[Organisation][RFC] Singularity Club

[HRogge]

Long reply post to an interesting idea...

Singularity Club – 19/Jun/2012

"The First Rule of Singularity Club, is that you don't talk about Singularity Club."

"The Second Rule of Singularity Club, is there is no Singularity Club."

There are occasional rumours, on the edge of the Hacker Underspace. When you ask people who should know, the usual answer is "How could you tell?".

Sounds like an insider joke of the Hacker Underspace to keep normal people (and AIs) on their toes.

Singularity Club, if it did exist, would be concerned with existential threats to Fenspace, and all known sentient beings. The headline threat is a runaway Singularity, which if it can occur, almost certainly, sooner or later, will do so. Singularity Club might be enthusiastic about the 'later' option.

There are some incredibly powerful AIs in Fenspace. You'd expect them to be more involved in things, seeing as they think orders of magnitude faster than humans. And humans, they manage to get their fingers in everything, even running "Plains Ape 1.0". Do AIs ever seem distracted? Are they just playing an AI-speed MMORPG? Singularity Club might be one answer.

Not sure what a club of people (with maybe a few AIs) could do...

You might be concerned that everything depends on the benevolence of handwavium. You might be concerned there is no Plan B. A Singularity would likely suck-in all sentient beings in the Solar System. For sentience as we know it to have a Plan B, if the Singularity fails in some way, there must be a functional culture outside it's short-term reach. Somewhere beyond the Solar System.

I would say one "plan B" is not randomly waving things into AIs but start being more careful.

So, this might be one reason why nanotech is taking so long to arrive in Fenspace. This might be one reason superintelligent AIs just seem to think like humans, only faster. This might be one reason.

Are you talking about some "creators of Handwavium" style of thing?

META: Emily was one early AI, with at least superhuman intelligence, and potentially access to as much processing power as she wanted, and could find power supply and cooling for (without advancing Global Warming too much). She was tasked to "fix the world", and a basic part of her nature is to fix things for people which are broken. She was also tied into the virtual world via "TRON", which is an abbreviation for the command "Trace On", implying an imperative to find out what was wrong there. Emily hasn't surfaced in the early history of the Hacker Underspace – what might she have been doing with her time?

Not sure how this mix with the story above.

This is a biggy. Nothing visible on the surface, maybe a lot of paddling below the waterline. Lots of AIs across Fenspace could be involved in this.

There might not be any storylines in this, though there could be. If this works no one human is likely to notice anything happening.

AIs in Fenspace are similar to people... so involving a lot of them makes it very likely that "Singularity Club secret plan 101" gets uploaded to some newsgroups pretty quickly.

But, I'm not sure, is this organisation in the spirit of the meta purpose of Fenspace?
(i.e. to write certain sorts of stories)

There might be a space for an organization like this, its just a question if they have any real influence or not.

Singularity Club could get quite upset if there was a group actually directly aiming for an early Singularity.

At least one (series of?) singularities already happened in Fenspace.

Whether there are any AIs in it, for one thing.

Okay, this gets strange... in the first post you say that the humans would most likely not notice anything happening? And now that maybe there are no AIs involved?

This kind of reminds me of a more benign and quieter Firewall (Of Eclipse Phase). Whether that's a good thing or not, depends on your viewpoint. They might well be a small subfaction, either within GJ or within the Patrol.... and without.

Yes, reminds me to Firewall too... just that it would be A LOT more difficult for a Fenspace Firewall to become effective.

Eclipse Phase Firewall is effective because they are backed by some really big guns... and Eclipse Phase is already a completely meshed "no privacy" kind of setting, something Fenspace is not. Places without Interwave are difficult to deal with at all, especially if they don't have a large presence in Cyberspace (or none at all).

Do 'Boskone' count as an existential threat to all known sentience?

No, they do not.

Though, if some Boskone were pushing for nanotech and run-away AI development, then GJ would be likely.

I don't think the Boskones could reach the level of development of Fenspace as a whole... and the last thing they wanted were "really powerful godlike AIs".

---

I like the idea of some "wannabe Eclipse Phase style Firewall" group in Fenspace, I just think they wouldn't manage to move that much. The places with powerful AIs in Fenspace are often difficult to reach or to influence. And its always a difficult question to judge how powerful an AI is.