the Centraal Station with his eyeballs powered up and the sunlight jangling off the canal, motor scooters and kamikaze cyclists whizzing past and tourists chattering on every side. The square smells of water and dirt and hot metal and the fart-laden exhaust fumes of cold catalytic converters; the bells of trams ding in the background, and birds flock overhead. He glances up and grabs a pigeon, crops the shot, and squirts it at his weblog to show he's arrived. The bandwidth is good here, he realizes; and it's not just the bandwidth, it's the whole scene. Amsterdam is making him feel wanted already, even though he's fresh off the train from Schiphol: He's infected with the dynamic optimism of another time zone, another city. If the mood holds, someone out there is going to become very rich indeed.

He wonders who it's going to be."

Charles Stross began writing Accelerando in 2001. It's a collection of short-stories about four generations of the Macx family, who play a major role ina technological singularity that leads to the rapid advancement of the human race and a future beyond which we can currently imagine. The story is secondary to the remarkable vision of the future that Stross creates. The steady advancement and introduction of ideas across several decades is painstaking and fascinating. Stross has shown remarkable prescience in foretelling much of the way we live at the end of the first decade imagined within the book. As time progresses the concepts and ideas that Stross describes are not just believable, but also have a feeling of inevitability about them. Could it be any other way?

In the singularity described by Stross, humanity reaches the point where computers are powerful enough to fully simulate the human brain. This has vast repercussions; a person can leave their meatbody to live in cyberspace. The rate at which time passes can be increased or decreased at will. Rapid technological advances and new discoveries in science are made possible as time can be slowed down within a virtual environment. While minutes pass in real time, years, decades and more can pass for uploaded minds living in virtual environments. Deep space travel becomes possible. Uploaded minds can live within a tin can spacecraft running a simulated environment. Why build a heavy, expensive habitable spacecraft for a crew to live in when this cheaper alternative is possible? Meanwhile, the minds inside can run at a decreased speed, experiencing only a few seconds for each year that passes on a journey across light years.

More things are possible. Memories and brain functions can be held externally, greatly increasing conscious capacity. During a conversation, a person may realise that they are unfamiliar with the subject matter. In this case, it is possible to instantly spawn a ghost brain function that can run in accelerated time, learning all about the subject before being reintegrated to the original mind later. Further implications of this scenario are very interesting. Imagine how online dating would change as a concept if it was possible to spawn a copy of yourself and a prospective partner. They could be placed in a virtual environment together to live out months of their lives in seconds, before the results are returned to the potential couple for a full assessment of their compatibility to be made.

It's not all good for post-singularity humans. The increase in computing capacity has benefits for other existing and even new species. The minds of animals, uploaded to run on a computer in accelerated time have the capacity for sentience. With an agenda much different to a human, the possibility of trouble being caused by such an entity is high. Similarly, corporations founded within the virtual environment can also gain sentience and can seek to modify economic models to further their interests, even if those interests are against those of their human creators.

But it's the first part of Accelerando that really shines. Stross extrapolates 2001's vision of the 2010s with uncanny accuracy. Manfred Macx is the protagonist, part philanthropist, part futurist, part renaissance man. He's an embodiment of the Open Source movement that has gone from strength to strength over the four decades of its existence to become a prominent philosophy not just within computing, but across much of our culture. Manfred has computing power distributed about his person and accessible through a pair of glasses, which act as his window to internal and external memories and computing processes. He treats bandwidth as an almost physical element within the world around him, almost like something that can be felt or smelt as it increases or reduces in strength depending on location.

For us, our smart phones and tablets and their links to 3G, 4G and Wi-Fi services are invaluable. As the availability of these services increases and declines, so to does our ability to access external information, cache memories or share aspects of ourselves with the outer world. It is no longer necessary to remember details when they can be so readily accessed by devices in our pockets, bags or -soon- placed within our glasses.

Accelerando is not always a thrilling read. It's a challenge, it's long, it's dry and it's complex. But it's also incredibly fascinating, a detailed vision of a possible, perhaps even likely future. Stross released the book as a free eBook under a Creative Commons license. Copies of it in various formats can be easily found online. In this, it becomes an example of one of its own core philosophies.